Man Who Thought Too Much, The

The Man Who Thought Too Much

Laurence Cole

July 30, 2002

Sid Bartram awoke one fine summer morning feeling distinctly uneasy. He
had no real reason for feeling so. He had enjoyed a relaxing weekend,
mainly sitting in the garden with his wife Maureen and enjoying the
lovely weather. It had been a most disappointing summer so far with
cloudy skies and cold breezed, but over the weekend the temperatures
had soared into the mid eighties, and the Bartrams had seized the
opportunity to add some colour to their callow complexions.

Monday morning had never been Sid's favourite time of the week. The
weekend was over, and he had five days at work hunched in front of his
spreadsheets to look forward to. Yet an odd part of himself normally
enjoyed the discomfort of work. This facet of himself would divide the
working day into hours, minutes and even seconds, working out down to
the exact penny how much he had earned. As the clock on the bottom
right-hand corner of his computer screen switched silently from 8:59 to
9:00, he would invariably mutter to himself 'And the money comes
rolling in.' He would smile, clasp his hands behind the back of his
head, then stretch them towards the ceiling, enjoying the way his
tendons cracked. Then he would settle down to work, typing busily away
and adding to his spreadsheets, then checking the clock again at 9:30
when he had earned precisely two pounds eighty seven pence, thanks to
the vagaries of National Insurance contributions and income tax.

That's not very much, you might think. Sid would agree, but he wasn't
too bothered. Maureen was the main bread-earner in the family with her
important position in the city. She had done so well for herself that
Sid didn't really have to work at all. They were childless and neither
of them were particularly extravagant spenders so they were able to
live a very comfortable life. Without his job, however, Sid would have
to forego the pleasure of watching the clock on his PC screen whirr
silently away, and would instead have to sit at home watching
television, without the connection of time and money that kept him
going through the long dull, office hours.

He was utterly unable to cope with stress - that was another reason
why he was perfectly content with such a mundane, badly paid position.
All he had to do was input financial data on his spreadsheets. The
phone on his desk rarely bleeped, and it was only on very unusual
occasions that any of the other people in his office came up to him and
talked. Instructions always seemed to come via e-mail, and although
people tried to be friendly when he first started, they were soon put
off by his monosyllabic answers and his lack of interest in asking any
questions back. These days he remained hunched silently over his desk
all day, apart from allowing himself the luxury of a ten minute break
at eleven to surf the internet (he enjoyed catching up on all the world
news on the BBC site), and then for half and hour at lunchtime he would
sit by the nearby lake, eat the sandwiches he had made that morning,
and read a couple of chapters of the latest Stephen King novel.

When his telephone did ring, he suffered terribly. Its horrible
high-pitched electronic bleat would cut right into him like a knife,
quickening his pulse and bursting out beads of sweat on the palms of
his hands. He would try to ignore it, to focus on his screen, to wipe
that infernal noise from his mind. But the other people in his office
would begin looking up from their work with puzzled expressions on
their faces, wondering why this strange, balding man wasn't answering
his phone. Sid would have to reach across with a trembling hand and
lift the handset, clutching it tightly to the side of his head in case
anyone should see how scared he was. The call would normally be a
simple query about the figures he'd inputted and would be over within a
minute. Its brevity failed to make the experience any less unpleasant
however.

Overall he enjoyed his work, and he enjoyed the way his mind operated
while he was working, dividing the day into financial segments and
making the time pass at a bearable pace. That was why he was so puzzled
by the sense of unease he felt on this particular Monday morning. It
had been a warm night, but he had slept well nonetheless. The
considerable bulk of Maureen laying next to him and shifted several
times, but only dragging him into a slightly shallower level of sleep
and not waking him up entirely. He looked across at her. She was on her
side and facing away from him, the duvet scrunched tightly around her
leaving very little for himself. He felt a sudden, almost burning sense
of disgust as his eyes wandered to her lank black hair that spread over
the pillow like the weed spreading over their pond. He suddenly found
himself taking an irrational dislike to the way she breathed through
her nose when she was sleeping, never snoring exactly, but rasping and
sometimes making odd little clicking noises that made him wonder
whether a cockroach had made its home in her nasal cavity and was
scraping its carapaced limbs together. And he was suddenly rather glad
she was turned away from him. Her breath had always been foul in the
morning, and if he had felt its damp, mouldy unpleasantness on his face
that particular morning, he might well have erupted into a rage, an
extremely rare occurrence for Sid Bartram.

