It’s the coldness of the stethoscope on Deidre’s bony chest that startles her awake. Her bedroom is dark, a collection of shadows, and the people she sees are nothing but colorful blurs: Dr. Ward, in his tan suit and blue bowtie, small but purposeful, as he takes the plugs of his stethoscope from his ears; Averil, angelic in white, as she efficiently examines the morphine hanging from the intravenous pole; and Nolan, in his blue overalls, standing by the window, cowering, as if he was folding in on himself.

“Well?” Averil says.

“Is it …?” Nolan says.

“It’s a matter of time,” Dr. Ward says.

Paltry light flickers through the part in the curtains, trying to stem the shadows from growing into an encompassing darkness. This is life now – or what’s left of it. And in the acknowledgement of so few heartbeats remaining, it’s Keene who Deidre seeks out. An imprint of his small body remains in bed beside her, the covers pulled back. Him spending the night by her side was one final treat – a boy terrified of a thunderstorm wanting his mother. The pain means nothing now as she thinks of how he will cope once she’s gone – if he will be able to. He is only seven. How does anybody that age understand and deal with death?

“Deidre,” Dr. Ward says, “how’re you feeling?”

Deidre’s breath rattles in her chest as she summons a smile. The fight is done. She’s had long enough to come to terms with that. Now all that remains is this final communion before whatever comes next. Dr. Ward nods, understanding, and pats her shoulder.

Averil draws the curtains to reveal rain has splattered the window and swirling thunderclouds fill the sky. A barn owl is perched on the sill outside but, startled by Averil’s appearance, leaps, flutters its wings and sails away, leaving nothing but a brief but glorious misty white contrail.

“I have a couple of patients to see before the storm hits,” Dr. Ward says. “But I’ll be back.”

“I’ll see you out,” Averil says.

She again checks the morphine bag on the intravenous pole, but more as if to busy and distract herself. Then she nods at Deidre, but shies away quickly, although not quick enough to hide that her eyes sparkle with unshed tears. She leads Dr. Ward from the room, quietly closing the door behind them.

Nolan sits on the bedside, Deidre struggling to focus on him. He hasn’t washed his clothes for a while – that much is evident; his overalls are dirt-stained and worn, the left strap – yet again – torn loose from the button. Deidre would like to sew it, just as she used to, and lifts her hands trying to find the muscle memory, but her hands are skeletal and weak. She lowers them to her midriff and feels the protrusion of her ribs. Nolan clasps her wrist, taking care not to disturb the cannula that sinks into her pale skin.

“Keene?” Deidre says, although there’s little strength in her voice.

“He was having breakfast,” Nolan says. “Tore up the house last night looking for that pendant he bought you. He thinks if he finds it you’ll get better.”

A citrine pendant he’d bought from the school fair. Whoever had sold it had impressed upon him the supposed virtues of crystals. But she’d lost it – hung it on the branch of a tree and forgotten it during a family outing to Miller’s Pond one hot summer’s day. The next day she’d found the lump and Nolan had sped her to the doctor, as if the lump was a time bomb that could be defused before it exploded.

Here was Keene’s logic: if he could find the pendant, she’d be okay – logic that is so simple and so charming in its naivety, but also so fallible that learning the truth could scar him. Children are so impressionable. And Keene is sensitive. Deidre worries how he and Nolan will cope together.

“Do you want me to call him?” Nolan asks.

Deidre can only manage to shake her head once. “Not yet.” It’s too early. The pain and exhaustion press at her until she’s being crushed, but she knows she’ll have one last respite, as brief as it will be. That will be the time to see Keene.

Nolan’s fingertips trace her cheek. “What can I do for you? Music?”

An old, small stereo sits in the corner, surrounded by an unruly pile of classical CDs. She would like to hear music now. The wind outside howls and rain hammers the roof. Thunder booms and the house creaks all over, as if it’s recoiling and is shivering in fear. Music would be good – the harmony in the chaos – but it’s something she shares with Keene. She could not listen to it without him. And Nolan has no appreciation of anything but rock.

Perhaps understanding, Nolan gently lowers himself by her side, one arm curling around her, his face nuzzling against her cheek. He is too warm. Deidre is not used to it. But she welcomes it as a shield against the chill in the room and the darkness that leaks from the corners. His presence will help stay death – for a little while at least. And she will have her husband lay by her side this one last time.

“This is not the way it’s meant to be,” Nolan says, his breath hot on her ear. “This is …”

Deidre is thankful his voice breaks. She takes a breath, shallow as it moves through her chest, thin and whistling as it sits in her diaphragm. No, it’s not as it’s meant to be. She has run that gamut already. How many lives unfold as they’re meant to be? Life forces detours on the way to meant to be and so many never reach the destinations they idealize.

“Don’t think like that,” she says. “Tell me what you’re going to do.”

“What can I do?”

“Tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after. You said lightning hit the tree outside …?”

“Last night. The branch splintered right through Keene’s room.”

“How’re you going to fix it?”

“I don’t—”

“Tell me, Nolan.”

Nolan gulps.

“Tell me … Please.”

“The council … They’re already here, taking it down – Bob McKenna owed me a favor, so I got them in straight away. I guess the insurance can cover the damage. Maybe that’ll help with the bank as well. I don’t know. I really don’t—”

Please, Nolan.

Does he sense her wordless plea? Deidre doesn’t know, but would like to think it’s the case. He kisses her cheek, his stubble scratchy. Thunder rumbles, then lightning flashes through the room and sears Deidre’s eyes. Shadows twirl up from the floor and she feels, fleetingly, that they’re wraiths rising to claim her. Her hand clenches over her chest; she looks through the window and to the dark and foreboding clouds that may be the blanket that will fall upon her life and darken it forever.

She yearns for one final glance at sunlight, and her mind goes back to that outing at Miller’s Pond, swimming with Nolan and Keene, and even with Bunch, the Border Collie enthusiastically chasing his ball across the lake. It was the last happy and carefree day they shared as a family. After that, it was doctors and hospitals and failing treatments, and her freedom dwindling until she’s been left with nothing but this room and the shadows.

For now, she revels in the normalcy that her husband can cuddle her, at least for this little bit. She sleeps and dreams that when she wakes, she’ll head downstairs, call for Keene and Bunch from the yard, then retreat to the kitchen, warm and glowing in the evening sun, scones baking in the oven. Nolan will sit at the kitchen table, that silly strap still hanging loose from his overalls, reading the paper over a beer. They’ll eat and laugh, Keene clumsily sneaking scraps to Bunch when he thinks they’re not looking, and then head into the lounge, where she will sit with Keene at the piano and teach him Mozart’s concertos. Keene has a gift that needs to be nurtured.

A thunderclap startles Deidre. Her eyes snap open. The room is still. Nolan remains by her side, but his breath is slow. The darkness closes in. Deidre’s mind is quiet and she barely feels the bed beneath her. Now there’s no pain – nothing but tiredness. But it’s not the usual exhaustion that comes from her body fighting to survive, but a tiredness where the peacefulness of everlasting sleep beckons. The window bounces under the rain’s assault and the wind shrieks.

“Nolan?”

The word struggles from her lips, no louder than his breathing, but he is up immediately.

“What is it?” he asks.

“It’s time.”

Nolan shakes his head. “No.”

Deidre doesn’t argue. Her hand closes above her chest. “Find Keene …?”

Nolan jumps up so quickly that the bed judders and he almost bounces out of the room. Deidre hears his feet thump down the stairs as he calls again and again for Keene. She expects that soon Keene’s voice will pipe in, bright and clear, “Here, Dad!” but there is no response. She tries to echo Nolan’s calls, but her throat is rough and she has no breath to power her voice above a warble.

Averil enters the room, and replaces the morphine bag – not that it matters anymore. “Nolan’s finding Keene,” she says, but more as if to assure herself.

Deidre nods, a small tip of her chin. “I’m going to have a little sleep. Wake me when he comes.”

“Deidre …?”

“It’s all right.”

Deidre closes her eyes, tells herself she needs a moment’s rest, but it would be so easy to slip away now, to blink one final time and know no more. But she can’t do that. She can’t go without saying goodbye to her little boy. Keene is her only tether now, and she will hold onto it as grimly and desperately as she can.

The screen door screeches open and clatters shut. The storm fades, the rain little more than a drizzle, the sort Deidre would’ve once listened to, would’ve shrouded herself in as she slept in on Sunday mornings. Then she would fold into Nolan, nestle her face on his chest, and bask in his warmth; and then, later, Keene, running in as fast as his little legs can carry him, would charge in, hurl himself onto the bed, and burrow under the covers between them.

“Keene …?”

Deidre doesn’t know if she is awake or asleep when she says his name, or if she has even said it at all. Then, muted violins, slow, but melodious fill the room and elevate it above the inevitability of what awaits her. Other instruments join in – more violins, cellos, and bass. She fleetingly thinks she has passed and this divine music greets her in the afterlife, but then she identifies it as Mozart, the second movement of his Piano Concerto 21. The sublime tranquility of the music is a fitting chaperone for what time she has left.

She opens her eyes. Cracks have appeared in the clouds and sunlight sprinkles over the house. She’s sure she feels the warmth frittering over her. The music fills the stillness of her body. Keene has put a CD on the stereo – part of the routine they share. He walks up to the bedside, his hair wet, like he has just showered, and in a fresh set of clothes. He holds his hands behind his back. She tries to smile but her lips don’t move.

“Mum,” Keene says as he climbs up onto the edge of the bed.

“What did you do today?” Deidre asks.

She struggles to get the words out, but this is part of their routine – what she asks every visit. He knows and beams with that adolescent need to impress, to make her proud. She tries to lift her hand to stroke Keene’s cheek, but cannot get it above her chest. Keene kisses her on the head.

“I went and got you a surprise,” Keene says.

“A surprise?” A smile tugs at her lips. During yesterday’s visit, he told her he’d drawn something for her – a picture to join the array of others they’ve stuck to the wall by the door to form a collage of startling color. “Your picture?” she asks.

“Better!”

Keene opens his hand. Her pendant – the very pendant she’d unwittingly left behind at Miller’s Pond – falls from it, jags upon the cord wrapped around his palm, then swings back and forth. Her disbelief swells.

“Kee, how did you …?”

“I went and got it. Me and Bunch.”

This is no boast, as it might be in somebody older – he does not understand the weather he has braved, or the dangers it represents. Even on a fine day he should not be venturing into the bush alone. But he is completely without ego, instead beaming with delight that he has won her surprise.

He lays the pendant on her chest. Her hand shapes around it with familiarity. Her chest heaves. Outside, the owl returns – wings fluttering as it perches outside the window. It watches her, eyes large and golden.

“That was very sweet of you, Kee.”

“Now you can get better.” Keene’s face shines with innocence.

“Better?”

“The pendant will make you better.”

Deidre frowns as trepidation fills her, and then overflows. The shadows rise around her and writhe in contempt. “No, Kee …”

“But you only got sick because you lost it.”

“No …”

“Get better now, Mum.” Keene shakes her by the shoulder.

She wishes she could hold him, could soothe him, and come the morning that he could wake and his fears would be forgotten.

“Kee, I’m not going to get better.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have to go …”

Keene frowns and his hand tightens around the pendant. He lies by her side, rests his head against her temple and draws his arm across her. She opens and closes her hand on the pendant as it sits on her chest.

“Mum …”

“Kee …” Deidre summons what strength remains and turns her head, just an inch, but enough that her eyelashes flicker upon his, her dark eyes wet. Her hand closes over the pendant. It has no power but its retrieval offers another kind of magic – a magic that fills her with a certainty that Keene is a boy both resilient and capable and resourceful. She doesn’t want to leave him, but is sure now – sure in a way that she doesn’t understand – that, ultimately, despite all the hardships he’ll face, that he will be okay. “You’ll be good,” she says. “You’ll be strong.”

“What, Mum? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Kee …? I’ve been very sick—”

“You’ll be all right now.”

“I’ve been very sick, and I have to go. I have to leave you now.”

“Mum …?”

The shadows beckon. There is nothing now; no heaviness, no tiredness, no concerns, and in their absence what fills her is euphoria. She could be floating. Her breath comes long and deep, until it is meditative, although she does not feel it in her lungs, but elsewhere, like it might be someplace ready to rocket her from her body.

“But even though I have to go … I’ll always be with you. Always, Kee. Always. Do you understand? Always.”

“Mum?”

“Love you. Always …”

She expects the darkness. She expects to sleep a dreamless sleep. She expects the nothing. But shadows flare and erupt into prisms of light that illuminate the room, and she is immersed in a blaze that incinerates her pain, burns away her fear, and disintegrates all awareness of self.

Almost as if sensing what’s happening, the owl springs from the window and soars up and up and up, almost as if riding a shaft of sunlight through the breaking clouds, wings outstretched, and Deidre knows nothing now, nothing but freedom and the boundless blue sky.

The clock radio’s buzzing woke Sam with a sudden rudeness that was startling. His eyes snapped open to the immediacy of the morning. Dust mites floated aimlessly in the grey light that snuck through the shutters. Cold seeped into the bed and urged him to cocoon himself deeper under the covers, but as attractive as a proposition as that was, that wasn’t what routine demanded of him.

Throwing the covers aside, he dragged himself into a sitting position. His mouth tasted like rotten fruit, and there was a tightness in his back that the day would loosen but never relieve.

He paddled the alarm off and trudged into the bathroom.

***

Sam hauled himself up from the toilet and wiped his butt. There were bright flecks of red on the paper. Once upon a time he might’ve worried about bowel cancer or Crohn’s Disease or something equally as dire. Now, he absently tossed the paper into the toilet, flushed, then brushed his teeth. There was also blood in the rinse. He watched it swirl down the drain, caught in the whirlpool of toothpaste foam. He shut the tap off, and lifted his face to the bathroom mirror.

He was sure it wasn’t a reflection that stared back: eyes bloodshot, face pasty, shoulders sagging. This was a sad parody – his father, who’d worked uncomplainingly for fifty years in a plastics factory, wasting away, until one day he woke up and was an old man; Stan had sworn he’d never left that happen to him, and could only rue now that he was unsure when it had.

Drawing himself up, he tried to find pride in conceit. Sucked in his stomach. Ran a hand through his thinning, greying hair. Kelly wanted him to dye it. She said he’d feel better about himself. Maybe he should. He could even join a gym. He squared his shoulders. He could make a new man of himself – or at least make a man of himself. Kelly cycled vigorously and played tennis; he could buy a bike. They could take rides together. She’d love that.

The landline rang from the bedroom. Sam hurried out and had almost seized the handset when the answering machine beeped.

“Hey, Sam, are you there?”

Sam’s hand froze above the phone.

“It’s me Joan.”

Like she had to tell him. Like he didn’t know. Like he didn’t respond instinctively to her voice. His whole body slackened, the declaration he’d made in the bathroom only seconds earlier not just forgotten, but as if it had never existed.

“Pick up if you’re there.”

He took a step back from the phone.

“Fine. Three things just quickly. Money wasn’t in the bank this week. Kids need new shoes and school uniforms. Can you see to that? I don’t want to go back and forth with this, or get lawyers involved.”

Sam smirked. No. Just the mention of lawyers. Typical Joan.

“Also,” she said, “Denny wants to take piano lessons at school. You know what Denny’s like – he’ll do it for a couple of weeks and give up. It’s not worth wasting the money or the time. So if he asks you about it, discourage him.”

Denny had always been creative – all three kids were creative, although Denny reminded Sam of himself at a similar age. Sam leaned forward, trying to summon the courage to pick up the phone and defend Denny’s right to take lessons. Maybe if he just found something he enjoyed he’d stick with it. And so what if he didn’t? He was eight. Kids needed to experiment to expand their boundaries and develop their minds.

“Finally, I know it’s meant to be your weekend with the kids,” Joan went on, “but my sister’s having a lunch for Robby – a party, because he finally got some Scout badge or other. I don’t know. Anyway, I want to take the kids.”

No, Joan. Sam’s hand touched the handset. I have plans. Kelly and I were going to take the kids to the zoo and the movies.

“You can have them next weekend. Let me know if that’s a problem.”

There was a pause. Almost as if Joan knew he was listening. Daring him. Sam released the handset.

She snorted. “Okay. Don’t forget the money. Bye.” The phone hung up.

Sam retreated to the bathroom.

***

Sam stood under the shower until the hot water had grown lukewarm, then outright cold. Muscles that had threaten to loosen seized up once more. He turned off the water, dried himself with a damp towel, and returned to his bedroom to rifle through his closet.

A line of grey suits confronted him. Kelly hated his wardrobe. She didn’t understand the firm wanted their account executives to dress in solid, dependable tones. Joan had. She’d picked out most of these suits and his array of pinstriped white shirts with a casual abandon, disregarding the few times he’d piped up to voice his own tastes. His victories had come with ties – Joan had let him pick out his own ties, but abashed, Sam had chosen only solid colours – or shades, to be more exact: red, maroon, and burgundy. Kelly had urged him repeatedly to shop for a whole new wardrobe. Maybe he would. Along with the gym membership and hair dye.

He dressed in a charcoal-coloured suit, then laced his bright red tie around his neck as he had every day for the last twenty years, but now it felt too tight. He couldn’t swallow. That was the thought that leaped into his mind – the tie was choking him! He loosened the tie and collar and took a deep breath just to prove to himself that he could. His chest cramped, and his left shoulder spasmed. That didn’t feel right.

But mornings never did.

***

Sam trundled into the kitchen and began making breakfast: he stuck two slices of bread into the toaster, put the kettle on, and poured himself half a glass of tomato juice – any more, and his stomach would bloat.

A stack of mail that had accumulated over the week waited on the kitchen table. Sam sighed and fanned the envelopes like a deck of cards – bills: gas, water, electricity, rates, the kids’ school fees, and then he wasn’t even paying attention to where the bills were coming from. Knowing they were bills was enough.

Grabbing a pen from his lapel pocket, he began to work his way through each bill, calculating on one of the torn envelopes just how much he owed. His hand moved with the casual ease of somebody who’d done nothing but find a way to make numbers work for him. He would have to push deadlines, maybe even run one or two of the bills to final notices.

The kettle whistled, steam filtering from its funnel. The kitchen began to reek of the burned toast seconds before the toaster ejected them in plumes of smoke. Sam scraped the blackened toast over the sink, then buttered them as the kettle switched itself off. He fixed himself a black coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and lumbered through breakfast.

As he ate, a 2 he’d hastily scribbled on an envelope caught his eye – the base of the two had hiccoughed into a serrated tale. The figure was certainly a 2, but it was more than that. No, not more. It could be more. The 2 was done, but it teased at something else, something that begged his exploration.

Flipping the envelope, Sam took his pen and pushed the nub down, feeling it indent the paper. There was nothing now. Nothing. Nothing. Until his hand jerked, almost like a spasm, and he continued to serrate the curve elegantly. Before long, he’d doodled an eagle with wings outstretched.

Sitting back in his chair, he sipped his coffee and appreciated his work. Drawing was something he’d wanted to do when he was young. It was amazing how long it had been since he’d remembered that – perhaps five years. No, ten. Maybe fifteen. Definitely fifteen. And then he was sure that he didn’t know – he really didn’t know, and that scared him most of all.

He sketched in a landscape around the eagle using other envelopes, then fitted them together like a pastiche. It was no masterpiece – a novelty more than anything. But there was an innocent charm about it that evoked some glimmer of joy and adolescent pride.

He wished Kelly could see it. She’d gush, encourage him to take up drawing again. Her enthusiasm always buoyed him. He gathered the envelopes into a pile. He could show them to her at dinner tonight but, just as he was about to put the envelopes in his pocket, the childishness of the endeavour – as well as his belief that it meant something – embarrassed him.

No, it was silly. Beyond silly. He flicked the envelopes across the table, scattering them like a bad poker hand that he’d tried to bluff, but had ultimately cost him a fortune. They were doodles. Nothing more. Scribbles. Even less than that. A waste of time.

He gathered them up and prepared to scrunch them. Stopped himself. Looked at them once more, torn with indecision.

Joan would’ve told him to toss them – Joan would’ve tossed them herself. She would’ve seized them when he’d been in the act of drawing. He thought that was just his dread imagining some horrible scenario, but now he did remember he’d doodle on napkins when they went out for dinner, and while she’d tolerated it when they were dating, once they were married she’d snatch the napkin, scrunch it up, and tell him to stop embarrassing them.

Kelly would encourage him; just six months into their relationship, she was still so unfailingly enthusiastic and encouraging. Sam kept waiting for that to polarize, but visualized her tonight, beaming at him, like he wasn’t some divorcee and part-time father accumulating debt, because that’s how she always looked at him. She beamed. Had Joan been like that? In the heady years their marriage had broken down, he was sure there’d been signs he’d ignored when they’d been dating, too inexperienced in relationships to recognize they were issues, and too gleeful he was getting regular sex as a young man to be objective.

He scattered the envelopes on the kitchen table.

And left the house.

***

Sam lifted his head to face the day with an attempted sense of determination, but the wind cut through him with a spite that made him wish he hadn’t gotten out of his bed. And then he went a step further: he wished he was still sleeping. And then he pondered what it’d be like not to worry about waking up. Trying to shake off the notion, he rubbed his hands up and down his arms. The sky was overcast, a ruddy tarpaulin struggling to contain a deluge.

