Chain Reaction

by Scott Speck

	A young man with unkempt brown hair perched a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses
high upon his nose while sitting on the edge of a ruby-colored sofa on a hardwood floor
that creaked to the tapping of his shoe in the cramped living room of a terrace house,
one of a row of ten along Towner Street, each divided from its neighbor by a brightly
painted downspout of a different color.  The front door, constructed thickly of wood and
glossed over in too many coats to count since it was first hung on brass hinges over a
century ago, stood ajar, allowing a warm winter breeze inside the musty house, reeking of
stale cigarette smoke that had tired of hovering as a thin blue cloud in a beam of sunshine
filtering through a cracked stained glass pane just above the door, and had come, instead,
to nestle deep within velvet upholstery.
	The man held an acoustic guitar in his embrace -- the first and only musical
instrument he had ever owned, and which he had been trying to summon the time and patience
to learn to play for the past six months.  He wedged the laquered wooden body between his
bicep and his bare chest, relishing the smoothness of the neck, the rough feel of the
bass strings abrading the whorls of his fingertips.
	The pick was lighter than air between his thumb and forefinger.  He rested
the tortoise-shell plastic against a string and plucked it.  Across two strings the pick
skidded, and, in that moment when he flushed bright with embarrassment at his own clumsiness
despite being alone in the house, he yanked his hand backward and away from the neck, but
not until his middle finger, already hovering between two other strings, twanged both of
them, producing an annoyingly sick hum from the untuned instrument.

	This blasphemous lack of musicality carried through the open doorway and across the
sidewalk, where a blonde pony-tailed mail carrier happened to be conducting her morning
rounds through the neighborhood.  She was an avid listener of folk music, especially of
acoustic guitar, and the loud twang caused her a moment's pause, mid-stride, such that her
walking shoe, soaked in a February drizzle which should have been snow had it not been for
the unusually warm winter, swung forward, impacting her toe against a rise between two red
bricks in the sidewalk.  Her shoe struck solidly.  She stopped for a fraction of a second,
causing her body to tilt forward, eyes snapping wide, breath sucking in, when her free foot
thrust forward and she caught herself in the nick of time from falling headlong upon the
sidewalk.  A rush of adrenaline jump-started her heart, and she gasped for breath.  She was
a new mail carrier, and quite out of shape, so she paused momentarily, adjusting the bag
slung across her shoulder.  It was during that ten-second respite, eyes turned down, that
she spied a disconcerting reflection in a puddle further along the sidewalk.  Perhaps she
shouldn't have looked up -- when she did, she beheld a black pigeon streaking straight
toward her face, and then, when she could discern quite certainly that one of the bird's
orange eyes was more dilated than the other, in a freeze-framed moment in which time
grinds to a halt, the fat bird swerved and careened an inch past her ear, each feathered
flap of wing and flair of tail accompanied by a softly muttered tweet.

        There wasn't anything more annoying to John than being forced to detour a major
highway traffic pileup only to plow through some shitty part of town, full of narrow
streets and short-lived green lights, while the office building in which he worked
towered overhead, a half mile and a half hour away.  As he idled behind a dented yellow cab
at a stoplight, his glance drifted about the intersection -- away from the rippled,
rain-slicked pavement that reflected a gray sky and three swinging traffic lights.  A gust
of wind rose, and, across the lens of a red light which glowed so vividly that he
tasted cherries, floated a plastic grocery bag, tumbling end over end before the burning
red eye, then sinking in a sudden turbulent downdraft.
	The bag dropped a few feet, then jerked wildly toward the curb, up and over a
bubble-roofed blue car with water beading on freshly waxed metal, as though an invisible
hand had grasped it and was dragging it away from traffic.  Stranger still was that
pigeon, flying straight for a mailman -- no, he realized on closer inspection, a mail
woman -- had suddenly lifted its right wing and swerved mere inches past the postal
worker's head, having dodged one obstacle only to fly straight into another -- the plastic
bag.  At that moment, his cell phone began to ring -- an annoying warble to which he had
become so accustomed that he avoided taking the call to observe this manic, crazed,
panicked aerial ensnarement of a filthy, fat pigeon by a plastic shopping bag.  The 
phone continued to ring, the light turned green, but still he followed the bag, complete
with pigeon encased inside the layer of thin, rattling tan-colored plastic, from
which what appeared to be a purchase receipt tumbled out and fell to the street.  The
phone's third ring was drowned out by the blaring horn from a vehicle behind him.  When
he glanced into the rear view mirror, he was confronted with a huge metal grill and two
huge white eyes staring him in the face -- a public transit bus.  He laid tire the same
moment that his cell phone stopped ringing.

