Chapter 3 - Death of a Salesman

CHAPTER 3

To this day the sight of a freshly polished tile floor leaves an abominable lump in my throat. At this point in the recurrent reverie, like in the original, it becomes irrevocably twisted in the moments to come, traversing the chasm separating irrational delectability to sober nightmare.

The intensity of the light we were experiencing suffered a great reduction, eventually giving way to fluorescent streaks on the floor before me. The light within us however failed to ebb. We were cast as apparitions among the surrounding artifice.

Gentle jazz music wafted from a grand piano, manipulated by an elegant formally attired man. The notes gently lapped our ears and immersed us in surreality. Zucchini was still there. Still radiantly gorgeous in her phantom form.

The jazz snobbery became more definite and all around it large bins of super-market goods appeared concentrically around the musical epicenter. Imagine the opposite of spontaneous combustion, instead of bursting into marvelous flaming spheres and falling into conical piles of dust, the objects were spontaneously manifesting into solid matter of the bin genus.

She tugged and I followed. We floated in and among the people until we were within paces of the circle’s musical origin orifice. In front of me was a great holster of agriculture, a container cordoning an assortment of multi-colored produce. The bin was ornately simple, paradoxical in essence. It was an indoor upper-caste monument to lower-caste open-air markets.
“Ha! Ten dollars a pound for fucking zucchini? What comedian is responsible for this slur?”
A tall dark-skinned man was fondling the vegetable in disbelief, while an American flag pin reflected the fluorescence proudly from his lapel.

An entrepreneurial, emasculating woman with a curious figure hidden beneath her power-suit and apron diced him maliciously with wild eyes. She was the vendor and was not about to be insulted over her organically labeled goods.
“Is there a problem sir?

“These vegetables must be tagged incorrectly, where else in the world do people pay degenerate prices such as these?”

His remark was earnest, quizzical and direct, not malicious but candid. I shiver now thinking about it. I could see her eyes marked with rage and primal glow burning with ferocity of California wildfire.
“Arrogance!”
She drew a pistol from her apron pocket and unleashed, a hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn, barrage of lead into his chest. He crumbled like a sack of potatoes, disjointed and grotesque.

“They’re trying to kill me!” Screamed another man with hilarious passion.

Later his face became clear to me, it was Yossarian. It’s worth noting that he vacated the premises immediately, likely to a safe house… A hospital perhaps.

The woman chuckled good-naturedly and snatched the floundering, stagflated zucchini from the air, breathed upon it and replaced it among corresponding greens. A prisoner of war began clapping, reveling in the imbecility of it all. It was moronic and sadistic like water-board torture.

The dark skinned scholarly man lay inconsequentially in his pool of wisdom. It’s almost too brutal to recall. I turned horrified to my hostess, and she pulled me into her bosom. Us being ghosts, the embrace was airy but I managed to displace myself in to the entirety of her greenness. Noting in my sorrowed and confused sight but glorious green. Without interrupting the tenderness, my vegetable guide alluded:
“Her facebook said she was ambitious.”

It was a rare scene in that segment, a wholly terrible observation. An exhibition and affirmation of esoteric screwyness and conditioned madness. A death of a salesman of sorts.