Gideon hated Mondays. For Gideon, Mondays fucking sucked. Feeling like shit after a hectic weekend of parties and pills. Drinking and fucking and dancing and shouting took it out of him. And even despite the fact that Gideon hadn´t had sex in, what, eight months now, he was still tired. God knew what the weekends must do to people who managed to fit in some actual fucking.
The damn weekend wasn´t nearly long enough. Gideon took his headset off at five o clock on the dot every Friday afternoon. Stuck his Walkman on. Switched his PC off, switched his cellphone on. By the time he reached the elevator, the tie was in his pocket and the shirt would at least have one button undone. Good party music in his ears on the long journey down. Bit of James Brown. Maybe some Public Enemy. Music for the street, music for the subway. Freedom is the expression on everyone´s face on the Friday night train home. If everything worked out, he´d be in the shower by six-fifteen. Wash that work life out of his hair. Scrub the office from his skin. Make a couple of calls. Find out where everyone was heading. Maybe do a line or two. Fuck it, it´s Friday. Meet up with some friends in that new club on 12th Street. Get a little loaded. Couple more lines. Hit the clubs. Maybe check out that new electro night at Aladdin´s. Get on the dancefloor. Get off the dancefloor. Walk Lucy home. Tell her how he really felt about her.
Gideon hated Mondays. Here´s a fun list of the things that happened on Mondays in Gideon´s life. Monday November 6th, 1983. His grandma died. Gideon was nine years old and he loved his grandmother. She did all the regular stuff, cookie baking and milkshakes. She came to his Little League games and had his drawings stuck up on her kitchen wall. Massive brain haemorrhage in her sleep. Her eyes filled with blood as her husband of forty-seven years tried to wake her and call for help and hold her and save her all at the same time.
Monday March 3rd 1986. Walking home from school with his best friend Mario Mercato and they were just jerking around, pushing each other and stuff and Mario pushed him a little too hard and little Gideon falls in front of a stolen car being driven by a fourteen year old crackhead called Vincent Schopenhauer. How he isn´t killed is a miracle. Comatose for three days and his family have found Jesus in a waiting room filled with photos of tropical islands. Gideon comes round and screams in absolute agony as he recalls the impact of stolen metal upon innocent limb. Spends the next two years learning to walk as best he can. A slight limp even now. Vincent Schopenhauer died himself a few weeks later in the back of a late ambulance. And that was on a Monday too.
Monday November 22nd 1987. His dad died. Big fucking heart attack on his son´s thirteenth birthday. That was the end of that party.
On various other Mondays, Gideon was mugged, dumped, beaten up and sacked. Of course, it goes without saying that Gideon was even born on a Monday. Fair of face. But not often on a Monday.
Mondays fucking sucked. All that damn regret. On Friday he´d had a whole weekend and he had shit planned. Things to do and say. People to do stuff with and people to tell stuff to. But he washed his scheduling, organised skin away on a Friday night. There it went, down the drain with his dead skin and spent hair. At least he showed up for the weekend. He went to that new club on 12th. He met his friends. He met Lucy. But the guy in the shower with plans had gone by the time he was dressed. All those things he was going to say died with him. Gideon flushed him away and sent his regular weekend persona in his place. Mr Fucking Ten Percent. He had all his priorities wrong. That´s the guy who should be in the office. That loser. Not Mr Nine To Five. Would he have problems getting laid? Fuck, no. He´d have that shit scheduled way in advance. Got all his good times downloaded and backed up. Talked to Lucy? Shit, he´d have had that stuff faxed and fedexed before you knew it. Got his people to set up a meeting with her people. Shook hands on a deal.
Gideon hated Mondays. They fucking sucked.
The Monday morning train and nobody´s expression read Freedom. Everyone around him had had the same weekend. Mr Ten Percent showed up in their place too. The air was thick with the stuff not done. No deodorant or aftershave or whatever was gonna get rid of that smell. Fuck no.
On waking, Gideon felt that this blue Monday would make it into his top five for sure. He just knew it had badness written all over it. It got off to the usual start, scrubbing away the last of his weekend persona in the morning shower and just catching the train to work on time. But last Friday night was a millstone around his neck. First he received a text message from Lucy asking if he was okay because he blew it big style on Friday. Left the club without telling anyone where he was heading. Gideon recalled this drunken act with a visible shudder. He´d had it all worked out. He was going to sit Lucy down and tell her exactly how he felt about her. But then some sensible part of his coked mind said that maybe he should wait till he wasn´t slurring his words to confess his true feelings. And the sniffing like a bloodhound and perpetual gurning wasn´t going to help matters either. So he just got a cab home and cried himself to sleep.
Saturday was a write off with a hangover. Sunday was spent counting the hours down till work.
R U Ok? Talk?