Starting down the drive, his thoughts whizzed and exploded in his mind. Joan. The kids. Denny, eight, wanting to play piano. Marisa, a teenager now at thirteen, constantly wanting clothes to fit the latest trends. At ten, Shelby was so pensive she might’ve been melancholy. She still hadn’t adjusted to bouncing between houses, and she was a pensive kid Sam connected to, while Joan never had. Then it was Kelly, her smile, the way she radiated hope and love. And here he was, his own sagging shoulders, his hair grey, his life a collection of arbitrary misgivings that he shouldered every day the same way he put on and knotted his stupid red ties. The eagle on the envelope. Being an accountant in a job whose career ceiling he’d hit ten years ago. Joan telling him when he could have his kids. His house. His bills. He tried to think of one thing he owned that did not pain—

Something tore right through his chest, like a scythe that might’ve severed his heart in two and sundered his lungs from the capacity to breathe. The panic that rose – the sense that this was the moment he was dying – overrode the realisation that he was falling, as if in slow motion, and eclipsed just how hard he hit the ground, his palms searing, his left kneecap crunching, a jolt that split his chin.

The drive swayed before him, like the swell of an ocean, grey and unforgiving. A stupid little memory came up: him and Joan catching a catamaran during their honeymoon in the Caribbean. He’d become horribly sick on the bouncing sea, although Joan had been oblivious. She’d told him he should’ve taken the ginger pill they’d offered before they’d boarded. There was no such option now. His hand closed on the dimpled surface of the drive, and felt the texture of it on his palms.

The sight of blood snapped the world back into focus: his chin was bleeding, issuing a thin stream that ran down the seam of the drive, and drew his gaze up to the beginning of the yard where the overgrown grass fluttered, almost as if each and every blade was an individual prostrating itself to his self-pitying. A solitary blade sparkled, like an emerald caught in the sunlight. It brightened until it spilled across the lawn and bled into the tyres of his car, which darkened until they’d become so black they seemed not only an absence of colour, but swaths cut out of reality to hint at some world beyond where his hopelessness welcomed him. The car’s enamel glistened into swirling, bottomless pits of black while, behind it, his plum tree swayed on the nature strip. Leaves that rustled in the wind bloodied like gunshot wounds. Splatters infected the neighbour’s house; the bricks ignited, as if in flame. Trees in their yard recoiled as blossoms detonated like fireworks while rims of leaves blazed golden as the sun.

Sam’s chest bucked like he’d been hit with a defibrillator and his body spasmed once, twice, and for a second – for just a millisecond – he wasn’t breathing and all the pain in his body, in his life, was gone. This was it: a moment of resignation where nothing else existed. Where he didn’t exist. Where everything was absent. And then it all poured back in an instant. His body relaxed. Tears streamed down his face and his hands trembled. His mind stilled. Head lowered, he pushed himself to his feet, legs trembling. He gulped for air and sucked it into his lungs.

Colours ran all around him until they burned, vivifying into a spectrum so glorious Sam wanted to capture them before they escaped. This was the world around him, the world he’d lost in the drudgery of self-pity, the world that was here for him everyday.

He smiled grimly, yanked off his tie, and vowed he would not lose it again.

Hey.
11.31pm

You didn’t have to drive off.
11.36pm

We could’ve talked.
11.40pm

I just wanted to say sorry.
11.44pm

Why aren’t you answering?
11.50pm

It’s childish if you’re gonna stay quiet. Grow UP.
11.57pm

I’m sorry. Ok?
12.05am

I know I get jealous. I tell myself not to. But when it starts, it’s like another person’s in control. I tell myself to stop, but can’t help myself.
12.12am

I do love you.
12.22am

Do you still love me?
12.24am

Answer me!
12.31am

I’m saying sorry!
12.41am

Hon?
12.50am

Please?
12.56am

I can’t take this silent treatment anymore.
1.05am

Please?!
1.11am

This is REAL adult.
1.20am

Fuck you then! Fuck YOU!
1.29am

Don’t contact me again! This s it! You’re so fucking immature!
1.38am

Don’t think you can come crawling back either! You don’t know how you’ve insulted me treating me this way! Fuck you! Fucking child! Fuck you! I NEVER want two hear from you again!
1.44am

NEVER!!!!!
1.57am

You’re a fucking child! It’s no wonder this didn’t work out! I’m too FUCKING good for you! Screw you! You’ll lucky to find anybody else who’ll have you and your shit! I’m the best thing that ever happened to you and you’ve thrown it away!
2.10am

DON’T. EVER. CONTACT. ME. AGAIN. I! NEVER! WANT! TO! HEAR! FROM YOU! EVER!!!
2.25am

Fuck you.
2.31am

I hate you.
2.37am

Cunt.
2.51am

This is Robin’s father. Robin was in a car accident and died at midnight. Please stop.
2.54am

It’s great you’re here.

The voice. Disembodied. But everywhere.

“Yeah,” he said, although he didn’t know what he was answering.

Thought you wouldn’t make it.

A singular frequency droning unwavering in his ears, he turned, and light in the room brightened until everybody was monochromatic, except his family, shining vividly with pulsing nimbuses; his wife, Taylor, seated, fidgeting, a tremor ready to earthquake; his kids, Bobby, trembling, and Emily, clutching at the lapels of her skirt around her knees; his father pacing, wearing all of his eighty years as if they’d descended on him at once; his mother wilting, just a puff from collapsing.

Are you staying?

He closed his eyes and, as pain spider-webbed through his chest, he thought of those Matryoshka Dolls that Taylor liked to collect – of a doll, inside a doll, inside a doll – and he’d always thought that at his core, he would find stillness and, if not that, at least purpose. But what he discovered was nothing but an antagonism of unease. The pain sharpened.

“I don’t know.”

It’s great you’re here.

But it wasn’t here. Well, not just in this room. He was somewhere else. Or somewhere else also. Somewhere without meaning. With questioning. With only a rudimentary reflection that peeled back each layer of conceit, until he faced things he’d either buried or learned to disregard.

Thought you wouldn’t make it.

He lowered his face from Taylor, left only with the memories of the other women: Denise, who he’d fuck routinely at the Bed’n’Breakfast; of Ally, whom he’d convinced, coerced, to have an abortion; of Rebecca, whom he’d buggered on his office desk – the desk where he’d unrelentingly manipulated numbers into better figures, clients becoming richer clients, morality and integrity shorn like damning documents in his tireless shredder while he celebrated his own ingenuity.

“Well … I did.”

Poor Taylor, so faithful, so loyal, so oblivious. He remembered their wedding day, gaping into her face, astounded that he could be so lucky. How long had the astonishment lasted before his eyes had roved? How long had his eyes roved before his cock had? And Taylor, poor Taylor. No wonder his chest hurt, an eruption that would not only sunder him and leave only an abyss, but an abyss into which he’d fall inexorably.

Are you staying?

Home he would come, Taylor beleaguered, kids screaming – brats; he would’ve loathed the parents of such shits before he’d gotten married, would’ve observed them with contempt and vowed that his kids would never be such little cunts, but he resolved now that’s not what they were, and that they were just being kids, frivolous, mischievous, and full of an innocence he’d long forgotten, ricocheting into boundaries that expanded treacherously because of his absence in their lives.

“I don’t know.”

And he, divorced emotionally, a debaucher, as good as an embezzler, indiscretions mushrooming into infidelities, cheater of wife, of taxes, of trusts, of life, a conscience eroded, dissipating, until nothing but sociopathy, until no remorse, no guilt, nothing but pillage and the pain, the agony, swelling, slivers searing from his chest and into his limbs, his scalp boiling as if it would pop from his head, and his soul would dribble out, coagulating on the floor like drying vomit.

It’s great you’re here.

He squeezed his eyes shut, until his eyeballs jabbed into his brain, his cheeks creased, and the line of his mouth caricatured, and he knew nothing but how easy oblivion could, could’ve, swallowed him, and that the precipice upon which he stood was crumbling under his fattening résumé of immorality.

Here. Again. But all he knew now was the self-examination, as if he stood outside himself, refracting from a multitude of facets, until every set of eyes was focused back on him, studying, dissecting, condemning, and those things he’d learned to discount demanded his utmost attention.

How had he not been consumed already? Or was that what was happening now? Was guilt eating him, chunk by chunk, bit by bit, breath by breath? Leaving nothing but the anguish and sorrow of conscience and, glowing in the embers of ruin, flaming to life, pitifully unbearable realisation, in which whatever promise he’d once nurtured whined forlornly.

Mind open, boundaries no more, he faced his life, until he knew that this was not where he should be, that he wasn’t just lucky, that he was chosen, and a route many-times ignored was now open again to him if he had the courage to face it, to face himself, to go on, to atone.

“Well … I did.”

He begged his eyes to open, and through a distortion that fragmented into the back of his head and spilled remorse from where it had been secreted, he engulfed Taylor, the woman he had once married, and the kids they had conceived and reared, and whom loved he unconditionally, unmindful of his frailties, seeing him only ever as a whole and unflawed.

Are you staying?

Not here, not now, not this place, not this time, not this life after. Anguish eviscerated him, tendrils enshrouding him in ribbons of fire, and his chest heaved until his stomach became a pit, and he was cognizant of an uninterrupted droning frequency stuttering, bouncing, pulsing rhythmically to the accompaniment of his heartbeat, a chaperone to what could be.

No.

He was going back.

To live.

In hope.

i.

Skip Lago scowled at the author photo on the back of his fourth novel, Cold Enterprise. The face that stared back at him – with its stylishly dishevelled hair, narrowed eyes, and pensive frown – was contrived to fill an affectation, and one that he would usually disdain.

“You need to face it, Skip,” Tyson said from his desk.

Skip slotted Cold Enterprise back up on the top shelf of Tyson’s marble bookcase and studied his books – seven of them, spines growing thicker, the covers fancier, his name bigger and bolder. The only thing that had grown disproportionately were the sales.

“It’ll be cathartic,” Tyson went on. “Then we’ll be able to move forward.”

Skip dragged down his first novel, Enrage, and his seventh, Streamline. Puffs littered the back of each. On Enrage, they were glowing pronouncements such as, “An exciting new voice” (The New York Times) and “Will keep you hooked from beginning to end” (Chicago Tribune), while Streamline could only boast “A sprawling adventure that promises much …” (San Francisco Chronicle). The complete sentence had been, “A sprawling adventure that promises much, but loses itself in a mire of indecipherable literary conceits.”

“Skip?”

Skip shoved the books back onto the shelf and stumbled towards Tyson’s huge comma-shaped onyx desk. Tyson reclined in profile; the sunlight that filled his high-rise office bounced off his solarium tan and charcoal suit, like he was the granite nose of some ostentatious sundial.

“How do you survive up here?” Skip asked, blinking.

“This is called daylight,” Tyson said. “If you ever got out, you’d encounter it once in a while.”

“Daylight’s overrated.” Skip’s back tightened and knees ached as he slumped into a chair opposite Tyson.

“Skip, we need to discuss your next book.”

“There is no next book.” Skip thought about the blank screen of his laptop, yet again the cursor blinking, as if taunting him.

“There will be a next book. You know that. Writers are always quitting out of despondency. But you’ll go back to it. You know you will. You just need to consider what you’ll write. Your last two books, Seeing Blinder and Streamline – no. No more of that.”

“No more flops?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what? What?”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“Seeing Blinder and Streamline were popular fiction. They weren’t bad stories. I know you liked Seeing Blinder—”

“Loved, Tyson, loved!”

“You’d be about the only one.”

“Milo loved it.”

“Milo thinks he’s your best friend. That’s what people who think they’re your best friends do.”

And that was true to some extent. Milo did challenge him, but was also easily swayed to Skip’s explanations about what he was attempting narratively. Then Milo would backstep and gush effusively. Skip wasn’t used to such adulation from alpha readers – or editors, for that matter.

“Tyson,” Skip paused, trying to articulate his thoughts, “do you know how rare it is for me to feel positive about my writing? I did about those two books – more so than the ones that came before them. They worked for me.”

“All right. Fine. But people don’t expect pop fiction ventures from you. You, Skip, are a literary author.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

“No I’m not.”

“We’ve had this discussion before. What’s your issue with being considered a literary author?”

“I want to write stuff that’s accessible to everybody. I want to write stuff’s that global.

“Commercial.”

“Fun,” Skip said. “At least in its own way.”

“You can still do that.”

“Look, it’s not ultimately a case of being one thing or the other. It’s just me being me. It’s what comes out. I don’t control it.”

“Then perhaps you’ve changed. The divorce, maybe?”

“I’m over Sherry. It was almost five years ago.”

“She was also the editor of Midnight and Cold Enterprise – your greatest successes. Is that something you’re missing? Her input?”

Skip shrugged, although there was more than an element of truth about that. Sherry was brilliant. She’d challenged him, attack him on plotting, and draw the best from his prose. Skip had to find something in himself he never knew he had to satisfy her demands. And they’d clicked – the marriage not so much, but the author-editor relationship definitely. He was sure he wouldn’t have experienced any success if it hadn’t been for her.

“She left the guy she left you for, you know?” Tyson said.

“What?”

“Wasn’t that long afterwards—”

“Tyson, why’re you telling me this?”

“Just in case it’s played on your mind.”

“It hasn’t. Once she went, she was out of my head. Her leaving had nothing to do with those books being different – not that those books are different. They’re some of my best work. I can’t help that people didn’t like them. There’re people who don’t like puppies either, you know.”

“Skip, you’ve developed a readership. They expect a certain type of work. You’ve eschewed.”

“Eschewed?”

“Eschewed, Skip. It happens with authors. You get too powerful for your editors. People are afraid to challenge you, to force you to refine and revise, to delve deeper into yourself and produce the good stuff. What we need to do is go back to the beginning. You need to be raw. Confrontational. Go home, jot down a few ideas. You have ideas, don’t you?”

“Ideas?” Skip frowned. “What’re they?”

“Very funny.”

“I always have ideas, but what’s the point?”

“Skip—?”

“How many writers are out there published and trying to make it? How many? Maybe I bombed because I have nothing new to say. Maybe there’s nothing new to say. Have you considered that?”

“Writing isn’t always about being new. Sometimes you just need to get the words down on the page. The truth is you need to put something out there or you’re going to sink into oblivion and never find your way out.”

“Fine.”

“And, Skip?”

Skip froze, half out of the recliner. Muscles strained. His stomach felt like ballast. But he fixed his eyes on the golden haze that was Tyson. He could’ve been an angel now, if angels were bloated, supercilious parasites that only wanted the best for an individual because it meant their own bottom life profited.

“Accept what you are. Accept it, and you’ll be fine.”

“Tyson?”

“Yeah?”

“Bullshit.”

ii.

Skip’s Husky, Silver, lay on the couch in his den – the couch where Sherry used to sit, legs folded under her, editing as he wrote at his laptop. Even when he’d accepted her presence, even though the only sound she’d made had been her pencil scratching across the page, she’d still been distracting. She disrupted the room’s feng shui – just as anybody would. Bar Silver. Silver helped harmonise the room. She was the perfect feng shui object.

He scratched Silver behind the left ear, Silver lifting her muzzle, eyes squinting closed. This was all she needed for bliss. Skip couldn’t remember if he’d experienced bliss. Sex had never been ecstasy. It had been enjoyable, but he’d never collapsed, panting, as if ecstasy had satiated him. Writing got close, although that was more a sense of contentment and relief. Then again, maybe that’s what bliss was: extreme relief.

He lay on the floor on his right side, pen in left hand, notepad splayed open.

And here it came.

He put pen to paper.

Nothing.

He grimaced, closed his eyes, and challenged his imagination to yield anything, but all he saw was Tyson lecturing him about his writing, and his lack of sales.

And there it was:

A bomb.

Not a real bomb. None of his stories dealt with action on that level. He liked the mundane, liked exploring everybody’s reactions to an everyday situation gone awry.

A disintegrating family.

He stared at the words. That was something which happened every day. He needed to polarise the dynamic.

Taking his pen, he

A disintegrating family.

and wrote under it

A re-integrating family.

This would be the crux of his story: a family trying to stay together, despite the individual secrets threatening to tear them apart. They wouldn’t be unravelling – that would be cliché. They would be ravelling.

That was a good start, the building blocks of a story. But it wasn’t enough. These people needed problems they battled to overcome. He filled in details:

What the family needed was …

A secret? No. Trite.

A family drama? Sorta.

One of the kids is involved in a hit and run? Nope, too extreme.

A dog.

There. That was something. A black Labrador named Vonda.

Skip toyed with the notion of telling the story from the dog’s point of view, witnessing conversations and actions it didn’t understand, but which would build the narrative through piecemeal accounts. Skip finally dismissed the idea. It didn’t feel right. The dog could stay, but the story from the dog’s viewpoint had to go.

The dog would be diabetic. When the family discovered it, they could have one brief bonding moment that defined them – whether that was for good or bad remained to be seen. But here it was. They couldn’t be there for one another, couldn’t bond as a family, but something as simple and undemanding as a dog could harvest their attention.

It was all stupid, all random titbits that whizzed around disconnectedly, but somewhere, somehow, they would build their own universe.

iii.

What is literary writing?

Skip patted himself down. His black blazer was crumpled, his faded jeans torn and in need of a wash. His boots were scuffed. As he tucked in his t-shirt, then yanked it back out, he gazed at the daunting Ravel placard Tyson had arranged to mark his return. Over six feet high, the face of the placard was the cover of the new book: all white, each for the swirling lines – each a different colour – which looked, depending on your perspective, as if they were ravelling or unravelling.

Literary fiction is usually character driven – intellectual, confronting, and challenging, pushing the reader out of their comfort zone. Popular fiction has a broad appeal and is plot driven. It can be about anything, and have an easy, if not universal appeal. Funnily, this is always the sort of fiction I thought I wrote.

In the top left-hand corner of the placard: Lago back to his best, and beyond. In the top right: Brilliant! In the bottom left: A masterpiece of literature. In the bottom right: A literary extravaganza. There’d been more – many more. Tyson had been confounded about which to use.

Skip snorted.

Maybe that’s arrogant of me, to think that I have universal appeal – he would pause here, as the audience would laugh with him as he laughed at himself. But it’s true; somewhere, deep inside, we – as writers – yearn for acceptance because we put so much of ourselves on display. Our books are ourselves, reinterpreted, redefined, and reconstructed through characters and story and plot. It’s only in that realisation that I’ve asked certain questions of myself. Foremost amongst those questions is this: what is it that I write?

Skip wasn’t sure he believed a single word of the speech. It had some merit on a cosmetic level, but sounded like a book report. Of course, maybe that was because he’d researched it from articles he’d Googled. He wasn’t passionate about any of this. It was just fodder to fill time.

“A drink, sir?”

The waitress was a pretty blonde who, on immediate impressions, seemed sixteen; on closer inspection, Skip could see the lines about her eyes that make-up didn’t quite cover and the tiredness about her face – she would’ve been in her thirties, although with a youthful energy that pulsed through her fatigue and the tedium of her duties.

She thrust out a tray of champagne glasses. Skip held up the forefinger on his right hand, as if to say, Wait. Then, with his left hand, he took a glass and gulped down its contents. He put the glass back and took two more, one in each hand.

“Thanks.”

“May I say I love your books, sir,” the waitress said, with a dimpled smile.

Naturally. Everybody had to tell him they loved his books. As if it was a secret they were sharing with him. Maybe he should start carrying around an elixir and anoint them into his own personal little cult. The Cult of Skip. Surely that would work – well, until they found out how dreadfully insecure he was.

“Thanks,” he said. “Which is your favourite?”

The blonde’s eyes rolled up, her mouth pursing. “Probably … “ she began, elongating the final syllable into a sustained pitch of, Eeeeeeee that grew annoying, like a ringing smoke alarm that was impossible to deactivate.

Skip endured a flash of insight how this particular habit would’ve irritated her partner – well, if she had one. And if she didn’t, this little thing was the reason – it would’ve been for him. Then again, maybe there were people out there who would’ve found it endearing, and he was simply intolerant. That sounded likelier.

He downed another of his champagnes, and exchanged the empty glass for a full one, still awaiting her answer. She’d say Cold Enterprise – it was everybody’s favourite. Or Ravel. Because he’d already heard countless times on the way in how he’d outdone himself.

“Streamline,” the waitress said. “That was twisted. I liked that.”

Skip almost spluttered his champagne. “You might be the only person who liked it.”

She shook her head. “I have friends who love it. We talked about it for weeks in my book club. I don’t think people get it. It’s so … so … so unapologetically outrageous.”

“Thank—”

“Skip!” Tyson, dressed in a pristine charcoal suit, slid out from the crowd. He took a glass of champagne from the waitress’s tray. “Thank you, dear,” he said. She moved on and Tyson clapped a hand on Skip’s shoulder. “You need to socialise.” His eyes fell on the glasses of champagne in each of Skip’s hands. “What’s this?”

“Champagne.” Skip sipped from the glass in the left hand. “I’d prefer beer, but you know how these things are – or how you cater them nowadays.”

“Skip, at least try to be civilised.”

“And after I try that, what should I try next?”

“Skip!”

Tyson reached for the glass in Skip’s right hand. Skip snatched it away. Drops splattered on Tyson’s sleeve and he cursed, removing a handkerchief from his lapel pocket and dabbing at the stain. Skip finished what remained of the glass and looked for somewhere to put it.

“Do you want to kill your career?” Tyson said, scrubbing at his sleeve. “Is that it?”

