The First Second Third

The times were silver. There were flashes of brilliance, but inevitably things tended to tarnish, so there was plenty of pocket money, but it fell into desuetude or out of holes in one's pockets, depending on whether it was lost in the laundry, or took on argent heat of impetuous consumerism: these were the two economic policies of the government at the time.
The times were silver, indeed.
It was not as if we said they were the best of times, and yet the worst, for there no longer were histories to compare; it was as if life had found a minimum on the fitness landscape of the galactic neighborhood, and we nestled in for a while, while the remainder of the local systems rushed on.
It was a world on disability, a world in waiting line # 5 in the District Court, where you are back so far that you cannot see what it is you are queued up for, so you'll take it on faith that this is the right line to be in.

My brother had chosen this time to go on the wagon and stop drinking. The booze had lost its kick, he said. The merry crowd that had always gathered at the end-of-times rathskeller was no longer attractive to him: their wit had turned to kraut, their repartee to reflex, their Muse was hustling tricks on the corner. Rocky the bartender was polishing glasses, grumbling that Chuck, his part-time fill-in, was late again. Everyone's teeth were on edge.

So it was this time he decides to do a miracle; now, when we thought the age of miracles dead: he got a job. And it wasn't a crummy job, where you pull down old drywall all day long without even a filter mask - where you had to wrap your t-shirt around your head to keep from breathing the dust, and the powder accreted on your sweaty body and burned with a lost intensity of gypsum meeting with water. No. He got a job at a bank; the conglomerate of The First Second Third Bank. The First Bank had been around for ages, and people called it the "old lady down on Atwater St." Now with the three of them together, it was like a coven of the weird sisters.
Of course, I didn't believe him. I expressed my disbelief, and he smiled like a bodhisattva who has found a favorite tree to sit beneath. In the old days, he'd just bark a laff and pull at a handy beer can, looking bleary-eyed, filled with hepatitis C, and angelic. Now he was just angelic. Not so angelic as Guy Kibbee's Captain January. Just a little angelic contentment.

So I decide to go with him on his rounds. All his vertebrae were firing: lumbar, thoracic, and cervical; the surgical inserts were well-oiled and smoothly operating. His nerves didn't go bic lighter and light up Central Nervous like a Rolling Stones concert. Everything seemed to work well. He even negotiated the stairs like he looked forward to returning and climbing back up them.
The sun was like Pickup on Noon Street and hurt his eyes, so he hid them behind some big, dark orbisons. Sweat accumulated in half moons beneath mens' breasts, and women had become scarce. It was one of those days when small commerce was transacted with wet, green, wilted currency of small denominations.

He had regular pickups. We went to the one down by the docks, where we had to descend the stairs of an unintentionally deserted parking structure. The stairs were corroding concrete blooming with efflorescence within the flying form of rusting steel, hanging ominously out from the salty walls, and threatening to fall on people below. We descended through the graffiti of desuetude, grime, and human perversions until we reached a large steel door on rollers. The light color of the door managed to grab the few, stray photons at the bottom of this stairwell, and cast a feeble light of reflection. Within minutes, I heard a lugubrious tread approaching through the dirge-sweepings which littered the floor: a humming, a coughing, a mumbling of phrases nonsensical and magic. A small sliding door slid open, and a small diskette container - large enough to hold maybe 10 DVDs - was thrust forward. My brother secured it.
"Thanks, Teech." he said.
"Later," came the voice. "Later, gator. See ya later... mater, bater, baiter ? , mater..." His rhythmical shuffle accented each rhyme until the noise disappeared.
"What the hell's that?" I asked.
"Dunno. I just come here three times a day and get it."

When we climbed back up, we switched over to the sky-way leading to The First Second Third. The concrete walls began to clean up. There was A/C, and as we walked we went from the hot and humid to pockets of the cool, and we were jabbed with blades of  A/C up and down our shirts. When we got to the middle of the way over the street in front of the Bank, you could see First Street off to the right, and all the way to Third on the other side. People looked like large ants - good sized ants - just below us.
The upstairs offices were encased in pine. Not a fresh new pine, but your gramma's pine paneling covered with cooking smoke and cigarettes exhalations: an old barnwood pine exposed to years of dust and mucking. The carpet was old and grimy; it had a rosette of greasy dirt within a navy field on which were laid intertwining branches of grape vines. The wooden steps from the entrance to the executive offices were worn down where the average placement of left foot-right foot occurred over the past hundred years: maybe a lot of Joes hung to the right side, maybe some Janes tootled down hugging the left, but most of 'em picked 'em up and put 'em down right square in the middle, and these areas were eroded away, and the stairs waved like a shallow ocean inlet.
Upstairs was crowded. My brother waved to a female type who shivered and gave a "one minute" finger to him. We sat down on a wooden bench, and he nudged me to look at the carpet: more oily rosettes and vestiges of of vermilion from the wild madder of Kandahar and Marjah. He motioned me to look at it at our feet, then looked at me. I quickly furrowed and unfurrowed my eyes to indicate "What the fah..?" when he turned his head slightly to the left, lifting it gently as he did so, to focus on a spot mid-way up the far wall where the carpeting had come to the edge of the floor and then proceeded to climb half-way up the pine wall, forming a wainscoting of a vibrant untrampelled color compared to the rest of the carpeting.
"Why would anyone run a carpet up the wall?" I asked in disbelief.
He smiled. "There's a lot of shit like that."