Steven R Kramer was a man who led a dull and uninteresting life. For the last fifteen years, he held the same job as a junior partner of an accounting firm. He would wake up at 5 am, every day to be at the office by 7, and he would often work day after day without taking time off for months on end.
After many years of the same routine, he started to hate his job, but it was all he knew. He had taken an entry-level position at the firm after college, and within a few years, he had become a junior partner. He had focused so much of his attention on getting the promotion that he neglected his social life. He dated different women from time to time but never had a lasting relationship.
He lived on the third floor of a modest apartment complex that had four or five other tenants. He never took the time to get to know any of them, but he tried to at least be friendly towards them on the rare occasion that they would see one another. He kept to him the rest of the time, either reading, listening to old records, or just sitting on the small balcony outside his apartment like he currently was.
He took a drag off the cigarette in his mouth as he pulled a watch from pocket. It was 5:54 am. He wound the watch and returned it to his pocket. Ordinarily he would be putting on his jacket to leave for work, but the firm had recently decided to close for a month in order to have some much needed renovations done to the building before the holiday season began.
He stood from his chair on the balcony and stretched. He picked up his mug of coffee and finished it as he returned to the kitchen to refill it before returning to the balcony. As he stepped out the door, he heard, "Oy!" coming from below him. He pulled a dollar coin from his pocket and flipped it over the railing. A moment later, a tightly rolled newspaper wrapped with a rubber band came sailing over it and into his hand.
"It's Sunday," called out a voice from below. Steven looked down at the paper boy as he reached for another coin. He didn't have any more coins, so he pulled out his wallet and pulled out a five dollar bill. He rolled it up and wrapped the rubber band from the paper around it and tossed it over, saying, "Put the rest in your pocket. Throwing a paper thirty feet up here couldn't have been easy."
He sat down and opened the paper and began to scan the headlines. There wasn't anything that caught his eye, so he just started reading the first article about a school bond proposal that was to be on the upcoming ballot. He thought to himself, "Great, more taxes, and I don't even have kids," while he sipped his coffee and waited for the sun to rise.
He read until his eyes started to feel the strain of overuse. He sat the paper down and rubbed his eyes, thinking, "I should probably get these checked. It's getting harder to read."
He stretched again and tried to stifle a yawn before emptying the last of his coffee into his cup. He returned to his chair on the balcony as the sun began to rise at the end of his street. He began to hear birds chirping as he lit another cigarette. The street started to come alive with people exiting their own buildings to begin their days.
He heard the ding-a-ling from the bells on the door of his apartment building. He looked down to see one of the downstairs neighbors, James O'Corra, exiting the building. Steven thought that James was an odd sort of man. He didn't know much about the man, only that like himself, James had no children of his own, and he kept to himself mostly. The only other thing that he knew about the old man was that he was retired.
Most of their neighbors thought James to be eccentric, or maybe even insane. He was always talking to himself, making rapid and vigorous hand gestures as he did so, and he would go out of his way not to interact with anyone, like, crossing the street to avoid people walking towards him.
Steve had watched for the past four days as James had left the apartment and had started to become intrigued by the man's oddness. He watched from his balcony seat as James interacted with the street vendors. Steve noticed that as the man approached the first vendor, he placed money on a side table and grabbed a plain bagel without saying a word or even stopping. He did the same at a newsstand and a coffee stand before turning a corner and moving away from his view two blocks away.
Steven had begun to obsess about the old man. Every day that he had been home from work, the old man did the same thing, and Steven started to wonder where the man went day after day. On a whim, Steven ran to his coat rack, grabbed his jacket, and rushed out the door. He ran past the street vendors and around the corner that he had seen James go around. He had thought that the old man wasn't walking very fast and that he should be able to catch up with him.
As Steven turned the corner, he stopped to catch his breath. He started smoking in college and had never quit the habit. As he leaned on the building, panting, he looked down the block to see the man muttering to himself as his arm flailed about in every direction nearly a block ahead of where he now stood.
Steven started to follow the man again. As he walked, he noticed that James kept his left hand on the right lapel of the trench coat he was wearing. It was like he was holding onto something. James made his way to a park that was several more blocks away where he found a secluded bench and sat down, still ranting to himself. He pulled a little black leather notebook out from his lapel pocket and began studying it and ranting to himself even more.
Steven found another bench on the opposite side of the park where he could still see the old man. James sat on his bench for hours reading from the notebook, ranting and jotting things down all the while. Whenever someone would come close, he would bind the notebook up tight, put it away in his jacket, and say nothing until they walked away. When evening came, he returned home in reverse order.
