Stacks of Humans

Short Story. Excerpt from "Fool's Errands"

Still warm throughout the day, the two young men found it harder now than in prior years to immerse themselves in their academics. The campus was active when the weather was like this, and being as close as they were to both New York and Atlantic City, there was always a healthy amount of social distraction at their fingertips.

The people-watching was exceptional as well. Ricky couldn’t help but appreciate the late-season hanging-on of summer attire. Skin was showing, and fit bodies resided beneath it. He liked both of these things.

Doug enjoyed people too. He would stare, often getting lost in thought, often coming across as creepy, and often hearing just that from passersby. This didn’t seem to bode all that well for someone pursuing a career in Communications, a vocation that demanded a couple of things. The first was curiosity, which he had in spades. The second was the ability to engender oneself with others, for which he had no measurable aptitude whatsoever. In the absence of having any refined communication skills or interpersonal intuition, Doug simply sought to put people in boxes.

Archetypes fascinated him. Through his late teens and into adulthood, Doug had constructed his own categorical framework which he applied to everyone he met or took a moment to observe, a system born from good intentions to mitigate his inherent awkwardness. It allowed him to neatly arrange his own segmented perspective on humanity, through which he could observe the patterns of their activities, behaviors, likes, and dislikes. For all these stacks of humans he sorted, he had developed his own architecture of engagement, a playbook for what he could say and do that would stand a good chance of being acceptable and occasionally even appreciated.

Needless to say, it took a lot of work for Doug to make new friends. He often wondered if this was why he felt more comfortable in front of the camera—it was cold, lifeless, a bit reflective, and above all else, it held no opinions or assumptions. Some people said the camera added fifteen pounds. Doug liked to say that even if it did, it never judged him for it.

Doug and Ricky approached an intersection in the campus walkway. A large formation of students crossed their path.

The lead group of four students had a determined head of steam. They were on a mission, their destination possibly unknown, but with resolute expectation that they would know it when they arrived. No periphery and no logos would slow them, clothed in plain garb and simple packs, most likely of discount rack or even thrift store acquisition. They counted four young men and women, two of each, all of them singularly focused on where they were going, these explorers at the head of the pack.

Behind them, not so far as to be completely detached from the overall procession, but far enough to ensure they were framed with adequate space and depth around them for anyone watching with a sense for composition, three girls walked in tight formation. One of them led the way, the other two slightly offset, reminiscent of the three-tiered orderliness of a podium. Small purses adorned the shoulders of their pristine, thin sweaters, and none held more than two books wedged between their torsos and arms. They were the heroes of their own stories, to be sure.

A trailing assortment followed with far less structure. Two engineering students, identifiable by snippets of a conversation that expelled quarks and hadrons into the air around them, shuffled along. Tangential to them were three assemblies of extra-baggy jeans and oversized button-up shirts of plaid and ironic striped variety, containing two guys with flat-brimmed hats and a girl with longer green-tipped hair. She carried a skateboard. The three of them must have walked in from the recent past of 2005 on their way to the more distant relaxed-fit fashion future of the 2020s. A few feet behind them, two of their semantic cousins trudged forward in the shade of their own black hoodies, large stringed cloaks floating above skinny jeans and unlaced high-top shoes.

Cutting across the grass and interfering with the unidirectional flow of this menagerie were several figures who couldn’t help but stand out even more so than any of these other smaller groups. Mostly due to four of them being well over six-foot-six, which, interestingly enough, also commanded significant attention to the very short man who flitted in and out amongst them.

“Oh man, it’s Brandon and Amare and those guys. I gotta catch up with them. Alright man, well, let’s get back on this tonight. I’ll hit you back later.” Ricky walked off to fall into formation with his friends from the school’s basketball team.

“Oh… yeah… later, man.” Doug was again lost in contemplation of his people-studying.

Everyone’s trying so hard to be unique, but aren’t they really all the same?

Am I the only one who can see this?

The many semi-conscious thoughts in his mind were all crying out for attention and conflicting with one another, stealing from the clarity he would need to realize that answering both questions in the affirmative would be impossible.