“If I’d wanted to do that, why’d I write the book?”

“You have a readership. These people are here for you. What do you think you’re doing?”

“Tyson,” Skip said, “do you really believe it matters how I behave here? These people are—”

“Careful what you say, Skip!” Tyson took the empty glass from him.

“We’ve had this conversation before, Tyson.”

“We have it all the time, Skip!”

“Then you know I hate these things. You know I hate the sycophantic nature of them. I’m sure there are genuine people here, somewhere,” Skip peered around, wishing Milo was here, but Milo was away for work, “maybe, but this isn’t a book launch. It’s a social occasion. People come to worship me. I don’t say that egotistically. But that’s what happens. They worship me, fawn over me, verbally fellate me, and I smile, anointing them my minions. I’m thinking of getting an elixir, you know.”

“What?”

“Then we disperse, and do you think anything meaningful has happened here? I’ll move on, they’ll all go on with their lives, and at their next social function, they’ll talk about meeting me, hobnobbing with me, and what a charming bastard or boor I was. They’d prefer I was a boor, because it makes for more interesting dinner conversation.”

“That’s all well and good, Skip. I just don’t want them going away and telling everybody not to buy your book. When you get so big that it doesn’t matter, you can behave how you want. I’ll even encourage you. But, for now, play the game.”

“Fine.” Skip shook his head. “You know, how nice you are to me is directly proportionate to how successful I am at any given time.”

“Nonsense. You’re imagining that.”

“No, you’re imagining that.”

“Skip, focus. Have you rehearsed your speech?”

“Speech?”

“Skip!”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s in my head.”

“Good. Now, go forth and—”

“Multiply?”

“Go forth and multiply your praise.”

iv.

Over the next hour, Skip mingled, signing books in his unintelligible lefthand cursive and exchanging measured pleasantries with handsome, dignified men in dark suits and grave smiles, and sophisticated women in elegant gowns and elaborate hairstyles just wanting to be untangled.

He was told repeatedly that Ravel was “marvellous” (an adjective Skip considered pompous and fraudulent), and an “important contribution to literature” (praise which was pompous and, worse, unqualifiable), and, worst of all, “a fine return to form” (which implied he had, in fact, fallen out of it). His lungs shrivelled and adrenaline pumped through his limbs. Fighting was useless. He wanted to flee.

“Skip?”

He knew the voice before he turned: Sherry. He imagined she would be pale – as always – with that beauty vulnerable but sultry; her large blue eyes forlorn; her dark wavy hair cascading down her slender neck; her lips full and pouting in bright red lipstick; her shoulders bare, exposed in her elegant pink dress with that right shoestring strap that was always askew and wanting to be pulled down.

Skip pivoted, and while he was right about it being Sherry, she looked different to how he’d visualised her – her hair braided, her dress a vivid bloody red and offset by a pair of fingerless black lace gloves, and while she was still gorgeous, her eyes were far from forlorn.

There’d always been something fractious about her nature, although that was only something he’d discovered following her adultery. But he couldn’t see that, couldn’t feel that anymore. Most people weren’t self-aware. Characters were. Characters had the greatest epiphanies and, usually, changed. People? Not so much. But Sherry had a maturity now that she’d always represented with her cool professionalism, but now manifested itself as something ineffable.

“I’m looking forward to reading this,” she said, holding up a copy of Ravel. “I’m sure it’ll be great. I always enjoyed your writing.”

“You still read my books …?”

“Even after we split up.”

“Thanks.”

“What do you …?”

Sherry waited patiently, if not with a hint of amusement.

“Well, you know?”

Sherry shook her head.

“You didn’t edit them.”

“There are things I might’ve suggested as an editor, but they wouldn’t have necessarily made those books better – just different.” Sherry touched his forearm, just this little gesture like she was trying to console him. “As much as we outgrew one another as husband and wife, I think you’ve outgrown me as your editor.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You should.”

And that was it – when they were married, she’d indulge his self-pitying only so far, and it’d never work. He’d sulk, and martyr himself, but right now he could identify that as a self-destructive indulgence. It had no further place in his life.

“Thanks.”

“For …?” Sherry frowned as thrust forward her copy of Ravel.

He didn’t need to answer. She was probably way ahead of him anyway – she always had been. A flash of self-awareness didn’t change that.

He took the book, flipped it open, and then wondered what the etiquette was when it came to signing a book for an ex who’d unashamedly left you for another man.

“You been good?” Sherry asked.

“Yeah. Yeah.” Skip stared at the blank space on the bottom of the title page. “Just, you know, writing. You?”

“I’m over at Palette, building their fiction list. You’re looking good.”

“Thanks. So do you. You good?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good to hear.” He wrote:

Sherry,

Thanks for all your help along the way. I couldn’t have become the writer I am without you. My writing misses you.

Hope you love the book.

Skip.

X.

He gave the book back to her.

“Thanks. Good luck.” She kissed him on the cheek, then moved on.

Skip didn’t watch her go. He couldn’t. He’d always known he’d encounter her again, and that meeting would generate whatever feelings he’d denied himself five years ago – maybe love, hatred, anger, jealously, or even lust. But there was nothing but some nostalgia because she was somebody he’d once known.

Maybe that was the way it was meant to be – not just for her, but his life as it had been.

v.

As Skip watched Sherry leave, he felt a big hand clap his shoulder – Tyson. Tyson loved clapping shoulders.

“Sherry?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Surprised she came.”

Skip shrugged.

“You okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Just asking, Skip.”

“I’m fine.”

“We’re about to launch. You ready?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.”

Tyson led Skip to stage at the front of the reception and provided an introduction that might’ve served better as a eulogy. Applause resounded. Skip rose, aware that those pains in his knees and ankles he used to experience were gone, and took his position behind the podium. He scanned the audience, their faces beaming. Sherry was nowhere to be seen.

“What is literary writing?” Skip said. His speech unfurled in his head but now, standing up here, it seemed worthless. “I don’t know.” There was a ripple of laughter. “This is my seventh novel. I loved the last two. Everybody else seemed to hate them – except for a waitress who I met today who told me she loved Streamline. But the critics hated them. I don’t know why. I’ve only ever wanted to tell stories. That was always my driving ambition. Why can’t people understand that? Why does it have to be so difficult? It’s like you exist, waiting for that first misstep. Then it’s zombies on the scent of brains.”

“Skip,” Tyson whispered from his chair, “what’re you doing?

“You have a story,” Skip said, “it’s in you, like a growing foetus. And it keeps growing until it’s miscarried or born. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes not so much. But that’s not the end of it. Because from there you need to rear it. You have help in doing this – your agent, your editor, your publisher, etcetera. But you’re the primary caregiver, and you shape this thing, hoping to make it the best it can be. Of course, it has a mind of its own. In a way, it has its own free will, so no matter how hard you plan, or try to stick to the plan, things can change. But that doesn’t make it wrong. Or bad. It just makes it different. And there’s nothing wrong with being different.”

Tyson jumped up, reached for the microphone. Skip wrestled it away, and shoved Tyson so that he fell back into his chair. The crowd, “Ooohhed”.

“Inevitably, you send them out into the world so they can fend for themselves,” Skip said, “but some of you are so anal you want to condemn anything you don’t understand, or if it doesn’t fit in the classification you have of me. It’s not that I’m trying to be different. It’s just that the story is what it is. You might as well complain that you have a child with curly hair.”

Pockets in the audiences tittered, while others whispered behind their hands. Tyson slunk in his chair, as if he was watching a self-immolation that would finish Skip as a writer. But Skip didn’t care. He’d always been nurtured – first by Tyson when he’d been a nobody, then by Sherry who’d guided him through the early stages of his career, and then again by Tyson (and, to a lesser extent, Milo), who’d become his proxy wife in Sherry’s absence. Now Skip knew it was time to take ownership of his own career, his own life.

“Maybe it’s just me,” he said. “Maybe I’m just an overly sensitive man-baby and those books were crap. It’s possible. I get the man-baby thing better than you. The point is – regardless – I’m proud of what I write. Whether it’s literary, pop fiction, any of that,” Skip shrugged – a big shrug so that even the people at the back would see it, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s pop literary. Who cares? There it is. Thanks. Thanks for coming. I hope you like the book – I really do. But if you don’t …” He shrugged. “What can I do?”

Silence.

Faces gaped at him as he’d done at the placard.

Then, from the furthest corner, a solitary applause, bold and intrusive.

Skip sought out who it was, thinking it had to be Sherry, that she must be back to rescue him. Or maybe Milo had made it, after all. But it was the blonde waitress, her tray filed under her armpit as she applauded. He smiled at her, and waved. Others joined in – not everybody, but enough to suggest that there were a few free-thinkers in the place. Skip held up his hand in appreciation.

Tyson seized the microphone. “All part of the show!” he said. “Thank you! Thank you!” And it was a gambit which might’ve worked, but he then seized Skip by the shoulders and shook him. “Skip, do you realise what you’ve done?”

Skip thought about it. “In the end, Tyson? Probably nothing. I’m just not that important. I don’t think any of us are.” He started away. “I’ll see you later.”

“Where’re you going?” Tyson called after him.

“Home,” Skip said. And, just as he was about to slip into the crowd, he held up a triumphant arm and called back over his shoulder, “To write!”

Mr. Miller was in the corner of his backyard, his back to me, his elbows moving – like chicken wings flapping – to the sound of click-click-click. As I got closer, I saw he was cutting his hedges – trimming, that’s what he told me he did: trim the hedges with his big, big scissors.

I tiptoed up to surprise him. Sometimes his son, Tommy, would help him trim the hedges while Rexy, their big German Shepherd, ran around the yard and chased the birds away. But now the yard was quiet and it was only Mr. Miller, so I knew I’d surprise him good.

“Hello, Mr. Miller!” I said.

Mr. Miller jumped the way I jump when my big sister Elsie sneaks up and shouts, “Boo!” But he didn’t get scared or angry like I do. Usually, he would smile. Usually, he smiled all the time. But, now, he only went back to cutting (click-click-click), to trimming his hedges, although most of the time his big scissors snipped at the air.

“Hello, Bobby,” he said.

“Do you like my new hat?” Mommy had given me a cap with a propeller on top. I wore it everywhere, even to bed and in the bath.

“It’s very nice, Bobby.”

“But you’re not looking, Mr. Miller!” I tugged at the hem his shirt.

Mr. Miller turned. His face was wet, because he sweats when he trims his hedges, and the sweat fills the deep lines of his face until it overflows. His eyebrows were bushy like Santa’s, his hair white and messy – Mummy would never let me go out like that – and there was even hair in his ears that looked like sprouts!

“It’s very, very nice, Bobby,” Mr. Miller said, patting me on the shoulder. Then he started cutting again.

Whenever I came over, Mr. Miller would tell me stories and sometimes he’d laugh so hard he couldn’t talk properly. Or he’d play with me and chase me around the yard – although he couldn’t run very fast – until Mummy would call over the fence and tell me to stop bothering him and Mr. Miller would call back to her and tell her that I wasn’t bothering him at all. But today was very different. Mr. Miller looked like he didn’t want to talk or tell me stories or smile.

“Mummy says Tommy’s gone away,” I said.

His scissors stopped for a moment. Then he started cutting again, although he kept cutting the air. I wondered if he knew that. Or was he doing something I didn’t understand. A lot of times I wouldn’t understand, and Mr. Miller would have to explain things to me. Sometimes, when I thought I understood, I suggested I should help him, but he would tell me I was too little.

“Yes, Bobby.”

“And Rexy too?”

“Yes, Bobby.”

I stood up straight, to show how big I was getting. Mommy said I was getting bigger every day. But I wanted to show Mr. Miller that I was grown up like him and we could talk about big adult things.

“Mommy said they’re living with Daddy now.”

“Did she?”

Mommy said Daddy had gone to live on a farm. He lived in a hospital for a long, long time, and Mummy would visit him. Sometimes, she’d take me and Elsie. I liked visiting Daddy. He would always tell me stories and talk to me and make me laugh. But after we’d visited a while, he’d get tired and wouldn’t tell me stories so much. Then Mommy stopped taking me and Elsie. When I cried and cried, Mummy said Daddy had gone to live on a farm a long, long, long way away, and that it was too far to visit because Mummy didn’t have a car.

Mr. Miller had a car, although Tommy wrecked it driving one day to the beach with Rexy. I wondered if that was why he went away, because he was in trouble for wrecking the car. Oh well, maybe Mr. Miller could visit Tommy and Rexy when he got his car fixed. I was sure he would. Mr. Miller was very smart like that.

“Rexy will like the farm,” I said. “He’ll get to run around.”

Click …

“And chase bunnies.”

Again, Mr. Miller was still.

“Do you think he’ll like that?”

“I suppose he will.”

The big scissors in Mr. Miller’s hands must’ve been very heavy because he had to rest them on the hedges. I wished I wasn’t too little and I could help him. His face looked shiny now. I wondered how long he’d been cutting. Trimming.

“And Tommy will get to talk to Daddy.”

A little bubble of sweat rolled down one of the lines of Mr. Miller’s face like it was a water slide. It shot through the air, shining and sparkling with lots of colors like I see in Elsie’s kaleidoscope. It hit me right on my nose and splattered its colors all over me.

“Maybe I’ll go visit soon, too,” Mr. Miller said.

I wiped the sweat off with my sleeve as I thought about how much Mr. Miller seemed like Daddy. Was he getting tireder? I didn’t want him to stop being the Mr. Miller who told me jokes and who played with me and smiled and laughed until he couldn’t talk. That would mean he’d go away. Maybe he’d go and live with Tommy and Rexy and Daddy. But I wanted him to stay here. With me. He could visit when he fixed his car!

I locked my arms around his leg and held on as tight as I could. If he was going to go, then he was going to have to take me. He was going to have to walk with me stuck onto him.

Mr. Miller made sounds like gorillas make at the zoo. His chest went up and down, and his whole body shook. Then, his face: at first I thought there was lots and lots of sweat, but now I knew he was crying the way I cry when Elsie teases me or hits me because she’s stupid.

“Are you all right, Mr. Miller?”

Mr. Miller shoved his big, big scissors in the top of the hedges, so the handles stuck up like a pair of bunny ears, before resting the palm of his hand on top of my head, squashing the propeller on my cap. Then he sank to one knee until I was looking right into his great, big grey eyes. They were wet and red, but didn’t look sad like before. I thought Mr. Miller might pick me up and spin me over his shoulder the way he did sometimes. Instead, he put one giant, gnarled hand on my shoulder, like he was going to be very serious with me.

“How would you like to help me with the hedges, Bobby?”

My mouth dropped. “Awesome!” I cried, screaming with the joy the way I do when I beat Elsie in a game.

Then, for the first time since I’d gotten there, Mr. Miller smiled.

i.

The bell’s imminent. I can tell because of the restlessness that creeps into the classroom. Even though they sit only a chair apart, Bianca and Justine text one another, probably planning how they’ll spend their Friday night; Rachel plaits a lock of her corn-yellow hair; Eric scribbles aimlessly across his page in a way that suggests he’s doodling; Dominic has already packed up, everything in his bag, his fingers drumming his empty desk.

Everywhere, kids are fidgeting.

I check my watch – 3.25pm – then look back at the faces of my students: bright, naïve, mischievous. They haven’t learned yet the gravity of life. Sometimes, when they’re screwing around, I want to holler at them, You better take this seriously, because one day you’ll wake up and be my age! But then I realize what a curmudgeon that makes me. And they’re only teenagers being teenagers. I envy that.

Opening my desk drawer, I look down onto a book with a wrinkled brown leather. Gently easing it out, I hold it like a bomb that might go off, and rest it on my lap. My fingers stroke the cover, feeling the smooth, dimpled texture.

I open the book.

The spine creaks. Mustiness wafts into my nostrils. The pages are brown with age and coarse when I touch them – or at least coarse compared to paper today. I’m scared to turn them, fearing they might fall from the binding, or the paper itself might crumple.

The book is a first edition of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. I stumbled on it last Saturday when Sophie and I went shopping. Sophie had been looking at shoes; I’d seen a second-hand bookstore across the street and ducked in. This had been sitting on top of a pyramid of old books waiting to be catalogued. The bookstore owner, some sixty-year-old hippy with a long white pony-tail (even though he was otherwise mostly bald) and rose-colored glasses, had priced it at one hundred bucks. Obviously, he didn’t understand what he had here.

Sophie hadn’t wanted me to buy it, even when I quietly explained it was worth maybe two thousand dollars. She asked if I planned to resell it. I’d told her no. She’d asked the point of “splurging” then – that’s how she’d put it. Why by it if it’s just going to sit there? she said. And I didn’t – not that day. But Sunday, I ducked out and bought the book, and kept it in my case until I could hide it here.

The bell rings. Those who haven’t packed away their things stuff them into their bags. Kids get up, their chairs screeching across the floor, as they stream to the door, then mushroom out, not waiting to be dismissed. Some perfunctorily bid I have a good weekend.

Dominic saunters past, grins, and points at me, as if to say, Catch ya later. But then he skitters to a halt. Bianca and Justine stop behind him. The trio are inseparable – the cool kids not only of the classroom, but the school. If I could freeze them in time, they’d be the equivalent of celebrities, envied and revered. God knows what time might do to them.

“What’ve you got there, Mr. D?” Dominic asks, gesturing toward my book with a thrust of his chin.

“It’s a first edition David Copperfield,” I say.

“It antique?” Justine asks.

“I guess that’s as good a way as putting it as any.”

“You like old books, Mr. D?” Bianca asks.

“If I could, Bianca, I’d own a bookstore filled with nothing but old books.”

“Then why don’t you?”

The naivety of the question stumps me. I stumble for an answer. “I guess I just never got around to it,” I say.

“Never too late, Mr. D,” Bianca says.

That’s how easy it is for teenagers: never too late. They have forever waiting for them – or so they think. I used to be like that. Then blink, and you’re middle age, thinking about the dreams that vanished, the missteps you took, and the mistakes you regret.

“See you, Mr. D,” Dominic says.

The trio file out, leaving just me, my book, and the empty classroom.

I relish the silence, not wanting to get up, although my butt hurts from sitting on this wooden chair, and there’s a tightening knot in the base of my spine. I stare at my book, my fingertips following the letters as if they’re braille.

Slowly, I close the book, delicately place it back in my drawer, then slide the drawer closed.

ii.

There’s a pain in my right knee as I leave my classroom, and my pants slide low on my butt. I need a new belt since I’ve run out of belt to make holes in with this one, and my growing paunch keeps pushing the waistband of my pants down over my pathetically flat butt. Maybe that’s something to do this weekend when I go shopping with Sophie – buy a belt, that is. My butt is beyond redemption.

As I head down the hallway, Jerry Logan pops out from the staff room. He flashes a big grin. The hall lights gleam off the top of his head, and his little, pointed goatee looks like something a Bohemian poet should be wearing, although he only wears it because it’s the only way to give definition to his chin.

“Stan!” he says. “Andies! What do you say?”

Andies is The Andion – the local. Some of the faculty retreat there every Friday for a couple of drinks. I wonder if Beth – the art teacher – will go.

“I’ve gotta go home,” I say.

“Come on, Stan!” Jerry claps me on the back hard enough that I feel my butt jiggle and my pants slide an inch. I yank them up. “You never join us.”

“I have so.” When Sophie was on a work trip.

“Once! In four years!”

“Maybe next week.”

“You always say that.”

“Really—"

“Really,” Jerry choruses with me. “You know, between home and school, you’re going to run yourself into an early grave.”

So? I almost say it. Almost.

“Sophie’s waiting for me,” I say. “We’ve got plans.”

“Yeah? What?”

“I’ve gotta go.” I brush past Jerry.

“I’m holding you to next week!” he calls after me.

iii.

The morning had been sunny, but now the sky’s darkening clouds. Wind cuts through me like it wants to strip the clothes from my body. The school grounds are empty. Amazing how quickly it clears. Everybody’s in a hurry to get their weekend started.

I start for the parking lot, my right knee aching whenever I extend it. I’m unsure how I injured it, although it’s probably just wear, especially from carrying extra luggage. I’m getting to the age where my body’s yelping about thirty-five years of neglect.

My hands are numb from the cold by the time I get to my Honda Civic. The car is a ghastly canary yellow. I remember when my dad and I picked it out of a lot – I thought it’d be an interim car. But it’s still with me, fifteen years later, despite any number of people telling me I should buy something new.

When I pull the keys out of my pocket, I fumble them, and in trying to catch them I drop my case. It hits the ground and the clasp opens. Forty homework assignments which need correcting spill and fan out. The wind stirs to carry them away. I stomp them with my right foot. Pain shoots into my knee. That’s the relationship we have now.

I kneel, my hamstrings straining, and my gut acting like a counterweight. The seat of my pants threatens to rip as I gather up the homework assignments and shove them back into my case. The assignments are crinkled now and some have the shard of a dirty sole imprint on them, but I don’t think the kids will mind. Which teenager keeps their homework anyway?

I thrust my hand onto the door of my Civic to haul myself up and see, across the parking lot, Beth heading toward her car, carrying a big box of art supplies. Copper hair blows across her face, and she wears a little blue vest that shapes the curve of her breasts in her puffy white shirt.

She sees me as she reaches her car and throws an arm out to wave. I wave back. She rests her foot on the bumper of her car, balances the box on her thigh, and fumbles to unlock her boot. The box teeters. I watch, entranced.

