Thor Dreams

Thor was normal. He awoke with the sun on Monday morning, padded to the bathroom in his boring black slippers and plaid flannel bathrobe in shades of hunter green and navy. He did his business, hopped in and out of the shower, toweled off, brushed his teeth, shaved his stubble, ran mousse through is still damp hair, donned a stuffy gray business suit, fed the cat (a tomcat named Tom), and headed out the door.

He grabbed a cup of coffee and a blueberry bagel from the same old coffee shop and picked up the daily newspaper at a little stand along his unchanging route to work. Thor worked in a tall, brown building that housed offices and offices and cubicles and cubicles. He clocked his nine to five doing who knows what insignificant collection of tedious tasks (Thor barely knew what his own job entailed), with only a quick mid-day bite to eat at his desk to break up the drudgery.

After work, Thor departed through the same door and embarked on the same dull course he had traversed that morning (and every weekday morning since he’d moved to the city many years prior). After a bland evening meal at an unexciting restaurant (the same one he would patronize for the next four nights and again the following workweek), Thor continued home. He unlocked the outer and inner doors to his building, climbed the three flights of stairs (the elevator had been out of service for thirteen months) to the plain white two-bedroom apartment he had all to himself. He thrust the key into the lock and wiggled and wriggled and fiddled and jiggled it until the tumblers finally gave way and conceded to grant him entry. He made a mental note to contact maintenance about replacing the lock. He wouldn’t ever get around to it.

Thor removed his shoes at the door and progressed to the tiny kitchen, poured himself a glass of Jack, and settled on the right side of the sofa in the living/dining room to view the evening news, absently stroking Tom as he relaxed on Thor’s lap. And then it was bed time. And then it was Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday and Friday. Every. Single. Day. It was all the same.

Weekends offered no reprieve. Laundry on Saturday morning after sleeping in until precisely 8:30 and breakfasting on Cornflakes with 2% milk from the same local grocery store, the only one Thor had ever shopped in…every Sunday afternoon. After laundry came lunch (an egg salad sandwich, a dill pickle spear, a handful of croutons, and a glass of 2% milk). Then it was nap time.

Then it was time for Thor to realize that his normal life was a giant load of crap.

***

Thor jolted awake. It was still Sunday night, and Thor had been dreaming. He was 86 years old and living in a rest home, where his ungrateful children had deposited him when they couldn’t handle his senility any longer. He was a cantankerous old coot and a huge pain in the poor nursing staff’s exhausted asses. He had been a pain in his children’s asses too until they stopped visiting the previous summer because he told them to stop visiting, insisting that they were all the illegitimate offspring of his allegedly cheating late wife, and he wouldn’t tolerate their pestilential involvement in his life anymore. The kids all looked exactly like him.

Thor was, at 86, just as he had been at 43 and at 21 and at 10: a bit batty. He had never suffered the tragically mundane existence of his dreams. Quite the opposite, in fact, though most days he had no idea. Thor had been a globe-trotting multi-billionaire with numerous impressive Ivy League degrees in fields entirely unrelated to his meal ticket--acting in his earlier years, then politics--both of which gained him world renown, neither of which he could quite recall.

Thor painstakingly lifted the telephone receiver and dialed his long-deceased wife’s old cell number, leaning way in to see the buttons. The phone on his nightstand was an antique, retained only for decoration. There was no telephone line to his room.

“Goodnight, Patricia, you cheating whore. I love you,” Thor crooned to no one in particular.

“Your wife is dead, you demented asshole!” his roommate, Dave, growled from the next bed.

But Thor had already drifted off into his dreamland of mind-numbing, monotonous normalcy.