	Ann switched off her cell phone on the fourth ring to avoid her assistant's
voicemail.  She hated leaving messages when she didn't have to, aware of how laborious it
was for John to call up, in turn, each successive message, review it, then decide how to
file it.  Plus, he might lose some critical, unretrievable tidbit of information,
like a potential client's phone number -- one of his bad habits -- to excuse himself from
following up on the daily chore of callbacks, a behavior she didn't want to reinforce.
	Rain poured from a featureless gray sky, blurring her view through the office
window with wind-driven sheets of water.  She swiveled on her desk chair, noting the smooth
feel of her tan leather chair against the undersides of her thighs.  It was like a
second skin, warm from her own body, rising to take its original shape as her weight
shifted away from each side of the seat cushion.  She was pleased with her legs,
gleaming in her glitter hose and revealing just a hint of the muscle she'd been
spending an hour each day building at the gym.  What a pity she had to view herself
in this light -- the ambience here at the office was less than ideal.  She took a hot
sip of her mocha java and spied the remaining half of a cinnamon roll, dripping with
a thick shine of frosting.  In a few days, she mused, a group of properly fussy designers
would save her from this dread atmosphere, by removing sterile rank on rank
and row on row of buzzing fluorescent bulbs.  They would redo the ceiling and add
designer incandescent lighting, as well as some neon.  Ann had hoped to discuss her plans
to hang a green neon iguana in the corner, above and slightly behind a very tall and
flourishing indoor palm, but John hadn't answered the phone. 
	Where was he, anyway -- he was usually at work by eight o'clock, no matter the
weather, and he drove like a madman on speed.  Perhaps he'd become trapped in traffic, or
maybe his boyfriend was having another crisis and he was home helping to mend the wounds.
She never assumed his car might break down, since he was his own mechanic, and, in his
own words, had never met a better one.
	She picked up the sleek, smooth black phone again and nearly pressed the redial
button, then set the device back down upon the honey-brown hardwood of her desktop.  Then
she took the time to enjoy her chair again, placing both high-heeled feet side by side,
just in front of the chair, and swiveling, rubbing her legs against that sensuous, supple,
other skin and realizing that this, perhaps, was the attraction her fiance' had in rubbing
her legs with his own.  In her enthusiasm, she swiveled too sharply, an armrest striking
the edge of her desk, toppling her tall mug of coffee from the desk and spilling its
contents with a hot, steaming splash upon the carpet.  She swore and immediately dialed
Lucy, summoning her to sop up the dark brown liquid already dying the lush ruby Persian
rug on which her sharply heeled feet were planted.  In the time it took her to place a
message on the maintenance department's voicemail, she failed to notice the orange bulb
blinking atop her phone -- a signal that someone was trying to call her on another line.

	Ann's fiance' left the most sensuous, deep-voiced happy birthday voicemail he
could compose while standing in the middle of Sydney airport with one hand cupped halfway
around his mouth.  He didn't have much time -- his flight was scheduled to begin boarding
in ten minutes, and then it would be a full day until he could call her on the phone again.
This part of the terminal, with its bright lighting and clean floors, was nearly empty,
and fairly quiet this time of night.  A stuffy British-looking woman with a long hook nose
and two close-set green eyes and a tall walking stick beside her who was staring at the
floor but shifting her glance toward him now and then appeared to have nothing better to do
than eavesdrop on his conversation, not necessarily because she was a nosey woman, but
because she was bored to death sitting alone in the airport terminal.
	He closed his eyes, breathed hard into the phone, and envisioned the feel of Ann's
smooth skin against his naked body.  Here was a man who strove to shower his woman with
romance and with passion, especially on a day like today -- her birthday, as well as the
signing off on the largest solo sale of his career.  When he finished his suggestive
message, he was left limping on the floor, but he still managed to smack one more kiss
that crackled over the phone.   He hung up and turned away, noting that the call had
probably cost him a pretty penny or two, or perhaps a pretty dollar or two from this far
down under, half a world away from his Ann, the woman he would marry this June.  As he
imagined the rich, brassy ringing of the bells from the brown stone steps outside Saint
Andrews, rice scattering off his black satin lapel and falling to the ground about his feet,
a very tall, very fat man with a long, wide gray beard said "Pardon me, sir."  Abruptly,
the two men traded places.

