A Man Apart: Part 3

          The morning is dawning, but I am so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open. All of a sudden the muscles in my eyelids seem to have taken on a great load, one under which they cannot hold out for much longer, and they gradually begin to oscillate up and down, though more steadily pulling down, like the lowering of the oceanic tides, caused by the lunar orbit…
          Andy doesn’t know it right now, but we know that the rest of the world is obviously not also sweetly slumbering as he is. As far as Andy knows, he is being carried by a formless being to another earth whose inhabitants know no sin, but he is a ridiculous and a fantastic dreamer, certain to corrupt these pure and innocent creatures. His neighbor, on the other hand, doesn’t know that Andy lies horizontal right now, drowned in oblivion, in a state which no earthquake below 5.0 on the Richter scale could even make him flinch. And it’s a good thing too, for if he did, he would probably be more interested in filching any number of Andy’s things than rousing him. In another room down the hall, students are silently gathered around books, cramming for exams, preparing themselves to take over for the dying generations of doctors, scientists, politicians, and businessmen—any avenue in which they can wedge their way for a while to justify their existence. In the hallway, some athelets jocularly make a vulgar joke about a girl as they head to the gym. Outside a high school dropout is delivering pizzas to inebriated students. Back at the pizza shop, a housewife is picking up a pizza pie for her three adolescent kids. Back at home, her daughter is talking about current pop culture phenomena unknowingly with middle-aged men from Tokyo, who live near an international corporation owned by multi-billionaires who have ties to the use of employing exploited Africans living in squalor to extract valuable natural resources. These African peoples are also facing genocide. In the middle East, greedy capitalist western governmens make swift decisions to commit murder on a mass scale, as if murder executed on such a large scale somehow separates it from murder. Soldiers are getting shot and tortured over millenia-old imaginary differences. People are fucking, others are making love. White men are smugly chatting in board meetings. People are stuck in traffic. Bums are begging for money. Babies are being born. Nearly half of the world is asleep on couches, beds, or floors, grass, gravel, sand, or dirt. In some places the sun is setting. In others, it’s rising. A satellite is orbiting the outer planets of our solar system before it returns home, to earth, several decades from now with samples of planetary debris. The space around it is freezing and silent. And outside Andy’s room, the sun’s rays are just beginning to illuminate the earth.
          But inside, Andy is just sleeping.