Well-Lit Entropy

A Short Story

Arthur Bell hated the smell of exhaust. It affected swallowing and made breathing cumbersome. Despite his hatred for the unfortunate perfume of automobiles, his lot in life was to operate the attendant booth at the mouth of an echoing garage. Arthur had spent the last thirty years daydreaming about the parties and debauchery of his youth while he tore dispensed tickets and updated meters. He often thought that in the age of new-fangled technology, the city ought to update the booth with one of those robots, but the thought was usually replaced by a sinking feeling. What else did he have to do?

His wife Alice had died twenty years ago. She was frozen in time, but he kept aging to the point that his fingers bent in different, useless directions and his vest fit awkwardly. Nothing about him was magnificent, noticeable, grand, or notable. Simply put, he was to others and to himself a stooping gentleman who had worn out his welcome, and his retirement would mean little to him and nothing to anyone.

Not much varied in Arthur’s life day to day. He woke up before the sun, piddled around his kitchen in the dark making a thermos of coffee and peeling his daily hard-boiled egg. He puttered into work in his scratched and battered sports car that Alice had always loved to drive with the windows open. Arthur made it a point to be promptly on time to work, not that he ever received praise for it. But for him, stepping foot into his transparent cubicle was his singular thrill of accomplishment during the day.

In the beginning, he was lonely, but much like a scab, if you don’t pick at it, the feeling subsided on its own and fell away. Arthur was rather resigned to his fate as attendant at the ticket booth, and he liked his routine well enough and the fact that he had an excuse for why he never could make it to his friend Ernie’s jazz concerts or his sister’s bingo nights: he was making use of himself and accounted for at the mouth of the parking garage.

On a typical day, Arthur would see upwards of a hundred or so faces, some smiling and some decidedly not. Usually all were in a rush or desperate to find parking on a lower floor. As far as they were concerned, Arthur was a vestige of technologically sparse years who performed one task—justifying their tickets and letting them in and out.

Monday of the fourth week of March had been rather similar, and as Arthur did not yet know, it would turn out to be rather different. The morning began as all others, with his steady path of coffee, hard-boiled egg, sputtering car, boots stepping into the booth, cars starting to arrive. A cough had settled deep into his lungs and resided there for many weeks, to such an extent that Arthur had adopted hacking and gurgling as an adjunct of his routine. His head ached especially this morning, and his stiff joints resisted the well-oiled machine of his existence, but nevertheless, Arthur persisted.

Nothing was unusual about the first five cars of the morning. The day had been like many others, with one exception. At indecipherable increments, a bright light would blind Arthur and rest over him for a moment. It happened when he opened his eyes with a flash; it resided over his thermos of coffee. It blinded him in a burst when he peeled his egg, so much so that Arthur almost cut his forefinger on a sharp piece of shell out of fright. Strangest of all, when Arthur stepped inside his booth, a light began to shine and thrum all around him. It awakened a dead sliver of his heart that began to bubble up. It was an uncommunicable feeling, one that he had not dared feel since his wife’s death. It was a feeling that, as he opened his mouth to express it, he realized he had forgotten the words. All sentimentality had been scrubbed from his person, so he didn’t think much of it. Old age did cause you to see wild things, he decided, and like he did with many other things, it was best to leave it be.

As the sixth car rolled in, Arthur felt that same strange trepidation that he could not express, but he went about his task anyway. He slid the window open as the woman in her car rolled down hers.

“Good morning, sir!” she said with a chipper clip to her southern-tinged voice.

“Morning,” Arthur replied, a bit taken aback.

“Well, how are you doing?” she asked, as if she had already expected Arthur to have begun a conversation. She had an idiotic smile, in Arthur’s opinion, plastered to her face.

“Fine,” Arthur grunted. This was the part he hated about his job. Small talk.

“I am just grand,” the woman said as if Arthur cared. She continued to prattle. “I’m taking my baby son to his first dance class today,” she gestured to the back seat lovingly. “I mean, of course they don’t really dance, on account of their being babies, but they do like to play with scarves and wiggle around to the music anyhow.” She paused to take a breath. “I know he’s young, but they grow up so fast. I do wish there was a way we could know when it’s our last time doing something. You know? Like angels singing or a spotlight or somethin’.”

In that moment, Arthur felt two things: an annoyance at cheerful southern attitude and a cold clarity.

The cold clarity turned to nausea, and all Arthur could do to prevent his hard-boiled egg from making a reappearance was reply with, “Uh huh.”

The woman exchanged final pleasantries, and Arthur buzzed her through. Arthur justified the next ten or so cars as they rolled past the barrier, but as he did so, his hands shook and his gaze blurred with the perpetual yellow glare of a light that no one else seemed to see.

The hum of anxiety got the better of him, and he decided it was high time he be surrounded by people. His misshapen fingers fumbled with the keys, and he clacked in a number on the old phone hanging in the booth.

It rang twice before the receiver clicked on.

“Uh, hello?” a deep voice said from the scratching phone.

“Hi, Ernie,” Arthur said quietly, clearing his throat. “I, uh, wanted to see if you were playing jazz this afternoon? Figured I’ve said no enough times.”

Ernie chuckled on the other line. “Good to hear from you, Arthur. Yeah, I’ll be with the guys at the Modern coffee shop around two. You should come on by.”

“Okay, thank you,” Arthur said eagerly.

Their conversation ended with exchanged pleasantries, much like Arthur’s earlier conversation with the southern woman.

As Arthur hung up the phone, a bright light emanated from it, and Arthur tried to blink it away.

More cars passed, all with the same sunlight quirk. Around one-thirty, Arthur began to walk slowly over to Modern Bagels and Coffee. He kept his eyes down to avoid the potential of seeing any unseemly halos or spontaneous lanterns. When he arrived at the shop, Ernie and his band were already playing a rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon.” Ernie smiled from behind his keyboard when Arthur shuffled in. His smile was highlighted with sunbeams, and Arthur felt a sinking feeling.

The jazz set was the first hour Arthur had really enjoyed in a long while, and he found himself tapping his foot to songs that Alice would play in their car on long drives to the coast. The nostalgia was overwhelming, but he felt somehow that it must be necessary.

By the time Arthur wandered back to the garage, it was dark, but the pesky light illuminated his path. On the walk back, he allowed himself to remember things he had tried hard to forget: Alice’s last night at the hospital, the laughter of nurses in the hallway, the dim light above her bed, and the room bursting into chaos and sound when she flatlined, followed by the sighs when the beeping stopped.

The booth greeted him like a hollow ribcage of glass and steel. He stepped inside and sat, suddenly aware of how light and empty he felt. Not starving, exactly, he had eaten this morning, but hollow, as if his body had been waiting for years for something he could not name. The light enveloped him, and this time it did not blind him.

Another car approached. Arthur straightened, slid the window open, and took the ticket gingerly. He justified it neatly and raised the gate, new purpose in his limbs and actions. The driver nodded, already gone. Arthur felt an unexpected satisfaction, a feeling he had not felt hand in hand with his job for countless years.

As the garage quieted, the light settled over him one more time. Arthur leaned back in his chair, his hunger easing—not because it had been filled, but because it no longer asked anything of him. He began to understand that this was his last shift. Outside, the garage lights clicked on automatically, efficient and timely. Inside the booth, Arthur Bell remained, finished at last.