	The bearded man was relieved to secure the use of the phone, having wondered how
long that Yank would be on the line, since he had been using the same phone off and on
now for the past hour, probably talking work by how smartly he was dressed, the crispness
of his motions, the alertness of his glance, and the abandon with which he swung around that
black leather briefcase.  But that was all water under the bridge now, as he picked up the
receiver, the plastic still warm from the previous user's hand, and dialed up his brother
to tell him that he had forgotten to mail an important letter back home, a goodly two
hour's drive away in the country, and he wanted to make sure his brother knew about the
letter, still sitting on the table, and mail it the following day.
	It was a very important envelope, containing an insurance premium payment for the
house, already so overdue that, should it not delivered to its destination within a week's
time, could result in the cancellation of the insurance policy.  By the age of the old
house, with its creaking walls and hazed over windows, any sort of repair might leap like
a demon from the darkness, into the light of necessity, and it could cost them thousands.
Fall was approaching, and, once winter arrived, that cantankerous old furnace of theirs
might give up the ghost with nothing more than a swan song puff of smoke and steam.
	He dialed as quickly as he could and awaited his brother's voice, just as a
woman's chidings boomed over the intercom and echoed throughout the cavernous flight
terminal, announcing that his section on the airplane should have already boarded by
now.

	Morse Penobscott was sitting on his favorite chair, out on the porch behind his
house, a two hours' drive north of downtown Sydney, beneath a brilliantly starlit sky
complete with a full moon, chirping crickets, and that first autumnal chill that causes
one to draw one's sweater across one's chest.  He took a long draw from his pipe,
the ember glowing brightly orange, the tobacco shreds crackling as they each caught fire,
one after another, in turn producing more of the warm, aromatic smoke that smelled of
cherries and filled his mouth with a fog he couldn't see until he exhaled it from between
his yellow-stained teeth.  What a beautiful evening it was -- he had just seen off his
brother on a weeklong business trip that would land them the contract in Melbourne they so
desperately needed.  With that kind of money and work experience, and a reference of that
caliber, their company name would finally be on the map.  Not only that, but he wanted to
repair the old family home that had been bequeathed to them, down through four generations
of Penobscotts.  The roof, in particular, had been leaking, and Morse figured there were
probably some slates which had loosened and were working themselves free, allowing the
seepage of rainwater.
	He was much too slovenly and afraid of heights to scale the walls and stagger
up the steeply sloped roof.  In fact, he had purposely avoided climbing up there ever
since his boyhood, when his uncle Albert died after falling from the rooftop while
repairing a loose brick on the chimney by cracking his head open upon the sidewalk.  A
sharp gust of wind rose and caused the tree before him, its trunk thick and black in the
night, to creak just as it had when he was a little boy.
	Then, the phone rang -- the metallic double bells sounding from the kitchen,
just inside a cranked open window that glowed softly yellow with lamplight from the parlor.
He sighed in frustration, since this was the third time this hour the phone had rung, but
he knew that he'd bloody damn well answer it, since it could be work-related, and anyone
running their own company, he had come to know, was quite completely and literally at the
mercy of every force and power beyond him.
	So he stood and stretched, stomping the numbness of poor circulation out of his
right foot while limping toward the kitchen door, when suddenly there was a dreadful
smashing sound, and a thud that shook the ground and then rang loudly, as of metal and stone
colliding in some terrifying conspiracy.  He nearly jumped a foot, adrenaline rushing
through his veins, as he spun around, and, in the near darkness, tried to make sense of
what had happened.  The silence of the night returned, followed by the chirping of crickets
which the noise had momentarily silenced.
	As the phone continued to ring from inside the kitchen, Morse saw that his chair
had been toppled, surrounded by chunks of what appeared to be black rock.  Slate, he
realized.  As he picked through the rubble, he surmised that at least four large slabs of
the stuff had detached from the roof, probably in that gust of wind, and had skidded
quietly down the slope of the roof to smash the backrest of his chair so badly that it was
quite beyond repair.  That could have been my head, he pondered, still shaking, as
goosebumps raised upon the back of his neck.  The phone!  That bloody phone had saved his
life!  He scrambled inside, hoping to beat the answering machine message, to thank whoever
was at the opposite end of the line for renewing his lease on life.
	Little did he know that his real lifesaver was a man, sitting in his musty,
junk-crammed living room, half a world away, still clearing his ears from his first attempt
at playing "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple, with this guitar that he had been holding
for nearly a half hour, the one he had bought with such lofty aspirations of becoming a
guitarist.  Who was it who wanted me to play the guitar in the first place, he wondered,
as he held the pick between his thumb and index finger.  It was Nicole, his ex-girlfriend,
the one who had tried to turn him into a poet and an opera-lover and a chef.  The one, who,
when he failed to live up to her high-winded expectations, had dumped him out with the
trash to take up with her brother's best friend.
	At that moment, in his state of singular frustration, he stood up and dropped
the guitar to the floor.  Wood struck wood, and the back of the guitar's body cracked.
The strings rattled and hummed for a few seconds, their sound carrying out through
the door he had propped open, to let in the pleasant, warm, moist breeze of a 
winter morning rainstorm.