Jack understands fear. For Jack, fear comes from the common and the vulgar, because true fear rarely takes the form of big things like nuclear war, widespread famine, catastrophic natural disasters, the death of children, the end of the world, or godlessness and fascism. The big things are unavoidable. The big things are incomprehensible. In the lexicon of fear, these are the mundane things. Real fear is born in what most people consider the mundane — the everyday, pedestrian realities of the world’s little towns and neighborhoods. Real fear, like Sartre’s hell, is other people. What they do behind closed doors. What they say behind your back. The perverse acts they might reveal to you one day at a party. The invitations they may extend. 

~

Real fear is knowing that tomorrow you will wake. And that everything will be the same.

Jack practices smiling in the mirror each day before work. He can describe the sight only as eerie and grotesque.

Dead autumn leaves rustle in the wind. The muddied footprints of children trail away from puddles in the broken pavement. On a bench, holding an empty bag, Jack throws imaginary breadcrumbs to the pigeons and cries.

Five o’clock in the evening.

~

Gripped by a sense of fright that he can’t explain, Jack confronts the piece of fruit on the kitchen table. Since breakfast he has been staring at the peach, paralyzed. Finally, he dares to eat it. The universe is disturbed.

Jack awoke in a panic, discovering himself fully dressed and slumped on the floor of a bathroom he didn’t recognize. On the mirror, a whorish smear of lipstick displayed the message “Worry and Perversion.”

Jack waits for the ghostly mourners to emerge from the darkness to spirit him away.

~

Will they lead him to the black coach? Will it be the carriage appointed to escort him to his eternity?

~

And will the footman help him into the carriage, stifling the hint of an indecorous snicker, as Jack listens apprehensively to the departure of the mourners, their spectral voices filling the air with the sounds of sobbing turned to laughter?

Like a frightened child quivering beneath bed covers after a hideous nightmare, Jack turns up his collar and walks quickly through deserted streets, desperately trying to avoid the image of his shadow on sunless days.

Sunday morning — another hung-over Sabbath — Jack panics in bed, unable to free himself from the gnarled and twisted folds of his sheets.

Coughing in the squalor of a Warsaw ghetto, dismissively brushing lice from one strand of his hair to the next, Jack waits for the last of twelve people to arrive for a final dinner together. His groin burns with the wet fire of the clap he contracted during too many indiscriminate encounters with prostitutes whose faces he can no longer recall.

~

The dun splatters of cooking grease or of old blood taint the walls of his room.

~

Outside Jack’s room, the shuffling of tired feet in the snow and the tentative trying of the mail slot brings a crisp shock of chill and creeping regret. Jack knows the postman waits beyond that door, bearing fateful news.