Despite my objectification, I don’t think about her sexually. Those thoughts creep in, but they’re not prevalent. During the breaks, she often chats with me about the books I love – she encouraged me to buy the Dickens – and she’s always asking how I am. Of course, that’s just Beth being Beth. She talks with genuine interest, and I love to talk as if I’m being heard.

She gets her boot open and puts her box in. I unlock my car and slide into the driver’s seat. It’s just as I slam the door closed (it needs to be slammed, or doesn’t close properly) that I realize what an idiot I am. I should’ve charged across the parking lot, should’ve taken the box from Beth.

There you go, Beth, I could’ve said.

Such a gentleman.

Anything for a lady.

She would blush. Of course she would. This was a fantasy, after all.

I cock my head back so fast my neck wrenches. If there was any chance to play the belated hero—

It’s gone, Beth’s getting in her car.

Oh well. Maybe next week.

iv.

I wrap my hands around the steering wheel and close my eyes. Driving’s something I used to love, especially when this car was new and humming. Humming. That reminds me of when I was a kid. Every weekend, we’d do something as a family. My dad would drive, my mum in the front seat, my sister Tanya in the backseat behind Mom, me behind Dad.

In the summer, we’d do outdoorsy stuff, like go to the beach, or to a park, or bike riding; in the winter, we’d do indoor things, like movies or shows. I saw “Swan Lake” when I was seven and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” when I was nine. My dad always wanted us doing stuff to “broaden our horizons”, as he put it. He hated us inside whiling away the time unless we were reading.

When we were done, I’d drift off in the back seat as dad drove us home. Dad’s Chrysler would purr – he took care of that car better than his own health, (heart attack got him when I was twenty); him and Mum’s quiet chatter a lullaby; and the radio would be on soft to some oldies station. I’d fall asleep and – until I got too old to carry – knew that when I woke up, I’d be in bed.

I open my eyes now, shove the key into the ignition, and start the car. It splutters to life. The transmission shrieks as I put the car into DRIVE.

I pull out of the parking lot.

v.

I drive down the Bypass, the Civic rattling among traffic, and flick through the radio stations, but there’s nothing that appeals to me: pop, alternative, heavy rock, jazz, and talkback. I turn the radio off. Lightning flashes in front of me. A midnight blue Monaro tailgates me. I check my speedometer: 70 in an 80 zone. Sophie’s always cautioning me about speeding. Driving home is the only time I don’t.

The Monaro swerves out into the adjacent lane and races past me. I catch sight of the driver. He’s young, tanned, with a neat, trimmed beard – another oblivious kid. In the passenger seat is a pretty blonde – too pretty for him. I think about the relationship they must have, about whether it’s just sexual, if it’s love, or if that’s somewhere it’ll go, and whether that’ll last.

Rain spatters the windshield, light and infrequent. I flick the wipers on. It’s becoming the sort of day where it’d be perfect to sit in a hot bath with a good book, but in all likelihood Sophie and I will sit in front of the TV and we’ll watch one of those movies she likes – some frivolous romcom full of improbable coincidences.

I turn the car’s heater on so it gushes onto my face, cold and urgent. It’ll be a while before it warms. The lights turn orange as I approach the freeway entrance. I brake, and let the lights turn red. I try the radio again, flicking through the stations, but find an equally unappealing medley of options. A car honks me. The lights have changed.

Pulling into the freeway, I almost hope that it’ll be jammed up – although peak hour isn’t for another ninety minutes, and traffic’s free-flowing unless there’s been an accident or there are road-works. No such luck. I fall into slipstream of the cars which surround me and push the Civic up to one hundred.

Lightning flashes in front of me again.

And then everything disappears.

vi.

Everything is dark around me, like somebody’s thrown a blanket over my head.

I’ve gone blind!

I lift my foot to slam the brakes. My right knee is a rusty hinge that screeches. Pain shoots through my thigh – if it hadn’t, I would’ve completed my action immediately.

Instead, I freeze.

If I brake abruptly now from one hundred miles an hour, who knows the chain reaction it’ll cause? I visualize cars behind me stacking into one another, then spreading across the freeway until there’s a cavalcade of crashes.

For the moment, I’m safe. Traffic unfurls along the freeway open and unhindered. I just have to keep my pace.

A sudden roar surrounds me. It must be a truck swinging into my lane. I swerve, then straighten. Somebody honks. There is no truck. It’s the world around me becoming alive. Everyday sensations scream at me.

My car funnels down the freeway, vibrating as the engine warbles discordantly and the tires grip the dimples of the road. Rain patters across the windshield as the wipers squelch, back and forth, back and forth. Hot air gusts on my face, but there’s also a chill – sweat on my face drying – that courses down my arms. My heart’s like thunder, one continuous roar that echoes within the car.

I blink and blink, like that’ll trigger my vision to return just as suddenly as it disappeared. My mind races with causes. Maybe a tumor rendered me blind, although surely there would’ve been symptoms leading up to this. The lightning flash? No. Ridiculous. Maybe it’s something exotic, something I’ve never heard of, which has shut down my body but left my mind alert. But I feel the steering wheel in my hands, the rubber rough, worn.

I will myself to see, to find a way out of the darkness, but in my terrifying fear, find only an unexpected speck of solace – me, happy and content, sleeping in the backseat on the way home from outings with my parents, all those years ago. My whole life had been ahead of me. I’d been safe and secure. Not like this, although I realize this hopelessness has been with – and within – me longer than I care to remember.

I can’t nurture it any longer. It needs to stop.

That insight swells in my head until it occupies my mind, then overflows, drowning out my panic and knee pain. That security has gone – gone so gradually that I never even recognized that it had disappeared. I couldn’t. That’s also how simple it is. I couldn’t because I’d become preoccupied with self-pity.

There’s a blaze of white – lightning. The road opens up before me, like it’s emerging from the iris of the sun. Cars flit into view, at first grey and amorphous, but then solidifying. The speedometer says I’m doing one hundred and ten. Somehow, I’ve sped up and yet not collided with anybody.

My exit approaches.

My hand hovers over the indicator. Returns to the steering wheel.

And I keep on driving.

My hand closes on Susan’s as she reaches for her champagne glass. Our fingers touch, then interlock; our wedding rings clink.

“Happy fifth anniversary.”

Susan smiles, flutters her lashes. “Why, thank you.”

Around us, the other guests chat amiably. We draw no attention – at least I don’t; Susan’s beauty eclipses me. From the dining room, the music – something modern and awful and wholly artificial – blares. I press against her, so she can feel me against her hip.

“What’re you doing?” she says, turning away.

“Let’s slip away, be naughty.” I cup her buttock through her white skirt.

She places a hand on my chest and glances sidelong. Nobody’s watching.

“We shouldn’t,” she says. “I have to bring the cake out soon.”

“Don’t be such a wimp.”

“Wimp?”

“Wimp.”

She downs her champagne, sets aside her glass, then runs a finger down my chest.

“Upstairs bathroom,” she says. “Five minutes.”

I don’t wait five minutes, though – I can’t, after watching her butt gyrate up the stairs, her legs extending from the tube of her skirt. I smirk. She knows what she does to me – and how to do it to me.

When I enter the bathroom, she is staring through the window at the revelry outside. I lock the door and run my hand down her arm.

“This is risky,” she says.

“That’s what makes it a turn on.”

“I don’t—­“

I push her against the bathroom door and kiss her – first her mouth, then her neck. I run my hands under her skirt and into her underwear, clawing at her buttocks. She laughs, amused at either my temerity or impatience or maybe a combination of both. We could be teenagers, desperate to take pleasure in one another, rather than thirty-somethings whose love lives have otherwise grown tempered.

Kneeling, I drag her underwear down her legs. Her pubic hair, full and triangular, is a deep, auburn brown, which doesn’t match her blonde finish. But there’s something about that, something about the construct that begs to be deconstructed so that nothing remains other than the boundlessness of our desire.

I thrust my tongue into her crotch. She hisses, arches her back and hooks a leg over my shoulder. My tongue probes her clit. She grabs at my head, trembling hands knotting into my hair so tightly it would hurt any other time.

Rising, I run my hands under her blouse, and she lifts her arms so I can yank it over her head. I nuzzle her cleavage, unclasp her bra and throw it clear. Her breasts are large, her areolae dimpled, her nipples stiff.

I kiss her again, clumsily squeeze her breasts, then run kisses down her neck. I swirl my tongue around her left nipple and pull at it with my teeth until she squeals.

She tries to push me away. “Easy.”

“You want easy?”

I jerk her by the wrist so she stumbles, heels clip-clopping across the tiles. She steadies herself on the towel rack under the window, her buttocks shaping toward me. My palm comes down once. She shrieks and scowls, but there’s no protest. This is the game we play.

I unbutton and unzip, let my pants slide down, and tease her with the head of my cock. She tenses, back arched, breasts swaying, hair curtaining her face.

When I thrust she gasps, then gives a long sigh. Closing my eyes, I cup her buttocks and force myself to steady. It would be so easy to lose it all here – and I almost have in the past.

Pulling clear, I tease her again, then thrust so her arms almost buckle – a moan escapes her lips.

Her buttocks shimmy, the flesh rolls into her hips – a sight I love, to know her whole body is rocked when we fuck. Her breasts bounce, her grunts elongating into an uninterrupted wail.

Our bodies find a rhythm that the opportunity drives into a frenzy. Through the window I see friends, guests, Cindy chats to Matthew; they mill around the table outside, waiting for the cake. Here is the occasion, and we’re the only ones missing. An errant thought pops into my head that’s tantalizing: the innocuous reasons that they’d think we might be absent.

Susan tenses, like she’s trying to delay the inevitable – of course she would, the way she shouts. I slow, run my fingers downwards. She releases the towel rack with one hand to try and stop me, but her protests are weak, if not cosmetic.

I grind in and out while I rub her clit. She takes the hand she’d been using to try to stop me and bites on the ball of the palm under her thumb. Her cries are muffled but not silenced. The hand on the towel rack squeezes and shakes; the rack rattles and the screws wobble in their housings.

I thrust once, twice, a third time. She sinks to her knees, then falls back against the hanging towels, panting.

Standing over her, my head pitched to the ceiling, I’m barely able to catch my breath as I stroke myself. Her hand joins mine, smaller, softer, but stronger. Kneeling before me, Susan smiles almost beatifically – like she knows she has me at her mercy. but she has from the first day I met her at a parent-teacher night.

My hips buck as I explode across her cleavage; a strangled groan tumbles in my throat. I throw a hand against the windowsill to steady myself. She takes me in her mouth; her lips tighten as she draws back slowly until, finally, she gives the head of my penis a peck.

I hoist her to her feet, and we kiss, holding one another, trembling. We could stand like that all day, oblivious to the music, to the party, to everyone and everything. This is more than passion. That’s how it began, but it has firmed into something I’m sure I’ve never known. Someone thumps on the door.

“Use the other bathroom!” I shout.

Footsteps recede and we nuzzle.

“I guess we should go,” Susan says.

“I guess.”

She cleans herself, fixes her hair and makeup. We get dressed, then kiss one last time. Opening the door an inch, she peeks out, throws me a smile, and slips away. I close the door and sit on the toilet in a daze. The same thump at the door rouses me. I get up, ostensibly flush the toilet and head out.

Beers are kept in a sea of ice in the bathtub. I grab myself a Corona, snap it open against the rim of the tub, and proceed outside. Susan’s there, an honor guard of people forming as she brings out the anniversary cake.

Cindy sees me, grins and waves. I approach her, take her in my arms, and rest my hand on her distended belly. She stands on her tiptoes and kisses me. Susan’s eyes flicker toward me as she sets the cake down on the table. Matthew’s arms close around from behind her in a big embrace and he kisses her soundly on the cheek.

“Happy anniversary, hon,” she tells him.

~

78.

What was that again?

74.

Ray closed his hands around Gloria’s and helped guide the knife into their fiftieth anniversary cake. The throng exploded into applause and – when Ray kissed Gloria soundly on the lips – whistles.

“Speech! Speech!” the call resounded.

Ray looked at their guests: their children, Paul, Matthew, and Thomas, and their wives; their tribe of grandkids; their great-grandkids; and so many friends that Ray’s memory was beyond recollecting them all – a collage of faces, old and young; a scrapbook of the people assembled throughout his life.

It was unreal that everything had turned out as it had. Maybe it hadn’t all been as he would’ve chosen. Like the hardware store. He’d started as a clerk so long ago, worked his way up, and eventually bought the store. Not that Ray liked hardware. But he could’ve done a lot worse. And the kids – Thomas an engineer, Matthew a journalist, Paul a partner in a prestigious law firm; who knew they’d be so successful? That they would’ve made him so proud, day after day?

It was Gloria – she was the driver behind it all. He hugged her to him and when she looked up, still showing surprise at any of his spontaneous affection, he kissed her.

What had life been like before her?

Ray thought and thought, but he couldn’t remember.

49.

Ray curled an arm around Gloria and hugged her close. She sniffled, smiled at him, then turned her attention back to Paul, glorious in his tux (there was a time he snorted at the thought of wearing a shirt), as he took his new bride in his arms and kissed her. As groomsmen, Matthew and Thomas were equally as resplendent in tuxes, and beamed with a pride that Ray rarely saw expressed between his sons. He grinned. He couldn’t stop himself. He and Gloria had done okay. Sure, Matthew was listless and still at home, but the kid was smart (genius smart, Ray sometimes thought), and would find his way. Thomas was excelling in uni. And here was Paul – who’d graduated with honours and was fielding offers from several law firms, thank you very much – now married to the woman he loved.

The woman he loved.

Ray looked at Gloria, quivering, her eyes moist. She’d blubber tonight, Ray knew that. She’d blubbered when Paul had announced his engagement a year ago, had broken into spontaneous bouts of blubbering since, and in the week leading up to the wedding had blubbered nonstop. Ray couldn’t believe that anybody could blubber so much.

But he loved her, and he wouldn’t change that, although sometimes, just sometimes, Sophie slipped into his mind. Life with her could’ve been … what? Ray didn’t know. But it would’ve been something different, and that mightn’t have been a good thing.

34.

Ray lounged in the recliner in his study, the newspaper sprawled open on his lap, his eyes stuttering on the same paragraph.

Outside, the kids shouted. Screamed. They always screamed lately. Paul and Matthew were always fighting. And Thomas, the eldest of the three, alternated between arbitrator and instigator. Sometimes, Ray just wanted to soundproof the closet under the stairs and throw the three of them in there to protect the world from their insanity.

“Right!” Ray heard Gloria shout. “Matthew! Get inside your room now!”

“But I didn’t do anything, Mum! Thomas took my ball—!”

“Bedroom! Now!”

Ray could imagine Matthew walking, head-bowed, upper teeth dug into his lower lip, hands crossed behind his back the way he did when he sulked, up the stairs to his bedroom.

“Paul, what’re you grinning about?”

“Nothing, Mum—!”

“Clean-up this mess!”

“But I didn’t—“

“Clean it up or go to your room also! Choose!”

Silence. Ray guessed that Paul had chosen to clean. It was the only safe choice in the face of Gloria’s wrath.

Ray closed his newspaper, and shut his eyes. Every day was a new battle. What would it be like when these kids were teens?

Red hair intruded into his mind: Sophie. He caressed her with his thoughts, felt the tautness of her hips; the way her breasts pronounced themselves, the nipples elongated; how smooth her pale skin always felt against him. He looked at her face, her pursed lips, aquiline nose, her hazel eyes that always seemed implicit with some challenge.

Would this have been his life had she never left him? What sort of kids would they have had? He couldn’t imagine them being the monsters his three were.

Maybe they were a product of his and Gloria’s relationship.

Maybe their love wasn’t right.

Maybe it didn’t relay to the children.

Maybe.

24.

Ray turned and looked back down the aisle.

Gloria was stunning in her wedding dress, a gorgeous strapless gown brocaded in silver, and with her nephew and niece bearing its overflowing train.

She had dieted for weeks to ensure she would fit into the dress, although Ray had quizzed why she didn’t go from a size 8 to a 10. Gloria had been horrified and Ray let the matter drop. When it came to women and weight, he was learning even diplomacy offered few victories.

It wasn’t as if Gloria was fat anyway. Maybe she was a little plump, but she was sweet and warm and generous and he loved her although – and not for the first time – the fear struck him that he didn’t love her in the right way, or at least not in the Til death do us part way. After Sophie, he’d sworn there’d be nobody else. And there hadn’t been. But when he’d gotten the job at the hardware store, there she was: Gloria. It wasn’t long before they were going out.

The problem was she was so loveable. Not in the same way as Sophie. Ray had wanted Sophie, had wanted to possess her. When they fucked, sometimes he pounded her as if he wanted to become fused to her. When they talked, Ray wanted to share everything with her.

Gloria didn’t inspire that zeal.

So, as Gloria reached the altar, and Ray looked into her oval face and her large green eyes, and at the way she beamed at him, Ray wondered whether his love for this woman was real. Whether it was love. Or whether he developed an affection for her because she was non-threatening, and because there was little chance he’d find somebody else.

He didn’t know.

21.

Ray sat at the desk in his bedroom, lifted his service revolver, and pushed the barrel against his head. He felt the gun tap dance against his temple. Was his hand shaking or was it his head? Maybe it was both.

Laid out on his desk before him were the pages of Sophie’s letter. The words were unintelligible through his tears, although he’d read the letter so much he had it memorized.

Sophie had met somebody. She hadn’t been able to wait for him.

He slammed his revolver down on his desk, and shot to his feet. If it had been love, she wouldn’t have done this, so it couldn’t be love. And he was contemplating suicide? He realized it wasn’t out of despair, but because he wanted to mar Sophie’s life. He wanted her to lament his death, feel responsible for it, and have it stand like a tombstone over whatever relationship she was in now (and might be in the future).

Ray closed his eyes, closed them so tight he felt a pain in the bridge of his nose. What he should do now was get drunk. That seemed the best plan.

As for women, he was done with them.

Fuck the lot.

18.

Ray sat in a booth in Percy’s Diner, Sophie nestled into his shoulder, his cheek cradled upon the top of her head. He ran his fingers down her arm. The contact made her real to him, and with that came a whole range of thoughts – most of which Ray was usually embarrassed to admit to himself but were diluted to the essence that he could not believe how much he loved her.

“What’re you going to do, Ray?” she asked. “You’re not gonna sign up, are you?”

Enlistment had been an option. Not out of any patriotism (although Ray liked to think of himself as patriotic enough) but because it could be a stepping stone to some sort of career when he got out. How would he be able to leave her, though? Three years. She’d wait, he knew that, but he didn’t know whether he could wait.

“I don’t have many options, Soph. I’m not school-smart. And I don’t want to end up like my dad, working in a factory all my life. I want a job that’s maybe gonna go somewhere. I want a career. You know, so when we’re married—“

She looked up. It was the first time he’d ever mentioned anything as permanent as marriage. Her astonishment stunned the lines out of her face, her eyes and mouth as wide as they were when she orgasmed. He loved that look so much.

“Married, Ray?”

“Gotta think about the future, Soph.”

She pushed herself up onto Ray until he’d almost slid down into the booth. Her lips closed upon his mouth, and her fingers tickled the tent of his pants. His response was immediate.

“We should get somewhere private, huh?” Sophie asked.

“I’m not saying now, you know? I’m just saying down the track.”

“Just that you’re saying it is enough, Ray.” Sophie slid out of the booth and grabbed his hand. “Come on.”

Ray needed no further prompting.

He got out of the booth.

16.

Ray and Sophie walked from the party, huddling close in the cold of night.

Questions raced through Ray’s mind. Should he put his arm around her? Did his breath smell? How far could he go? And what if he messed-up? Experience wasn’t something Ray had when it came to girls. The prevalent question was how the hell had he ended up with Sophie Sellar?

They reached the end of the street and turned to face one another. Sophie, with her wealth of copper hair, her large green eyes and pale complexion, in a shirt unbuttoned low enough to tease cleavage, and pleated skirt so tight they showcased the taut butt that was the talk – and idolisation – of every boy at school.

“You gonna kiss me?” she asked.

Ray folded his arms around her. She closed her eyes, and pursed her lips. Ray kissed her, and was surprised to feel her tongue invade his mouth. He ran his hands down her back, and over her buttocks. Then he lifted his right hand up her side, her waist, and cupped her breast.

She yanked back enough to relay that particular contact was prohibited, but not enough to break the embrace.

“Easy,” she said.

“Okay,” Ray said, still unbelieving that this was Sophie Sellar, a girl everybody lusted after, and he’d obsessed over since the first day of high school. He felt abashed by his erection, knowing that she had to be able to feel it. The head of his penis pulsed, a bomb ticking to detonation.

Then he leaned in and kissed her again.

12.

Ray sat in the back of English class, elbows on the table, his chin on his hands, his eyes fixed on Sophie Sellar. Her face – with its high, rouged cheekbones, her large green eyes, and Aquiline nose – framed by unruly copper hair so unalike the other girls in school, made her so unusual, so different, from all the other girls. They were pedestrian in comparison.

He wondered what it would be like to kiss her. What would she taste like? What would her body feel like against his, with her nubs for breasts and small hips?

Ray squirmed in his chair as he felt his body respond to his fantasies.

The moment he’d walked into high school and seen Sophie, some irrational attraction had mesmerised him. Maybe it was love at first sight – Ray had heard such things happened.

It didn’t matter.