For the first time in many years, he remembered his first sight of
Maureen. He usually tried to avoid thinking about the past, and became
absorbed instead in the present, every second, every penny of the
present at that. But the shapeless bulk sprawled next to him in bed on
this particular morning seemed so far removed from the lithe, happy
young woman he had first glimpsed at the funfair thirty years before,
that the comparison made the past impossible to forget.

It had been summer, late August, and the fair that appeared on the
town common once or twice a year was into its last day. They would
begin packing up the following morning, and within hours the only hints
that anything exciting had stood there at all would be the patches of
yellowed grass where the tents had been pitched and the few scraps of
litter that had been blown into the trees surrounding the open spaces
and been forgotten.
Night had fallen quickly, as it so often did in late summer, as if to
prepare us for the darker and colder days ahead. Sid had gone to the
fair with a couple of his friends, and they had wandered around
aimlessly for a few hours, trying the odd ride, laughing at how the
Ghost Train so completely failed to scare them, fighting back the urge
to puke when they had tried the Waltzer after one too many
doughnuts.

Maureen had simply wandered past him, one face amongst dozens of us.
He was pretty sure it hadn't been love at first sight. The emotion her
tanned face had awakened within him wasn't so much love, as curiosity,
a desire simply to get to know her better and to find out what she did.
He had overcome his usual nerves and began talking to her immediately,
influenced by a vague, gnawing doubt deep within his gut that he might
never see her again. After all, he had never seen her before.

She had been reticent at first, perhaps seeing something of the
ridiculous in the tall, rather scruffy 19-year old who was making the
first clumsy attempts at conversation. But then she must have seen
something interesting in his eyes, perhaps feeling that same curiosity
that he felt, because within two days they had gone on their first
date, within two weeks they had been sleeping together, and within two
years they were married.
Curiosity killed the cat, thought Sid uneasily to himself, and then
wandered where the thought had come from. Perhaps something had been
killed, within both of them, since those heady days. They had been
happy at first, and their marriage had survived Maureen going off to
business college and then embarking almost immediately on her lucrative
career, while he made a few half-hearted attempts at forging a career
for himself. But something had slowly and almost imperceptibly died in
those intervening years. Sid no longer felt that old shiver of
anticipation when he knew he was about to see Maureen again after an
extended absence, the sort of shiver that made his pulse quicken and
the world seem full of endless possibilities. He felt nothing now,
apart from a horrible, guilt-ridden emptiness that he had never really
noticed until now. He was worried that even this horrible lack of
feeling might lead to something worse, to downright hate for his wife.
Perhaps his disgust at her size, at the sound she made when she
breathed through her nose, perhaps this was the first sign, the first
harbinger of impending hate.

Sid rose from bed, and was relieved to leave the oppressive atmosphere
of the bedroom. He hoped his shower might scare away some of his night
phantoms, but as the warm water cascaded over him, it seemed to offer
only a further opportunity to dwell on them, to made them bigger and
more solid, and invite them to spend the rest of the day with him.
Toweling himself dry, he padded back into the bedroom to see that
Maureen had turned over, and was now facing the rumpled, Sid
Bartram-shaped patch of bed he had recently relinquished. Nice, he
thought to himself. She keeps her back to me when I'm there, and can
only face me when I'm not there anymore. Bitch.

He felt a surge of guilt reddening his face as if he had actually said
the word out loud instead of thinking it. He can never thought such
things about his wife before. Never. What on earth was happening to him
today?

He checked his watch, and saw there was still half an hour before he
had to leave for the office. Feeling a mixture of guilt and nervous
anticipation at what he was about to do, he dropped his towel and
climbed back in beside Maureen, aware but trying desperately to forgot
that his half of the bed had become a lot smaller than it used to be.
He pressed himself against her, willing sensation in the flaccid and
underused object below his waist, but feeling only that terrible
emptiness that he had woken with. How could he be expected to become
aroused, when the once slender woman next to him looming under the
duvet like a hibernating Brontosaurus was supposed to be the sole
object of his affections?

Maureen snorted, and a gust of warm air wafted over his face. Sid
smelled rotten eggs and last night's Chicken Kiev and almost gagged. He
jumped out of bed again, almost tumbling to the ground in his hurry to
get dressed, eat, drink, get the hell out of this awful place and rush
to the safety of the office, where he could immerse himself in his
spreadsheets and his moneymaking seconds, and forget the crazy thoughts
that were flying through his head this morning.

