—Thomas’s mistake, like nearly all of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that. Avoidable, avoidable, avoidable.
This story consists almost entirely of an interior monologue that all occurs in the space of time that it takes for Thomas to follow a colleague down the hallway of his office to the coffee cart, which resides in an area of the office the employees refer to as the Moors, and wait behind her as he ponders whether to speak to her.
There’s some amazing verbal virtuosity on display in this story. A constant barrage of crazed and disturbed wonderings, some of which are hilarious, and some of which are disquieting. There’s a lot of evidence here that Thomas has been pushed a little or a lot over the edge. I think I underlined more passages in this story than I have in any other story in a long time, and I’m not ordinarily an underliner, but I kept finding myself saying—wait, what? Let me read that again!
However, I did have some trouble getting through this story. I think I became overwhelmed with the dense non-stop stream of peculiarity spewing from Thomas’s mind, and had to set the story down a couple of times and come back to it later. Although it may also be that I simply kept trying to read it when I was in no position to give it my full attention. But there was a part of me that I found asking—so when are they going to get to the damn cart? Just how many weird thoughts can actually go through someone’s mind during the span of a walk down a hallway?
Overall though I was impressed and intrigued. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out for others by this author.
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