As far as Ray was concerned, Sophie was the one and only, and he knew that there would never, ever, be anybody else.

i.

If I knew it’d be like a light going out, that one moment there’s everything and next it’s done, I think I’d do it, I really think I would. But since I don’t know that, since stories of damnation and shit have fuelled my upbringing, I just lay in bed, knowing I should get up, but thinking about everything I have to do today and how I don’t want to do it.

The light seeping through the blinds covering my bungalow windows, as well as the sounds of neighbours, suggests it’s about nine. Maybe later. My body’s in agreement, my head cloggy from sleeping in. I roll onto my side and look at the clock radio on my bedside drawer.

9.17.

I try to summon the will to get up, like the day’s a freezing pool I have to build the courage to leap into. Once I do, there’s no getting out, not until I go back to sleep, although that’ll be late tonight since I’m meeting Ash and Dylan at The Back Room for drinks. Dylan says he’s got an announcement. Ash has joked that Dylan’s announcing he’s going inside for having a seventeen-year-old girlfriend.

I haul myself out of the cosiness of my bed and undergo my morning routine: pull on my sweats and socks, turn on the computer, open the blinds, put on the electric kettle, drop a chamomile tea bag into a cup, and dart into the bathroom.

My antidepressants wait for me in the medicine cabinet, an unwanted house guest I can’t disinvite. I pop one into my palm and dry swallow it. Once, I’d get side-effects: dizziness, stomach cramps, thumping heartbeat – emergency room stuff. Not that I went. It was bearing through the meds or facing the shit. I bore through. The side-effects are still there, but they’re the lesser of two evils.

I leave the bathroom, open the door of my bungalow, and stare across the yard at the house. I should go inside and make myself breakfast – some toast maybe. You’re meant to eat something with antidepressants because they’re so rough on your stomach. But it’s too early to deal with my parents and their everyday recriminations about being over thirty, not married, and living in a damn bungalow.

At the foot of my door I spot a clothes peg. It’s split in two – one of my mum’s victims when she’s in a hurry to pulls down the clothes. It saddens me looking at it. The peg had one purpose, and now it’s done.

I go outside, pick up the halves, and hunt around for its hinge, even as I hear my kettle whistling. I’m just about to give up (at least for now) when I see the hinge poking up from a clump of dirt in the garden. I pick up the hinge, brush it clean, reassemble the peg, and clip it back on the line. There. All better.

I return to the bungalow as the kettle shuts itself off, so I fill my tea cup, sit at my computer, and open my emails. A pile already waits, including the one which came yesterday from Samantha.

Hey! It’s been a long time. Hope you don’t mind me emailing you. Got your address from Facebook. It’d be great to catch-up. Get back to me, huh?

Samantha’s a girl who chased me through high school, but depression and life (like there’s a separation between the two) got in the way. She got married to some dick, which might be unfair, but I remember hearing at the time that he was a dick. Suburbia swallowed them into domesticity, and I’d heard they squeezed out a couple of kids. Her email is a surprise. I don’t know how to answer it, other than to say something noncommittal, which isn’t answering it at all.

I have other emails, which I don’t read, but I can guess what’s in them depending on where they came from. There’s the usual circulars people send when they’re killing time at work; some from Advanced Business Solutions, as well as Healthy Plus, for whom I copywrite on a freelance basis; as well as a couple from fiction anthologies to which I’ve submitted.

I stare at the emails from the anthologies: Collected Works, and The Bold Writer – two of the country’s premier journals. You get published in them, you’re making a name for yourself, which is something I’d like to do – especially after fifteen years of trying.

I nurture a quiet expectation that when I read these emails, they’ll be acceptances. No, it’s not even an expectation. I know they’ll be acceptances. I don’t mean to build myself up. I always tell myself not to, because it makes the fall further.

Of course, over the years, I’ve submitted my work hundreds of places (if not over a thousand), and I’ve had this feeling a lot. The handful of stuff that has been accepted I didn’t give a chance, and had even forgotten sending out. Journals are notoriously slow. Publishers are little better. I just sent my book out and it’ll be months before I hear anything.

My phone rings – Ash. I answer it.

“Hey, filth,” he says.

“Filth.”

We don’t mean anything by “Filth.” It’s like “buddy” for us.

“What time tonight?” Ash asks. “Nine?”

“Yeah.” I go through the emails from Advanced Business Solutions and Healthy Plus. They’ve got a shitload of notes there and want brochures – usual stuff that’s so tediously unimportant that I feel guilty even bringing it up.

“Okay. I might be a bit late. Stuff happening with Cindy.”

“Okay.” I don’t bother asking about Cindy, Ash’s wife. Cindy’s great. She would’ve made somebody an awesome wife. Just not Ash. Over the years, he’s mentioned her less and less, and we’ve seen her less and less. It’s like Ash is erasing her from his social circle, although that’s probably not surprising given the way Ash behaves. It’s amazing their marriage is still going. And strong, too.

“I’ll see’ya later, filth.”

“Filth.”

He hangs up and I go through the circulars, working out what I’m going to recirculate and what I’m going to delete, but I’m really just holding onto the anticipation before I check the responses from the journals, because while I hold onto the anticipation, the unopened emails remain possible acceptances, and my dreams could still be going somewhere. Life could still be going somewhere.

Finally, I look.

Rejections.

I delete the fucking things.

ii.

The Back Room is a third-storey bar which sits on top of an Italian restaurant (Agostini’s – overpriced, but awesome pizza), and a floor that’s been vacant for as long as I remember. I think Agostini’s now use it for storage. You get to The Back Room through a stairwell so narrow it must violate fire-safety regulations.

The bar itself is split into quarters: a lounge with couches and little tables, like you might see in a coffee shop; a dance floor, where some nights they’ll have a band – usually Incandescent X, this awesome three-piece acoustic ensemble headed by a woman with these luminous aqua eyes that you’d expect on a black cat or something; a hall with rows of pool tables; and one corner out in the open with tables and chairs, like an overblown terrace overlooking the street, although you’d freeze going out there tonight. A circular bar sits right in the middle, like an axis, accessible to every quarter.

We’re draped over the couches in the lounge – me, Ash, Dylan – drinking Coronas. Since it’s a Monday night, there’s not a lot happening in The Back Room. The place started as a nothing bar years ago, and had its regulars every night. But then it developed a nouveau trendiness, the way places do. Now, it grows busier the deeper the week goes, and overflows Fridays and Saturdays. It’s annoying more than anything, since we came before it got popular.

“So what’s happening, filth?” Ash asks Dylan, but Ash has his eyes on the butt of a blonde at the bar who’s wearing tight, faded jeans, the right pocket torn to show a flash of red lace.

Dylan sits on the couch opposite us, rocking, Corona between his hands. The way his shock of already-receding hair stands up defying gravity makes his contemplation almost comical. He takes a drink, then shrugs.

“Come on,” Ash says. “Otherwise, I’ve got something to say.”

Everybody’s got something to say. I wish I had something. I think of the rejections from the anthologies. An acceptance would’ve been something to talk about. Maybe I could tell them about Samantha, although it’s hardly newsworthy. That’s something you’d mention as a throwaway.

“It about Lauren?” I ask, as Ash’s attention drifts back to the blonde, who’s ordering drinks. One of her friends – a brunette in a tight skirt – has joined her to help her carry. It’s not going to be much longer before Ash’s dick becomes his rudder.

“It’s not Lauren,” Dylan says.

“Why didn’t you invite her?” Ash says. “Oh, that’s right, she’s underage.”

“Ha ha.”

“You idiot,” I tell Ash. “It’s obviously past her bedtime.”

“How brave,” Dylan says, which is our way of wry condemnation. It’s all mocking, in its own way – and Lauren’s great mocking material given her age. It’s weird, because Dylan isn’t much to look at – not like Ash, who’s rugged and sporty – but he’s never had trouble with women. Lauren’s his first relationship that’s become serious.

“Okay, if you don’t tell us your announcement,” Ash says, “then I’m going with mine.”

“I’m getting transferred for work,” Dylan says. “Interstate.”

We’re quiet. It’s not like Dylan’s told us he has cancer or something like that, and we should be happy for him, but we’ve been friends a long time – Ash and me twenty years; Ash, me, and Dylan ten years. The dynamic between us meshed from the start. It’s the way friends work. It’s not about interests and shit. That stuff comes later. You click or you don’t. But that’s relationships in general. Life in general.

“They do that in construction?” I ask, because Dylan’s a roofer for some company that buys big blocks of undeveloped land, then ploughs through it, erecting cookie cutter middle-class suburbia. Surely it’s not like needing a neurosurgeon, no disrespect intended.

“Transfer-promotion,” Dylan says. “Boss likes my work, and recommended me to head office, so they offered me a foreman’s position on-site for some townhouses they’re putting up.”

“Are you shitting us?” Ash asks.

“This is for real.”

“You take it?” I ask.

“Had to for the money they’re offering. It’s like twice what I’m getting, and they’re setting me up with a place to live and everything.”

“When?”

“Six months. First thing in the new year. That’s when this townhouse project starts.”

Again, quiet. Maybe it is like cancer – the killing of a friendship. You take them for granted. You really do, thinking they’ll be around forever. But there’s always something happening unnoticed under the surface.

“What about Lauren?” I ask.

“You can’t take minors interstate, can you?” Ash says.

Dylan chuckles, like he wants to be blasé about it, but there’s no humour in it. “It’s six months away,” he says without conviction. He takes a drink from his Corona, then lazes back on the couch, trying to relax. “What about you?” he asks Ash. “What’s—?”

“Cindy’s pregnant,” Ash says.

“Really?” I say.

“Yep.”

“No shit?” Dylan asks.

“No shit.”

“Who’s the father?”

Ash laughs. “How brave.”

“You’re going to be a father?” I ask.

“What? I’ll be a good father,” Ash says, but his eyes rove the lounge until they target the blonde on a couch in the corner. I walked into the toilets once and Ash was banging a redhead in a cubicle while a crowd of onlookers watched. Whatever loyalty he’d had to his vows, debauchery and drinking have beaten into submission. Not that Cindy knows, or even suspects – well, I don’t think she does. She’s the model wife living her model suburban life. Ash, though, cheats, gets in fights, and goes on drinking and gambling benders. He can be a prick, which is an awful thing to say, but you still couldn’t find a better friend. Well, most of the time.

“Congrats,” Dylan says, leaning forward on the couch and offering his Corona. “To your baby.”

“To your job,” Ash says, thrusting his Corona forward.

I thrust my Corona forward and can think of nothing to add.

iii.

I stand on the terrace, looking at the street three-storeys below. Traffic whizzes by, people moving obliviously on with their lives. I sip from my Corona. The night’s freezing, and the barrel of the bottle threatens to stick to my lips. The beer’s not going down well, and it’s not a night for big drinking, but that’s exactly what I want to do. This is the habit life’s forged.

Taking a swig, I look back into The Back Room.

In the lounge, Ash sits on the couch with the blonde. She throws her head back and laughs at everything he says. Give it an hour, and Ash will be fucking her. His magnetism is inexplicable. I wish I had it. An ounce of it. And more so his confidence. It makes you wonder why he got married. I think he was hoping to find somebody to save him from his own recklessness, and Cindy did, for a little bit at least.

Dylan plays pool with Lauren, who showed up about half an hour ago. Sometimes they card her, but most times they don’t. Bars are always stricter on guys than girls. Girls are good décor, while guys are a hazard. It’s obvious which you’d prefer given the choice, and Lauren’s gorgeous with her blonde hair and dimpled smile.

I gaze back down at the street, wishing I had a Cindy, or even a Lauren, not that Ash knows how good he’s got it, and maybe Dylan’s just finding out. I wish for anything, but realise I have nothing.

I know now what I want.

And what I don’t want.

I don’t want this life.

Perry drifts through the bookstore, thinking if Elsie’s quick, maybe he can get home and catch the second half of the game. Unlikely, though. Elsie’s anything but quick. She’s treacle. He knows he should be understanding; he should be supportive, the way Elsie’s been for him over the last twenty or so years, but for some things his patience wears thin.

He hates bookstores. Doesn’t understand the point of them. Or the whole book-buying experience. You read a book, you’re done with it. Why would you need to own it? Does the story change on rereading? Why even reread it? Not that Perry ever got as far as reading a book for the first time. Standard fare is comics and sports in the paper, and only over breakfast, or when sitting on the crapper.

Elsie reads. And has forever. In recent years, her volume of reading’s grown. Maybe it’s because the kids are getting older and need her less. Or maybe it’s because they don’t do things together like they used to. Not that it would matter if they did. She’d read instead. It’s all she does. She reads mornings before she gets up to start the day. He’s sure she reads while he’s at work at the garage – she enjoys the soaps, but the feel-good talk shows have never sucked her in. And at night, boy, she reads at night. One time, Perry awoke at 3.00 am, and there she was, still reading, saying she just couldn’t put the book down. Perry hollered at her, telling her the book would be there in the morning, and she’d blinked at him, unable to reconcile his rage. It was a damn book. And he needed his sleep. He had work in the morning, after all.

Perry squints at her across the store now, dowdy in her floral dress, swaying like some savant trying to decipher everyday life as she stands in the ROMANCE section searching for her next fix. He snorts, the sort of sound he makes when he wants people to know he’s dissatisfied, but there’s nobody close enough to hear him. So he snorts again, louder, but still as futilely. Elsie once told him that books offer escapism, but into what? Make-believe? They’re just stories.

This has become their ritual. She takes an hour to find a couple of new books … Well, maybe not an hour. But that’s the way it feels. Then, she’ll rush up to him like a kid wanting to show off, thrusting her finds into his face, as if these latest discoveries will convert him from his skepticism. Perry never knows what to say. He used to scoff or try to say something which was meant to be witty but came out stupid. Then her face would shatter. She so wanted him to understand. Even after all this time. Why didn’t she just accept he couldn’t? Nor did he want to.

Pursing his lips, Perry forces himself through the aisles, looking for diversion, but instead only dismisses books, ignores titles, and disregards covers – unless they offer the titillation of a bit of skin. Then, he’ll pause, look around to make sure nobody’s watching, pick up the book and flick through it. Just about every time, the cover’s a lie, and bears no relationship to the contents.

He rounds the corner and heads into a new aisle, into SCIENCE/RELIGION, but stops, trying to get his bearings as he ponders where SPORTS is. He’s been here dozens of times, but the geography never sticks. At least in SPORTS he can amuse himself until Elsie’s done. Well, probably. He looks down the aisles, at the signs aligned to the shelves: first NEW AGE, then SELF-HELP, HEALTH, BIO, and then …

He freezes.

At the opposite end of the store the clerk stands behind the sales counter. Her shape’s indistinguishable under a loose blue dress and the bookstore’s shapeless knee-length blue apron. She wears a pair of red pumps with low heels, her left foot cocked now upon the ball of the sole, the heel itself elevated daintily above the linoleum floor.

Framed between her red pump and the hem of her apron is the perfect bow of her left calf, her posture pronouncing the firmness of the muscle, the skin unblemished and pale against her outfit.

Perry doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t breathe.

He’s seen calves before. Elsie has two, of course, although they quiver, are prickly with stubble and borderline varicose. It’s been three kids and twenty years since Elsie’s had the legs of a dancer. But there have been other offerings. Like the long-legged vacuous redhead who comes into the garage to ask the inanest questions about the Beamer her rich parents bought her. She wears minis, or shorts, and exposes a lot more than calf. There’s also the girls from the local. Some afternoons, he and the other guys drop in for lunch and – if work’s slow – they stay for a show. Those girls reveal even more than the redhead.

Sometimes – particularly after he’s had one or two too many – Perry’ll slip them a little money, and they’ll shake their breasts into his face or gyrate their firm butts onto his lap. Then Perry feels himself respond so painfully that he has to pick at the tent of his coverall’s crotch to give his erection a bit of freedom.

He knows maybe he should feel guilty about that, like he’s cheating on Elsie or something. But nothing’s happening. Not really. And like any of those girls would have any real interest in a balding, middle-aged grease monkey with an expanding paunch. If anything, Elsie would be thankful – if she knew – because the nights following these long lunches, he’s always in a mood for some loving, and she likes that. She likes him being frisky.

Now, there’s none of that.

Nothing but this calf.

What had the clerk looked like? He’d caught a glimpse of her coming in. She was a pretty blonde thing with bobbed hair, pale – the sort who wouldn’t tan – and maybe about thirty. Not that he’d really noticed, of course. When you’re married, and in accompaniment of said wife, it’s never prudent to stare too long (if at all) at other women.

It would be the easiest thing to lift his gaze now, to look at the profile of her face, but instead Perry remains fixed on her left calf. He imagines how smooth it would be under his calloused fingertips, how it would feel against his grizzled face, and how her scent – the mix of whatever perfume she wore and whatever sexual musk she had (as all women had, of that Perry was sure) – would fill his nostrils.

He envisages the swell of her thigh under her dress, the firmness of her leg, and the way her panties – which, Perry visualizes as black, lace, and snug – would cup her taut buttocks.

He thinks of the concavity of her waist, how slender it would be, how malleable she would be if he had the arcs of her hips in his hands, and sees the mounds of her breasts, her nipples stiffening in his fingertips and rising like flagpoles upon the bases of her areolae.

He disrobes her of her blue dress and bookstore apron, pulls her panties down her long legs, over her strong thighs, down past those perfect calves, and off her ankles, and lays her before him, savoring the perfection of her body. Her pubic thatch is a small triangle, an arrow pointing him on target. He likes that. He doesn’t understand the rage nowadays that less – if not none at all – is better.

Her legs – her calves – rest upon his shoulders, her thighs tensing, and he relishes how tight and hot she is around him as he enters her, his hands locking around her waist, her breasts shimmying as his crotch pounds into her buttocks, an ecstatic hiss of breath escaping her mouth as her upper teeth bite her lower lip.

“Perry?”

It’s like a sheaf of paper shearing, and the fantasy is gone, replaced by Elsie standing in front of him, obstructing his view. She holds out a couple of books. Perry doesn’t look at the titles, nor their colorful covers. The books are romances – what else are they going to be? He knows that just as he knows that if he looks into Elsie’s face, she’ll be beaming at him, but wary, afraid he’s going to piss all over her love – again.

He forces himself to look at the books. Looks at the titles. At the covers which show some model-perfect buffoon with windswept golden hair holding some swooning dark-haired floozy in his arms. A hundred responses jump into his head. Real men don’t look like that. Or, There’s nothing fairy tale about love. And the ever-popular, Great, now let’s get the fuck out of here.

He looks at her.

Elsie’s mouth twitches.

But he understands, finally, the fantasy, the escapism, and how imagination can find a home that reality cannot.

He smiles. “I think you’ll enjoy those.”

Elsie’s twitch avalanches her lower lip, causing her mouth to chasm. Her eyes are big round circles, like somebody’s taken the ground from beneath her feet and she’s falling. But then she forces her mouth closed, and it arches into a grin. Her eyes ignite. The wariness evaporates. She’s the woman he fell in love with that first time he saw her, sweet but coy as he caught her eye across the dance floor at one of the clubs he frequented as a teen.

Perry kisses her lightly on the lips, takes her hand in his own, and squeezes it. “Let’s go,” he says.

Together, they go to make her purchases.

Philip felt Ellie’s grip tighten around his hand until her nails dug painfully into his palm. Opposite them, almost lost behind the enormity of his glass comma-shaped desk, sat Arturo Maldonado, a small, balding man in an immaculately pressed pastel grey suit.

“I must admit,” Maldonado said, “we here at the Directory are largely unimpressed when couples take part in unsanctioned conceptions. It speaks to us of a certain … irresponsibility.”

Phillip shifted restlessly. Maldonado was perhaps sixty, and with those years – as well as his position – came a dismissive gravitas, as if Phillip, and Ellie, at only thirty, could never understand his breadth of experience. But this was what it was like when it came to dealing with the State. They always knew better.

“Doesn’t it mean something that we’ve come forward?” Ellie asked.

“That depends upon your motivations,” Maldonado said.

“Motivations?” Ellie said. “We’re here because we want to have a child. There are no motivations other than us wanting to start a family.”

“But by conceiving, you’ve already started,” Maldonado said. “Without purity. You’ve already started the process of trying to have a family.”

“Us conceiving w–was … an accident.” Philip bowed his head. The whole office – with its white carpet, white walls, and glass furnishings – was suffocating in how pristine it was. He felt dirty just being in here. “But we’ve taken …” He gulped, and forced the tremor from his voice. “We’ve taken responsibility. We didn’t go underground, didn’t try and have an unlicensed baby. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Mr. Richards,” Maldonado said, brow furrowing so deep it caused a series of ravines across his balding scalp, “responsibility begins in the home. It is the responsibility of couples to practice birth control, to show us at the Directory that they can be worthwhile contributors to society by observing the rules and regulations of the State. Now those laws apply to us all, regardless of standing. However, you do fulfil most of the prerequisites required to apply for purity – simply to apply, mind you.”

Maldonado reached for his Quire. It came alive at his touch and displayed a file on its smooth glass surface. Philip saw his and Ellie’s names bolded in the text, diagrams, and even pictures of him and Ellie – was that a shot from their Caribbean honeymoon (that had come two years after the wedding itself), that one time they’d dared to have sex in the water? And there was a picture of them grocery shopping, the angle no doubt taken from a CCTV camera.