This vague little text message reminded Gideon that he was in love with someone and gave him a feeling of optimism on his journey workwards. Maybe he might accidentally bump into her again. They worked on the same floor; it was more than possible. But her desk was in another department and Gideon´s department didn´t work too closely with Lucy´s so they didn´t cross paths often.
Fuck it, he thought. I´m going to tell her today.
That Monday, Gideon had three meetings lined up. And a conference call with those jerks in Futures. He just knew he´d be there on the fucking dot for those. Even though they would bring him no happiness whatsoever. But he could guarantee he´d be on time for them. Almost aloud, he found himself thinking, so why am I unable to send an email to the only woman I have ever met who makes my heart sing? Tell her how I am fucking crazy about her. Tell her how my every waking hour is spent in absolute torment thinking about the way she smiles, the colour of her eyes and the descent into mental illness that her beauty is responsible for creating within me.
Gideon limped off the train as usual and knew that by the time he´d reached his desk on the 83rd floor he´d have lost his nerve.
A day of tedious meetings with tedious managers followed. The conference call with Futures was so dreadfully dull that Gideon nearly quit his job. Fucking Futures. Only the thought of Lucy and the occasional bumping into her in the corridor saved him from the search for work.
Half past four and Gideon began to draft an email to Lucy. Before he´d written a word of the message he´d stuck a little flag motif on it so Lucy would not delete it accidentally before reading. He´d written two thousand tender and sincere words when he realised it was half five. This was not company time he was wasting but his own. Saving the draft carefully he shut down his PC and made his way to the elevator.
Lucy was by the doors staring at a countdown to her floor.
´Hey you!´� she said.
´Hey me. Look sorry. I was drunk and erm you know a jerk and that.´�
´No problem. If you want to talk, we could go for a bite to eat now and grab a beer or two? I mean, if you have no plans.´�
Gideon had no plans. And if he had, they would have been cancelled in a heartbeat.
Lucy and Gideon took a quiet elevator down to the city and walked a couple of blocks till they got to Claudio´s Bar, a quiet place where they always showed Monday night football and the drinks were cheap.
They drank and they chatted about nothing of much consequence. Gideon told jokes and did a pretty good impersonation of Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone. Lucy showed Gideon her party trick, which basically was gargling La Cucaracha with a mouthful of Tequila. Claudio´s Bar gradually emptied and the barman, initially cynical about the limping guy´s chances, felt his spirits warm to them both and brought them over a round of tequilas on the house whilst he cleaned the other tables.
It was a beautiful evening. The stars are all on Broadway in New York; you can´t often see them in the summer sky but fortune was with Gideon as he walked Lucy home, and the sky was a horoscope. On the steps outside the apartment block where she lived, Lucy invited Gideon in for coffee.
´Nah, I´d better not. People will talk!´ he said, pointing at a guy asleep in the next doorway.
´You sure?´�
´Nah, I´ll see you tomorrow. It´s late and I got to be in early. Can we meet for lunch?´�
Lucy smiled and said sure and then ran back down the steps and kissed him goodnight.
Gideon did not want this Monday evening to end. He wanted to feel the city´s night heat upon his glowing face. He felt her kiss echoing on his face like a rush of pure E. He looked at the stars above the city and thought of his father. He wanted to tell himself that it was only a kiss, not even on the lips, but that would only serve to deny himself a perfect evening. He was walking through Paradise; his limp seemed to have left itself at home. He felt alive. When he finally made it home he thought he would never sleep but the walk had taken its toll. Gideon fell onto his bed the moment he saw it. He dreamt of angels, slept like the dead.
On waking, he realised he was running late for work. No time for a shower, he dressed quickly and limped quickly to the subway. It was a beautiful morning and the sun was still smiling on Gideon long after he followed the other worker ants beneath the city. The train was full of people for whom Tuesday was just a Diet Monday. People dreaming of the weekend already. But Gideon was not amongst them, and people stared at him as if he were mad. Others smiled politely at this grinning idiot and looked away. The elevator was packed as usual as Gideon soared high into the heavens, his body trying to meet his mind somewhere in the clouds.
The 83rd floor. Securities. Gideon´s desk.
On opening his PC, he saw the drafted message from the day before. His fingers became a blur on the keyboard, his heart spilling through his digits and onto the dusty screen.
The last sentence he typed was
´I started writing this before last night and I wanted to say it but I couldn´t but I am crazy about you and I need you to know this even if it means we don´t do lunch today.”
Cupid´s arrow was poised above Send. Gideon breathed in deeply and clicked his mouse. Soon, he received a report message to say she had opened the mail. He stared at the screen. And stared until his vision became blurred. His inbox became as bold as his heart. One new message. Gideon gulped and clicked on Lucy´s reply.
Before he could read the message, Gideon was aware of noise and shadow. And in the time it takes for love to become fear and vice versa, a hijacked plane travelling at the speed of bad news smashed into the side of Tower One and killed them both.