Front Row Seats

Scott William Carter

        Daniel lingered in his cramped office at the University of Minnesota long after the other professors in the Math department called it a day.  He was still there when all the lights under all the doors winked out and the parking lot outside his window was a bleak, snow-draped emptiness.  He was at his desk when old Cal Thomas from Geography shuffled past, taking his incessant coughing with him.  He stayed until the equations on shifted lattices turned to squirrelly nonsense, lines and squiggles on ruled pages, until finally he felt the thing creep into his thoughts, that black starfish wrapping its prickly limbs around whatever memories he chose to dwell upon, making his ears ring and his eyes water. 

When he felt it coming, he finally got up, knowing that it didn't matter where he was because the pain would be the same.

He took the rear stairwell in the off chance someone was in the lobby.  When he hit the frosty outside air, he realized he had left his overcoat, but he didn't want to go back, so he trudged, shivering, to his Camry.  A kid with a stocking cap dotted with ice rode past on a ten-speed, tires crunching over packed snow.  Daniel waited for the look of pity he had gotten so accustomed to seeing, but the kid did not look his way.

On his commute home to New Ulm, Daniel passed near the Cinema-3 Theatre, and he thought, what the hell.  As long as the theatre was crowded, maybe no one would know he was there by himself.  He hated going to the movies by himself.  

"What's your most popular movie?" he asked the kid at the window, a round-faced boy who wore a button that read Escape With Us.

"The most full, sir?" the kid said, voice crackling through the intercom.

"Yeah, which one is that?"  His teeth chattered in the frigid air. 

"Harry Potter starts in five minutes.  We got seven seats left for that."

"Is that any good?  Oh, forget it.  That'll be fine."

"One adult, sir?"

"No, t--" he said, then caught himself.  The starfish fluttered at the edge of his vision, and he felt as though his lungs collapsed as he forced out the rest:  "Yes, one, please."

The kid slid the ticket through the opening in the glass.  When Daniel took it, he felt the stream of hot air blowing out of the little coffin of a room. 

"Hey," the kid said, "aren't you Professor Cooper?"

Daniel cringed.  Of course he should have expected this.  Of course he might be recognized.  He knew what the kid was thinking:  poor wretch, going to the movies by himself.

He nodded.

"I had calculus with you last year," the kid said.  "I'm sorry about your wife, man.  Really, that sucked."

Daniel said some trifle that seemed appropriate, but which he immediately forgot once he walked through the doors.  He had many rehearsed responses -- Thanks, I appreciate your condolences -- Thanks, I'm doing okay -- Thanks, I am seeing someone now, and it's helping.  He seldom thought consciously about them. 

The packed theatre smelled of warm bodies and popcorn.  He stumbled across a few people in the second to last row and found a seat in the middle.  As he sat, the lights dimmed.  He was grateful.  In the anonymity of the darkness he could pretend it wasn't an old woman next to him who smelled of peppermint.  If he kept his eyes facing forward, and repressed the urge to turn, he could pretend it was Debra, and it was just some new perfume she was trying, some sample she had gotten free in the mail . . .

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© Scott William Carter. Originally appeared in Chizine, April 2004. Find out more about Scott William Carter's work at http://www.scottwilliamcarter.com.

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