Another Untitled Excerpt From Zeitgeist

A Novel by Christopher Pyles

To read the first excerpt click here

Non compos mentis! It was how everyone made Chip feel in his dream. He was in this burning building composed of a hundred floors and a thousand apartments. A remarkable structure if you’re into that sort of thing, but — still — it was nonetheless on fire.

“Fire!” Chip yelled himself awake in horror.

The smoke was thickening. And somehow the torrid mess was a 360-degree envelopment. And now, he’s only just awake — hazy and clammy, heart racing like someone hit him in the chest with a shot of adrenaline.

Thinking to himself how much that sucked and identifying within it the larger metaphor as he shakes to his feet, he stands, stretching his torso upward like an erection to relieve the pressure along his spine.

The scene is so fresh and vivid still. Every apartment comprised of people going about their ordinary lives. Oblivious to the inferno, their domicile was ablaze and they could neither hear nor see Chip. He ran around desperate to warn and save them, but they were so consumed and absorbed by their distractions, their immediate desires, and their vanity that they wouldn’t have cared anyway. The plain minutiae that occupied their living moments were sufficient and self-satisfying enough for them to be concerned otherwise. The world around them was conflagrant and perishing. Chip recognized it was dire.

… Some time passes.

Later that afternoon, Chip is at Cafe Gourmet waiting for Autumn. It’s a long story. Either way, his paramour (Autumn, that is) careens into the premises. This blustering beauty remains otherwise engaged in her head. She’s never fully present — if you know what I mean.

Nevertheless, Chip stands to embrace her. They press their lips together for a second, hug for two, and then sit opposite each other in chairs that would be better suited in someone’s den set before a fireplace. Instead, Chip and Autumn sit shrunken like toddlers on overgrown teddy bears and emit tender body language, open, relaxed, and engaged.

He looks her in the eyes and knows she was with someone else. She abates his concern:

“Stop!” Then continues, “Have you heard of Choice Theory?”

Chip reflects, certain that she means is he familiar rather than if he’s actually heard of it. “At some point I’m sure,” he responds.

“So there’s five basic needs.”

“Mmmph!”

“Really, they’re survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.”

“Okay.”

She takes a drink of coffee. “Ugh,” she implores. Why she always does this knowing that Chip only drinks his coffee black and stern is complicated. It’s a long story.

She adds: “It’s a way of understanding personal accountability for decisions. The idea is that awareness of self in each facet of life will make you more behaviorally responsible and will help you develop healthy relationships. We all have a mental view of an ‘ideal world,’ but our problems derive from where we place value on our impressions from the ‘real world’ — positive, negative, or neutral. So when you compare what you want to what actually is and that impression is disagreeable, you’ll experience a bad feeling, which in turn influences your thoughts and decisions. Only you are responsible for the experience and your response. You can’t invoke that upon someone else and when you do — if it’s distaste — it can be toxic.”

“If I meant to … Hmm!” Chip ponders. “Look, I just feel the imbalance in our relationship. We need to evaluate whether what we are doing is helping us achieve what we want and whether our actions are interfering with what the other person wants.”

“My point exactly!” Autumn asserts.

“Forgive me for wishful thinking. A person’s sexuality is one of the most unique things we can share with each other and that depth of intimacy should be preserved for meaningful experiences, and not passed around frivolously like a platitude to assuage some fleeting pang.”

Inhaling deeply, he displaces his air to calm, then furthers: “I value you!”

It’s a long story, and time passes on.