The Man Who Thought Too Much - Conclusion

His office was only a short walk from Euston. He liked to take a small detour through a patch of greenery just outside the station, to enjoy a last taste of fresh air and freedom before entering the conditioned air and electronic slavery of the office. He occasionally bought a paper from the Big Issue seller who seemed to spend his whole life in this tiny park ringed on three sides by roaring dual carriageways and on the fourth by the grim station building. Even if he didn't buy a copy, he would always say hello and sometimes chat briefly about the weather.

On this particular Monday however, even though Sid took his usual
detour, he was completely unaware of the tiny island of grass and
soot-stained leaves through which he passed, and although the Big Issue
seller had become so familiar to him that he had almost begun to
consider him a friend, he completely failed to acknowledge his greeting
and strode on into the office building. He passed one couple who
exchanged puzzled glances. The tall, smart-looking man who had rushed
past them had been breathing extremely heavily. It might be a good idea
for him to join a gym or go jogging, because at the moment he sounded
like prime heart attack material.

Sid, flustered and unsettled, arrived at his desk some ten minutes
before nine. This was perfect. It gave him time to settle before
moneymaking time began. He would normally make himself a coffee from
the communal kitchen and then log onto the Internet to check his
e-mail. The company didn't allow him his own official e-mail address
because even though he had been working there for many years, he was he
was still officially a temp and had to fill out a timesheet each week.
He therefore failed to qualify as a fully-fledged member of staff and
was accordingly denied his own e-mail. He had managed to circumvent
this problem by signing up to one of those internet-based e-mail
companies that you could access wherever you were in the world. He
didn't really have any friends - the guys who'd accompanied him to the
funfair those many years before had long since dismissed him as boring
and ever-so-slightly odd, and he'd become so introverted that he found
it extremely difficult to make new ones. But he'd signed up to a couple
of newsgroups, and enjoyed reading other people's conversations,
especially about politics and world events.

This morning he was delighted to see eight new e-mails, all from his
newsgroups. Perhaps if he focused intently on them, he would forget
about his breathing and might just be able to operate effectively for
the rest of the day. There was one particularly interesting comment
that some stranger had written about the situation in the Middle East,
and Sid leant forward so that the PC's screen filled his entire vision,
with the aim of its contents in the same way filling his entire mind,
leaving no space for paranoid thoughts about breathing, and women's
breasts, and how foul his wife was. For a time, it worked, but then he
made the terribly mistake of sipping from his coffee cup.

He loved the feel of the hot, rich liquid swilling around his mouth.
He swallowed, looking forward to the buzz he'd receive after several
gulps, the caffeine rush that he'd try to maintain throughout the day
by drinking cup after cup. Even though the coffee was still pretty hot,
he swallowed it all down within seconds and licked his lips, before
turning his attention back to the article, and not thinking about his
breathing.

He swallowed again, just to get the last of the coffee down his
gullet. Perhaps it would increase the caffeine rush just a little bit.
After several seconds Sid noticed that his mouth had begun filling up
with saliva again, so he gathered it all together with his tongue just
behind his front teeth and swallowed again. Within seconds, he felt the
saliva returning, and tried to fight the impulse to swallow
again.

Sid felt his pulse rate rising and a horrible tight, panicky feeling
in his chest.

It's just like the breathing. It's just like the bloody breathing and
that bloody woman on the train, and my bloody wife, and how bloody
unhappy I've suddenly realized I really am. I've become conscious of
something I've never been conscious of before. I'm not normally aware
of the act of swallowing. I'm not normally aware of saliva building up
in my mouth, and of me having to swallow to get rid of it. If I don't
think about it, I suppose the saliva doesn't build up, and I don't have
to swallow in the first place. Oh my God, I don't think I can cope with
this any more. I can't cope with spending the rest of my life having to
consciously control my breathing and my swallowing, having to imagine
every woman I see naked, and comparing them to the horrible sight that
is my wife dancing naked in front of me. I can't stand realizing how
everything has gone so bloody wrong.

Sid realized he was on the verge of tears, and raised a red flag to
bring this particular, desperate train of thought to a screeching halt.
He glanced at his PC clock and saw it was 9:02, and he didn't even have
a spreadsheet open on the screen. One of his managers sat several desks
behind in the huge open-plan office he worked in, and could probably
see that he still had Hotmail, and not Excel, open on his PC. God, he
could even get the sack because of his crazy thoughts.

"Sid?"

Sid snapped back to full consciousness, to notice that someone was
standing behind him, their right hand leaning on the flimsy chipboard
divider that separated his desk from his neighbour's. He didn't even
know who his neighbour was.

He looked behind and up, and saw it was his immediate line manager Mr
Davies, a short, rotund and generally good-tempered Welshman who had
always treated Sid decently, despite his lack of a proper e-mail
address.

"Alright Sid, had a good weekend?"

