Despite his looming tardiness, Cole proceeded to shower. He stood checking his e-mail while the bathroom steamed up. A memory of a friend admonishing him about water rights trickled in amongst the checking of messages in his inbox: you should never just let your shower water run or run the water while you brush your teeth. A woman friend of his, Tina, had told him this. He glanced at the steaming rising steadily in the bathroom and wondered if he was indeed using up some allotment of water, some quantity never again to be replenished. His touch screen began to fog. White people, he mused, and laid his cell phone on the window sill next to the toilet. Always saving the world but never themselves.

The shower water was hot, too hot as it always was when he stepped inside. Shielding himself with one hand, he bent and adjusted the hot cold mixture. Water blasted him right in his face. He reached for the soap, scrubbing his groin and then shaved armpits. Most of his time spent in the shower was focused on how to evade doing as much work work as possible and instead on how he could find time to read and do homework. Groping with water-filled eyes, he shampooed his hair and washed his neck with a rough wash cloth. He was to have read six chapters on Bourdieu — he read perhaps four paragraphs. The French as so damned boring! All they do is snivel about what you cannot know. Bastard rationalists.

8:02. Cole walked dripping out of the shower and straight into his home office where his ironing board lay set up in a semi-state of permanence. He plugged the iron and and proceeded to fill the spray bottle with water. A powder blue dress shirt with a small white checkered pattern was taken from the walk-in closet as well as a pair of dark tan slacks, an orange-and-blue stripped tie, brown belt, argyle socks, and a fine, light-tan sports jacket with light-blue windowpane. Despite his lack of veracity for his job, Cole did take some pride in the way he dressed. He ironed his items one by one with a taught precision, spraying intermittently with the bottle to remove any wrinkles. 8:12. It’s always later than you think.That phrase. It always stopped him. He never felt that he quite owned it, yet it often found its way into his head, into his thoughts. As if someone where speaking it to him at the appropriate moment. He dressed methodically, if hurriedly, rounding up all the bits he would need to the day: phone, laptop, notebook, pen, wallet, double checking that he had is TransPass. All sundry items were stuffed into their respective places, back pockets and shoulder bag. His final matter was tying his shoes, always done sitting on the stair case. He did not allow shoes inside his house. Bad enough to have to vacuum once a week without tracking the whole world inside with you.

The bus was always a tricky equation, like some radical coefficient. Cole often thought of charting or cataloging how many times the bus passed him by while he was huffing up the street — he only ceased from doing so as it would involve more technology, as he was far too lazy to do such math by hand. Instead, he imagined the bus passing him by as he drew closer and closer, as if the contraption possessed a prosaic malevolence. Often though, amidst this daily question, Cole would be forced to recognize that the bus had pulled up in a timely fashion just as many times he turned the corner on to Cypress avenue, as if summoned by his butler. That is if he had a butler. But more often than not, he was bestowed ten or fifteen minutes of quietude, allowing him to collect his thoughts, attempting to suppress the anxiety and depression of going to his office. Occasionally he even succeeded, though most days he did not. Instead, he boarded the bus, swiping his pass that felt more akin to paying Charon his copper coin.

Cole considered public transportation one of the few good uses of technology. Unfortunately, it also involved the public. The entire trans system chaffed his skin like a chemical burn. The seats were all grime-filled, with old chewing gum melted into the fabric, heated by the bottoms of countless passengers. The clientele themselves looked like such a  ragtag motley crew of degenerates, it boggled his imagination that they even mustered the fortitude to board the vehicle. Most looked so dejected he felt it nigh to impossible they even had a viable destination. Probably just want to use the a/c.

Street by street, the bus hammered on, its blocky form pounding into potholes in the manner a ship’s prow cuts through a wave. Jolt by jolt, Cole’s demeanor became more abject, more bleak. Like a court official, the speaker pronounced judgment on Cole. 54th Street. 53rd Street. 52nd Street… Like a list of trumpted up charges, each one brought him closer and closer to his final sentence. 43rd Street.

Exiting the bus, Cole walked the last block to his office. The School of Creative Studies. Right, he brooded. A day care for kids who weren’t smart enough to go to law school or medical school but just didn’t feel right if they didn’t spend enough of their parents’ money. The building itself was a squat, red-brick square construct that did little to conjure up notions of creativity or studying.