“Married thirty months,” Maldonado said as he scanned the Quire, “both employed, no felonies. Well, that’s something, isn’t it? I also see you’d applied prior to discovering this unsanctioned conception.”

“Yes,” Philip said. “We were still waiting for that to be heard when this happened.”

Phillip hated that a union with Ellie, a night of lovemaking, could be reduced to something as cold and impersonal as a this.

“Yes, of course.” Maldonado scrolled through the file, his thinly pencilled brows arching with cartoonish menace. “I see you’re committed to a long-term mortgage of your home.”

“Isn’t everybody?” Philip asked, and then laughed nervously.

Maldonado looked up, face serious, the pun wasted on him. “No.”

Phillip wasn’t sure what to do – look away demurely, as if admitting his embarrassment, or hold Maldonado’s gaze, and perhaps be deemed challenging, if not insubordinate. He settled, unwittingly, on both: starting to look away, deciding that was incriminating, then trying to hold firm.

Maldonado had other ideas – he snorted dismissively. “What’s more,” he went on, “you’re each employed in positions where the capacity for promotion is low.”

“Does that matter?” Ellie asked.

“A child is a lifelong commitment, Mrs. Richards. We have to be certain you will always be able to provide for them, that they will never want for anything.”

“What about love?”

“Does love put food on the table? Does love pay for education? Does love pay the bills?”

“Love inspires us to strive for those things!”

“Striving is not accomplishing, Mrs. Richards. Indeed, herein lies the problem: you can try. We all try. But this is not grade school where we reward children for effort. In reality, we’re measured by success, rather than endeavour.”

Phillip squeezed Ellie’s hand, as if to tell her, Leave it. She did so – reluctantly. At home, she never would’ve given up this easily. And he’d no doubt hear about this later. Exhaustively. But he was sure he’d have his own well of venting to contribute.

Maldonado swivelled the Quire around to show them a spreadsheet of figures. Ellie leaned forward to examine them, but Philip didn’t bother. Whenever money was highlighted in meetings, it was never good. The truth was that both he and Ellie worked jobs to pay bills, rather than to build careers. Certainly, he’d never impressed anybody at a party by telling them that he’d worked in the same small cyber-security firm since graduating high school, or that his weekly perusal of the job market showed he was either hideously underqualified for positions that offered advancement, and sadly overqualified for anything that might provide a refreshing change.

“Your projected earnings over the next twenty-five years,” Maldonado said, “minus repayments for your home, annual fees such as bills and various insurances; and the cost of raising a child in today’s society compounded by inflation. As you can see, you have a very narrow margin for error. Also, this projection does not facilitate for emergencies – such as a hospital stay, for instance. Something like that could leave you indebted the rest of your lives.”

“We can’t base our lives on what might be,” Ellie said.

“But that’s what life is,” Maldonado said, abruptly swivelling the Quire back, as if deeming they were unworthy of its examination. “What might be.”

“You’re basing everything on financial motivations, though,” Ellie said. “Raising a child isn’t just about money.”

“Are we back to love?” Maldonado asked.

Ellie’s nostrils flared. “My family was poor,” she said. “I grew up fine.”

Maldonado’s fingers danced across the Quire. The file opened into a new page. Philip could see reversed through the glass a picture of Ellie, just sixteen, sullen and defiant, hair streaked with pink – a mug shot.

“You had several juvenile convictions for misdemeanours, Mrs. Richards,” Maldonado said. “Two counts vandalism, one underage drunkenness—”

“I was sixteen,” Ellie said with no hint of embarrassment, “a kid. That’s life. You grow up, you do stupid things.”

“I never had any juvenile convictions.”

“Mr. Maldonado, that’s hardly surprising.”

“Neither did your husband.”

Ellie straightened in her chair. Now it was not Phillip squeezing her hand out of warning, but her squeezing his out of frustration until he thought she might crush it.

Maldonado waited, amused, no doubt thinking that Ellie would incriminate herself, that her temper would blow and condemn her prospects as a parent. Somebody with a temper like that certainly isn’t fit to be a mother, Phillip could imagine Maldonado saying.

“Since I’ve become an adult,” Ellie said, drawing the words out to dilute her anger, “I haven’t had one sick day at work; I’ve never been late; I don’t have a single speeding ticket; I volunteer at a soup kitchen weekly. Teenagers make mistakes.”

“Indeed,” Maldonado said. “And we appreciate the fine adult you’ve grown into. The point is that while I agree money isn’t everything, it is something. You need to be able to provide for your child so that they’re constantly entertained and not led astray by more subversive influences.”

“Subversive influences?” Ellie said. “What I did was a kid just being stupid. I wasn’t trying to bring down the State.”

“Nevertheless, it is a step in the wrong direction, and a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Our prisons are filled with adults who mis-stepped as teenagers.”

“As my wife pointed out,” Philip said, feeling an inevitability developing in this conversation, “she is now an upstanding member of the community. As you stated earlier, neither of us having any felonies. T–t–those charges you’ve cited are juvenile misdemeanours that should’ve been wiped from her record once she became legally recognized as an adult.”

Now Ellie squeezed his hand gently – Thank you.

“But is that behaviour potentially pathological—?” Maldonado said.

“Of course not!” Ellie said.

“And I believe you,” Maldonado said. “I truly do. But it’s my job to be certain, to be unequivocally certain, that I only grant purity to couples I believe are capable of nurturing a child into becoming another worthwhile contributor to society. Society. Not community – community is your locality. Society belongs to us all.”

Philip gritted his teeth. That had been the second time Maldonado had used that phrase: worthwhile contributor to society. It was his fallback, the infallible argument. This was why Ellie was so angry – she’d read this in Maldonado immediately.

“Because that’s what it comes down to,” he went on. “Our prisons are bursting at the seams, our institutions are overflowing, our crime rates are out of control. We don’t need to contribute to their number. We need to contribute to the solution.”

Frown disappearing, scalp smoothing, Maldonado zipped through the remaining pages of the file – pictures, genealogies, cat scans, and things Philip didn’t recognize, but how important were they so late in this discussion – if this indeed was a discussion?

“Your workups are good,” Maldonado said. “Neither of you suffer from any diseases or conditions that can threaten a life in its prime, nor is there any record of it in your lineage. In fact, we’re very impressed with the longevity of your forebears. That’s encouraging. Your education is also good, both of you completing secondary education certificates with above average grades. That’s important to us here at the Directory. We want to produce thinkers, not stinkers.”

Philip almost laughed. He couldn’t help it. They should’ve branded that above the entrance of the Directory – the big white marble building that was so impressively gothic, so intimidatingly large and convoluted with its pillars and arches, and there, in gold letters above the arched entrance, they could emblazon this credo: Aiming to produce thinkers. Not stinkers!

“If I may ask,” Maldonado said, “considering your education, why didn’t either of you pursue more challenging vocations?”

“You take what you can get, Mr. Maldonado,” Ellie said.

“And that’s the crux of our problem. Ironically, if you were lesser educated, if your IQ results had produced lesser scores, we’d find your respective occupations befitting.”

“Are you saying we’re too smart for our jobs?” Ellie asked.

“People require stimulating environments in order to feel challenged and contented,” Maldonado told her. “We speculate you’re in positions where you’ll stagnate and grow dissatisfied. This could lead to a negative schism in the home, and the innocent victim in circumstances such as this is always the poor child.”

“We could get new jobs,” Ellie said.

“Could you? I assume you would’ve already if that was such an easy possibility. Right now, we’re dealing with what is. And you certainly wouldn’t be getting a new job as you carry this child to term, which puts the onus on your husband. Do you have any prospects, Mr. Richards?”

“N–no.”

“Unfortunately, it’s difficult in this market.” Maldonado shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Richards, but I cannot in good conscience – at this time – grant your application for purity.”

Maldonado’s fingers blurred across the Quire. The file disappeared, leaving only a transparent sheet of glass. He put it down and smiled.

And there was silence.

Phillip was unsure what came next. Were they dismissed? Arrested? How did this work?

The office door slid open and a troupe of figures in pastel grey surgical gowns and masks entered. This hadn’t entered Phillip’s calculations. He jumped to his feet but they seized his arms and dragged him, flailing and sobbing, to the floor. A syringe flashed and was plunged into his neck. Philip’s muscles slackened, and he lost all sense of his body.

Others struggled with Ellie and thrust her up against the wall. One lifted her blouse and exposed her belly. Ellie spat at them and cursed them, thrashing as she tried to fight them off. But they were too many, too big and too organised. A syringe was thrust into her neck. She fell limp almost immediately. The figures eased her down, her teary eyes level with Philip’s as her blouse was lifted again, and a new syringe was brought to her stomach – one that contained a mucky green bile.

Maldonado came around his desk to address them. “Relax, Mr. Richards, Mrs. Richards,” he said. “Our techniques are near-instantaneous and relatively painless. Best of all, there’s a ninety-six per cent chance of no residual damage, so you will be able to try again one day – given the approval of purity, of course.”

And as the syringe shot into Ellie’s belly, Philip found the will to scream.

Thursday, June 30th

I see her through the window, bathed in the flickering light of the bus-stop across the street, her short, coppery hair glinting like dried blood.

It’s late – I don’t know the time, but it must be past midnight. The other patients sleep, their snoring a restless chorus. I’m in an eighth-floor hospital bed after surgery, pain pulsing in the numbness that has become my right leg. My eyes are heavy, my throat dry, my head clogged.

I turn back to the window.

The old woman is the last thing I see before I slip back into a troubled sleep.

Friday, 1st July

I see her through the window, her shoulders cowed like she’s huddled from the cold. Others crowd her at the bus stop: school kids in deep maroon blazers, who shift and chatter with the impatience of youth; and adults, tired and resigned, waiting to go to work. But she is dark, a shadow of melancholy that touches everybody around her, until I’m sure they feel her unease, and become uneasy in themselves.

A bus arrives and obscures them as a group of doctors approach my bedside. The doctors smile and laugh like they don’t have a care in the world and ease back my bed sheet. My right leg is elevated on a hill of pillows. The foot and ankle, purple and bloated, throb, while pain cuts from the big toe to my heel.

I grimace at the scaffold screwed into my shin and foot. The doctors explain the frame – the “external fixator”, they call it – is holding the bones in place until the swelling goes down enough so they can operate on the break and insert plates. I don’t care. I don’t want to know.

When the doctors leave, two other doctors arrive, introducing themselves as being from the Pain Team. They tell me about the painkillers I was given during surgery, like morphine; and Ketamine, which they say can produce hallucinations, like thinking people are talking to you, or – a common one – seeing grass across the floor of the ward. I glance around nervously, like these are things that may occur spontaneously. They assure me I’ll be okay and talk to me about the medication I’ll be on – OxyContin, for the pain; Lyrica, for the nerve trauma; and good old Paracetamol, just to take the edge off.

When they leave, I’m pensive, until the other patients engage me in small-talk and we exchange horror stories. Wayne, sitting in a chair by his bed, a cane resting across his lap, had surgery on a prolapsed disc in his neck. Penny, opposite me, has fractured a hip. Diana, opposite Wayne, remains asleep throughout – she’s had a stroke.

The nurse interrupts us, dragging a blood pressure machine behind her on squealing wheels, telling me she needs to perform her ‘obs’. She plugs the machine in and wraps the blood pressure cuff around my left arm. While it’s inflating, she sticks a thermometer in my ear and attaches a little clamp to my right index fingertip, which she explains measures my heart and oxygen levels.

My readings light up on the blood pressure machine’s display. The nurse remarks they’re good and jots them down in my chart. She runs a hand over the roof of my swollen foot, looking for a pulse. Her frown deepens, and I expect the worst, but then she smiles. She says the pulse is strong, writes that down, and finishes by asking if I would like some pain relief. Relief! Like there could be relief from this.

“Yes, please.”

The nurse gives me my meds. I gulp them down with water from a little plastic cup and soon I am drowsy. I turn to the window, falling asleep to the sight of the departing bus revealing the old woman, sitting there alone.

Saturday, 2nd July

I see nothing through the window but an empty bus stop and a busy street. No school or work today, so none of the regulars who use the stop on weekdays. They are home, living their lives and enjoying their weekends, just as I should be.

Breakfast is served – toast, juice and tea. The toast is soggy, like it must’ve sat under a heat lamp in the kitchen absorbing the margarine that has been spread across it. While I eat, Diana is discharged. She’s being transferred to a home. The bed is changed and another patient, Roddy, is checked in. He has a festering wound on his foot, perhaps from a spider bite. Wayne hobbles around the eighth floor with a cane as part of his rehab.

Afterwards, the nurse performs her obs. Again, my readings are good. When she’s done, she asks if I’ve moved my bowels. What a question! I answer no, so she adds laxatives to my cocktail of medication, telling me painkillers can bind up the stomach and lead to constipation. She encourages me to wash, bringing me a hand towel, a bath towel, and a basin of warm soapy water. Drawing the curtain, she leaves me to it.

It’s not easy washing with a hand towel when I can’t turn or move my leg from the pillows. It’s even harder washing my back and buttocks. A metal rung hangs above the bed; I use it to haul myself up with one hand, while washing behind me as best as I can with the other. It takes several hoists to be thorough, and my efforts dishevel the bed.

When I’m done, the nurse returns and remakes the bed around me. I use the metal rung to lift myself out of the way when she slides a new sheet under me.

I’m exhausted when it’s over.

Sunday, 3th July

I see nothing through the window but the emptiness of the bus stop, so settle back, feeling alone, if not deserted. I eat breakfast mechanically and wonder how I’ll spend the morning, but then my stomach gurgles. I urge the nurse for the bedpan and she brings a variety of things: the bedpan, toilet paper, and other toiletries to wash myself. She offers to slide the bedpan under me, but I tell her I’ll be okay, so she draws the curtain.

Pulling aside my hospital gown, I lower my underwear, haul myself up with one hand and manoeuvre the bedpan under me with the other. The bedpan is cold against my buttocks.

Moving one’s bowels in this situation is difficult. It’s not just the awkwardness of the position, but also being in a ward with other people, knowing they can hear you, that they can smell you, that they know what you’re doing.

Afterwards, I wipe myself – which is harder than washing myself – and put the waste in the bedpan. Then I wash myself and call for the nurse to take everything away.

Monday, 4th July

I see her through the window, her bright red scarf like a beacon amongst the Monday-morning crowd. The bus arrives, and the others clamber on. But not her. She stays. Like she is waiting.

The arrival of the nurses distracts me. Penny is discharged. After the bed is changed, she is replaced by Shaun, a portly, middle-aged man who’s had a knee replacement. It’s amazing what surgical technology can do.

The doctors come and lift my sheet, but their examination of my leg is perfunctory. They tell me it’s still too swollen and check my foot. The sensation in the sole is numb to their touch.

The doctors go, so I turn to the window, to the woman now seated alone at the stop, and close my eyes. Through the tiredness, confusion, and pain, she appears in my mind amongst a crowd of onlookers. I sit on a nature strip, clutching my leg, the bones bulging through the flesh.

Now I know her – she is the woman who hit me with her car.

She is the woman who put me here.

Tuesday, 5th July

I see her through the window among the rest of the crowd at the bus stop, pacing back and forth, like a dog straining to get off its leash. Maybe she’s trying to summon the courage to come in here so she can apologise. It’s a beautiful morning, unseasonal for this time of year. It would be nice if she didn’t have to come in here, if I could be out there. It would be nice to take a walk. I used to walk all the time, sometimes as exercise, sometimes to clear my thoughts, sometimes for both.

Physios arrive and flex Shaun’s leg to get the new knee working. He grimaces and whines, but doesn’t know how lucky he is, every moment bringing him a step closer to recovery. Wayne scoots around the eighth floor, his cane an accompaniment like tap shoes.

Outside, the bus comes and goes and, of course, the woman remains. If she came in here to say sorry, I think I would act noble. I would tell her accidents happen and that I accept her apology.

The doctors arrive and perform their examination. They tell me the swelling is going down but still not enough for surgery. The nurse follows them with her obs. The pain is tolerable and I don’t want to take the painkillers the nurse offers, but she says if I let the pain back in it’ll be harder to push out again.

So I take the painkillers and watch the old woman through the window until I drift off into a drug-addled sleep.

Wednesday, 6th July

I see her through the window, the centrepiece among the morning crowd for whom I’ve imagined names and histories: Susan, a blonde teenager who despises everybody thinking she’s stupid because she’s pretty, and wants to become a doctor; her classmate Gary, who has a crush on her and fantasizes about her every night; Henry, a stocky middle-aged man who’s the manager at the local supermarket; Ruth, a thirty-year-old redhead who’s unhappily married; and on the list goes.

But for her.

She is a void. Everything I imagine about her is not right. Maybe it’s because she ran me down. Crippled me, however temporarily, maybe permanently, because I don’t know how my leg will recover. Maybe I’ll walk with a limp. Or a cane. Maybe the feeling in my foot will never return.

I scowl and don’t engage as the others chitchat. My teeth grind when the physios help Shaun hobble across the ward with the aid of a walker. He’ll be out in no time. Roddy cheers him on. Wayne laps the ward.

When the doctors come, I want to question them about my recovery. I prop pillows behind me and sit upright, like a schoolchild at attention. The doctors examine me and declare the swelling’s better, but still too severe to operate.

My questions flare in my mind, frustration incinerating them, disappointment scattering the ashes.

Thursday, 7th July

I see her through the window, just a blur among the others as drizzle curtains the bus stop. The sky is grey, and the day looks cold and miserable – the sort of day I wouldn’t want to get out of bed, let alone leave the house.

For once, I am glad – if only for a moment – to be in here.

But just a moment.

Then I think about how nice it would be to feel the outside – to feel the wind ruffle my clothes, the coldness of the rain on my face, and hear the world unfold around me.

She has put me here and yet stands outside, trying to gather the courage so she can face me. I can understand her reluctance. I can understand her fear. That I might explode and condemn her. I was crossing at an intersection and had the right of way. She turned and hit me. How did she not see me? Of course she’s afraid to face me. She should be.

Maybe I’ll send a nurse out to tell her it’s okay to come in. Even with the encouragement, she may still be too scared. The nurse can relay my forgiveness. Hopefully, that would be enough. Then the old woman could go home to whatever family she has and leave me to wait in here, waiting, waiting, waiting to heal.

I buzz for the nurse.

When she arrives, I ask for pain relief.

Friday, 8th July

I see her through the window, the scar to a fire that has finally burned itself out left nothing but smouldering ashes. The bus arrives and takes away the others, but she remains.

Just her.

And me.

Us.

I don’t want the pain.

I don’t want the ashes. There are no phoenixes in real life.

So I try to focus on Shaun as he packs – he’s been discharged. The way he walks, you wouldn’t be able to tell his whole knee has been replaced. The nurses change his sheets and Andy, who’s ninety or so, is checked in. I don’t know why he’s here, but he sleeps the whole morning, his snoring reverberating through the ward.

The doctors arrive and perform their examination, joking between themselves like I’m a cadaver for which they need to pay no regard. When they tell me the swelling’s better but still not good enough, I turn to the window, to her, sitting there, not even able to offer an apology.

Saturday, 9th July

I see nothing through the window but an empty bus stop, so I am left with the world that has become my new normal – the ward.

Wayne is discharged, so we exchange goodbyes and somebody else is checked in – Tariq, I think his name is. I don’t care. Not anymore. Only the empty bus stop really matters – empty because she is at home, living her life, because that’s what she’s able to do. I see her, sitting with husband, an old man with a kindly face who bellows laughter that fills the room with warmth and happiness. She has children who are married, and they have children who clamber onto their grandparents’ laps and cover them in kisses and giggles, never knowing, never suspecting, that their grandmother has crippled a man.

After lunch, she takes her grandchildren to the park, and watches proudly as they play on the swings, imagining lives they might lead when they grow up – successful in their jobs, happy in their relationships, and healthy in their bodies and minds. By then, who would I be to her? Nobody. Some small wrong she wishes could be undone – and undone not for me, for the damage she has inflicted, but because of the guilt it has caused her. Perhaps she does not even remember. Perhaps she just takes for granted that everything would’ve worked out.

She is a bitch, a monster, a sociopathic cunt with no real concern for me, other than to seek my absolution for her own peace of mind. If she were to come here now, if she were to stand at my bedside, I would spit on her, I would tell her to go fuck herself, that I wish a car struck her as she walked across the street with the right of way. I would say the most abominable things possible, so that she carries this with her and has no doubt about what she has done.

That will be my legacy.

Because this is her legacy to me.

Sunday, 10th July

I see nothing through the window but the empty bus stop – empty, because she can take a break from her useless vigil, although I cannot take a break from my pain. My anger simmers until the doctors arrive. I expect nothing, but they tell me the swelling has reduced enough for surgery.

From there, it’s all preparations: I change gowns, and wrestle on hospital underwear and a hospital cap. Then I am brought to theatre. I grimace as an anaesthesiologist cannulates my arm and explains they’ll be using the same painkillers they did when they attached the external fixator.

They wheel me into surgery – it’s colder than the rest of the hospital and a humming I can’t pinpoint fills the room. The surgeons are faceless in their scrubs. The anaesthesiologist puts a mask over my face and tells me to count to ten.

I don’t get past three.

When I awake, I’m in recovery. A nurse tells me they’re bringing me back to my ward, and explains I have a clicker in my hand to control my morphine intake. My right leg sears where they’ve cut into me.

