To Sam Sabori: A Short Story Written by Marcos Norris

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary-over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore-While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping-as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door-'tis some visitor' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door-only this and nothing more'"
---Edgar Alan Poe, The Raven
FRED
The transparent window panes were a sad reminder that freedom would always come with a price. Time was winding into night as Fred gazed placidly at those panes, his eyes resisting the indifferent collapse of his thin withered lids; his mind's eye, equally withered, similarly gazed at the back of his eyeballs. As he lounged low-sunken in his decade-old arm-chair, tattered and frayed, he recalled how his second grade teacher, Mrs. Rodick, had molested him when he was a young school-boy; she was a beautiful woman, exotically built, with eroticism gleaming in her eyes. He remembered her healthy breasts and the manner in which they bounced with the same buoyancy as so many rubber-globes on the playgrounds of the schoolyard. As this memory slid through him, his right cheek bundled and lifted the corner of his slightly opened mouth--the crooked smile looked almost sinister. The reminiscent meaning in this nostalgia slightly captivated him, but died quickly after a few receding thoughts.
He was a unique man, Fred; sanctified with a special genius which he dedicated his life to cultivating. Most of his history was spent in the academic milieu--from his belt hung a PhD in the field of psychology, and a second in anthropology. For twenty wonderful years now, he had been head of the Anthropology department at the University of New York--I say wonderful, because academics and the fervent pursuit of intellectual enlightenment were the transforming magic that marked the flourishing influences of his long and meaningful career. Interestingly, whatever my personal apprehension may be, Fred no longer attributed such meaning to his career or to the many complicated vicissitudes that marked his memory. Overcome with ambivalence and indeterminacy, Fred discovered he was disastrously unable to partner with "meaning."
"I don't care anymore," he sputtered, his lips and tongue smudged with the paste of drunkenness and dehydration, "I don't care anymore." He gripped the tattered arms of his chair and took a deep languid breath. He felt hollow and drained, but having noticed the bottle of merlot lounging equally drained beside him, he sluggishly stammered to the liquor cabinet for some tequila. Fred spent a decade of his life belligerently induced by tequila; his wife had spent half of that decade rotting in her death bed and the second half in her grave. Fred was still a young man then and his alcoholism was short lived; why, on this night, he chose to revisit this past-time escapism is a reason both complicated and profound. Let it be noted by the reader, however, that this escapism was not induced by sadness; rather, it was induced by the absence of such human abilities; Fred was numb and desperate for a feeling of some kind--a feeling that would assimilate hope and purpose in his future.
Bitterness suffocated every location in his mouth and the reminiscent taste awakened an emotional bitterness far more painful, poisoning Fred's soul as he swigged from the aperture the stabbing morbid tequila. A rush of memories, like the pounding dominance of water breaking through a damn, crashed over Fred and swept him ferociously into a whirlwind of mental pictures and memories of his past: among these were his wife's smile, the time they first kissed, the way her face lit up when he bowed to one knee and proposed, he heard her voice say "I love you," and he saw her dying face. Once the tide subsided, he became conscious of the streams of tears that were gliding with the consistency of an assembly line down the sides of his face. At this moment, Fred collapsed forward and fell to the ground sobbing. There he remained, convulsing, for some time.
There was no sleep that night: Fred's exhausted figure and drained soul were stealthily upheld by the solid presence of deeply grounded contemplations. Fred was overcome with desolation and whatever liquor affected him that night failed to deliver him from the debilitating arrest of his thoughts. Captivated as such, Fred began to run over the familiar lines of Hamlet. "To be or not to be?, " the question was ironic and absurd; He couldn't understand why Hamlet could be so concerned with death's mysteries when the inevitable implications spread so much further; the indeterminacy of death fueled the indeterminacy that poisoned language, human history, and every wanting detail of the universe; most of all, it poisoned his own metaphysical concern. It was because of such contemplations that Fred, and all men on this earth who have ever reached the limits of such apprehensions, was oppressed by a life and world that could never, for such reasons, be meaningful. He wanted to slap Hamlet across the face and spew indecencies at him.
The relationship between the genius professor and the dark window panes in front of which he was squared and for some time now peering into, was much like the relationship between the half-wit George and the 'judging' eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg. Remembering this monumental moment from The Great Gatsby, Fred laughed at its twisted and mocking irony. Nevertheless, the symbolism the professor ascribed to those dark panes owned a lurid meaningfulness that even his powerful existentialism couldn't extinguish.
Contained within his vicinity, hour upon darkening hour, Fred glared into those panes--glass barriers and denizen of untold secrets--wondering what could be on the other side, what hidden knowledge could be locked in the dark unpromising plummet beyond. There no doubt has been a great history of death-bed confessionals; even Hamlet understood this much. This idea, throughout the night, had been seeping into Fred's consciousness from a sub-awareness, which for some time now had been driving Fred toward his current circumstances; for it is unquestionably at death's door-step that all men realize their own existentialism--the meaninglessness of what they must now regard as a painful waste of human life, both mocking and cruel, ridiculous and absurd. It is such considerations that make the confession, a disclosure of what the soon-to-be corpse somehow deems meaningful, so intensely interesting and mysterious. Yes, it was the death-bed confession that most interested Fred.
After some time of mental silence, the voice within spoke lucidly: A life without this hidden knowledge is no life at all, what lies beyond will tell...I must now know...I can't wait any longer. With a final examination, eyes pacing spasmodically amongst the window-frame's corners and edges, pulled by the magnet-like darkness of the night sky, Fred bolted from his chair and sprinted with the fierceness and determination of murderess passion toward the window. Head-first, he shattered the barrier, was released into the open-sky, and plummeted eight stories to the concrete below.
Whether or not Fred discovered the freedom for which he was so desperate that night, only Fred will know.