Goines On: Pregnant with possibility

By Moristotle

[Author’s Note: Allusions in this vignette to other Goines vignettes are not acknowledged. My intention is that the vignettes, artfully collected and arranged, might someday be published as a book, a sort of “portrait in a thousand strokes.”]

The sky ahead of Goines was vast and cloudless as he merged onto the freeway to go to an ophthalmology appointment. He felt strong, he felt good, enjoying the sky, the feeling. He felt as though there were many possibilities for him out there in that expanse of world and time, and though he knew he wouldn’t, he wanted to live forever.
    A little ways on, Goines became aware that he wasn’t thinking about anything, wasn’t remembering any happenings or earlier thoughts, wasn’t tapping any words on the steering wheel. But immediately he realized that he was thinking, about not thinking. And he understood that what he most wanted to live forever for was to go on thinking. He could not imagine not thinking.
    Some mornings it seemed to Goines that it wasn’t he who was thinking, when whatever was happening in his head didn’t sound like him. Every few weeks or so, he would hide himself inside the body of a movie or TV character, or in some way be under the character’s spell. He had awoken a few weeks earlier to find himself inside the body of the character Bob, a Belgian policeman posing as Peter in “Undercover,” of which Goines and his wife had watched the last two episodes of its first season the night before. Goines had suspected at the time that he had “become” Bob in order to be closer to the Dutch policewoman Kim, undercover as Peter’s wife, Anouk, who was dark, slender, beautiful.
    His phone began to ring and soon engaged the car’s Bluetooth, the ring switching to emerge from the car’s speakers. He lowered his eyes toward the steering well and pressed Enter with his right index finger. The voice was too low to make out so he looked down again at the steering wheel for the volume control, although he couldn’t remember whether it was the button on the left or the right. He pressed the right one a couple of times and recognized the canned phrases of a robo-call. “Jesus,” he said aloud, and looked down yet again to press Exit.
    An eighteen-wheeler swooshed by on his left and Goines jerked right a bit, cognizant that he had just been thinking about living forever. The late morning was so pregnant with possibility, he wanted nothing to go wrong today. He remembered that much earlier morning drive he and Mrs. Goines had taken, to the airport for their trip to Minneapolis – a drive on which something had gone wrong. Arriving at the airport, they had reviewed which bags he would leave at the curb with her before parking the car, and they soon discovered they had left one of her bags at home.
    He attributed his energy this morning to five consecutive days of priming himself each night to awaken energetic the next morning. Each night he had silently said affirmations and done visualizations for the next day’s activities, imagining himself doing them vigorously, however routine or mundane each activity might be. He had begun the practice after returning from Minnesota, after almost a week of feeling tired, run-down. They had done an awful lot in Minnesota.

Copyright © 2019 by Moristotle