HTML Testing

You’ve had a rough day at work. You head home and go straight to bed, mumbling, “I wish I’d wake up tomorrow and be anyone but me,” before dozing off. When you wake up in the morning, your dream has come true, as you quickly realize that you are not you—

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Charlie resolved to sit there silently with his arms crossed for the remainder of the session, but after a couple of minutes, Dr. Altschul offered to pro-rate. He seemed to feel a little bad, but probably this, too, was a ploy. They obviously trained them not to have feelings. As Charlie rose to open the door, the doctor told him that his “homework” this week was to think about it. A red-haired lady out on the waiting-room couch looked up, curious; Think about what? He had an urge to grab the magazine from her hands and rip it in two. Instead, he said something a girl at school had said to him once: “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.” And fled through the narrow basement door, grazing his head on the overhang.

It was midday now, the air hotter and stiller than it had been when he went in. The lime-green pelt of pollen on the cars boxing in Mom’s wagon let you know they hadn’t been driven in a while. Nor had the street been swept; rotten mulberries from the trees littered the asphalt like dog shit. Charlie kept walking. As the blocks piled up between him and the grief counselor’s office, his indignation ripened into something almost like pleasure. Messiness, death, righteous anger: this was Charlie’s world. It pleased him that the berries were spoiling and the brownstones were falling apart and the plastic window of a convertible he passed was slashed, wires spilling from its dashboard where the radio had been. It was Dr. Altschul who was the freak, hunkered in his anal little cave, trying to sell Charlie on a world that made sense. It was Dr. Bruce Altschul who was in denial.

On Bleecker Street, a speaker out front of a record store blasted Jamaican music. He saw two leather-jacketed boys, one black, one white, loitering inside between deep bins of LPs. Charlie’s normal move would have been to hurry past, but the bright, clear flame of defiance was still lit; woe betide anyone who tried to fuck with him now. Not that the boys even saw him come in. They were not so much loitering, actually, as pretending to loiter, while a person he hadn’t noticed snapped pictures from across the store. “Good,” she said. “That’s great. Except can you try not to look at the camera, dumbass?”