Mr. Durand Jones

I see Mr Durand Jones sitting in the mall massage chair, a dangerous place. If there

aren’t twittering twelve-year-olds sitting in them checking their phones, unhappy-looking

middle-aged women staring at the ceiling as the cores of their bones are rattled, or couples

looking saccharinely into one another's eyes, they’re empty and defeated-looking, like

leather ghosts. I’m no germaphobe, but I wouldn’t sit in one of those.

Mr Durand Jones stands out because nobody wears a suit to the mall. He might’ve

just walked off one of the Macy’s mens’ department displays; it’s crisp and ironed as if it

were modelled onto his body. It’s grey, with a navy-blue tie and a white shirt. His body is

crisp and ironed-looking as well; it’s conventionally attractive, and his face is as plain and

ordinary as that of a man in an ad. In plainest words, he’s too normal, and painfully so.

Something else about Mr Durand Jones is that in his array of painfully normal

features, he’s got a painfully standout one: red eyes. Every blood vessel around the clear

circles of blue is bulging and swollen, like an irritated, dry desert around pools of water.

Little do I know, Mr Durand Jones isn’t a stockbroker who just got fired and is using

substance abuse to cope, nor a severe allergy sufferer in the massage chair to try and

batter the mucus out of any fibre of his body it may be hiding in. His eyes are red with tears,

and he’s trying to get over as fast as possible what has the least normal thing that’s

happened to him in his whole life.

Mr Durand Jones has spent his whole life being the most normal person he knew. He

never wore any clothes that would make him stand out, and his grades were all perfectly

normal. He never deviated from the mould. His parents were both such ordinary people

that it only meant one thing: a son of such a calibre. He had quite a few girlfriends in high

school and college, also as normal as could be, all going for him because he was the safe

option; he regarded them the same way. Unfortunately, this inspired two non-normal

tendencies in Mr Durand Jones: a tendency to believe he was the most handsome human

being that had ever graced the planet, and a violent temper for that which is not normal.

I mean it. Mr Durand Jones could not stand things that were out of the ordinary. A

person wearing flashy clothes could make his blood pressure rise. A new type of music

could make him grind his teeth. A mural on a building that wasn’t perfectly geometric could

make his temples throb. None of those things would ever make his heart throb or the speed

of his breathing rise—until he saw Larisa.

It was a typical day off for Mr Durand Jones, which he decided to spend buying more

normal clothes. Mr Durand Jones was the type to wait until his clothes were on the verge of

wearing out to get new ones (though he’d never wait until they really wore out; that would

attract unnecessary attention; how un-normal!). As such, he decided to go to the only store

he ever visited at the mall; they only sold clothes that were perfectly professional and

average. It was sixty degrees out that day with no wind; not even the trees were disturbed

by the gentle drafts that blew through the air, much less Mr Durand Jones’ gelled hair.

I shan’t bore you with the unbearable details of all the clothes he bought and how he

picked them out and how much he paid. All you need to know is that the arrays of polos and

cardigans and slacks he carried under his arm like a middle-school girl running to class

tumbled out when he saw her.

At first, he couldn’t decide whether he was angry or awed. She was at the checkout

counter, with her red polo uniform shirt tucked into one side of her belt, and she was

nodding at someone else as they walked out. Her skin was unevenly tanned and she had

splashes of freckles in the most annoying places; he couldn’t tell what colour her skin even

was. In patches it might’ve been almost cocoa-brown, in some places it was fair. Her hair

was dark with blonde stripes, and her nose was a cute button shape with a bump in the

middle. Her lips were full and one had a scar in it; her eyes were unusually big, with one

green and one brown. To cap it off, she was wearing yellow eyeshadow on her lids, and

shimmer on her cheeks.

Mr Durand Jones was really in love for the first time.

He hurriedly picked up the clothes from the ground and strode as casually as

possible towards the checkout. Not that it was easy to stride like this when nothing had ever

knocked him off balance. For the first time, he was determined to be the cut above—maybe

normal, but in a special way.

“Hi, how are you today?” she asked in a harmonious voice. Her timbre seemed to

contain the whole of the universe; her voice was roaring brass, singing flutes, graceful

strings. Mr Durand Jones would’ve felt assaulted by such an unprecedented sound if he

weren’t head over heels.

“Great,” he said grandly, proudly placing his clothes on the counter.

“Okay.” The tag on her shirt said Larisa. “Find everything okay?”

“Yep.” Mr Durand Jones slid his credit card into the slot. It’s a Capital One

Platinum—she’s bound to be impressed.

“Okay, thanks. Have a great day,” comes the orchestra.

Maybe she didn’t see. Mr Durand Jones slides the Platinum ever so slightly in her

direction. She sees it, definitely, but she hasn’t acknowledged it.

“Yes, you can put your card away now,” the angels sang.

“Okay.”

Maybe if that bought something really impressive, Mr Durand Jones thought, and let

his eyes linger on her slightly longer before hurrying back into the back of the

store—towards the really nice suits.

He was back ten minutes later with a smart steel-coloured one. She looked surprised

to see him back.

“Just this,” Mr Durand Jones said.

She nodded and scanned it, looking nonchalant as ever, yellow eyelids flickering

over the display on the cash register. Mr Durand Jones can’t believe it. Maybe he has to be

more direct.

“Here’s my Platinum,” he says before inserting his card.

She nods. “Okay, thank you.”

“It’s a Platinum,” he insists, showing her the card.

“Yes, I saw,” the harps of heaven trilled. “You can remove it now.”

Mr Durand Jones doesn’t move. He’s never felt less normal in his life, and he’s

starting to dislike it.

“Sir?”

The only resolution there can be is to be more impressive, he thought to himself, and

darted in the other direction, ignoring the faint “Sir?” Larisa emitted behind him.

Five minutes later, hair slightly out of place, Mr Durand Jones plunked the ugliest,

most expensive shoes in the entire store down on the counter, earning an eyebrow raise

from Larisa.

“Okay. This all for today?” a chorus of spirits croons.

“Yeah. I’ll pay with my Platinum again,” Mr Durand Jones says, acutely aware of the

flush beginning to arise in his face from how frustrated he is.

Finally he decides to grate it out: “Why—won’t—you—date—me?”

“Um...are you alright, sir? You seem really tense.”

What was going on! How could she not consider him as the most handsome, perfect

being in the world! He was so unabashedly and excessively normal, there was no way!

There was some mistake! Mr Durand Jones roared in frustration and whipped around,

shoving the checkout temptations of candy and cheap electronics into the ground. He

overturned the gumball machine and watched the hundreds of gumballs scatter as if in a

game of pool. He threw himself to the ground and pounded his hands on the ground and

rolled around like a toddler, all while Larisa watched with alarm, huge eyes even wider. The

truth is, nothing had really gone wrong for Mr Durand Jones; there was nothing he could be

bullied for, nothing too terrible about his grades, nothing out of the ordinary about the girls

who picked him as a safe option. Now that he didn’t even begin to have the tools to process

his failure, his circuits were overloaded.

His tantrum was interrupted by laughter. Musical laughter, delicate laughter,

laughter whose notes skated around in the air with grace and dissolved with grace. Mr

Durand Jones gazed at Larisa as she was breathless with laughter.

“That’s the least normal, and the best, thing I’ve seen in my whole life,” she said,

clutching her sides. “I’m going to go get my manager.”

He fled the store. As an act of penance, Mr Durand Jones retreated into a bathroom

mall and changed into that useless grey suit, and when I spotted him in the massage chair,

muttered, “I seem tense...I seem tense...”