He had a line in psychophysics and the spectatorial imperative of public transportation systems, people on escalators, people on stairs, ups and downs both enabled and volitional (though a perceptive reader of his first big paper split a hair here, noting that “even an elevator is volitional, at start and at end—if graphed, think points rather than line—escalator a segment”), and so he was sitting on a bench at rush hour watching, doing research, when out of the crowd a single face emerged, not even a face at first, a sheet of hair, a color pitched between blonde and red, sometimes more to one end of that spectrum, sometimes more to the other (the work of light), and even before the head that held the hair turned, he knew the face he’d see, the eyes that seemed like they were looking away even when they were looking at you, the mouth that held in at least as many words as it let out, the chin that tilted up into something spiritual even in the grubbiest of places, even here, and something inside him, maybe his heart (he was a psychophysicist, not a doctor), leapt up, not fully volitionally, and it was all he could do to keep his legs from following. The air around him suddenly smelled like lust and he crushed the point of his pencil into his notebook in what he would have insisted to anyone who asked was embarrassment.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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