I wrote the following piece as a way to coax myself to sleep ... that it did not do, but it was fun to write. It is, like all forms of art, partly me and partly my imagination.
A Day in the Life of Charles Widmore
by Wes Kendall
It was in that chair where he often ended his days – landing there in both triumph and defeat, as though his survival were victory. For arriving to that part of the day meant – at last – that something was reserved for him, a type of spiritual attic for his soul that had been refinished for his escape and salvation.
He let his head roll back the cushioned foam, feeling the texture as a way to root himself. Material and sensuality were his saving grace after long days of cerebral exercise.
Charles, as one of the untold unknowns working to secure accounts and build profit, managed to fix himself to a great wheel that had spun and would spin through human history. Supply and demand, market forces: whatever it was, it was mostly devilish and brutal to any soul – like the medieval wheels that slowly, surely tore men from their own bodies.
For Charles, it was particularly cruel, repressing his once passionate soul beneath wave upon wave of figures and reports. Many days he was not at all sure that the computer he worked at for the majority of the day had not spread some virus through the keyboard into his body, eliminating most of his humanity. His work was a symbiosis of subtle death, a virus he was sure had been let in by his own fear. He began this career not knowing what else to do with his life; he only knew that college lay behind him and life’s hard knocks before him.
By the time Charles returned home from work, his mind taxed and his eyes worn dull by two twenty inch wide windows of digital information, he was the equivalent of a calculating brain, an awful thing, totally unlike the observing eye that Thoreau had proclaimed as the goal of true humanity.
Such a state - that is being all brain with a soul buried somewhere in its recesses – was, of course, a terrible condition to be in for any environment, but most of all for home. This was a fact that Charles realized almost every evening as he emerged out of his car, passed unobserving through his garage and into his house, where his wife and two children usually lay in waiting in a state of near emergency, needing significant attention.
At work the crisis was always something distant, or – otherwise – something in his mind, but it was always internal. At home, crisis became external, and it forced him into action in ways he was not prepared for. He always felt foolish and inept, dropping his bags by the door, shamefully slipping by his wife and kids with only half cognizance, hurriedly changing out of his suit and dress shoes into something moderately comfortable, then reemerging with hopes that his bedroom closet might serve like some phone booth to transform him into something other than who he was.
On his better days, Charles was able to do just that, morphing from calculating and decisive into sensual and playful – letting his son climb upon his back while tousling his daughter’s hair at the table. On his very best days, he even stood with his wife in the kitchen, helping her prepare the evening meal, talking through the day’s highlights, thumbing through the mail with vague interest. If he was lucky, there was no significant issue that would need to be resolved at dinner, no bill that needed explaining or reviewing, no issue with the children that would require his intervention.
On his worse days, Charles was nothing – a vague shadow in the house, a fact that only compounded his wife, Mary’s, own exhaustion from holding a house together. His lack of engagement pushed the whole system into a sense of chaos, each person in the family seeking some way to assert its needs and desires as each felt the horrible dependency of being around people who needed community or independence, and were instead mired in the malaise of a crowded, unsettled room.
Typically, he bounced somewhere between the good days and the bad days, doing just enough to hold his wife’s anger and exhaustion at bay while engaging his children’s longing for continued stimulation. This too, though, was a performance, and it wore him down, which only made his soul stretch beyond the moment, into that place where he might find rest and leisure.
When he did arrive alone to his chair, he was so worn thin and the days usefulness so past, that he preferred to expedite his settling back into his body through alcohol. The nightly cocktail thus became medication to slow his mind and bring back his senses. By the end of the night, though, he was not unaccustomed to pushing beyond the harmony of spirit and body into a prolonged buzz of delayed, slurred feeling.
It was a habit he acquired in college, one he learned as a way to deal with the infinite stress and anxiety placed upon him through academics and society. These escapes began as a volcanic release, usually ending in dark tours into oblivion over a toilet. But, with time and the prolonged reality of his uprooted soul, he had learned to drive away the madness through subtler forms of numbing and forgetting, his first choice being two stiff glasses of Johnny Walker, the second without the ice.
By the time Charles reached his thirties, sleep would not come at all quickly. Shortly after drifting near subconscious, he would awake – sensing that something inside of him was agitated, unfixed, disturbed, like a planet let loose from its orbit with unknown and ominous consequences.
