The Brand New Monday

Fucking Monday. I wake up and instantly realize I’ve somehow managed to oversleep and miss the start of my shift. Cursing, I jump up and – without even trying to wash my face or rinse out the taste of whatever crap I must’ve been pouring down my throat all weekend – start frantically pulling on the cleaner of my two T-shirts. I burst out of my tiny, government-issued shoebox apartment and tear toward the docks, heart hammering as I imagine what my shift supervisor will do to me for being late. The bastard’s a workaholic who drinks through the weekend right along with the rest of the crew, yet somehow manages to pull himself together by the start of every week. Hell, he even shaves every morning – unlike yours truly, whose stubble could scare a porcupine into fainting. When booze becomes your primary value and the biggest line item in your budget, everything else quietly slips into the background. Even my degree in “International Transport Logistics” has, for the past couple of years, boiled down to hauling empty bottles to the dump while trying not to draw too much attention to the nature of my cargo. I’ve been drinking for about three years now, trying to drown the disgustingly persistent sensations lurking somewhere at the bottom of my skull – the ones that sometimes become downright unbearable. Back when I still had money for head-shrinkers, they diagnosed me with “dissociative disorder,” thinking that would somehow help. Doctors always think that if they slap a name on some incomprehensible bullshit, fit it into a classification, and assign it a reference number, the bullshit will start behaving like a well-trained pet for whichever professor coined the term. In my case, unfortunately, it didn’t work. The feeling that I was living someone else’s life sometimes got so bad it wouldn’t let me sleep. Strangely enough, I found some relief online, where a whole community of people like me had formed. We traded thoughts, supported each other, and tried our best to convince the world – and ourselves – that we hadn’t completely lost our minds and were still capable of maintaining something resembling an acceptable lifestyle in the eyes of normal people. Maybe that was even true, but still… By forty I’ve accumulated: a shotgun marriage at eighteen, the death of my newborn son, an equally swift divorce, countless meaningless flings in the aftermath, relatives who long ago gave up expecting anything useful to come out of me, and a deafening, all-consuming loneliness. Sometimes it seems to me – as it does to many of my fellow sufferers – that everything used to be different for us. That somewhere there’s a planet exactly like ours, only tilted a little differently toward the Sun, where each of us has a home and someone in it who waits for us in the evening, tolerates our lousy temper, and doesn’t throw our countless flaws in our faces. I don’t know. I don’t like thinking about it. Even if that other life really does exist somewhere, here and now I’ve got the one I actually have – with friends and drinking buddies who can trade a few words with me over halfway decent booze at the local bar; with Felicia, the cute chubby girl who works there and has lately taken to giving me the eye; with the port where I work and old man Wolff who pays my wages; with… Yeah, that’s probably it. I don’t like thinking about that either, or about my prospects, or about what might have been if my life had somehow unfolded the way it occasionally appears in those waking dreams of mine. Maybe I really should change something. Try to make my life at least vaguely resemble the one whose ghosts keep spinning around in my head. Maybe I should do it sooner rather than later – while I still have the strength, while my alcohol-eaten brain is still capable of sending even the faintest warning signals to the idiot who owns it… Maybe… Running past yet another alley in my desperate attempt to catch the bus that slammed its doors in my face, I spot a street preacher standing on a wooden crate – and for some reason he catches my attention. Another déjà vu, that weird feeling that a second reality is shimmering over the first, almost identical but not quite. The old coot shouting his mantra has a mop of tangled hair, a rat-chewed gray jacket patched in several places, the eyes of a lunatic, and exactly two listeners – a pair of half-drunk hobos with neither the strength nor the money to sober up and crawl out of the blast zone of the raving loudmouth. Three, if you count me. He’s screaming something about the Antichrist and about how we won’t notice the end of the world even if it turns out it already happened long ago. Sick bastard – just like all of them. Just like all of us. A phone call tears through my thoughts with an angry trill, meaning I’ve already missed the briefing before the loading shift and that old man Wolff’s all-seeing gaze hasn’t overlooked my screwup. I curse and swipe away the call, hoping that by the time I get there the boss’s temper will have cooled a bit. What the hell was I rambling about? Ah, right. Maybe it really is time to finally invite Felicia over for the night and take a proper look at all the virtues her uniform keeps hidden.