my enemies

It's an absurd thing about the world that a person, however harmless, accumulates enemies. For me, the last two weeks have been a bumper season of new additions to my enemies list. It seems like new ones accrue every day, like pollen falling on the windowsill, or boxelder bugs congregating on my door this November. In fact there may be some gothic connection with the boxelder infestation and my new enemies.

This morning I was walking, alone, in a transition area between the bucolism of a suburban neighborhood, and the hell-like strip of a busy street. I have an embarrassing tendency to walk in the very center of the road. It's not something I mean to do, I just find myself there--I suppose it's the place to walk that I enjoy the most, if there are no fresh fallen leaves to drag my feet through along the sides. Occasionally I was passed by a car of some sort, usually one of a gentle, meandering disposition.
Whatever can influence an individual in the apparent sanctum of their vehicles seemed not to be present in any of the drivers I had observed heretofore. But abruptly, this rule was violated, when a black pathfinder appeared behind me, and drove by me in a strange way.

I was reminded of SUV commercials in which the driver must quickly avert some emerging danger, usually caused by lightening. The driver of the black pathfinder drove in just such a way this morning as one might use to avoid a boulder, or a deer, crashing or leaping unexpectedly into the roadway. But I had been plainly walking in the road, in its very center no less, for hundreds of yards. It was hard for me to understand how the nearness of the truck as it passed could have been anything but intentional. Then it occurred to me, even before my pulse rate had regularized, that I probably had another enemy on my hands.

As things happened, traffic was congested enough that I eventually passed the truck again on foot. The model was new, and clean, and the windows had some kind of platinum tinting like one sees on the visors of certain vintage model space-suits. It was simultaneously nauseating and pleasing, a very neat job of something I associate with crushing banality, and poor aesthetics. Inside the cab there was an unbathed woman, or so it appeared at a glance. She was abusing sportswear, in the sense that she was patently unfit, but was nonetheless wearing sweatpants, as though they could be worn for the purposes of fashion.

I think she had been dreading my approach, and when I arrived, she wasn't totally unprepared. Her face turned towards mine, and her lips manifested a Pressly-esque snarl, which I intuited was meant to be dismissive, indicating that she knew just what I was about to say. That she might have known was entirely possible, but I was baffled as to how she could act wrongly with such idiotic insouciance. Her radio was blaring, so I was in the position of needing to speak very loudly and distinctly-- I ended up sounding like one of the MC's at a boxing match. At first I only offered only advice. But as she refused to entertain my comments, turning her head away, my suggestions became less reasonable, and more vitriolic. By the time traffic shifted and we parted ways, we had indubitably become true enemies. My heart sank slightly as I realized that this was the case, since everyone wants to keep their enemies to a minimum.

Every time I make a new enemy, my mind is unsettled. This is disturbing for anyone, but for me it is especially irritating, because it prevents me from being able to do my job--mathematics--while walking. For me to calculate in my mind I need a very relaxing setting, one in which my conscious awareness of the real world fades to black, and brightly colored symbols can be manipulated. Any kind of confrontation freezes me in the real world, and it can before hours before I'm able to slip back into my little black domain.

Later, I was reading The Sheltering Sky, the scene where Port dies of typhoid. I was affected by the descriptions, and the stress of acquiring my new enemy, and I started to experience a twisting feeling in my own entrails, weirdly similar to what the character was experiencing. This became steadily more painful, and eventually I was actively controlling myself to prevent others, seated around me, from noticing my discomfort. It seemed like someone was tossing my intestines with salad tongs, and the pain would come so suddenly and with such unexpected ruthlessness that once or twice I grimaced and flinched before I could steady myself. I began to visualize tendrils of cancer spreading out into my viscera and coiling around my lower spine like wands of hemlock.

What this episode means, I have no idea. It was one of those situations in which I was feeling no anxiety that I was conscious of, but anxiety was still present, as if it were an objective property of my body of which I could be unaware, like its specific hardness, or precise temperature. It attends me in a different aspect, this physical response, every time the register of my temporal foes increases, as if it were a daemonic warning against making adversaries. Still I seem unable to stem the flow, and experience suggests I could make a new enemy at virtually any moment.

This relates only my most recent enemy; there are others, much worse, who I have to encounter on a daily basis. Cheating students. The guy from the cafeteria, who performs a taunting dance akin to the Locomotion when I come into view. All of these things make my life more difficult, and I wish they could be changed.