Peering over the balcony of the hundredth floor, the city is my petri dish. I’ve analyzed him for weeks, the man on the street, the one that sleeps beneath my balcony. He and the other organisms avoid each other’s glances at stoplights, bump into each other at coffee shops, and collide into each other in dimly lit bedrooms; all within the walls of the dish, all within the confines of the city limits.
“Honey, didn’t I tell you to pour water on the stoop so he can’t sleep there anymore,” I hear my girlfriend yell from the living room. She is referring to Bright Eyes, the man I’ve been analyzing.
At this altitude, the people on the street not only appear smaller they move slower; the closer you are to a large mass, in this case the earth, the slower time passes. Conversely time moves faster on the 100th floor, I age slightly faster than my neighbors on the 99th floor. It is indiscernible to most people because gauging it is either beyond their means comprehend or irrelevant to them.
I yell back into the living room, “Chelle, he’s one of those special homeless people, the kind that start developing resistance to our cures, like an HIV virus, he just keeps mutating. I’m telling you, the more we try to mess with him the stronger he’s getting. Trying to contain him is like trying to hold mercury that has no home and unemployed, in one’s hand.”
When I am around her I have to be someone else, I can’t let her know how smart I am. It would scare her, scare most people that I know she has exactly 105 eyelashes on her left eye lid and 106 on her right, that I have created several charts that display every possible shoe, top, bottom combination, or that she uses an average of eight minutes to decide what to wear and that she goes through an average of sixty one of those 2,000 combinations and that she inevitably settles on twenty of those combinations.
“Just pour some water...wait, come take a look at these new shoes I got first,” she says.
Combinations possible: 206
“It's not a good idea. Last Tuesday when I was coming home late from the lab, I saw him getting sprayed by the street cleaning trucks that come every at 2:00am. I was laughing so hard, I was barely able to record a video and upload to YouTube. The video was all wobbly, so naturally, this week I waited in my car. I was shaking, shivering, because I was trying to compose myself while holding in my laughter, but this time, he just laid there with his clothes laid down nicely to welcome the blast of water. He was a adapting, he was a learning homeless."
Excerpt From - The 100th Floor Balcony
