Pemulis and Hans

He's been literally counting the minutes tick by for the entire six days that have passed since she told him. Almost every single one of them. Around 8,640 minutes minus a handful where he was able to sleep for the briefest of moments. In fact, most of the time he's even been counting the seconds. He had created a whole swath of games in his head with the numbers. Sometimes he would count up, and other times he would be counting down. Something like "it's been 945 seconds since <some time> and 4 + 5 = 9 and 5 + 4 = 9 and 9 - 4 = 5 and 9 - 5 = 4 and 945 seconds is exactly 15 minutes and 45 seconds which is crazy because the 45 seconds do the same thing as before but now we have the 15 minutes and with 15 you can get 5 - 1 = 4 and then you have a 4 which goes to 4 + 5 = 9, and cetera...". This had actually been happening off and on in his head for as long as he could remember but it had really ramped up and came more to the surface, let's say, over these previous six days. During the wait, he had gone through an entire week of work. She told him on a Sunday, now it was Saturday afternoon, and between those two moments he had somehow attended meetings, written e-mails, conversed with colleagues, and all manner of work stuff had gone down so to say, but all of it was, well, I guess, repressed? It happened completely and utterly capital F-R Freud subconsciously like a dream or even further back than a dream. He knows it happened but he basically just floated through all that stuff that seems to have somehow happened. Each day after work he headed straight home and straight to the couch where he immediately turned on the TV. News, weather, weather, watching the clock, counting seconds, counting minutes, weather, moving pictures that didn't actually help to speed up the clock (or at least the feeling of the clock speeding up) but he felt that if he didn't go straight to the TV that things would feel even slower somehow (even though he didn't try it [not going to the TV, that is]). He took dinner in front of the TV, leaned forward over a short white cheap coffee table. Drank six beers. Seriously. Six every night, and on two of the nights whiskey for dessert. It still couldn't bring him towards sleep, though. Things simply got real hazy and even slower, if you could believe it, and he knew that the beer and the whiskey weren't going to get him to sleep and he even knew that it would make things worse because not only would he not be able to sleep, but he would be drowsy enough that he wouldn't be able to do anything else like read or even watch TV because his eyes would burn so much, but just like with the TV (earlier in the evening) he couldn't NOT do these things because the fear that not doing them would make things even worse was stronger than the rational realization that doing them was making things worse.

Friday night should have been a milestone both because he had somehow made it through the entire work week and he was now only 24 hours away from it. But things felt worse than ever. Since time had somehow exponentially been slowing down, psychologically he was at the furthest point from Saturday night that he'd been since the previous Sunday! That's some wonky space-time physics-voodoo. But still he soldiers on and watches the news and the weather and drinks his six beers and tries to keep watching more TV but his eyes are burning and so, just like every other night in the last week, he turns off the TV and he goes back to counting the seconds and the minutes and after what is truly an infinitely long period each time -- and he knows that a lot of this "literally this" and "literally that" and "infinite this" and "infinite that" is sensationalistic and trust-bleeding in the sense that clearly it wasn't literally every second that he counted and an infinite amount of time by definition will never be reached and all that and so he's sorry that it has to be portrayed this way but THERE'S LITERALLY NO OTHER WAY it was just so so long and the time was going by so so slowly -- he counts the hours too. Finally Saturday morning arrives and the dog wakes him up (yes he actually managed a few minutes sleep somehow) by licking him on the face -- oh what a good boy, he would never do this to me -- and he pats the dog on the head and sits up from his lying position on the couch and turns on the TV and starts watching the news and the weather. It takes just forever, of course, but finally after eons of watching TV and pacing the house and watching more TV, evening arrives. Pemulis feels, in precisely equal amounts, both dread and relief.

His daughter Helga arrives home after being out all afternoon and announces that her new boyfriend Hans is no longer coming over for dinner because she broke up with him and she decides she's never going to have another boyfriend ever again. So Pemulis takes her out for a fancy dinner and buys her a beautiful gold Rolex and a sports car and they play scrabble and he goes to bed and has the most luxuriant sleep of his life and doesn't wake up for 15 hours.