When he was a child, his mother would calm this rising tide, this sea of tumult. The very rhythms of her voice would move into his soul as her hand rubbed his back and he let his head find its way back to earth. She had the power to force the demons away, or at least turn Leviathan back into the deeper waters.
Now, as a man with his own children to sooth, he was unable to unearth mercy or healing in such profound measures for himself. He sought other voices – sirens – to fill that space and serve that function. Some nights it was jazz. Other night: blues. Some nights it was Motown – Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. Whoever it was, he preferred an artist who had at least wrestled with the devil and with God. He claimed you could tell whether an artist had really done their homework if you could picture the devil and God warring to determine the outcome of an album. Would it end in harmony and reconciliation, or would it descend into dissonance and chaos? This is how Charles measured music. He thought himself quite a critic, but he knew – deep down – that this was one of the passions that he had never truly embellished.
This evening he choose to listen to Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, one of Marvin’s most personal – written as a testament and release to a marriage that had fallen apart. With the alcohol warming Charles' cheeks, he closed his eyes, and listened as the music took him through agony and longing. He remembered a fragment of a poem he had read earlier in the week, something about the way that even joy in old age can become sorrowful, the way memories can dull in the mind while continuing to pierce the heart. And, with that lingering thought, he tried to let his body let go of the world. His wife encouraged him to try certain exercises to aid his release – picturing himself holding specific pieces of paper, persons and conversations from the day, then letting them drop, watching them float into a waste basket, trusting that they are gone. “Today has had enough troubles of its own,” she would say. “Let them go. Tomorrow will worry about itself when we get there.”
With that advice, he busily moved through his morning, watching the numbers fall off his computer like molten pieces, burning down his desk and cooling on the floor. He saw his boss enter with the stern look of a mortician, but in Charles’ mind, his boss never made it half way across the room. Instead, he dissipated into sand and fell into a pile on the carpet.
Occasionally, Marvin’s voice sang out, “When did you stop loving me; when did I stop loving you?” And Charles’ mind would become fixated on something deeper in his core. Dismissing it he moved on, but his focus upon the day was itself now disintegrating. He looked around the room, for once feeling as though he was actually occupying it, letting his head nod to the synthesizer playing within the music, singing out loud, “Sometimes my eyes were red as fire … intoxicated … sometimes the spirit was moving on me … I’m gone … I’m gone … and I’m gone … and I’m gone … You have won the battle. Oh, but dad is going to win the war.”
A slight smile finally crept across his face, as though he were finally satisfied to realize something that no one else knew. And with that he let the empty crystal glass rest on the table next to his sofa chair, tucked the recliner back into itself and stood up upon the cold, dark, hard wood floor, letting himself feel the ground beneath his feet, letting his head rest as a piece of his body, and nothing more.
For Charles, it was particularly cruel, repressing his once passionate soul beneath wave upon wave of figures and reports. Many days he was not at all sure that the computer he worked at for the majority of the day had not spread some virus through the keyboard into his body, eliminating most of his humanity. His work was a symbiosis of subtle death, a virus he was sure had been let in by his own fear. He began this career not knowing what else to do with his life; he only knew that college lay behind him and life’s hard knocks before him.
By the time Charles returned home from work, his mind taxed and his eyes worn dull by two twenty inch wide windows of digital information, he was the equivalent of a calculating brain, an awful thing, totally unlike the observing eye that Thoreau had proclaimed as the goal of true humanity.
Such a state - that is being all brain with a soul buried somewhere in its recesses – was, of course, a terrible condition to be in for any environment, but most of all for home. This was a fact that Charles realized almost every evening as he emerged out of his car, passed unobserving through his garage and into his house, where his wife and two children usually lay in waiting in a state of near emergency, needing significant attention.
At work the crisis was always something distant, or – otherwise – something in his mind, but it was always internal. At home, crisis became external, and it forced him into action in ways he was not prepared for. He always felt foolish and inept, dropping his bags by the door, shamefully slipping by his wife and kids with only half cognizance, hurriedly changing out of his suit and dress shoes into something moderately comfortable, then reemerging with hopes that his bedroom closet might serve like some phone booth to transform him into something other than who he was.
On his better days, Charles was able to do just that, morphing from calculating and decisive into sensual and playful – letting his son climb upon his back while tousling his daughter’s hair at the table. On his very best days, he even stood with his wife in the kitchen, helping her prepare the evening meal, talking through the day’s highlights, thumbing through the mail with vague interest. If he was lucky, there was no significant issue that would need to be resolved at dinner, no bill that needed explaining or reviewing, no issue with the children that would require his intervention.
