Gabriel sat in his chair as the sun perched high in the sky over the bay. Looking out his window from high atop Pacific Heights, he thought for a moment of his mother, no more than twenty blocks from him then, on the ninth floor of that great white hospital building looming high over the Sunset District in the southern San Francisco hills. Was she, he wondered, watching this same scene? He’d call her later, but first there was more pertinent business to set his mind to. Gabriel put his red-socked feet up on the windowsill and kicked off, gliding over the hardwood floors in his desk chair and back to his computer screen to finish today’s blog entry.

And so, dear readers, today I woke in my bed and felt within my brain a singular purpose for my day. As it were, this was a welcome change from just one day preceding, for as you well know I spent that day wrapped tightly in my bedclothes as I wrestled in my mind with the dialectic of existence versus nonexistence and epiphany versus catastrophe until the early evening hours, when I finally roused from my mattress to satiate myself with a bag of sour cream and onion potato crisps and a tonic water. Not today though, no no — today my purpose be as clear as can be, as salient as a master chemist’s new discovery and as concrete as the sidewalk; today, my dear reader, I’m going to sell my bucket.

Gabriel Mathison was a curved wisp of a man, six feet five inches tall and barely one hundred thirty pounds (“congested glands,” he wrote in the blog, are what arrested him forever in the body of a gawking prepubescent that grew far too quickly into a grown-up’s body). He was sharp but lonely, an educated man with a penchant for preprocessed potato chips and slightly more master’s degrees (one) than friends. His blog received around fifty or so hits per month, although the majority of these were from him checking for other peoples’ comments. He ordered his groceries online and had them delivered. Gabriel hadn’t left his apartment in seven months.

Yes, I, your noble hero, am selling my bucket. Not because I need the money, no, no, but as an experiment, a test to see what decrepit vagabonds wandering aimlessly through the dimly lit and disease infested back alleys of cyberspace will actually respond to so preposterous an announcement. Fear not, though, for I will be safe — I assure you that I will not meet face to face (indeed, if a “human” being lost enough in the folds of the universe to come seeking my galvanized merchandise even has a face) with these people, merely wait by my telephone for their phone calls and then duly report their contents on these very pages. I’ve no doubt that, once again, my deft maneuvering to and fro about the darkest and most sinister of peoples populating this earth will again prove the horrific, abhorable state I see culture/society/etc. currently in. Until then, as always, The Angel.

He munched some sour cream and onion chips. As the sun seemed just ready to dip below the rows of houses off to the West, Gabriel got his first call. “Hello?”

“Yeah hi. I’m calling about the bucket, the, uh, the one you put on the Internet.”

“Hm, well, you certainly sound like the type that might.” Gabriel said, tipping the phone receiver away from his mouth as he stuffed in a handful of chips. “What’d you like to know?”

“Oh well, you know, your ad makes it kinda hard to know a lot about it. I had’a bucket I used for lots around here but, you know, now I can’t find it no more, so I need a new one.”

Gabriel ran his tongue across the backs of his teeth looking for errant chip mush. “Well, again, you certainly sound like the type that would call for my bucket. However, I — “

“Oh, I don’t know yet, you still gotta tell me a few things,” the caller interrupted.

He blew air out his nostrils. “What else is there to know. It’s just as it says in the ad. Metal bucket, eight quarts. The human body only has five point five quarts of blood in it, so you’d still have some room to spare in there after you carry out whatever horrific and murderous deed is no doubt your true-hearted motive for inquiring to me as to the use of the bucket — I assure you, it will be more than able to accommodate your reprehensible and morally bankrupt needs for this galvanized receptacle I am offering.”

“Um, well, you know,” the caller paused, “I’m really just callin’ about your bucket. I don’t need to know any doctor stuff ‘bout blood or anything. But since you mentioned it and stuff, just like, you know, I gotta ask you what’s galvanized mean? It just sounds kinda fancy and, I mean, I know I paid way less than five dollars for my last bucket. I’m on a budget, you know, I don’t wanna pay for somethin’ I don’t need.”

Gabriel leaned back in his chair. “Ah, now this front you put on is bold, charlatan, but you should know assuredly that I am onto your devious scheme,” he said, kicking his desk and spinning once in the chair. “Thorough is the downfall of civilization when one would spend any amount of one’s waking hours in swift pursuit of a trivial five dollar trinket of the modern age. I feel our work here is done, harlot — I’ve gotten all that I need from this exchange.”

“Oh, no, no, sorry, my name isn’t Charlotte, it’s Denise. Look I think our connection must be bad maybe, but I’m havin’ a real hard time hearing you. I just wanna know what gal-ven-ized means so I know if I wanna spend any extra money on it. I’m between the jobs right now and I gotta just be careful — only reason I’m callin’ you in the first place is that I just made a sale myself, sold a red New Year’s dress to some lady over in Milbrae for a hundred and fif — “

“Miss, we’re done here. I feel yet more disquieted than ever right now, and I must go swiftly to lament at the current state of our society in my Weblog. I say goodbye now.”

Gabriel clicked the phone off as the sun set behind him in the western sky.