Walking to the kitchen for coffee made my legs feel flimsy, no doubt because they were so little used. I hadn’t been out of the building in a year, and  lethargy had thus utterly conquered me, and atrophy was likely setting in.

It had been a fairly rapid descent into agoraphobia. Simmering neurosis coincided with several unexpected family deaths to transform me from a reasonably vigorous human being, into one filled with fretfulness, dread, and finally, terror of leaving the apartment. In essence, the idea of being out in the world gave me a monumental case of the yips.

While rattling around in a drawer looking for coffee pods, I heard a thud in the hall. It was my neighbour Ray, whose apartment was directly across from mine. Ray cohabitated with his own demons.

Having secured fresh coffee, I returned to my desk, and restarted the audio of The World as Will and Representation. I had never been particularly interested in philosophy. But with long stretches of unclaimed time now available since I’d stopped going to work, and with no one willing to hire me sight-unseen, even for a job working from home, I’d been immersing myself in all kinds of things. My wife Leila had a good job, and we lived in a rent-controlled apartment she had occupied since her college days.

In Schopenhauer I believed I had found a philosophical home. That day, as on days before, I read and listened, and wrote my thoughts down along the way. But then I heard Ray again, this time loudly bumping against our door. I returned to the kitchen, opened the door, and there was Ray slouched in the hall, a large man with bushy blond hair, clad in his usual green army jacket.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m good,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I’m hurtin’ a little these days - you know.”

I did know. Ray had been a policeman, perhaps a decent one, or perhaps a dicey one - I had no idea. His patrol car had veered off the street and flipped somewhere near the Lincoln Tunnel on the way to an emergency. Ray was left with an extraordinary level of chronic back pain and pelvic pain, and in short order, found himself dependent on a variety of opiates. Unable to continue policing, he was for all intents and purposes a junky. The building’s owner, who operated a fleet of hot dog carts which were loaded onto the back of a flatbed every morning from an adjacent building, subsequently suspended Ray’s rent requirements in exchange for helping out around the building, lifting the carts on the back of the truck in the morning, and dropping them around the city.

“Dry spell?” I asked.

“Really dry. Getting sick dry.”

“Cash flow?”

“That - and too ill to get to where I need to go.”

“Where do you need to go?” I asked.

“A guy on Amsterdam.”

“Maybe I could go instead?”

Taken aback, he said, “I thought you never went outside?”

But it made sense to me, even if I didn’t try explaining it. It was the intersection of Schopenhauer with my ex-cop neighbour, Ray.

Schopenhauer, in his essay The Wisdom of Life, identifies the oscillation between boredom and pain as the foremost obstacle to happiness. He writes, “In the degree in which we are fortunate enough to get away from the one, we approach the other. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between the two.”

I had already diagnosed this conundrum in my present condition. Because I no longer went outside or faced the prospect of doing so, I was largely calm and content. And yet, at a certain point, I’d begun to register the sameness of the days and surroundings. There was a flatness, though it was short of monotony, since I kept myself mentally stimulated. But there was a kind of languor. The routineness, at the very least, produced at times a staleness that approached boredom.

As I talked with Ray, the idea came to me: I could seek a return to balance by oscillating in the direction of pain, venturing out into the streets for the procurement of Ray’s opioids. I agreed both to fetch the drugs, and to pay for them, returning Ray to his own balance.

As I got dressed, there were second thoughts. But by the time I was ready, I was fully resolved. Descending the stairs, I was reinforced by a sort of fatalism: I was probably going to come to harm. But so be it. In the lobby I stood in front of the building’s glass door watching as people passed. It was like the pause before the shock of jumping into icy waters.

Outside, horns, motors, and tire squeals assailed me with a forgotten immediacy. As did the smells: bus fumes, pavement, the aromas of food. After a year without experiencing it, I was astonished how much fear could rise inside me.

As I walked, I scanned the rooftops and edifices of buildings for anything out of the ordinary, in particular construction work. The fear of something falling and hitting me was overwhelming. I kept my distance from other pedestrians. I stayed well-back from the others while waiting for the light to change at the first crossing. I cowered slightly in the intersection. I began to feel the sweat turning cold underneath my arms and in my groin. If I could only do what I had promised Ray, and get back home in one piece.

After a ten-minute walk I reached the address. It was a narrow, drab stucco building. I pressed the apartment’s buzzer, and a man’s husky voice answered brusquely, “Clyde.”

“I’m Martin, Ray’s friend.” I told him. The door buzzed, and I carefully climbed the stairs. Clyde’s door opened a second after my knock. 

“Hey,” he said.

He was a tall man with a long beard, and a tattoo on the back of his neck. I followed him to the kitchen counter, where there was a dish containing several packets of tablets. There we conducted our transaction. When I started toward the door, he said, “Why don’t you wait a little longer? Looks better if the super doesn’t notice people coming and going that way.”

I sat down on the sofa where he directed me. He seated himself at the other end. From the coffee table he picked up the control to a remotely operated toy helicopter. It lifted up vertically, and began buzzing around in circles in the middle of the room. After about five minutes Clyde guided the helicopter down, landing it on the carpet. He declared sufficient time had passed, and I was cleared to go.

As I walked back, seeing people whisked through the streets in cabs, and going down the stairs at subway stops, I remembered how terrified I had been of being trapped inside a taxi or a stalled subway car. Even now I was horrified of being abducted and squeezed into the trunk of an automobile.

Once I was back inside my building the relief washed over me, even though I was still shaking. It took Ray a while to get the door. But when I handed him his packet of morphine tablets, I was thanked effusively.

First thing in the apartment I took my coat off, and hung it in the closet, then sat down in the chair beside the window. I took one of the morphine tablets out of my shirt pocket. I had bought a couple of extra ones. I put the pill in my mouth, and washed it down with a swig from the water bottle beside the chair. I stared out at the old rooftop water tower across the way, and the weathered brick facades. I heard Ray’s voice on the other side of the wall, and from the sound of it, he’d begun to sing.

In Schopenhauer’s pronouncement that “without peace and calm, true well-being is absolutely impossible,” there was only truth.

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Ken O’Steen’s stories have appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Fjords Review, Eclectica, Crack the Spine, Litro, and other publications. Ken is from Los Angeles, California, and currently lives in Proctor, Vermont.