The Pizza Dilemma (2)

2.   

 As James walked down the trail he thought about the series of events that had led him to that exact moment. Only a month before he had been living in a reduced income apartment with a meager salary from a sinecure, which could have easily provided him with a living wage for a few more years. His position in the world had been one of security and blissful ignorance, until he had been offered his dream job. Without a second thought he signed the papers, packed up shop, and relocated. 
    Most people in his situation might have stopped a minute to consider the predicament that was relocating one’s entire life for what seemed too good to be true, but James was an idealist. One October morning in the dim light of his unfurnished one-bedroom apartment, he had received a phone call. “I’m sorry James, but I’ve got some bad news. In order to conduct further business, the business has had to cancel your contract, meaning that you are in effect out of business.” There probably hadn’t been that much talk of ‘business’, but James didn’t possess the best memory and had to fill in the gaps with something. 
    At the present, he was facing a trifecta of equally pressing problems. Well, two of the problems were of immediate importance, the third was the pizza, which was pressing to James. The other two were the aggravated collector in the black Cadillac, and an altogether unrelated accusation of identity theft. The debt was the result of James’s incapability to stop making snap decisions, the aforementioned tech conglomerate, as well as his penchant for pizza (although less so). The identity theft had come into being as the result of an unfortunate typo when James was entering his social security number. 
    The initial move to his apartment had been a hectic time filled with caffeine and shaky typing fingers. As such, when he entered his information for a background check, the ‘5’ in his social security number had spontaneously decided that it would rather be a ‘2’. While the service managed to catch this typo with little confusion, it did create a tiny red mark on a  sheet which should not have had a tiny red mark on it, and caused a great deal of displeasure in the otherwise placid property management community. 
    In fact, it had been this tiny red mark that had driven an overweight woman of forty-two up the three flights of stairs to James’s apartment, despite her aversion to physical exertion and inclined walkways. By the time she had reached the top of the stairs, her heart was beating twice as fast as it would have liked to be beating, and nearly caused a heart attack. Instead, she experienced mild indigestion and used the rest of her remaining energy to pound on James's all-too-fragile door.
    James, confused, had opened the door in his bathrobe, holding a cup of coffee that he had spent fifteen minutes preparing. He was not particular about many things in the world, but the temperature and brewing time for coffee was one of them. In his world coffee was next to God, and would have been above God had he not been an atheist. Instead, the coffee rather floated around in an undefined space caused by shoddy division tactics. 
    In any case, the woman began to yell at James, which was wholly unexpected. “What do you think you’re playing at? Giving us a fake social security number and then moving in like it’s no problem. Who are you really?” James took a sip of his coffee, unable to savor its delicate aromas due to the confusion pervading his being. No one had ever suspected him of being someone other than himself, and the notion was frankly confusing. If he was going to pretend to be someone, he would have picked a famous person, or someone with a great deal of political clout, not a twenty-something working the daily grind. 
    “I’m sorry,” was all he could muster before the manager slapped the cup of coffee out of his hand. He watched the cup summersault, hanging briefly at the apex of its flight, and then crash down to the carpeted floor below. In a wonder of physics, the cup landed straight up and only spilled a few drops onto the white carpet. James picked it up and took another sip, making sure to actively savor it.
    If the woman’s eyes could have turned red, they would have. “You need to get out of this apartment today or I’m going to call the police.” In fact, there were no grounds for evicting James, and under rental laws he was legally allowed to stay in the apartment. Of course he knew none of this, and thought what she was saying was likely the truth. The woman turned on her heels and stomped down the stairs; an act which would contribute heavily to their eventual collapse. James stood in the doorway, still confused about the whole matter, but very thankful that his coffee hadn’t spilled. Rather than worrying about it anymore, which he probably should have; he went back inside and enjoyed his coffee while having a staring match with his cat. 
    The issue of his identity continued to fester in the white-walled rooms of the management building. James chose never to venture there, not out of fear that they might mention the issue, but instead out of a dislike for perpendicular building design. It was fortunate for him that the contractors who had built his apartment only five years before were a load of shoddy workers who had knocked off early for a happy hour beer special, and had left the support beams only half finished. Over the five years, the unfinished beams sagged and gave the apartment the look of a mopey bowling ball. James was not concerned about the structural instability, as the rounded shape was pleasing. 
    He thought about the pleasing shape of his apartment as he approached the rigid structure that contained his favorite pizza shop. Angles could be briefly tolerated when there was the potential for large quantites of food. At the exact time that he was shoving the pizza into his face for no reason other than to do something, the angry property owner returned to his apartment to find the door kicked in, and an angry debt-collector standing in the ruin. For a brief moment, this confirmed her suspicions of James’s identity theft, but then a gun went off and she didn’t think much of it anymore.