Up and Adam

THE SALSA MUSIC blaring from the clock radio when the alarm went off wasn't what I had expected. Before I'd even opened my eyes, my mood was set mildly off kilter.

I rolled over and scrolled through the stations, listening for the news that usually woke me up.

Hip-hop-Elton John-a hymn-some R&B. Nothing. I always have the darndest time finding that station, and once I find it, I hate losing it again. After shutting the radio off (having decided I'd reset the station later), I flicked on the light, sat up and put my contacts in. That radio business still bugged me a little bit. It didn't bode well.

The woman who comes to my apartment every other week to help me try and keep it in some sort of livable condition sometimes plays the radio while she's there, and rarely resets the station when she's done. Sweet lady that she is, she also tends to move a lot of things around while she's working-things I don't notice until later. Brooms, forks, pill bottles, lens cases. Things I always expect to be in the same place when I reach for them. When they aren't, I get frustrated. I spent several hours once looking for a trashcan she'd set on a shelf.

After showering and getting dressed, I had a hell of a time in the kitchen. I put my watch on and went for the pill bottle. Gone. Not stolen, just moved a little to the right. Enough to confound me for a minute. Same with my spoon. And she'd emptied the half-cup of cold coffee I'd set aside for myself the previous morning.

My mood began to slip a little further south. These were hardly tragedies. Nor were they anything I hadn't encountered before. They were easily and quickly rectified, but still, when the morning's already off to an inauspicious start, they can add up.

My body was feeling a bit off, too. Bloated and bleary, like I wasn't all there. But I put that down to the barometric pressure (I blame a lot of my mood swings and physical disgruntlement on the barometer these days) and being awakened by salsa music. Waking up to salsa does bad things to me.

I got myself together despite all the roadblocks and headed out. It was dark outside. It had been getting darker over the past weeks. The previous day, in fact, was the first time in a long time I had to use the cane to get to the subway.

No matter. I pulled out the cane again and set on my way, thinking little of it. Sure was dark, though-dramatically darker than it had been a day earlier. At 6 a.m. the sky should at least be beginning to lighten some. I put it down to heavy cloud cover. They said it was supposed to be cloudy and rainy all day. That could do it.

There wasn't much traffic on the streets, but there never was at six. More pedestrians than usual that morning, though.

The platform was empty when I got down there. Probably meant that I'd just missed a train. There were never that many people down there, but I could usually count on a few.

I glanced at my watch. Something should be along any minute. Strange, though, that the station was so empty. I looked around for a sign-train service had been kind of screwy lately-but didn't see anything obvious.

Then a few more people came down the stairs to wait. I relaxed a bit, and a train rolled in. When the doors opened, I noticed it was strangely empty. There were a few people aboard, but most of the seats were wide open. I didn't think about that much beyond being grateful, took a seat and pulled out a magnifying glass to see if I might be able to read a page from the book I was carrying.

When we pulled into the 23rd St. station, a few people got off, same as any morning. I was mostly preoccupied with the things I needed to get done at the office. It was Friday, and Fridays were among my busiest days. A lot of things needed to be turned in.

Only when I got up to street level did it begin to dawn on me that something was seriously, seriously wrong. It was still dark out. It was never still dark by the time I get into Manhattan. And it wasn't just dark-it was impenetrably black.

I ducked back into the light for a moment and looked at my watch again.

It said it was three-thirty. But that couldn't be right, I thought. Damn thing must've stopped. The batteries have been in there for a couple years now, so I guess it was about due. I'd stop and get a new one on the way home.

Then I looked back at the darkness on the street. It couldn't be. I must've glanced at my watch three or four times while I was getting ready, and everything was fine.

Deciding not to even consider it a possibility, choosing instead to believe that some great, mysterious darkness had fallen over the world, I let the cane flop open and began tapping toward 7th Ave.

Lots of people were out on the streets on this end, too. Far more than I usually ran into at that hour.

I tapped through a crowd of young people. Mostly I just see old bums in the morning-never people like this. They were gathered together on the sidewalk, smoking. They seemed to be congregated around a door, behind which I could hear loud music thumping. That was strange, too. I never heard music at that hour, except from the stereos of passing cars. It slowly became clear to me that my watch batteries were not dead, that it really was 3:30 in the morning, and that I was on my way to work.

I am such a fucking idiot.

It was too late to turn back, return home and try to get some more sleep. By the time I got there it would be close to five, just in time for me to start the whole process over again. I could've hopped a train down to Morgan's place, but I was too keyed up now, too full of adrenaline, too full of loathing for my own incompetence and the irrational schedules I clung to.

As I maneuvered my way through the scaffolds that shrouded nearly the entire length of 7th Ave., I kept trying to hold on to the quickly fading notion that maybe it wasn't really 3:30 after all. Just a strange, disorienting morning. It was Friday the 13th, after all.

My coffee guy wasn't there yet when I reached his spot, and the newsstand wasn't open. I went half a block further than usual to the deli, got a cup of coffee, and went up to the office. Every clock I could find confirmed the hour.

So how could it happen? The alarm was easy enough to explain. The cat could've sat on it, or the cleaning lady might've squeezed a few extra buttons while looking for her salsa station. But for all the times I looked at my watch along the way that morning, how could it have not registered until I got to Manhattan?

Well, for a very simple, stupid reason. My morning routine is so automatic that even when I look at my watch, I only have to look at the minute hand. The hour hand doesn't even occur to me. And from what the minute hand had been telling me, I was right on schedule.

So that was my lesson for the day: Check the hour hand as well as the minute hand.

I shook my head, still dismayed by all this, turned on the computer, and got down to work. I wanted to see how much I could get done before all that adrenaline evaporated. o