Warning: when I brought this over to HTML format, I lost ALL my formatting. I will be re-formatting it soon; my apologies to anyone who has to read it in this form!
Quick background: The town of Tremont is a small college town somewhere in New Jersey; no one really seems to know exactly where. It's hard to get to, and is notoriously hard to get to either Philadelphia or New York from there. Television and radio channels seem to tune in and out at will, and some people claim that on a particularly cloudy day you can end up gettings signals from as far back as eighteen years ago. After living there a day or two, though, these idiosyncracies of the town
start to seem like second nature... most likely a result of getting to know the people who live there. The events of Yesterday's Town take place in this fictional town.
Yesterday's Town: Table of Discontents
A story in progress by OtterZero
The phone rang entirely too early for a Saturday. If it was a
telemarketer, John was definitely going to unload some of his emotional baggage on them, starting to look forward to it as he stretched out a gangly arm to reach the receiver.
No such luck -- the unfortunately familiar voice on the other end started up even before he got the reciever to its standard side of the head position --
"Hey John! Guess who's moving?"
Before his waking mind had a chance to recognize the voice itself, the realization that the caller had started speaking the moment he picked up the phone set off one of John's old alarms: the TJ alarm.
"Let me guess, TJ's moving." Referring to him in the third person while actually speaking to him never had any effect, but it gave John a strange sense of satisfaction. "And where is TJ moving? Far away? Far, far --"
"Montgomery. I got a job at a small museum there..."
"Alabama?" John smiled, his still-closed eyes crinkling in the corners with sudden joy.
"Uh, no, John, the one in Jersey, right outside of Princeton. I'm not gonna be that far away, great, right?"
John sat up in bed, flipped on the TV, catching a glimpse of a cartoon he'd never seen before before heading into the living room with the cordless receiver. After quite a long silence, he responded, "Whatever. I'm sure that I'll be busy absolutely any time that you want to hang out. You know, work. Let me guess, you want help moving."
"Close, I was wondering if I could store some stuff at your place. I mean, you have that big-ass basement, right?"
Okay, John, think, John thought. "Yeah, but I'm not the only one living in this house, TJ."
"Right, but you're the last person I asked. Marsh and Justin both said it would be fine."
"Shit."
"There's a new word you might be interested in, John, it's called NO," Justin sarcasmed at John from the kitchenette table. "He was your friend. If it's okay with you, it's fine with me. We decided way back when that the basement was yours anyway."
Leaning against the refridgerator with a half-finished mug of black coffee in hand, John glared at his housemate as he often did when his roomate Justin left him to settle his own matters. As always, the young yet disturbingly craggy-faced student was surrounded on all sides by papers and journals, surrounding the kitchen chair at all angles as well as spread out on the table before him. His attention focused on a worn-out, well-annotated photocopy, he couldn't see John glare at him, though he was aware of it.
"I don't understand what the dynamic between you and TJ is, anyway. You say you hate him, yet you regularly hang out with him and let him walk all over you."
John scowled. "It's been months since I even talked to him. I thought he'd finally gotten a clue when I didn't call him for eight months."
"You shouldn't have assumed that that would stop him. YOU haven't called HIM ever since that weird period where you were going out together all the time."
"Uh, I wouldn't say that TJ and I were going out. You make it sound a liiiiiitle too disturbingly like we were dating."
Justin shuffled some papers with no obvious result in mind. "You may as well have been. You were inseparable. Then you suddenly started hating him, not surprisingly, since we all hated him to start with."
John continued his previous scowl, pausing only briefly to drink more coffee. "If you all hate him, why you tell him it was alright for him to move his shit into the basement?"
"I didn't exactly give my approval. I'm assuming Marsh didn't either, she probably told him the same thing I did: that it would have to be your call. Surprised? Now, TJ's never been known to twist other people's statements around, has he?"
An uncomfortable silence followed as John continued to drink and Justin tossed a few loose pages into a nearby trashcan. Finally, Justin turned to John, his coldly rational side at full intensity. "The better question is, why did YOU tell him that he could?"
John was flustered; "I didn't say that I did."
"No, you didn't tell ME that you said yes. But you told him that he could. I know this. So when is he coming?"
John sighed. "About an hour."
The pickup truck slowing down in front of the house wasn't familiar,
but the passenger was; worse, the cargo was unmistakible.
"Oh great," Justin said, standing on the porch next to John (now on his
third cup of black coffee), "it's his art."
As the truck settled into its parking spot, the tangled mass of wood,
steel, and vinyl tied down in the flatbed shook with something that
could have resembled apprehension, as far as sculpture is capable of
expressing it. The driver remained seated while the passenger opened
the door and hopped out to the curb. This young man, about five four
and eighty pounds, with scruffy facial hair and hair cut close to match,
was dressed in army surplus fatigue pants and boots with a dress shirt
and nondescript maroon tie, a typical mismatched outfit of the sort that
he always wore.
"John! Can't tell you how much I appreciate this, right?" He yelled
from the curb, lowering his voice only slightly as he neared the porch.
He spread his arms out in an apparent proto-hug gesture, but John kept
his arms out of docking position, his coffee mug held clutched to his
chest. TJ settled for a nod as he stood in front of his old friend.
"You don't even have to lift a finger, I'll get the stuff in myself."
"Good," John muttered, focusing on his coffee to avoid continuous eye
contact. "We've got the basement door in the back opened up. You're
all set. Just make sure you lock it up before you go."
