Playtime by Bart Hopkins Jr. Read Free Book Online

dining
table leafing through one of the brain books, focusing on that for a while then
thoughts drifting to Renee or the accident or his future. After a while it is 5
a.m. again, and he gets down on the floor and runs through his exercise
routine, dresses in his running clothes, and heads out to the street. 

Chapter 10
    Another great night: stars and moon out and
glowing. He thinks about the death thing as he rolls along down his street,
beginning to sweat. He is not really very aware of his surroundings because he
is probing deep inside, trying to find a trace of that memory of the seconds and
minutes after his head hit that pole. He has this feeling that if he could just
remember that time all else will suddenly be clear. He searches inwardly, going
deep for that memory. 
     But nothing. 
     A few minutes of that and he realizes there is
not going to be anything right now. His head comes back up and he refocuses on
the things around him. Death is such a funny subject, he thinks, because it is
the unknown. Funny, odd, and scary too. We all go about our business trying to
ignore the reaper. Don't ask who he is coming for, because he might be coming
for you. 
     He remembers a movie, Meet Joe Black, that
had made a lasting impression on him. Brad Pitt had played dual roles, one of
them being death embodied somehow, come for Anthony Hopkins. Love interest
Claire Forlani.   
     But apparently Death had never had occasion to
actually exist in a live body, and he becomes slightly enamored of life
himself, which is an ironic twist. Since he is having so much fun he gives
Anthony Hopkins some extra time to get himself together for the big leap, while
Death explores a very human romance with Hopkins' daughter, including some very
real joys of the flesh.  
     Some of the reviewers had panned the movie as
being slow-moving without enough action, but Blaine thought it was one of the
greatest of all time. Love and death, he thinks. What greater themes are there? 
     And that thought brings him back to Renee, of
course, and he runs the silent, dark street wondering if the great loves only exist
in the movies, on the screen. Untouched by petty feelings.   
     He thinks about that ability we have to make
things up, to bring forth that which doesn't exist. Imagination is a great gift
that makes so much possible. It was the faculty that had propelled us down from
tree branches and into skyscrapers. It was the ability that let writers, or
anyone else: film-makers, poets, whoever, create. He remembers reading
somewhere that if you can imagine something, and it is not against the laws of nature,
and thus impossible, sooner or later you can make it happen. David Deutsch, the
physicist, had said it. 
     The thing he loves about writing is that he can
make something nobody else ever has, something unique to him, even though the
language he uses and the ideas he has have their basis in the common pool. He
gets to put them together in ways that have never been, and never will be
exactly again. Sure he is standing on the shoulders of those who came before.
How could it be any other way? But that is the glory of it: he can stand
on those shoulders. That is what makes humanity great, he thinks. We talk about
being individuals, but all the time inside we know that we are more than that.
We are linked to each by blood and history, and we form really a type of super
organism, a great being, continually shifting and changing form, with parts
falling off and others being added, coming and going, but the larger organism
going on. 
     So he is running along thinking all this, sweating
and warmed up inside and out now, ground flowing beneath his feet and ideas
running through his mind. And he realizes in some sense his wish for insight
into the death thing has been answered. He has never been very religious, but
he has always been spiritual, and as he runs he suddenly is more aware of the
ground pushing against him as he pushes against it, and the