I flitter in and out of sleep as I’m wheeled through hallways, the anaesthetic a fog I can’t entirely escape. When we reach the ward, the old woman’s waiting by the entrance. I’m not surprised to see her. I expect her. The orderly pushing my bed goes to consult with a nurse to check on where I should be put. The old woman teeters, trying to summon the courage to approach me, her mouth moving wordlessly. I lift the hand that holds the morphine clicker; I want to tell her to stay where she is, that it’s okay.

The orderly returns. “All good?” he asks.

I nod.

He wheels my bed back into position. The old woman smiles at me from the ward’s entrance, as if we’ve come to an unspoken understanding. I think about my anger, about the way I thought of her, about how I wanted to tear her down, but I see her now for what she is: an old woman who made a mistake.

I turn away from her and to the window. The sun blazes across my face and coats my body with warmth. The bus stop sits there although I register it as little more than an afterthought as I drive my gaze up, up, up the road, to where it meets the sky.

It’s the last thing I see before I fall back to sleep.

i.

Bob stormed from Eve’s house and clambered into his tan Ford Laser sedan. He dumped his phone into the change compartment, and started the car. She’d message now, start the inevitable to and froing. He switched on the radio – Howard Jones’ Things Can Only Get Better blared at him. Ha!

On the bypass, peak hour traffic thickened. Bob checked the rear-view mirror. Another 91 tan Ford Laser sedan drifted behind him – a coincidence, but always a kick to see a clunker like his own still out on the road.

Bob’s eyes narrowed. The car was more than just like his own. There was also a big tick-shaped scratch on the hood, the grille was similarly dented, and it had the same askew registration: B0BB0B – his registration.

The car wasn’t like his own. It was his car.

His mind raced. Was this a joke? Or maybe something more sinister? Identity theft perhaps. Bob snorted. He had nothing worth stealing.

Bob sped onto the freeway, but the other Laser accelerated alongside him, the driver a silhouette through the tinted passenger window. Wind funnelled around them, a blurry but inescapable vortex.

‘Hey!’ Bob said. ‘What the hell?’

The passenger window lowered. Gaping back at Bob was himself.

ii.

Bob stormed from Eve’s house and clambered into his tan Ford Laser sedan. He dumped his phone into the change compartment, and started the car. She’d message now, start the inevitable to and froing. He switched on the radio – Howard Jones’ Things Can Only Get Better blared at him. Ha!

On the Bypass, peak hour traffic thickened. Bob checked the rear-view mirror, then lifted his gaze. A car pulled into his lane in front of him: another 91 tan Ford Laser sedan – a coincidence, but it was always a kick to see a clunker like his own still out on the road.

Bob’s eyes narrowed. The car was more than just like his own. It had the same dented bumper and cracked right brake-light. The registration read B0BB0B – his registration.

The car wasn’t like his own. It was his car.

His mind raced. Was this a joke? Or maybe something more sinister? Identity theft perhaps. Bob snorted. He had nothing worth stealing.

He followed the Laser onto the freeway, accelerated, swerved into the adjacent lane. Other motorists honked him. He pulled up alongside the duplicate Laser. Wind funnelled around them, a blurry but inescapable vortex.

‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What the hell?’

The driver’s window lowered. Gaping back at Bob was himself.

iii.

Bob stormed from Eve’s house and clambered into his tan Ford Laser sedan. He dumped his phone into the change compartment, and started the car. She’d message now, start the inevitable to and froing. He switched on the radio – Howard Jones’ Things Can Only Get Better blared at him. Ha!

On the Bypass, peak hour traffic thickened. Bob checked his rear-view mirror. A 91 tan Ford Laser sedan drifted behind him, whilst another 91 tan Ford Laser pulled into his lane in front of him. He chortled. What were the odds of that?

Bob’s eyes narrowed. The car in front of him had the same dented bumper and cracked right brake-light. He checked the rear-view mirror. The Laser behind him had a big tick-shaped scratch on the hood. Both cars had the same registration: B0BB0B – his registration.

The cars weren’t like his own. They were his car.

The collar of his t-shirt tightened. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his breath came in shallow gasps. This was impossible.

He followed the Laser in front onto the freeway, accelerated, swerved into the adjacent lane. Other motorists honked him. The Laser behind him sped up, flanked him, so he was now between the two.

‘Hey!’ Bob said. ‘What the hell?’

Windows rolled down. Bob was mirrored to either side – both drivers were him, eyes wide, mouths agape. Wind funnelled around them. Bob’s mobile beeped. A message from Eve. His thumb hovered over the phone. The funnel tightened and he choked for breath. He deleted the message. The funnel shattered. Images of himself fell away, like shards from a broken mirror.

He dumped the phone back into the change compartment.

And drove into the unknown.

“You’re stressed,” my GP told me following a check-up. “Is there anything bothering you?”

Bothering me? Hmmm. Let me see. Relationship in the shitter, no social life, and work … ah, the inanity of work. People dropping in on me. Constantly. “Can you take a look at this?” Courteous. Exquisitely. “Write this up for me. Cheers.” Behind their fake smiles. Their plastic expressions. Their neediness. “How’s that report going?” Their ongoing demands, always their demands, never-ending, never-stopping, never—

“No,” I said.

“You need a way to unwind!” my GP declared, as if this was the most radical diagnosis he’d ever pronounced. “A hobby! Everybody needs a hobby! Find something you enjoy doing, something that’ll help you relax. Preferably something physical. Get rid of that nervous energy. Spend it. Leave it all out there. It’ll do you a world of good.”

I tried the gym, but company annoyed me – people offering to spot me, asking me how much I could bench, wanting to talk. I exercised in my garage, but found it claustrophobic. I tried jogging, but my feet were pounded into surrender. On and on my search went, through a variety of endeavours, until I discovered cycling and the open road. This was it, and I even bought all the gear – bike, helmet, reflective kit, pump, chain-lock, water bottle, and even a pedometer. The whole lot set me back over a grand, but it was worth it.

The first week my muscles burned with every metre pedalled, protested at every hill, and screamed for relief the further I pushed myself. Conditions that seemed mild – like a cool breeze – were exacerbated at high speeds on my bike. But I was invigorated – reinvigorated. I controlled the pace, cruising when possible, and speeding whenever the urge took me. Most of all, I revelled in being uncaged, open and free. By the second week, I couldn’t wait to finish the daily tedium of work to get on my bike.

Then I learned the most disturbing thing. Or maybe I just started noticing it – noticing it in a way that it becomes impossible to un-notice it, and which makes every subsequent incident cumulatively aggravating.

Cyclists have their own little sub-societal etiquette.

Whenever I passed somebody on a bike, they’d nod their head in acknowledgement – acknowledgement that, hey, they were a cyclist just like me (in case I hadn’t noticed). If we were going leisurely enough, it wasn’t just a nod, but an entire “Hey”, or even a, “Hey, how’re you doing?”

I tried to ignore it initially, tried to conveniently look the other way whenever these exchanges loomed. But they became inescapable, gnawing at me, overwhelming me through their sheer weight of repetition.

Pressing.

Demanding.

Smothering.

Nod.

Nod back.

“Hey.”

Hey.

“Hey, how’re you doing?”

Good.

Somebody even had the audacity to stop to talk to me one evening when I’d paused at a park for a breather. He pulled up right alongside me, hopping gracefully off his bike even before it had come to a halt, and resting it against the bench by which I stood.

I braced myself as he approached – his lycra bodysuit exaggerating how finely his muscles were etched into his torso. His ingratiating smile was a weapon he was already firing at me. Even the sweat that trickled down his tanned face was fashionable.

“Hey.”

Hey. I checked my pedometer. Three Ks so far.

“Nice bike.”

Thanks. I took a drink from my water bottle.

“Looks pretty new.”

Yup. I took my chain-lock from my bike.

“Haven’t been riding long, have you?”

Uh uh. Wrapped my chain-lock around my right hand.

“You’re probably only just starting to feel the benefits – the muscle tone in your legs, the increased fitness, the mental well-being.”

Hmmm. Closed my right hand into a fist.

“But what is it they say?”

What? Cocked my right hand back.

“Healthy body, healthy—”

And punched his fucking head in.

The first blow hit him – literally hit him – right between the eyes. The flesh popped, like a burst water balloon, with a splatter of blood; there was an almighty crack, which must’ve been the bridge of his nose shattering; and yet what registered first on his face was surprise.

That would teach him.

Something must’ve clicked in his head then, some survival instinct, because he tried pulling away. He wasn’t quick enough. My next punch caught him exactly in the same spot as the first, and he stumbled back, hitting the bench, and falling onto his butt.

I kept punching him and punching him; punching him until he was lying back on the bench, and I had a knee planted into his chest; punching him until his face was pulped, the way an orange gets when you grind it; punching him until his skull shimmered within the flesh of his head, as if it had shattered and lost cohesiveness; punching him until I had nothing left to give, and no rage left to exhaust.

I rose from the body, and took a moment to compose myself.

Then I took him and ditched his body in some thickets, covering him with branches until he was hidden. I had no illusions; he’d be found, and much sooner than later. But I didn’t want him lying out in the open like that. What if kids stumbled upon him in the morning, when they were crossing the park to get to school? You can’t be subjecting impressionable young minds to shit like that.

His bike I set against a pole on the far side of the park, by the road. Unchained, it was sure to be stolen. It was just a matter of time. Damn neighbourhood. You really can’t feel safe anywhere nowadays.

I was about to get on my bike when I realised that I felt different. Something had changed. I stopped, gave myself a moment, and found my mind clear. I was filled with a peculiar but intoxicating euphoria.

For the first time in many, many months, I felt awesome.

Getting on my bike, I rode from the park.

My GP was right.

Everybody needs a hobby.

Once upon a time, a writer was showering when inspiration struck – an idea for a new book! The Writer was breathless, excited, awed. He’d already written a couple of books — one about a blind, idiot savant serial killer who worked in a prison as a janitor, killing the prisoners one by one; the other about feral bunnies who rebelled and enslaved the human populace. Shockingly, neither book sold. Each did the rounds of the slush piles but elicited only rejection after rejection.

This new idea, though, was The One.

The Writer was sure of it.

He wrote to the detriment of everything else in his life. He neglected his wife, barely seeing or speaking to her. The Wife was not surprised, as she was used to her husband’s idiosyncrasies — although by no means did she approve of them. She not only considered her husband’s aspirations foolish, but thought him foolish, too. The Writer also became unreliable in his job as produce manager at the local Safeway. His boss was particularly displeased as The Writer would often show up late to work, and sometimes not at all. But The Writer fawned and thanked his boss so much for his continued support that The Boss didn’t have the heart to fire him. The Writer’s already-anorexic social life deteriorated, and his physical and mental wellbeing declined. His few friends hardly saw him, and he scarcely ate or washed or slept.

How could he? There was something much more important to be done. He had to write! Nothing else mattered. He needed to finish his book. Needed to! Everybody and everything else could be damned. The people in his life would understand once his book became a bestseller. Maybe he’d even buy each of them a nice present.

Maybe.

When The Writer finished his book — a manuscript, he deemed, of awesome scope, stunning complexity and masterful storytelling — he grimaced at the thought of all the paper and ink he would have to waste to print out a rough draft. Reams of paper were cheap enough at about six bucks a ream, but ink…? Toners for printers weren't cheap. Like a salesman once told him, manufacturers didn’t make their money on the printers themselves. But for as spendthrift as he was, this needed to be done.

The Writer printed out one hardcopy, and gave it to his wife to read. Actually, The Wife had to be pushed to read it. Her ongoing comments were neither helpful nor encouraging. Moreover, her noncommittal grunts, mordant half-smirks, and occasional rolling of the eyes, as she read the book in bed, offended The Writer.

It took a week for her to read the book, and she was indifferent when she was done, conceding as if she was no more doing no more than comment on the weather, “Yeah, it’s good.” This prompted The Writer to consider taking his old Olivetti clunker out of the attic and burying it in his wife’s head. It’d be the best work it had ever done.

Never mind, he told himself. His friends would offer better insights, and he passed the same draft around to them to read. They were used to looking at his work and had tried to be encouraging over the years. Once they were each done reading The Writer’s latest manuscript, they decided to take him out for a meal and make a night of it.

They had pizzas and beers and talked about the stress of their relationships and the tedium of their jobs and how the coming Christmas was bankrupting them. Throughout, the anticipation built for The Writer. What would his friends say? Come their sixth round of beers, they finally hit The Writer with the wisdom of their collective feedback.

“Yeah, it’s good,” they told him.

Annoyed, The Writer decided that a book as brilliant as the one he’d written needed a lover, not a series of prostitutes. Why the hell was he relying on his wife (who had the intellect and usefulness of an empty spare-tyre compartment) or his friends (whose idea of reading was browsing the copy on an internet porn site)? He needed professional help, and sought a manuscript assessment service.

Unfortunately, this path never eventuated, as The Wife told The Writer in no uncertain terms that they didn’t have the money to spend on getting his book assessed. The Writer was resentful, and The Wife’s rejoinder that this wouldn’t have happened if he had a more practical job — like lawyer, doctor, garbage man, crash test dummy, or medical cadaver — was no help at all.

The Writer, ever the paragon of self-reliance, recomposed himself and spent the next two months proofing, revising and editing. Again, he obsessed; again, his marital and social relationships, his job, and his physical and mental health suffered. Christmas went by unnoticed and New Year uncelebrated. This didn’t bother The Writer. He told himself it’d all be worth it in the end.

The greater the suffering, the greater the rewards.

Becoming sicklier and more impoverished each passing day, The Writer put the finishing touches to his book. He realised, with microscopic humility, that his previous works were acquired tastes. Obviously, that had contributed to their failure in the world of publishing, but, no doubt, they’d be published retrospectively on the back of his fame after this book became, as they say, ONE BIG FUCKING HIT.

The Writer began printing a final draft of his book. Midway through the job, a paper jam cost seventeen pages of paper. Usually, such an incident would have enraged The Writer. This time, as he was dealing with a work of such magnificence, his tolerance and good manner were commensurate.

These things happen, he told himself.

The Writer cleared the paper-jam and resumed printing. Unfortunately, with just sixteen pages of printing remaining, the toner ran out of ink. The Writer stared at the printer in disbelief. The printer stoically looked back at The Writer (if it could be said that printers had expressions). The Writer’s anger rose.

If not for that damn paper jam …!

The Writer pleaded with God, demanding to know why these things always happened to him. God chose not to answer. This could’ve been for a variety of reasons. Perhaps there was no God who could answer. Perhaps there was a God but He was busy. Perhaps God found The Writer’s request trivial. Or perhaps, just perhaps, God could not issue a response because He had run out of toner Himself.

The Writer begged his wife for the $106.00 to buy some new toner. This did not go over well because The Wife had just bought a new pair of shoes. She told The Writer there was no money in the monthly budget for a toner cartridge. Maybe next month. Or the one after. And if not then, definitely the one after that. If they saved. Well, probably, but he shouldn’t bank on it, because she had her eye on a dress.

Exasperation skyrocketing, The Writer considered his options. He could sell blood, or semen, or maybe even strangle his wife, gut her with a dull butter-knife and sell one of her kidneys on the black-market. These all seemed good, logical options, and only one of them was not at all realistic — giving blood always left him dizzy.

Instead, The Writer pulled the toner cartridge out of the printer, shook it, threatened it, and then reinserted it. It printed a couple of pages fine, but the next one was faded. He took it out again and repeated the process over and over until the printing of his book was completed.

The Writer then took his newly-printed book — his masterpiece — to the post office and mailed it to a publisher, being careful to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope so they could mail it back to him (if required). He did this to observe etiquette. There’d be no need for it, as the publisher was going to love his book and get on the phone to him the moment they’d read it.

When, five-and-a-half months later, the publisher responded, using The Writer’s stamped self-addressed envelope, excitement brimmed through his limbs. With trembling hands he tore open the envelope and pulled out the publisher’s letter, which thanked him for his submission but lamented that it was not quite right for them. But, happily, they did wish him all the best in the future! The Writer was dejected but not defeated. He scrounged the money together to submit the book to another publisher.

Three months later, he received a rejection from them, also. The Writer’s frustration blazed into infuriation. He forced himself to look at the bright side: at least this rejection had been quick – well, sort of quick compared to the time it took to receive the first rejection. Again, he scraped together the money to submit his book to another publisher. And another after that. And another. In the space of eighteen months he went through five publishers.

Or perhaps it can be said that five publishers went through him.

But the sixth publisher thought they saw something in the manuscript and held a production meeting in regard to The Writer’s book. The Editors loved it. They thought it could be THE NEXT BIG THING. The Finance Department asserted that the book was doable in terms of expense, but they were concerned about whether it’d make a profit. The Marketing Department suggested that the book might have limited appeal. What if it came down to selling The Writer to sell the book? How would he hold up in appearances at readings and in interviews? Would people buy the book on the basis of being charmed by the author? They had researched him and found he had a limited online presence – a handful of short stories he’d had published over the years. At the end of much discussion and debate, the meeting yielded the result that The Noble Publisher would go ahead with The Writer’s book.

When they contacted The Writer to tell him the good news, The Writer was ecstatic, and The Wife thought that maybe her husband wasn’t such a screw-up after all. This was a notion she entertained then dismissed on the basis that it had no right to exist in a marriage.

The Writer did not care. He signed a contract with The Noble Publisher, receiving a pittance up-front and a percentage in royalties with which he would be lucky to buy a new toner cartridge. The Wife was irate, asking The Writer if this was what all his work and time had amounted to. The Writer wasn’t bothered; his book would become a bestseller and he’d soon be rich. Then, maybe, he’d take a contract out on his wife.

Of course, he was being facetious. Why let somebody else have all the fun?

The Noble Publisher was aware of none of The Writer’s domestic issues, as they concentrated on making the book a reality. They retained a designer, and had the manuscript edited and their style applied, oblivious to what The Writer was going through.

The Writer recoiled at the amount of edits. Surely The Noble Publisher hadn’t recognised the work of genius they had in their hands; how could they tamper with such a masterpiece? The Wife told The Writer not to be such an idiot (she already thought he was an idiot, so he was just being more of an idiot). He should be happy they’d taken his book at all. The Writer obliged, knowing that when the money started pouring in, The Wife would have to be more gracious, and The Noble Publisher would have to give him more leeway on his next work.

While the designer chose the style, size and leading of the text and the headings, breathing life into the words on the page, The Writer got extensions on his credit card. The Wife bought up big on shoes. She wasn’t convinced that the book would make a fortune, and she didn’t need all those shoes; she just knew that, whatever happened, her husband would be paying.

Just as he’d done their entire married life.

The Noble Publisher continued work on the book. The first page proofs for the manuscript were corrected and the artwork scanned. The Writer, indifferent to the technicalities of his book’s production, thought his life was finally gaining momentum — positive momentum — and his books would fuel a long and prosperous career. As a reward to himself, he put a deposit on a new car — a sporty red Mazda he’d had his eye on for several years.

The second page proofs of the book went to The Writer and The Editor. The Writer grinned and accommodated The Noble Publisher. Things would be different for his second book! He’d have the power, and then they’d be falling over themselves to accommodate him.

The artwork was prepared. The Writer disagreed with The Noble Publisher’s selections. The Noble Publisher tried to appease him by telling him they knew the market. The Writer baulked, saying he knew his book. The Noble Publisher told The Writer that he had signed a contract and this was their choice. The Writer said they didn’t understand his work. The Wife interceded and told The Writer to shut up and stop rocking the boat. The Noble Publisher sent The Wife a bouquet of flowers. The Wife had a fling with The Noble Publisher’s designer.

The revised page proofs were checked and finalised, the plates were set, and The Writer’s book was printed and bound. Convinced he was going to be a huge success, The Writer waltzed into work at Safeway, got onto the intercom and quit his job, telling his boss, “Stick it!”

Then The Writer celebrated — truly celebrated — his first Christmas in three years. He lavished gifts on his wife (who was touched by the gesture and mellowed, then decided that mellowing had no place in their marriage), and his friends, much to the chagrin of his credit card, which grimaced (if it could be said that credit cards could do such a thing).

New Year brought not resolutions from The Writer, but plans. He mapped out his entire life: which novels he’d write and in what order; what he’d say in interviews with Ellen and Oprah; and how exactly he’d use his towering success to tame, break and reinvent his marriage.

Advance copies of The Writer’s book were handed out. The Writer took his share, showering them on his wife’s family (who had always thought he was no good), his friends (who thought he was good, but would never amount to anything) and his ex-workmates (who were largely indifferent to whether he was good or not). The bulk stock of The Writer’s book hit the warehouse, and then filled the shelves of retailers’ stores.

Sadly, very few copies of The Writer’s book sold.

The Wife, disgusted by The Writer’s continuing failure, not to mention his accumulating debts, left him for the Noble Publisher’s designer. The Writer returned to Safeway and begged his boss to take him back.

His boss said, “Stick it!”

So alone and destitute, health failing, and indebted, The Writer succumbed to the hopelessness of his life and threw himself from a bridge. While this was a horrible life-choice, it was the best career move The Writer had ever made.

Popularized by his death (and the glorious calamity of his life story as it emerged in the newspapers and, even more spectacularly, in the glossy magazines), The Writer’s book became a bestseller. The Noble Publisher went into second, third and fourth print runs. The book won awards.