On his worse days, Charles was nothing – a vague shadow in the house, a fact that only compounded his wife, Mary’s, own exhaustion from holding a house together. His lack of engagement pushed the whole system into a sense of chaos, each person in the family seeking some way to assert its needs and desires as each felt the horrible dependency of being around people who needed community or independence, and were instead mired in the malaise of a crowded, unsettled room.
Typically, he bounced somewhere between the good days and the bad days, doing just enough to hold his wife’s anger and exhaustion at bay while engaging his children’s longing for continued stimulation. This too, though, was a performance, and it wore him down, which only made his soul stretch beyond the moment, into that place where he might find rest and leisure.
When he did arrive alone to his chair, he was so worn thin and the days usefulness so past, that he preferred to expedite his settling back into his body through alcohol. The nightly cocktail thus became medication to slow his mind and bring back his senses. By the end of the night, though, he was not unaccustomed to pushing beyond the harmony of spirit and body into a prolonged buzz of delayed, slurred feeling.
It was a habit he acquired in college, one he learned as a way to deal with the infinite stress and anxiety placed upon him through academics and society. These escapes began as a volcanic release, usually ending in dark tours into oblivion over a toilet. But, with time and the prolonged reality of his uprooted soul, he had learned to drive away the madness through subtler forms of numbing and forgetting, his first choice being two stiff glasses of Johnny Walker, the second without the ice.
By the time Charles reached his thirties, sleep would not come at all quickly. Shortly after drifting near subconscious, he would awake – sensing that something inside of him was agitated, unfixed, disturbed, like a planet let loose from its orbit with unknown and ominous consequences.
When he was a child, his mother would calm this rising tide, this sea of tumult. The very rhythms of her voice would move into his soul as her hand rubbed his back and he let his head find its way back to earth. She had the power to force the demons away, or at least turn Leviathan back into the deeper waters.
Now, as a man with his own children to sooth, he was unable to unearth mercy or healing in such profound measures for himself. He sought other voices – sirens – to fill that space and serve that function. Some nights it was jazz. Other night: blues. Some nights it was Motown – Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. Whoever it was, he preferred an artist who had at least wrestled with the devil and with God. He claimed you could tell whether an artist had really done their homework if you could picture the devil and God warring to determine the outcome of an album. Would it end in harmony and reconciliation, or would it descend into dissonance and chaos? This is how Charles measured music. He thought himself quite a critic, but he knew – deep down – that this was one of the passions that he had never truly embellished.
This evening he choose to listen to Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, one of Marvin’s most personal – written as a testament and release to a marriage that had fallen apart. With the alcohol warming Charles' cheeks, he closed his eyes, and listened as the music took him through agony and longing. He remembered a fragment of a poem he had read earlier in the week, something about the way that even joy in old age can become sorrowful, the way memories can dull in the mind while continuing to pierce the heart. And, with that lingering thought, he tried to let his body let go of the world. His wife encouraged him to try certain exercises to aid his release – picturing himself holding specific pieces of paper, persons and conversations from the day, then letting them drop, watching them float into a waste basket, trusting that they are gone. “Today has had enough troubles of its own,” she would say. “Let them go. Tomorrow will worry about itself when we get there.”
With that advice, he busily moved through his morning, watching the numbers fall off his computer like molten pieces, burning down his desk and cooling on the floor. He saw his boss enter with the stern look of a mortician, but in Charles’ mind, his boss never made it half way across the room. Instead, he dissipated into sand and fell into a pile on the carpet.
Occasionally, Marvin’s voice sang out, “When did you stop loving me; when did I stop loving you?” And Charles’ mind would become fixated on something deeper in his core. Dismissing it he moved on, but his focus upon the day was itself now disintegrating. He looked around the room, for once feeling as though he was actually occupying it, letting his head nod to the synthesizer playing within the music, singing out loud, “Sometimes my eyes were red as fire … intoxicated … sometimes the spirit was moving on me … I’m gone … I’m gone … and I’m gone … and I’m gone … You have won the battle. Oh, but dad is going to win the war.”
A slight smile finally crept across his face, as though he were finally satisfied to realize something that no one else knew. And with that he let the empty crystal glass rest on the table next to his sofa chair, tucked the recliner back into itself and stood up upon the cold, dark, hard wood floor, letting himself feel the ground beneath his feet, letting his head rest as a piece of his body, and nothing more.
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