A Croissant Story (Chapters 1 & 2)
A Croissant Story (Chapters 1 & 2)
Chapter 1: Late
Maximilien was late for work. He showered quickly, struggled with his backpack and supplies, repeatedly dropped the apartment keys, and then ran down the street to catch a city bus, which, knowing the reliable driver that took care of that route, would probably be precisely on time. He had hope he could catch it, but he would have to run for several blocks.
He startled awake and cursed himself for having wanted just a few more minutes in dreamland. He was dreaming that he was already underway and on the run to the bus stop. He was still in bed. He jumped up and started getting ready. At least his clothes had been selected and laid out on a chair—no time for shaving the overnight stubble unless he wanted multiple cuts to have to paper over. The teeth had to be taken care of because he would be talking to clients most of the day.
If he is late, it is all his own fault. No excuses. The alarm rang that morning, and he kept pressing the snooze button until the alarm simply didn’t ring again. It would only try to wake him up three times and then give him up as hopeless.
He was hungry. He had told himself to prepare breakfast and lunch the night before, but he had felt tired from the previous day and believed he would be up in time to make it that morning. Fortunately, he hated coffee. He did not need it to stay energized for the workday. So many people seem to be unable to function without it. He did not need to worry about it.
There is a bakery down the street on the path to the bus stop. He stops running at the entrance, pulls the door in a quick yank, enters, and then cuts in line in front of everyone, apologizing profusely. People complain loudly and push Maximilien around. He cries out to the owner to shove three croissants into a bag and then throws a bill over the counter that is three times the price. The owner flicks them into a paper bag, closes it in a quick crunch, and throws the bag at him, and he then runs out. He continues apologizing profusely as he exits, and their loud complaints become murmurs as he is no longer in line or the building. That took about one minute.
Maximilien continues to run to the bus stop. He is going to make it. He sees the bus stop, and passengers begin to board. He is going to make it. The driver sees him coming, waves a greeting, and smiles. A wonderful, generous smile that tells him that he will wait. It will only be a few seconds, and he is a regular passenger. It is a sacrifice of very little cost to give up a few seconds, and it will make for a feeling and outlook on life that everything will work out and that this will be a great day.
Someone opens a door. Someone opens a door, not expecting another someone to come running by at high speed on the sidewalk. It was all clear when the door started opening, and the person opening it and exiting had been looking inside, walking backward, and saying warm goodbyes to the people inside. The collision brings Maximilien to a dead stop.
He is on the ground looking up in a daze. He does not see it, but he can hear the bus disengage its’ parking brake, the mechanical noise of the doors closing, its engine hum louder, and then the sound fades as it drives away. Was it going to be a great day? The bus is gone, and he will be late for work. He collided hard with this other person and expected it would soon result in a big bruise on both of them.
He pulls himself up into a sitting position, still clutching the paper bag at its throat. The bag has ripped, and two croissants have escaped and lie beside the wall. He looks at them and wonders if he should pick them up. They still look clean and delicious on top. He decides against it as there is a discoloration on the sidewalk and a slight smell as if old soda was spilled, mixed with urine, and powdered with a fine layer of dirt, small rocks, and broken glass.
The man opening the door lost his balance and was pushed back onto the ground. He is now grimacing in discomfort. The people inside the small shop open the door and run toward the other man. They seem oblivious to Maximilien, which is just fine, he thinks.
Maximilien gets up from the sidewalk and holds the door open as the store owners help the fallen man get up. He is disheartened to have missed the bus and accepts that he will be late for work. Despite waking up late, things were going well enough, but the wind had been knocked out of him, and he now felt tired and discouraged. He goes inside to help the man and apologizes for the accident. The man in the store does not blame him, nor does he accept blame but acknowledges that it was an unfortunate series of events.
Maximilien leaves and walks down the sidewalk slowly. He feels a little lost and thinks he might not have a job anymore. The morning sun has just risen above the buildings on the horizon, shining brightly in the clear sky, but he does not feel hopeful. He anticipates a hot day with a scorching sun that will leave nowhere to hide as it mercilessly sweeps its blazing rays. He had wrapped the bag's paper around his remaining croissant and shoved it into his pocket when he got up. He now opens it and takes a bite.
He takes several steps toward the bus stop and sits to wait for the next one. He chews on his croissant and looks back at the two on the sidewalk half a block away. The morning birds have come to pick at them. They stab their beaks into the bread and use their feet to keep it in place as they struggle to tear out pieces.
* * * * * *
Rain. It is a heavy rain that falls as Maximilien exits the bus on his way home. It is a rain that has only just begun and will continue for hours. He did not carry an umbrella that morning. He places the backpack on his head for a few minutes but then gives up on that and places it on his shoulders.
The two croissants are still on the sidewalk, and they are absorbing water like sponges. The birds have left many holes in them, but they retain most of their shape. They are reminders of a hopeful day. Reminders that are being rained upon. He arrived at work almost an hour late, and no one was happy with that.
