tick

This is why you have positioned your most comfortable chair to face squarely the southwest living room window of your ground floor apartment; why, for the past nine weeks, its ornately lathed front legs have stood three feet (24 floorboards) away from that portion of wall below the window which opens to your grindstone of a street called Ribbon; why you reset your wristwatch by telephone every morning around 6:45, then ease into the chair, which has retained the shape of its previous owner's impressive haunches, and run your thumb across the cloth upholstery embroidered with flowers, pink and green; why you sip your freshly brewed coffee, lightly creamed to your taste, which varies daily, until 7:00, when you work your hips to fit snugly into the angle where your chair's seat meets its back, squaring your shoulders to face straight out the window in anticipation of his arrival, instead of driving to Norton Lumber Company to punch your time card before 7:30; why, during the next five minutes, you cannot resist the temptation to lift your left wrist to eye level and follow the graceful sweep of the slender second hand of your wristwatch, always careful to glance repeatedly out the window for his entrance, stage left; ad why at 7:06:49 he appears from behind the left pane of your window, hunched as usual, spewing forth his ceaseless, indecipherable chatter, chastisements seemingly directed at his own two feet (or shoes, at least) on which he is fixated while walking up what you imagine would be defined in his eyes as the flowing gray concrete stream of Ribbon; why he wears his swan-white hair cropped close to his scalp and his black Winter jacket zipped snugly over his visible pot belly even though it is a 70 degree Summer morning; why he weaves his way around town, seemingly never to stop, like a crazed second hand on the clock-face of this city; why, when he disappears behind the right window pane, you lock your eyes on your wristwatch, and record on a long sheet of yellow legal paper the times of his entrance and his exit across the miniature stage you have made of your living room window; why, although a carpenter by trade, you own an extensive and varied personal library, however heavy on French and Spanish American existentialist fiction; why you were laid off from your job at Norton Lumber Company four months ago, and why you plan to receive your limit of unemployment checks by conducting yourself in an unacceptable manner during the required job interviews, accepting your checks as though the money were a state research grant; why you have noticed the man sputtering around town, here and there, while you run errands or pick up hardware for the odd jobs you take on for a few extra dollar, why his appearance at those moments looks to you like a tick-mark on time and space, similar to those marks you have made yourself with a pencil to measure a slice of pine, mahogany, or poplar; why you ask your neighbor, obese Mrs. Oxblood, while over at her house for a leisurely cup of coffee, the man's name; why she ignores your question and continues to talk about her irregular bowel movements even though you two are not on such personal terms; why, the moment you stand to leave, Mrs. Oxblood offers you her tiny jar of instant coffee, which she keeps for company only and doesn't drink herself, using it only on occasion for enemas, as she says; why you only now realize that she has been drinking tea the whole time; and why you walk from Mrs. Oxblood's directly to the bus stop and ride the bus around town all afternoon, looking for the man through your left-side passenger window thick with city film, ready to take note; why you spot him obliviously crossing Seventh Avenue; then, two hours later and one mile away from Seventh, climbing Vine Street; why you only now consider mapping his daily trail by this method of riding the bus, using its route as a constant; why you return to your apartment that evening and feverishly look up the word "tick" in your dictionary; why it defines "tick" as "a blood-sucking arachnid arthropod; a light rhythmic audible tap or eat, as from a clock; a small mark used to draw attention to or check something," like the "mark" made by you often enough with a simple pencil, during your carpentry career at Norton Lumber Company; why you will time tomorrow morning's little window one-act play, starring the man, and finally tally the fruits of your accumulated observations; why you had set out to prove the quite natural assumption that over the course of these nine weeks he would tire, eventually slow down: you will swear by you calculations that the man is getting faster. . . .