Four years, eleven months, and two days

“I’m gonna need four years, eleven months, and two days off,” Davis croaked into the phone, staring blankly out the windowpane.

“That’s all?”

“They’re back,” he responded, his tone denoting no little impatience. “And I’ve got a gas leak in my apartment.”

“Isn’t the gas outside?” the other side quipped, referencing the wildfire season that had just begun.

“All I know is my apartment smells funny.”

“Well I’ve got a guy, you know, he can probably get the job done in less than four years…”

“Four years, eleven months, and two days.” “Sure.”

Davis fiddled with a paper clip, wondering how much longer this conversation would take. He had delayed waking up on account of a funny feeling in his chest. It started with ten minutes, a singular simple delay. That morphed into several other ten-minute bursts, piling up and rolling into an hour, an hour and a half; with each new increment of time he made concessions by cutting out further parts of his morning routine, from the superfluous to the basic necessities of hygiene. And then all of a sudden it was ten-thirty and he could no longer pretend to salvage his commute.

“I’ve been thinking, you know,” Davis declared wistfully, his untrimmed happy trail burning upon touching the windowpane, made warm like embers from the blazes. Davis’ first reaction was to wince, his second to wonder. Everything was new, sensations and feelings, with childlike glee he directed his soul outside of his body, towards the cosmos.

“Thinking?”

“Thinking.”

“Got any thoughts about coming to work today?”

Davis made a polite pause before replying, “A few.” Davis cradled the phone between his neck and shoulder as he squeezed a generous helping of Azure Foliage into a joint.

“What do you believe in?” Davis implored. His supervisor’s voice didn’t miss a beat, moving past the existential nature of this query:

“I believe in routine, and your irregularities are interrupting it. I’ve got a half a mind…”

“How can one have half a mind?”

“It’s just an expression.”

“What does it express?” That earned a brief pause from the lolling diatribe on the other end:

“Well, Davis, I guess I’m not really sure.”

“What do you feel about the California dream?”

“Very little,” his supervisor responded.

“You mean you don’t believe in it?”

“I don’t think I ever have,” the words he said sour like battery juice.

“Sounds like you’ve got some things to work out,” Davis suggested with the lightness of pound cake. “You know how creation begets creation?”

“Pardon?”

“You know, Adam begat Seth, Seth begat Enos, Enos begat Shirley. Creation begats creation.” Davis could almost hear the creasing of his supervisor’s forehead, but it was too faint, not loud enough to unravel the gas within his heart.

“I don’t believe it was Shirley…”

“Well, whoever it was.” Davis punctuated his statement with a deep, provocative exhale.

“Wake and bake? Are you going to be lucid for this conversation, Davis? You could just take a mental health day, you know.”

Davis rose his eyes to the auburn sky as if to consider this, a strange gesture of goodwill given that his conversation partner could not see him and that his mind would never change.

It started the night before, a series of statistics and data points, acres and percentages reported dully on the evening news. The figures repeated in his mind now, “thirty-four-point eight percent contained,” “fifty-seven-point three acres,” the placid voice of the news anchor lulling him.

The mathematical analyses that had come to characterize the wildfire season, or what he had previously called summer, put him in a state of catatonic fright, a bitter taste in his mouth he tried to drown out with pop culture sludge and inane video content. But yesterday, as the fragments of the news, that garish mélange of stone figures, videos of unlikely animal friends, and advertisements for constipation remedies whizzed around his head, his thoughts rose to join the clouds.

He felt a strange sort of optimism, a palpitation of happiness to be alive; a sudden realization of his limbs and his capacity for thought, the shock to his system of the routine he had trapped himself into, the realization that things were not okay and that he could very well do what he pleased.

And so as his resolution to request time off hardened and slid into the crevices of truth, he had thoughts. They were abstract thoughts, opinions and notions, wouldn’t it be greats and how beautiful is thats, strings of images suspended along threads of silk. No, he couldn’t focus on anything at the office; he had better, more weighty things to concentrate on, people to become.

And yet, he also began to open his heart towards this ethereal exchange, found it impossible and unsightly to condescend, and thus Davis said: “So you wanna know my thoughts on coming to the office today.”

“Yes, that would be nice.”

“I’m thinking I need to extend myself over territory, cross the universe…”

A clearing of the throat: “Oh yeah?”

“A layman might call it ants in my pants.” Silence, the unfurling of flames outside the window, nature tending to its business.

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the expression,” the supervisor stated dully.

“Really?”

“No fooling.”

“What about something like cabin fever? Does that make sense to you?” Davis’ surprise upon sensing the earnestness of his supervisor's silence gave him pause.

“I get the picture.” Davis didn’t quite understand his reply, but he considered the matter moot, and decided to change the topic: “I’ve been wondering, too, if it’s aggressive or humble to covet knowledge.”

His supervisor took a sip of something -- Davis assumed his mid-morning coffee prescription drug cocktail -- and then responded blasé: “Have you made any progress on that front?”

Davis considered the possibilities before declaring to his supervisor that progress was exactly what he needed to make. His head had been swirling, overflowing with thoughts, his body like a vessel for a pilgrimage of the mind. “The soil’s not right here anymore,” Davis implored. “It’s time to move.” Davis could picture his supervisor’s face, contorted with the angles of one experiencing the misfortune of rotten milk.

“And so you’ll return in four years, eleven months, and two days?”

Davis stopped to ruminate, but before he could find a clear answer, his supervisor barked: “I’ll run it by HR.”

***

Later, when the airport counter attendant asked him where he wanted to go, Davis said “I’m brave, not good or wise, take me a million li away…”