He does not care about the rain. He is indifferent to it, and in the overall scheme of his life, it does not matter. At one time, he thought he had the greatest job on earth. He was happy. And meaningful and joyful work allowed him to feel that he was growing and helping others. It all changed when the second-tier boss took the helm of the company. That boss became a different person once he was in charge of the whole operation. They had worked together for several years, and he had never heard a complaint or correction for anything he submitted for his work assignments. How could it have gone in the completely opposite direction in just a few years? It seems like such a short time to go from being the greatest job to work that felt like a meaningless waste of time.
It started with the boss suddenly taking a different view of the quality of his work. At least, that was the excuse the boss used to harass him with frequent reviews and assessments of the work he submitted. He would earn low points and be told he had to be placed on different improvement plans and be sent to get staff development.
Maximilien was the type of person who would barely recognize that dents were forming on the surface of his self-image. He was oblivious because he had a relentlessly positive attitude. These dents of daily life were easy to repair, so his confidence was usually quickly and easily restored, and he had the energy and enthusiasm to continue forward, contributing positively to the collective effort of the organization to which he had dedicated his life. But in recent months, the dents were getting deeper and larger and were occurring more frequently. The deformations were piling on top of other deformations, so he was starting to feel like a mangled mess. The frequent reviews, the staff development, the enormous quantity of work, the unfair distribution of responsibilities, and the criticisms were all wearing him down. The corroding imperfections were growing and reaching into the interior of his self, getting into what he regarded as his essence and transforming him into something sickly and twisted. He wanted to be free of all this burden that weighed so heavy that he was starting to feel crushed.
“I wish life could be different. I should have taken a different path.” Maximilien said out loud.
It happened in an instant. On the sidewalk, close to the bus stop and in the heavy rain, his old life ended, and he embarked on a new one.
Chapter 2: Discovery
In a little more time than it takes a frog’s tongue to stretch out to catch an insect, the remains of one of the street croissants expand like the plasma of a red sun, surrounding and enveloping Maximilien, and then shrinks into the resemblance of the solidity of a white dwarf star. The brilliant white light exploded in all directions and then faded quickly into nothing without a trace. The rain-soaked and tattered croissant throbs with the remnant energies for a few seconds as they disappear in successive measured steps, and the croissant is restored to completeness and impervious, for a time, to further damage from the rain.
Maximilien was caught in the first burst of red energies and pulled inside the croissant as those energies retreated into the interior. A reshuffling of matter has occurred, and many objects from the world exterior to the croissant have been pulled inside. Maximilien finds himself flying through passageways that are a complex web of lattices resembling the large-scale distribution of strings of galaxies. He travels through the voids until finally reaching a great plain somewhere in the deep interior, where he is gently set down.
It resembles a deep expanse of a landscape in a setting like a valley nestled within distant mountain ranges. A valley that has white mountains on the horizon of increasing size that eventually reach into the sky so that they form walls, and in those walls can be seen openings that lead into similar valleys. The sky has an opening, a hole, a space with what looks, beyond that threshold, like a great cave reaching into some infinity, the white color of the increasingly distant walls fading into grays through distance and atmospheric perspective. On the ground where he stands, there is the feel and a smell in the air of a cool spring day. Exotic plants and grass grow in colors he had not imagined possible. Colors so brilliant and diverse in their combinations that he begins to feel dizzy.
He closes his eyes and takes several deep breaths. Serenity does not come to him, but he feels calmer, so he opens his eyes, and there, only a few centimeters from his own, is the face of an old man—Maximilien startles and steps back.
The older man smiles. He has a thick cane that is slightly taller than him. It was cut from the branch of a tree and is unadorned. His gnarled hands resemble the texture of the wood. His hat, coat, and clothing ensemble are the same colors as the plants in the landscape. The colors on his clothing fade into each other through filaments and threads that stretch into different zones of intense and pure hues. Maximilien looks down at his clothing and their somber coloration to calm his mind from the intensity of input from the environment.
“Hi. Where am I? Do you live here?” said Maximilien.
“I live near here. I was out walking, and then you came down from the sky. I found you standing here with your eyes closed. What were you doing? Said the old man.
“I felt dizzy, so I closed my eyes. I was trying to calm myself.”
“Did something upset you?”
“No. No. It’s just that the colors are so strong, so brilliant, I find it a little painful to look at them.”
“You are not from here, are you? You’ll get used to it. Where are you from?”
“I don’t know where this is. I am from somewhere different where the color is not as intense. I live in a city.”
“A city? What is that exactly?”
“A city? You do not have cities? A city is a place where many buildings are close together. Some of them are very large. Many people gather in cities. Many things go on in cities, like trade, communication, money transactions, leisure activities, education, and more.”
“We do those same things here without cities. Are you lost? Are you looking for your city?”
“I think it would be nice to return to where I belong. Yes. Do you know where I can find my city?”
“I do not. There is a place in that direction that might resemble a city, as you described it, but I doubt it is the one you are looking for.”
“It might be a start. There might be a way for me to get more information there. How do I find this place?”
“I can take you there. It is a half days journey. I need to go there anyway as I have things to sell and things to buy. We will travel together on my wagon.”