"Got you at a bad time, right? Don't want to hang out and catch up or
anything?"
"Right. No time to hang out. Have plans."
"And I hate you with an all consuming passion," Justin calmly stated,
"so don't expect me to even respond to whatever remark you make to me."
TJ smiled in a way that clearly indicated his non-appreciation of
sarcasm. "Justin, you're such a kidder. Okay, let me get the stuff...
I'll knock if I need anything, right?"
"Sure," John said, already turned to follow Justin back through the
front door.
Locked in his bedroom watching strangely dated cartoons, John was
startled to hear a knock on his door. "TJ wants to speak to you,"
Justin's voice sounded through the door, "says he can't fit everything
in the basement."
John opened up his door to find Justin already seated back at his
standard kitchen table perch. "Fuck. He must have separated all the
pieces."
"There goes your playroom," Justin smirked to himself.
"Fuck." John went to the front door, opening it to the smiling face of
his inescapable acquantance.
"Hey John, your basement is a total gallery right now, you gotta see
it, but there's one piece I couldn't really fit down there, and here it
is," he said, gesturing to a small three legged table on the porch.
"Not much in the way of furniture, is it." John said.
TJ looked taken aback, and stopped smiling for the first time since he
stepped out of the pickup truck. Concerned, he said, "John, that's one
of my pieces. It's particle board. Particle board, great, isn't it?"
John just stared at the harmless looking table. He felt strangely
concerned for the little thing.
"I got the idea after I got stuck at an antique fair one day. I didn't
really understand why some of the darn things were so expensive, right
-- things like chairs you couldn't sit in, they were so old. Then it
hit me, that the fragility of some of the pieces were part of the
appeal. Particle board, John. Prefabricated fragility, beautiful,
right?"
After the near-effortless task of moving the table into John's room --
its triangular slightly fitting strangely well into an unoccupied corner
-- TJ declared his sudden need to be somewhere and left without much
fanfare. As the truck started up, Justin suddenly got up from the table
and ran to the front window of the house.
"I remember now. Ann's party," he said in a hushed yet audible tone.
From his room just off the kitchen, John heard this strange remark and
decided that if he didn't ask what it meant, it would bother him for at
least three or four minutes. "Hey Justin," he yelled, walking into the
midst of the kitchen and looking out into the living room, "what are you
talking about?"
"The man driving the truck," Justin replied in his previous tone of
voice. "I know who he is now. Well, not really..." As the truck
pulled away, he returned to the kitchen as his usual speed. "I was
discussing one of my articles at Ann's party last month, and he
interrupted me. We had a quite heated argument over the value or lack
thereof of interpreting literature."
"Gee, I wonder what side of that argument you were on," John said
smugly.
Noting the humor of the remark but choosing not to comment on it, Justin
continued, "I was worried that he would be one of those people you meet
once and are upset at the incompleteness of your conversation. But if I
could meet him again and continue our argument... hm... the next time
you see TJ, ask him how he knows that man."
John sighed. "Sure. First topic of conversation." He returned to his
room, cartoons still blaring on the television, the particle board table
standing calmly on its three long legs. Justin came to the doorway of
the room and looked in.
"Oh, that's art, all right," he snarled. "What does he call that one?"
"I don't think he calls it anything," John replied. "It supposed to be
some comment on the fragility of antiques or something. Furntiture with
automatic built-in fragility and uselessness."
"Oh. So he actually put some thought into this one."
John snickered, "either that or there was a serious sale on particle
board this week."
Justin smiled a rare Justin smile at the remark, then suddenly turned a
bit more grim. "So I take it the two of you are friends again?"
John breathed a deep breath and made scrunchy mouth shapes as he thought
about how to respond -- not to Justin's question, but to the situation
that TJ had placed him in. "I don't know. He was out of my life so
long, I just assumed he was gone. I don't want to say to him, 'I don't
want to be friends anymore.'"
Justin noted, "which is strange, since it seems like that's exactly how
you feel." Pressing the point, he said, "for one thing, he didn't call
you in ages until he needed something. That says something about the
quality of your friendship -- that he needs something from you. In the
past, it was spending time together, now it's free storage space.
That's not what I call a solid basis for friendship."
Something clicked in John's mind as Justin spoke, but before he
verbalized his thoughts, he placed the coffee mug on top of the
defenseless little table. It didn't even shake.
"It occurs to me..." John spoke, his cold tone somewhat mocking of
Justin's perpetual coolness, "that if I were to somehow fail him as a
provider of storage... that he might decide that I am a poor provider
for his occasional needs."
"Hmmm..." Justin scratched his chin. "Harsh, manipulative, I like it.
The theory seems sound and in keeping with TJ logic, but howfore the act
itself? Host a party in the basement and watch the wood and plastic go
flying?"
"Even better," John said, evil creeping into his voice, "we show him the
true meaning of fragility. At that, he picked up one of his five pound
weights near his bed and slowly, slowly lowered it down to the top of
the table to its landing spot by the coffee mug. Both of them remained
silent as the weight began its descent, as if John were placing a domino
or the penthouse of a house of cards.
Weight touched particle board with no sound at all, and John suddenly
released his grip.
Not even a shudder.
Both men looked at the table in silent disbelief.
"I suspect this will be harder than I thought," John said, as the phone
began to ring...