When he was about to leave, he tiptoed back up the stairs, desperate
not to wake his wife in case he might have to (horror of all horrors!)
actually converse with the woman. "Have a nice relaxing day off, love,"
he whispered, leaning over and giving her the lightest ever peck on her
cheek. He tried not to breath while he did so, his guilt being slowly
replaced by a much more manageable emotion - amusement. Comedies had
been made about this sort of thing, he said to himself. Couples who'd
been married for thirty years weren't supposed to love each other
anymore, they were supposed to find each other amusing and sickening in
equal measure. Okay, the sickening seemed to be winning hands-down over
the amusement factor at the moment, but that could change.

By the time Sid had walked half a mile to the station, had found his
favourite seat on the train, and was tucking into the UK news in the
Daily Telegraph, he was feeling quite cheerful. Fair enough, his wife
had grown into a hideous fat, lank-haired smelly whale, but perhaps he
could simply pretend they weren't even married anymore. They shared a
bed, they ate together, and that was fine. But it wasn't as if they had
sex when they were in bed, and actually talked when they were sitting
at the dining table, was it? They were just two people that just
happened to do some things together, and it wasn't really necessary for
them to like each other, was it? After all, she probably thought the
same about him. His hair was growing thinner by the day, and the upper
half of his body seemed to be gradually seeping into the lower half,
spilling out at the waist when there wasn't any room left. He hardly
cut an attractive figure. The best way out of the problem was for both
of them just to get on with their lives, to obtain as much enjoyment as
possible from their existence, and to think as little as possible about
the other person.

Sid became absorbed in the newspaper for a few moments, a faint smile
flickering on his lips. If anyone had been observing him closely, they
would have seen the smile not just fade, but suddenly end as quickly as
it had appeared. Sid's mind had drifted away again, and had traveled
back a couple of stops on his train of thought. My waist is getting
rather large, he said to himself, folding his newspaper and peering
down to where his belly was bulging out into his white shirt. He
clenched his stomach muscles and pulled it in, breathing in so loudly
as he did so that the woman opposite looked sharply at him, alarmed.
Perhaps if I keep on doing that, my stomach muscles will strengthen and
prevent everything from bulging out, he thought. He was vaguely aware
that pulling in his lower stomach simply meant it sagging forward
further up, just beneath his ribcage, but he thought that might look
slightly better.

Contented again, he opened the Telegraph again and turned again to the
article he had been reading on the situation in the Middle East. All
the time he tried to keep his stomach muscles clenched, but found it
took such a conscious effort that he lost track of the article and
found he could make little sense of it. He breathed out suddenly and
loudly, and then looked back down to see whether his belly was sticking
out any less than it was before. Perhaps it was, just a little, he
thought, and breathed in again, repeating the process. At this rate my
stomach will be flat as a pancake by the time we reach Euston.

He must have cut a rather ridiculous figure as he stared at himself,
because the aforementioned woman opposite seemed to sink as far back
into her seat as she could get, and to become even more absorbed in her
paperback than she had been before. Sid realized this, and looked up,
straight into her eyes, which stared back at him, briefly and
nervously, before flicking back down to her book. She was young,
probably in her early 20s. Her long hair was blonde, but was
undoubtedly dyed - he could tell by the roots showing in her centre
parting. She was wearing a black pinstriped suit with a skirt bottom
and a plain white blouse. The skirt was quite short and Sid could see
her thighs curving up into enticing darkness. Just a bit different from
my Maureen, he thought to himself and unbelievably felt something stir
beneath his waist, which he was still holding in. After his experience
in bed with his wife that morning, he'd feared the feeling down there
had been deadened for good. He was certain Maureen's size had killed
him off in that way, had rendered him sexless. He had been wrong, and
he felt damn pleased with himself.

He gave up on the Middle East article and placed the newspaper on his
lap to avoid any embarrassment. The woman appeared to be still reading
her book, but Sid wondered if her mind was on other things. He wondered
if she had a boyfriend, and presumed their recent sex lives had been
rather more active than his and Maureen's. Jesus, even if they'd only
had sex once in the last year, they would still be winning. And all
this time, Sid had assumed there's been something wrong with him. There
had been times when Maureen had been up for it, and she had disrobed
before him in a manner she believed to be alluring but which (and he
had only realized this today) he found merely comical and verging on
the alarming once she was naked. Sid had failed utterly to perform,
unable even to entice the merest vestige of life in his member.

