Timothy Allen

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

I call where I live a tenement; it isn't, really, at least not in the sense in which some people use the word. It appears to have been built as a single family home, a giant, frame, barn-like structure, with a now-sagging porch on two sides, and faux brick tar paper siding. It has no architectural significance whatsoever, and clearly never did. There are a lot of old, run-down, barnlike houses in this part of town, all broken up into cramped, barely livable warrens.

I rode my bicycle home from work, cabled it to one of the spindles supporting the railing of the slanty porch, which appears to have been painted brown at one time, but I'm not sure. I shook the sawdust off my clothes, as best I could. Copious perspiration insured most of it survived the dozen block ride from the furniture factory where I'm employed. It's a hulking, six-story brick building, where the machines on each floor are driven by a series of shafts, belts and pulleys from a single, antiquated steam engine in the basement. Nobody outside Appalachia realizes places like this still exist. A non-union shop; I'm paid fifteen cents an hour over minimum wage.

I went upstairs, showered, and donned my least embarrassing shirt and jeans. Ten minutes to make it to class; shouldn't be a problem, I think. A chevalier now, grabbing my bent-spine philosophy book from the nightstand, bolting down the creaky stairs, and ousting the latchless screendoor from my path. We'll be starting on Aristotle tonight, I'm thinking. Comfort waves over me; I feel a loosening of the tautness in my spine. I pause, mid-stride, savoring this sensation. "There are good things to be found in this life," this feeling is saying, here in the midst of sawdusty, crumbling factories, of sagging tenements, grassless yards, and heaved and creviced brick streets. The corners of my mouth are relaxing, rising: I am smiling. Not just my mouth; my entire consciousness is smiling, at the drab awfulness in my existence being escorted off stage.

I relish and bask in this feeling; the perceptual world is gradually coming back to me, though. Something is wrong. It takes a moment for me to grasp: It. Is. Gone. The spindle, jimmied from its lodging, is lying alone on the paintless and warped porch floor. My bicycle has been stolen.

"The class!" I blurt aloud; "How am I going to get to class?"

"A ten-minute ride on a ten-speed," the train of thought continues, but now my lips do not move, "takes at least forty minutes to walk."

The warm aura of a few seconds ago is slashed viciously by the icy machete of reality. The full force of my tenement-dwelling existence is on my face and shoulders, in all its immediacy: a suffocating, leaden mucilage, intent on forcing me down, through the flimsy flooring of the weather-beaten porch, into the bowels of the earth, right here, right now. I white-knuckle the railing to maintain my balance.

Timothy Allen is trained as an academic philosopher; adventitious vision loss, however, has rekindled his dormant literary interests. He lives in the mountains of upstate New York.