HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Now you see him, now you don't.
Will is a drab and dreary man. His closet swells with business suits—tan, tan, tan, and tanner. He has a pinstripe option for a chirpier day, but he stolidly fancies solids as camouflage. Ecru shirt, ecru shirt, ecru shirt, flip a coin, what will it be? Never white, never blue. Ecru, ecru, ecru, and more ecru, a hay field of sartorial eternity. Starched, erect, aligned, they hang. The coin is purely sardonic.
Brown shoes, five times two, a pair for Monday through Friday, easy on and easy off; the leather is hand-rubbed and painstakingly bland. Will wears only loafers, not because he is lazy but because he stores all his pennies and other quiet takings in a jar, the lid an escape hatch he opens every day. Today compounds nicely by what we do tomorrow, and the next, he recites to his cat, Rex. The cat purrs atta-boy, or so Will construes and relates.
And this drab and dreary man dresses the part. In a mirror, thinly smiling, with no reflection.
Will sits at his tidy dining table for breakfast and methodically eats cream of wheat, the same soggy hue as his dress shirt, dry toast, and thin tea, no honey or sweet, just bitter, and warm. Not cold, not hot. Tepid, he does this every morning. He is a clock winding down, a spring planning to spring. His soft-sided satchel is packed for humid travel, but not today, not quite yet, and he etches an X on his scarred kitchen wall. The entire surface is a calendar.
Will stands at his drab and dreary bus stop on the corner of Insipid and Tedium. He boards his drab and dreary bus, an ant in a line of ants searching for picnic scraps. He sits, as is his custom, in the last row, never seeking a face. He’s content observing only a bobbing sea of haircuts, napes, and backs. And he buries his drab and dreary face in his daily paper. For fun, now and again, he reads it upside down and right to left.
He enters a drab and dreary office building, huffs, and puffs up three flights of stairs to arrive at his workplace. He gingerly turns the gummy knob and beelines to his drab and dreary desk, where he sits, exactly thirty-two paces from the door. He shuffles drab and dreary papers, ledgers, and files. Then he eats his drab and dreary lunch—American cheese on soft white bread. Dry. Water, no ice, to chase. He talks just enough to be noted but never enough to be seen. On most days, hello suffices, but never a potluck or drinks at five. He did this daily for decades until he retired. He hid in plain sight, an accountant in invisible standing, a yawning pocket watch his dutiful reward.
He asked that the watch be mailed to his home—and it came back undeliverable weeks later to his employers, Dowdy and Oblique—how perfect, how complete.
Today, Will’s closet is a hundred roman candles exploding from a peacock's ass. His wardrobe is bursting with brash, eccentric Hawaiian and Bermuda shirts. He lives on a beach in a faraway place, flip flops flipping and flopping, skin glowing and sand so warm his eyes simmer with delight. His days are filled with rum, gin, tonic, and those pink drinks with flamingo-shaped straws. He dances, catches the eye of a local lady or two—occasionally a lonely librarian on vacation—and shakes hands, slaps backs, smokes cigars, and slumbers under palm and frond. He learned to sail, to swim, to live.
Once in a blue moon, Will ponders his prior life, drab and dreary as it was, and how easy it was to ignore them as they ignored him. And as they gazed away, he pilfered fifty pounds a week, the balance sheet balanced only by him, his thumb on the scale, a splash for them, a smidge for him. A forgotten man with iron resolve and imagination, he was, with discipline and a larcenous heart, anonymous.
His full name is William Steel. That's Will for short—for those who care to notice. The slanted nameplate on his drab and dreary desk said Will Steel. He couldn't be any more apparent than that.