He would have no problems with the woman opposite, he realized. He was
pretty sure she didn't have folds of fat hanging down just below her
armpits that made it look like she had four breasts. God, he was
envious of her boyfriend. Imagine having that laying next to you at
night, imagine your hands reaching down between those smooth thighs,
imagine your tongue darting over her pale, firm young breasts...

Sid snapped himself awake, horribly aware that the newspaper lying on
his lap had risen somewhat, and that the gentleman sitting next to him
had moved away slightly. Sid felt his cheeks burning with shame, and
dared not look at the object of his fantasies sitting opposite. Good
God, his mind was running amok! He seemed to have utterly lost control
of what was going on in his head. His thoughts were normally as
well-ordered and disciplined as his work at the office, but if his mind
could be compared to a desk, well...there would be papers strewn
everywhere and probably other, more incriminating pieces of litter
lying around. He tried to focus himself, to think about the
spreadsheets he had to work on that day, and felt his pulse rate steady
and the burning sensation in his cheeks ease.

For a few moments, he was more like the Sid Bartram of the day before,
perfectly pleasant and personable, but a trifle dull. But then he
became aware of his stomach again, and realized that all the time he
had been fantasizing about the stranger opposite, he had been holding
his guts in. He breathed out, and then stared out the window as the
train approached London's outskirts and the green gaps between the
houses became fewer and fewer. Sid took another breath, held in
briefly, the breathed out. Then other, and repeated the process.

Gradually he became oblivious of everything other than his breathing.
Every aspect of his conscious self became involved in the vital, basic
and normally subconscious mechanism of breathing. Sid thought little of
it, and tried to allow his train of thought to move on to the next
station, Spreadsheet Junction perhaps, or Money Halt.

But it wouldn't.

His mind refused to obey him. His train of thought seemed stuck on
Breathing, and the sound of rushing air in his lungs as he inhaled and
exhaled air reminded him of the hissing of air released from the brakes
of a stopped train. Oh My god, he said to himself. I have to control my
own breathing. It's no longer subconscious. For the rest of my life, I
will be able to think of nothing else but my breathing, otherwise it
will just stop and I will die. How will I work? How will I be able to
concentrate on my spreadsheets?

Sid realized there was movement around him and that the train, like
the one in his head, had ground to a halt at Euston. Zombie-like, he
rose stiffly to his feet and followed the grounds along the station
platform, unaware of his legs moving beneath him, or of slotting his
travel pass into the automatic ticket barrier, and of the machine's
grey plastic arms snapping apart to let him through.

Someone nudged him from behind and he turned around dreamily, his mind
intent on only one thing.

"You left your ticket in the machine," said a distant voice. "Oi,
mister, I said you left your ticket in the machine!"

Something was thrust in Sid's face but he just ignored it, and focused
on the rhythmic goings-on in his body - in, out, in, out, in, out. Got
to keep the rhythm up or I'll just die. I'll just become starved of
oxygen and die. I wonder if this has happened to anyone else. I wonder
if I'm the first. They'll want to examine me. I'll become a subject of
worldwide medical curiosity.

A slightly more rational side of Sid's mind attempted to remind him
that while he had been pondering his possible future fame, his
conscious mind had forgotten about his breathing and his subconscious
mind had taken over, but Sid dismissed it as irrelevant and
concentrated again on the endless rhythm that was keeping him alive -
in, out, in, out, in, out.

His office was only a short walk from Euston. He liked to take a small
detour through a patch of greenery just outside the station, to enjoy a
last taste of fresh air and freedom before entering the conditioned air
and electronic slavery of the office. He occasionally bought a paper
from the Big Issue seller who seemed to spend his whole life in this
tiny park ringed on three sides by roaring dual carriageways and on the
fourth by the grim station building. Even if he didn't buy a copy, he
would always say hello and sometimes chat briefly about the
weather.

On this particular Monday however, even though Sid took his usual
detour, he was completely unaware of the tiny island of grass and
soot-stained leaves through which he passed, and although the Big Issue
seller had become so familiar to him that he had almost begun to
consider him a friend, he completely failed to acknowledge his greeting
and strode on into the office building. He passed one couple who
exchanged puzzled glances. The tall, smart-looking man who had rushed
past them had been breathing extremely heavily. It might be a good idea
for him to join a gym or go jogging, because at the moment he sounded
like prime heart attack material.

