To the detriment of liquidity, the suited man wrested Monday from multi-tasking and hit the street with his knowledge of French New Wave to shield him from the future.

He still wore hard-soled shoes, because he knew he would have to dig in his heels to prevent himself from being carried forward any further toward that end he had decided to avoid, toward the end of any day in particular. He cancelled his email accounts.

The first step was to spend all the money, and he couldn’t do that unless he stopped first for the whiskey so as to begin the swim against the flow of time and obligation that was carrying him along, so as to dip foot into the leisure stream and drift there on it in ambivalence to the flow of the mighty 9 to 5.

The first UFO was sighted hovering over a barmaid’s head in a familiar neck of the woods. It limned her good straight barmaid’s hair with an extra-terrestrial glow. Lo, and it deepened the shadows in her cleavage. The whiskey channeled that timeless light even into his bones, and he looked into that rift between the spheres and could see to the beginning and to the end as though they were one. He crushed ice between her teeth and he knew she was both the venus of Olduvai and the Madonna herself.

The light was high and he stepped away from the bar, one with knowledge but losing the definition of those points on a timeline he could usually remember. All music was becoming familiar to him, but he did not remember the words. He had his smile, which never met with refusal, so he was unafraid to walk amongst the willows whose limbs turned and whistled in the winds outside the modeling agencies. He in his turn whistled.

The second UFO flew through the air at his own height, clamped over his ears, singing. He felt sublime importance as he made his way in the opposite directions, bobbing his head and doling out his unstoppable smiles.

More drink would be necessary before long.

The suited man grew youthful and more useful to himself, and he felt a hard shell begin to grow to cover his back, turned away from the days he had left, the only scornful part of him now as he relaxed.

He fell into a bar he used to know and used his knowledge of Mid-Western punk to arm the jukebox against silence. He used his intuition to feel his way among the taps and came to know which beer would be his drink.

He felt fine. The future rumbled away like the 2nd avenue subway, away in sealed tunnels, nowhere, and it was fine that that future toiled on toward itself forever away from him. It was fine that it was gone.

Onward toward the natural sunset he sat, and the crowds circulated in to where he was to provide him with the fucking to redeem his head in the priceless morning to follow, the priceless morning when he would step into the airplane that others, ground like keys in dim pursuits, would barely see, as they barely saw all airplanes through their bad office windows, so they would not know that he was redeeming his plane ticket to Babylon, the endless city of knowledge where nobody wears a watch.