Mad Tom and Whimsy

The choppy, indecisive wind didn't scatter Tom's mousy brown hair — more shaggy lately than usual — as wildly as such wind might typically have scattered it. His hair didn't scatter well today because it was greasy and it was greasy today because he had, for a couple of days now, neglected to wash it. Rather rumpled and extraordinarily distracted, he sat leaning against a wall — the retaining wall that separated the artificially built-up, high tier of Worthy Park from the lower, street-level tier — with his legs stretched out across the grass in front of him so that he could press the ball of his bare foot against the cool concrete of the picnic table bench.

Behind the counter at the MailMart they could not smell the pond and they could not see the perfect, astonishing blue of the sky. The wind did not touch the skin there among the printers and copiers and binding machines with all of their smokey, chemical smells and their incessant clicks and whirring noises. These sensory deficiencies, however, were of no concern to Tom as he gazed, without really noticing it, across the surface of the pond in Worthy Park two blocks away from the MailMart. He was unaware, given his state of mind, of the mild but real annoyance his absence was causing in the MailMart. It had first become noticeable to them shortly after 7:00 AM and had become increasingly noticeable in the two hours since. By this time it was positively obvious and bothersome.

These facts were, of course, thoroughly lost on Tom. The concept of a MailMart must, after five years of employment there, have been stored somewhere in his memory, but those parts of him were not working well this morning. Certain cognitive functions had, unbeknownst to Tom, been degrading slowly for some time now, and he had come at last, unaware, to a crisis of mental failure that would shape the rest of his life. There is a fine line in the brain, it turns out, that separates the level of function at which you can carry out duties at a MailMart from the level of function at which you cannot carry out those duties. At some point between the previous evening and the current morning Tom had, again without realizing it, crossed that line. He was in uncharted territory, a dangerous place, a strange land. He was in Worthy Park at 9:00 AM with his back against the wall.