Sid, flustered and unsettled, arrived at his desk some ten minutes
before nine. This was perfect. It gave him time to settle before
moneymaking time began. He would normally make himself a coffee from
the communal kitchen and then log onto the Internet to check his
e-mail. The company didn't allow him his own official e-mail address
because even though he had been working there for many years, he was he
was still officially a temp and had to fill out a timesheet each week.
He therefore failed to qualify as a fully-fledged member of staff and
was accordingly denied his own e-mail. He had managed to circumvent
this problem by signing up to one of those internet-based e-mail
companies that you could access wherever you were in the world. He
didn't really have any friends - the guys who'd accompanied him to the
funfair those many years before had long since dismissed him as boring
and ever-so-slightly odd, and he'd become so introverted that he found
it extremely difficult to make new ones. But he'd signed up to a couple
of newsgroups, and enjoyed reading other people's conversations,
especially about politics and world events.

This morning he was delighted to see eight new e-mails, all from his
newsgroups. Perhaps if he focused intently on them, he would forget
about his breathing and might just be able to operate effectively for
the rest of the day. There was one particularly interesting comment
that some stranger had written about the situation in the Middle East,
and Sid leant forward so that the PC's screen filled his entire vision,
with the aim of its contents in the same way filling his entire mind,
leaving no space for paranoid thoughts about breathing, and women's
breasts, and how foul his wife was. For a time, it worked, but then he
made the terribly mistake of sipping from his coffee cup.

He loved the feel of the hot, rich liquid swilling around his mouth.
He swallowed, looking forward to the buzz he'd receive after several
gulps, the caffeine rush that he'd try to maintain throughout the day
by drinking cup after cup. Even though the coffee was still pretty hot,
he swallowed it all down within seconds and licked his lips, before
turning his attention back to the article, and not thinking about his
breathing.

He swallowed again, just to get the last of the coffee down his
gullet. Perhaps it would increase the caffeine rush just a little bit.
After several seconds Sid noticed that his mouth had begun filling up
with saliva again, so he gathered it all together with his tongue just
behind his front teeth and swallowed again. Within seconds, he felt the
saliva returning, and tried to fight the impulse to swallow
again.

Sid felt his pulse rate rising and a horrible tight, panicky feeling
in his chest.

It's just like the breathing. It's just like the bloody breathing and
that bloody woman on the train, and my bloody wife, and how bloody
unhappy I've suddenly realized I really am. I've become conscious of
something I've never been conscious of before. I'm not normally aware
of the act of swallowing. I'm not normally aware of saliva building up
in my mouth, and of me having to swallow to get rid of it. If I don't
think about it, I suppose the saliva doesn't build up, and I don't have
to swallow in the first place. Oh my God, I don't think I can cope with
this any more. I can't cope with spending the rest of my life having to
consciously control my breathing and my swallowing, having to imagine
every woman I see naked, and comparing them to the horrible sight that
is my wife dancing naked in front of me. I can't stand realizing how
everything has gone so bloody wrong.

Sid realized he was on the verge of tears, and raised a red flag to
bring this particular, desperate train of thought to a screeching halt.
He glanced at his PC clock and saw it was 9:02, and he didn't even have
a spreadsheet open on the screen. One of his managers sat several desks
behind in the huge open-plan office he worked in, and could probably
see that he still had Hotmail, and not Excel, open on his PC. God, he
could even get the sack because of his crazy thoughts.

"Sid?"

Sid snapped back to full consciousness, to notice that someone was
standing behind him, their right hand leaning on the flimsy chipboard
divider that separated his desk from his neighbour's. He didn't even
know who his neighbour was.

He looked behind and up, and saw it was his immediate line manager Mr
Davies, a short, rotund and generally good-tempered Welshman who had
always treated Sid decently, despite his lack of a proper e-mail
address.

"Alright Sid, had a good weekend?"

"Quiet, but nice," replied Sid, using the response he always used when
his boss asked that question on a Monday morning. He was aware all the
time that Mr Davies was looking down at him that all the new thoughts
that had assailed his mind that morning were still running around
inside there. He could once again consciously feel the rise and fall of
his chest, the train brake-like hiss as his lungs sucked in and
expelled air. He tried to forget his breathing's endless mechanical
repetition, to focus entirely on Mr Davies' words at the expense of all
other thought. But he succeeded in switching his attention only to his
swallowing, and became uncomfortably aware of his mouth filling up with
saliva. He refused to swallow. After all, he never swallowed when he
wasn't aware of all that increased spittle, so really there should be
no need to swallow now. It must look absolutely ridiculous gathering it
all up at the front of your mouth and pursing your lips together like a
whore. People would see him doing it and laugh.