"Quiet, but nice," replied Sid, using the response he always used when
his boss asked that question on a Monday morning. He was aware all the
time that Mr Davies was looking down at him that all the new thoughts
that had assailed his mind that morning were still running around
inside there. He could once again consciously feel the rise and fall of
his chest, the train brake-like hiss as his lungs sucked in and
expelled air. He tried to forget his breathing's endless mechanical
repetition, to focus entirely on Mr Davies' words at the expense of all
other thought. But he succeeded in switching his attention only to his
swallowing, and became uncomfortably aware of his mouth filling up with
saliva. He refused to swallow. After all, he never swallowed when he
wasn't aware of all that increased spittle, so really there should be
no need to swallow now. It must look absolutely ridiculous gathering it
all up at the front of your mouth and pursing your lips together like a
whore. People would see him doing it and laugh.

"Have you got plenty to do at the moment?" asked Mr Davies.

"I've still got a couple of spreadsheets to complete," replied Sid,
finding it quite difficult to pronounce some words as his glands
produced more and more saliva. "I should have them finished by
lunchtime, and then..."

The unthinkable happened and Mr Davies interrupted him. "Skipped our
breakfast, did we Sid?"

Sid, not realizing the implications of the question, smiled. "No, I
can some peanut butter on toast, it's always been..."

"You're dribbling at the mouth," said Mr Davies. "I thought perhaps
you were hungry. We can't really have employees of this company
drooling at the mouth, can we Sid? You do know that our customers visit
us on a regular basis. It really wouldn't make a very impressive sight.
And you are only on a week-to-week contract. Your position here is
tenuous in the extreme."

Mr Davies disappeared back to his desk somewhere behind Sid. Sid sat
silently at his desk, staring into space, before pursing his lips as he
gathered his spit together, and then swallowing it all down so loudly
that he sounded like a frog. His unseen and unknown neighbour
sniggered.

Trying to make his mind a blank, but failing abysmally as he breathed
deeply and pursed his lips all at the same time, Sid opened his first
spreadsheet of the day and began to type in the figures printed on the
mound of paperwork lying on his desk. He felt his first caffeine rush
of the day subsiding, and wished he could pour himself another cup of
coffee. But drinking another cup of coffee meant loads more swallowing,
and that might just make the situation worse.

He glanced at the clock again. 9:14. He grimaced, disappointed at the
slow passage of time over the past fourteen minutes, but also at the
incredibly fast passage of time over the past thirty years. On any
other Monday, he would have rejoiced in the fact that he had now earned
?1.40, but money was now the furthest thing from his mind. As he
worked, he became aware of his heartbeat. It was so loud it seemed to
fill the entire office. He half expected to see his colleagues looking
up from their desks and staring at him with a mixture of amusement and
horror, much the same way as he had thought about his wife earlier that
morning. It was so loud he looked down at his chest to check whether he
could see it pulsing in and out, in and out, in and out. He couldn't,
but he could feel it nonetheless, and it started him thinking about his
breathing again, in, out, in, out, in, out. Then he pulled his tummy in
tightly, hoping to strengthen those abdominals and get rid of the beer
gut he had acquired over the years. Then he pursed his lips as he
sucked all the saliva together at the front of his mouth and then
gulped it down. His neighbour sniggered again.

He felt his mind straining under the pressure of having to think about
so many things at the same time. He decided he had to focus on just one
of them, otherwise he would go completely mad, and end up thrashing
about and foaming at the mouth in some lunatic asylum. Jesus, he was
foaming at the mouth already.

He chose to think about his heart, and that was undoubtedly the worst
decision he had made in his entire life. His breathing, his swallowing,
his stomach, sex, his unhappiness, all faded into his subconscious,
leaving only his heartbeat. It became faster and louder until it
thundered in his ears. It even pulsed in his eyeballs so that the
entire office seemed to throb in rhythm with it, as though some
strange, regular earth tremor was hitting London. He looked down at his
pile of paperwork and attempted to copy some of the figures onto his
last spreadsheet, but his eyesight pulsed so violently that he was
completely unable to focus.

Then, just when it seemed it couldn't get any louder or faster, and if
it did, then his head would explode and he would at last become
intimately acquainted with his neighbour in a way neither of them were
unlikely ever to have imagined, it stopped. Completely.

Okay, thought Sid calmly to himself. My heart has stopped. That's
fine. When I stop breathing, I know how to start again. I just...well,
I just think it, and it happens. And when all that nasty saliva builds
up in my mouth, well, I just swallow and it goes away for a bit. And
when life with Maureen gets just a bit too joyless, and when the sight
of her fat lump in bed with me in the morning sickens me, then all I
have to do is leave her. But I never have. I've never been able to work
out how. And I've got absolutely no bloody idea how to get my heart
started again. Do I just think it like the breathing? I'll try...

Sid tried, but nothing happened, and he ended up dead and slumped over
his keyboard, his forehead depressing the keys and inputting
intelligible nothings into his last spreadsheet.

The couple that heard him breathing heavily as he strode past them in
the little park just outside Euston Station would hardly have been
surprised to learn that he died of a heart attack.