Mr. Brown

Mr. Brown, although he was of a slender composition and was always stubbornly underweight, was a person composed of circles and elipses; his wrists, poking out of the baggy cuffs of his mechanic's jumpsuit, creased in such a way that his hands almost seemed unattached to his forearms. His long, bony fingers twitched nervously now and again, and he never seemed to know what to do with them: if they were in his pockets they became bulges against his thighs, and if they were out they always seemed to be bumping into somthing, always in flight, as though someday the perforation between palm and wrist would snap clean away, leaving them wriggling uncomfortably against the floor. His face was strangely free of lines and slim and rounded at the edges. His nose was long and slender; his lips were tense and smooth and round, and he was always moistening them with the tip of his tongue, as though testing a barrier between the world and the words which, when they emerged, flew from his mouth like smoke dissapating into the greasy air of the airport where he worked, a setting which was hardly ever identified as incongruous--although it was--since nobody ever noticed quite what Mr. Brown said. They looked at Mr. Brown's eyes as through the bottom of a glass of milk; his glasses fogged his eyes so thoroughly that their original color, an insipid blue, could not be discerned even if any of his coworkers had been inspired to try. They saw the way his brown hair fell limply over his forehead and they disregarded what he said. Mr. Brown worked quietly and efficiently at the work to which he was assigned; he put his tools away when he was done with them and he took one hour to eat lunch when the clock switched numerals. Because of his nearsightedness, he tended to hunch slightly over whatever he worked on. This was the state in which he could be found most days, hands grease-stained.