"Have you got plenty to do at the moment?" asked Mr Davies.

"I've still got a couple of spreadsheets to complete," replied Sid,
finding it quite difficult to pronounce some words as his glands
produced more and more saliva. "I should have them finished by
lunchtime, and then..."

The unthinkable happened and Mr Davies interrupted him. "Skipped our
breakfast, did we Sid?"

Sid, not realizing the implications of the question, smiled. "No, I
can some peanut butter on toast, it's always been..."

"You're dribbling at the mouth," said Mr Davies. "I thought perhaps
you were hungry. We can't really have employees of this company
drooling at the mouth, can we Sid? You do know that our customers visit
us on a regular basis. It really wouldn't make a very impressive sight.
And you are only on a week-to-week contract. Your position here is
tenuous in the extreme."

Mr Davies disappeared back to his desk somewhere behind Sid. Sid sat
silently at his desk, staring into space, before pursing his lips as he
gathered his spit together, and then swallowing it all down so loudly
that he sounded like a frog. His unseen and unknown neighbour
smaned.

Trying to make his mind a blank, but failing abysmally as he breathed
deeply and pursed his lips all at the same time, Sid opened his first
spreadsheet of the day and began to type in the figures printed on the
mound of paperwork lying on his desk. He felt his first caffeine rush
of the day subsiding, and wished he could pour himself another cup of
coffee. But drinking another cup of coffee meant loads more swallowing,
and that might just make the situation worse.

He glanced at the clock again. 9:14. He grimaced, disappointed at the
slow passage of time over the past fourteen minutes, but also at the
incredibly fast passage of time over the past thirty years. On any
other Monday, he would have rejoiced in the fact that he had now earned
?1.40, but money was now the furthest thing from his mind. As he
worked, he became aware of his heartbeat. It was so loud it seemed to
fill the entire office. He half expected to see his colleagues looking
up from their desks and staring at him with a mixture of amusement and
horror, much the same way as he had thought about his wife earlier that
morning. It was so loud he looked down at his chest to check whether he
could see it pulsing in and out, in and out, in and out. He couldn't,
but he could feel it nonetheless, and it started him thinking about his
breathing again, in, out, in, out, in, out. Then he pulled his tummy in
tightly, hoping to strengthen those abdominals and get rid of the beer
gut he had acquired over the years. Then he pursed his lips as he
sucked all the saliva together at the front of his mouth and then
gulped it down. His neighbour smaned again.

He felt his mind straining under the pressure of having to think about
so many things at the same time. He decided he had to focus on just one
of them, otherwise he would go completely mad, and end up thrashing
about and foaming at the mouth in some lunatic asylum. Jesus, he was
foaming at the mouth already.

He chose to think about his heart, and that was undoubtedly the worst
decision he had made in his entire life. His breathing, his swallowing,
his stomach, sex, his unhappiness, all faded into his subconscious,
leaving only his heartbeat. It became faster and louder until it
thundered in his ears. It even pulsed in his eyeballs so that the
entire office seemed to throb in rhythm with it, as though some
strange, regular earth tremor was hitting London. He looked down at his
pile of paperwork and attempted to copy some of the figures onto his
last spreadsheet, but his eyesight pulsed so violently that he was
completely unable to focus.

Then, just when it seemed it couldn't get any louder or faster, and if
it did, then his head would explode and he would at last become
intimately acquainted with his neighbour in a way neither of them were
unlikely ever to have imagined, it stopped. Completely.

Okay, thought Sid calmly to himself. My heart has stopped. That's
fine. When I stop breathing, I know how to start again. I just...well,
I just think it, and it happens. And when all that nasty saliva builds
up in my mouth, well, I just swallow and it goes away for a bit. And
when life with Maureen gets just a bit too joyless, and when the sight
of her fat lump in bed with me in the morning sickens me, then all I
have to do is leave her. But I never have. I've never been able to work
out how. And I've got absolutely no bloody idea how to get my heart
started again. Do I just think it like the breathing? I'll try...

Sid tried, but nothing happened, and he ended up dead and slumped over
his keyboard, his forehead depressing the keys and inputting
intelligible nothings into his last spreadsheet.

The couple that heard him breathing heavily as he strode past them in
the little park just outside Euston Station would hardly have been
surprised to learn that he died of a heart attack.