The Wife — now The Merry Widow — told the media that she had always thought her husband would make it, and that she had always believed in him and that his book was good, regardless of what everybody else had said – in fact, regardless of what he’d said. She espoused that he’d often had crisis of confidence, and had to unfailingly prop him up until … until …

Well, there, her Story tapered away, leaving the Public to martyr her, and laud her courage and nobility. She became rich on the success of her dead husband’s novel. His previous two manuscripts were published, and they also became bestsellers, and his short stories were released in anthologies.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Except for The Writer, of course.

As the hot water sprayed Lucas and steam filled the shower cubicle, the scars on his body glistened, pink, raw and, most of all, entirely surreal. He traced one with his fingertip, still in disbelief at its existence. Twelve months might’ve healed the wounds, but the evidence would remain forever. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

The doorbell rang, puncturing his attempt to recompose himself. Lucas turned off the water, stepped from the shower, and tied his robe tighter than it had to be. He hurried into the dim hallway, anxious to be done with this. Light trickled in through the tattered curtains in the lounge, dust mites floating through the air.

Lucas grabbed his keycard from the mantle. His chest tightened and legs quavered as he peered through the front door peephole but, as expected, it was just the pizza delivery guy – a gangly teenager whose curly hair poked defiantly from the rim of his baseball cap. Lucas opened the door and blinked into the sunlight. He thrust his keycard at the delivery guy and snatched the pizza from him.

“Oh, wait, I don’t have the thing,” the delivery guy said.

“What?”

“The thing.” The delivery guy mimed using the card reader. “For the card.”

“You don’t have it?”

“I mean it’s in the car. Hang on.”

Lucas bounced on the spot as he waited for the delivery guy to return. A short, buxom brunette in tight black jeans and blouse walked up onto Aiden’s veranda next door. She flashed a smile and Lucas tried to grin back, but she looked away quickly, so all he must’ve offered was a grimace.

The delivery guy returned with the card reader, swiped Lucas’s card, made an error, apologized, then swiped it again. Lucas wordlessly cursed every delay, the ground underneath his feet rocking, his breath shortening.

“Debit?” the delivery guy asked.

“Yeah.”

The delivery guy keyed in the amount, then offered the card reader to Lucas. Lucas reached for the keypad, hand trembling. He closed his fist, told himself he was less than a minute from being done, and typed in his pin.

“You okay, man?” the delivery guy asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look so good.”

“Got a cold.”

“Bummer.” The delivery guy watched the face of the card reader. “All cool. Want the receipt?”

“No.” Lucas started to close the door.

“Hey! Your card!”

Lucas snatched back his keycard. “Thanks.”

He slammed the door, flicked his keycard onto the mantle, and hurried into the study. It was dark except for his computers, their operating lights flickering, processors whirring. Their cases lay open, cables interlinking them as if some gargantuan spider had wound them all up in some hideous multi-colored web. An array of flat screens blared. Websites appeared on some, while columns of code unraveled across others.

Lucas cleared the table of notepads, cans, and chocolate wrappers, then put his pizza down. He sank into his recliner and sat there, waiting as his breath normalized and heart settled. The smell of the pizza wafted into his nostrils and warmth emanated from the box. He grabbed a slice, the cheese leaving a contrail across the desk, took a bite, and alternated his attention between the code on the screens and a USB that protruded from a port in one of the computers, its function light blinking frantically.

Monty was at work.

One of the sites unlocked into its root server with a triumphant beep. Lucas grinned. Monty was a phishing program he’d devised, replete with firewalls and an ISP randomizer to protect his location – at least temporarily. Right now, Monty was hacking into several servers – nothing major, just sites that were good test runs.

Through the wall Lucas heard soft music, something slow and melodic – Aiden, no doubt, entertaining his date. Lucas wished he had Aiden’s confidence, Aiden’s charms, Aiden’s looks.

But he didn’t.

He had his scars and his computers.

And his pizza.

At midnight, Lucas finally resigned to tiredness and went to bed. Light twinkled into the doorway from the computers in his study, like they were a gaggle of unruly teenagers staying up for a sleepover. Monty would be at it all night – he had a list of sites to crack. Through the wall, moans punctuated a squeaking bed. Nothing new in Aiden’s world.

Lucas stroked himself through his pajamas. His erection stirred. He closed his eyes and thought of Karen, wishing he’d dream of her, of normal times, of dates and kisses and happiness..

But he knew he’d dream of knives instead.

The doorbell woke Lucas, but it was the ringing phone that got him moving. He reached for the phone on the bedside table. Nothing but emptiness. He stumbled out of bed, put on his robe and hurried into his study, where he found his phone. Monty was still busy at work.

“Hello?” Lucas answered as he drifted into the hallway and looked through the front door’s peephole. A supermarket deliveryman got into his van.

“Hey, Lucas,” a coarse voice on the other end of the phone said, “only me.”

Me was his boss, Harry Parkes, who owned and ran WebCentrics. Harry knew little about IT, less about design, and nothing about coding, but he did know how to mesmerize clients. There was a backlog of work dating months.

“How’s that bakery job going?” Harry asked.

Lucas opened the front door. A box of groceries sat on the front step, like a patient dog waiting to be let in. Lucas picked them up. In the neighbor’s drive, Aiden was getting into his Ford. He smiled and waved to Lucas, a collection of perfect things – perfect body, perfect sculpted face, perfect beaming smile. He belonged on a billboard. Lucas waved back.

“Tonight, huh?” Aiden said.

Lucas gave him a thumbs-up and closed the door. As Harry went over details that didn’t need going over, Lucas put his groceries in the kitchenette, fixed a couple of slices of toast and poured an orange juice. He swallowed his two antidepressants, wolfed through breakfast, and finally interrupted Harry to assure him he would be finished tomorrow – he’d be finished today, but Harry didn’t need to know that.

After Lucas was done – both with breakfast and Harry – he returned to the study to find Monty had infiltrated thirteen of the twenty-five assigned sites. That was better than Lucas had anticipated.

He poured through reams of code Monty had recorded – a log of his travails most would’ve considered indecipherable. Lucas had shown the code to Aiden once, who thought it gibberish. But Lucas could see patterns in it, could see a language which, sometimes, he felt only he understood.

He’d programmed Monty with a metamorphic algorithm that identified patterns and anticipated the probability of characters in any given password. In short, Monty learned and adapted, so the more data he accumulated, the more intuitive he became – the hope was he could even grow to predict randomness. Most mid-range sites used variations of the same security, and checking the time indexes showed Monty’s successes had come progressively quicker.

The big boys would be next.

With Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto” playing on the stereo in the lounge room, Lucas spent the rest of the day on the job for WebCentrics – a site for Alfonso’s Bakery. It was little more than a glorified frontend, but it was a fifteen hundred dollar pay-check.

Every now and again he checked on Monty, who continued notching up triumph after triumph. When Lucas was finished with Alfonso’s early in the evening, he printed a hardcopy of Monty’s log to flick through. In the coding, Lucas could see the websites the coding constituted, but there was also some shadowy tendril. It looked almost like redundant leftover code, although its constancy wouldn’t explain why it appeared on every site, nor why it was encrypted.

A rapid thumping at the door startled him – trademark Aiden. Laying the printouts aside, Lucas headed down the hallway. The familiar sensations greeted him – the quickening heart, the shortening breath, and stifling around the collar. He tried to dismiss them.

Beer would provide a sedative soon.

Lucas and Aiden sat on a couple of wicker chairs on the veranda their houses shared. The willows lining the street not only swayed mournfully in the night, but provided a shadowy wall that at least created the illusion that Lucas was enclosed. Still, that didn’t stop him from racing through his first Corona. His breath was still shallow, and he couldn’t stop fidgeting. It would settle as soon as the beer took effect – although he was eager to get back to his printouts. Aiden drank at a more sedate pace. Four more Coronas sat in their six-pack box on the little table between their chairs.

“Game Saturday night,” Aiden said. “You should come.”

“Maybe,” Lucas said, but there was no maybe about it.

“It’ll be okay, you know,” Aiden said.

Lucas finished his Corona, grabbed another, opened it with Aiden’s key-ring opener, and took another swig.

“You should try. The world’s not like that night.”

Lucas had heard all this before – from psychologists, counsellors, Karen before she’d given up on him (and not that he could blame her), and sometimes even himself.

“Can we just … you know, sit here, talk about normal stuff?” he asked.

“Just trying to help, man.”

“I know. But some things can’t be helped.”

“That’s not true.”

“What do I do?” he asked. “Every person I look at, I think they’re a threat, I think they’re gonna pull a knife. I know it’s not the case. I tell myself it’s not the case. But telling doesn’t mean believing.”

“So you’re just gonna live in your shell?”

“Modern living, Aiden. You can do everything from a computer.”

“Not everything.”

Lucas finished his second beer. They hadn’t gone down well tonight. There was no buzz, nor any mellowing. “I gotta go,” he said.

“We just sat down.”

Lucas rose. “I got some work waiting.”

“I’m sorry if I pissed you off.”

“It’s not that. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Lucas …?”

Lucas went back into his house.

The code was everywhere. Lucas had thought it was interlaced through the websites, but over the next several days he traced it in servers, in browsers, as well as in various operating systems. It wasn’t indigenous. Somebody had sewn this in, or had set it loose, like a virus, to intertwine itself – no, not a virus, but a parasite.

Lucas printed out every example and tiled the floor with it. When he ran out of room in his study, he used the hallway, the kitchenette, and the dining room. When there was no more space, he wallpapered the walls.

Still, he couldn’t piece together what he was seeing. It wasn’t until he was sitting in his creaking chair flicking through sheet after sheet, trying to take them all in at once, that he realized he was staring at fragments. Independently, they were an oddity, but innocuous. Together – a site interlaced with the server, a browser, and a computer’s operating system – the code formed a protocol that relayed data to another remote host. Lucas got on the computer and tracked the host to a farming equipment website that sold harvesters. Surely that couldn’t be right.

He set Monty onto the site, almost out of habit. The security surprised him. It wasn’t commensurate with a retail website. It had to be a dupe. Lucas rose, paced the floor, snowy with printouts and crunching underfoot. His stomach rumbled – both with hunger, as well as constipation. His own odor clogged his nostrils.

He checked his main screen. Monty obliviously phished away. Lucas decided to use a little time to take care of himself.

Lucas went to the toilet, showered, and made himself a sandwich, but remained preoccupied with the code throughout. Computers – both hardware and software – were an amalgamation of technology. Components could go through numerous hands before they reached their destination. Anywhere along the way, a foreign body could be slipped in.

The question was why. Lucas couldn’t come up with one reason that satisfied the foreign coding’s pervasiveness. That alone suggested a realm of power usually associated with a level of security he really shouldn’t be engaging. The best thing to do would be to unplug Monty, trash the printouts, and forget about it.

Somebody pounded at the front door. Lucas jumped. But it was Aiden – had to be. Everybody else used the doorbell. He wouldn’t let up, either. Any failure to respond meant something was wrong. Lucas hauled himself up and trudged to the door.

“Haven’t seen you for a couple of days,” Aiden said, noting all the paper spread across the floor and on the walls. “Everything okay?”

“Had bugs with some of the stuff I’ve been working on. Been trying to work it out.”

“I got a date in a bit, but how about a beer?”

“Mind if we do it tomorrow? I’m pretty tired.”

“Sure.”

Lucas started closing the door.

“Hey?”

Lucas froze.

“I’m sorry about the other night.”

“It’s okay. My bad.”

“I’ll bring some beers, pizza, and movies over tomorrow, huh?”

“Yeah. That’ll be good.”

“See’ya then.”

Lucas again started closing the door but now stopped of his own volition. “Aiden?”

Aiden, halfway down the veranda stairs, turned.

“Thanks.”

Aiden flashed a grin that would’ve killed with the women. “No problem.”

Lucas closed the door.

Lucas rifled through the desk drawer in his study. It was where bits and pieces went to remain out of sight. He plundered through paperclips, memo pads, pencils and erasers, then finally found it – a creased picture with dog-eared corners of him and Karen taken in a booth that night.

Karen had her arms around him, her lips exaggeratedly pursed at his cheek. Her red hair fell tousled over her face. He was grinning – he’d tried to be suave, but he’d been stunned that somebody like Karen would be interested in him.

His thumb stroked her face. Where would Karen be now? Probably dating somebody like Aiden. She’d tried with Lucas, tried to help, but he couldn’t reconcile before with after, and was only left being stuck in now. His hand tightened around the picture.

Monty bleeped triumphantly. Lucas spun in his chair and absently shoved the shot of Karen and himself in his pocket. The retail website disappeared. Appearing on each flat screen was:

Lucas half-typed his own name but then stopped. He should use somebody else’s, but his mind blanked. Music filtered in from next door. Should he? Moans resounded, and then a bed squeaked.

He typed in Aiden’s full name and hit ENTER. Numerous results appeared with addresses from all around the world. Lucas scrolled through them and chose the one from next door.

The screen segmented, each section filtering different information: Aiden’s personal details; a history of the websites Aiden had visited for the last five years; a breakdown of his surfing habits; as well as a psychological profile.

Lucas lost track of time as he read through the text. The profile was assembled entirely through an analysis of Aiden’s browsing history – what he read, where he shopped, how much he spent, how much he banked, what he typed in search windows, the sorts of nicknames he used when registering for sites, messages he posted, the times he was logged on, how he interacted on social media – nothing had been overlooked.

The last paragraph offered a conclusion: Subject is above average intelligence, but unmotivated professionally. Given his parents have each divorced twice, it would suggest the subject has a reluctance for commitment. Being brought up predominantly by his father has robbed him of a strong female role model, which could suggest a disregard for women. He has a need for male camaraderie, and showcases a surprising level of empathy. But he does like routine, and the unexpected can trigger insecurity.

And on it went.

The name – Harvester – was apt: it was harvesting users from the internet and profiling them through their browsing habits.

There wasn’t even a question of who was responsible – likely it was some sort of Big Brother protocol, which meant it had to emerge from some shadowy government sect or, more likely, an intelligence agency. And if that was the case …

Lucas shot to his feet. How long before his intrusion was detected? Given the Harvester’s sophistication, it was likely there would be equally advanced security built around it. How long before it unscrambled Monty’s location. Not to mention Lucas had been idiot enough to use Aiden’s name – Aiden’s address would be a starting point for any search. Was he being tracked now? The screen showed nothing.

Rushing to the front door, Lucas jerked it open. Headlights appeared at either end of the street and engines gunned. Cars raced toward his house; a helicopter rumbled in overhead and shook the walls. The cars screeched to a halt. Doors opened. People in black suits and gloves shot out, hands going into their jackets. A flitting spotlight from the helicopter blinded Lucas before engulfing Aiden’s house.

Slamming the door shut, Lucas stomped through the printouts and glowered at his computers. It was impossible to clean up what he’d done. There was physical evidence everywhere. It was just a matter of time before they realized their error in apprehending Aiden.

Yanking Monty out of the computer, Lucas stuffed the USB in his pocket, grabbed his jacket, shoved his feet right into his shoes, and staggered to the back door. Through the walls, he heard the suits break into Aiden’s house, and Aiden’s and his date’s startled shouts.

Lucas opened the back door. His heart pounded so hard it beat in his ribs, and his breath had become so thick he couldn’t force it into his lungs. Sweat streamed from his temples. His tiny backyard swayed, like a boat on an ocean swell.

He stood, certain he couldn’t go, but when the front door splintered and crashed behind him, his resistance sundered like a snapped plank, and he stumbled out into the dark without looking back.

i.

The promotion should’ve been mine!

The Associates implied they were going to choose me for the position of fiction publisher if I did a good job, if I put in the time, but instead they went with an outsider, with Ivan, Ivan (or Eee-vun, as he pronounced his name) Kerkow.

Ivan Kerkow!

I hadn’t planned to kill him – really I hadn’t. Oh, certainly, you can make a case that I cut the b-string from my piano; that I brought my tattered gardening gloves with the frayed hems in to work; that I wore my black jeans, a black jacket, and a gray shirt; and that I lay in wait, in the parking lot, enshrouded in darkness, surrounded by thickets, obscured by driving rain splattering on the glistening asphalt; but, really, I was only trying to feel self-important – anybody would do the same.

Then he emerged from the building’s rear exit, this tiny thin man in an awful cream cardigan with patched elbows, whistling a merry tune and jingling his car keys as he made his way to his company car (a Beamer), a bounce in his step.

A bounce!

Next thing I knew, I had the piano string tightening around his neck – tightening so that it carved into his throat and sheared through flesh, muscle, and tendon. It felt – and sounded (for what muffled, grinding sound it made, and could be heard over his gurgling and gasping, our wrestling, as well as the pounding rain) – like leather ripping.

He couldn’t scream, couldn’t use that voice that had inexplicably impressed the Associates into choosing him over me. But he did struggle for what little it was worth, although I was too determined – as determined as I had been after they’d implied the promotion was mine.

Pain sliced into the bottom half of my right hand – the piano string had cut through my glove and was now doing to my poor hand what it was doing to the beastly Ivan’s neck. Oh, the damn usurper. This horrible, thoughtless man. Would his inconsideration never end? First my promotion, then one of my favorite gardening gloves, and now my hand. How much more need I suffer?

Supported only by the piano string, his body slumped, a lifeless marionette now bereft of all ambition. I stood there a moment or two, reconciling what I’d done, until the sound of his keys falling from his limp grasp and hitting the ground startled me into action. Where to now? I had not considered this at all. But I was a senior editor and used to cleaning up messes, used to making something coherent and purposeful from something ungodly and directionless.

The scene. I had to clear the scene!

I went to my battered Ford and opened the boot, still filled with sacks of remaindered books. You see them on discount tables outside bookstores, beggars crying for a home before they are sent back to be pulped. I collected them periodically from the office with the intention of disposing of them but had not gotten around to it yet. Underneath them, I had a tarpaulin that I wrangled out and used to wrap up Ivan’s body.

He was little, but heavy – dense, no doubt, with duplicity – as I dragged him to my car and deposited him into the boot only to find I didn’t have the room. The backseat was an option, but risky. What if I was stopped? And why have him there anyway? Laying there reproachfully as I drove. Hadn’t the damn usurper cost me enough?

The Beemer!

I recovered his keys, opened the boot, and slung him in there. He fit so perfectly it may have been where he always belonged. Then I drove to the bay, taking a scenic route – the Beemer was a beautiful car, and who knew whether I would ever have opportunity to drive another? It was just too good a motoring experience to abbreviate as I had abbreviated Ivan.

When I arrived at my destination, I removed Ivan from the boot, unwrapped the tarpaulin enough to weigh him down with rocks from the bank, wrapped him back up like a book in a dust jacket, and rolled him into the bay. There. Gone. Just like a manuscript deleted with a single keystroke.

Now for the Beemer.

For one irrational moment, I contemplated keeping it. Why not? It should’ve been mine. Of course, now it was connected to a disappearance, so it had to go. I drove it far north to where suburbia ceded to paddocks and dirt roads, parked it roadside, then hiked back hours to the nearest bus stop. Thanks to our wonderful transport system, I was able to return to Gray’s parking lot around midnight. Fetching my own car, I drove home, where I washed out the wound to my hand.

It stung, and I imagined it would hurt worse tomorrow. Oh, that damn usurper. I wish he could feel this pain.

Still, it was a small price to pay.

ii.

It started with the Gems – not real gems, mind you, but classic books that had fallen into the public domain, which meant anybody could now republish them. The Associates had wanted me to repackage and re-release them, to gimmick them into a series. They say you should never judge a book by its cover. Maybe that’s true. What’s truer is that you can sell books with really nice covers.

I met the Associates in their conference room, taking the elevator up to their floor. The elevator itself rattled and heaved in its shaft, and short-circuited if you pushed too many buttons at once. The stairs were no better – their tiling cracked and shifting treacherously – and the stairwell itself dimly lighted (particularly when the single bulb was out).

It said something that this was the way the Associates separated themselves from the rest of us employees. But that was Gray’s – it was one of the oldest publishers in the world, and management liked to think of themselves as aristocracy. We employees were just the hapless court, ready to serve their every whim, while the public were their peasants.

But they were not as high and mighty as they believed. The windows in their conference room may have once overlooked a thriving coastal neighborhood full of promise back when Gray’s had first been established, but time had not been kind. Now it was a pedestrian industrial sector immersed in an omnipresent murk, the ocean itself a shadowy rumpled blanket. This area had not grown as they’d anticipated half a century earlier.

The Associates themselves were just ghostly silhouettes, although I could always identify each of them by their shape and mannerisms: Randolph Lippincott, old and bent yet still the tyrannical CEO; Penelope Morgan, upright and young (at forty-five) and ambitious, ruthless; Regina Boggs, matronly, seemingly ageless, and inscrutable; Stanley Sikes, stoic, barely a shadow, rumor claimed he’d died years ago and nobody had yet realized; Kay Harlow, wheezing, decrepit, so old that time used her as a measure.

They were toweringly unimpressive once you navigated their lineage and the façade behind their mystique, although whenever I interacted with them I liked to think of them as, if nothing else, bombastic, so their whimsy fit the conceit of theatre they vainly tried to perpetuate.

“Thank you for joining us,” Lippincott said grandly. “Thank you indeed. Now I won’t beat around the bush: there’s an opening for the role of fiction publisher. We need somebody astute to oversee our entire fiction department.”

The previous fiction publisher, Barney Sacks, and I were good friends. We’d come up through school together, found jobs at Gray’s together, and had often vied for the same opportunities. Some summers, we would holiday together, or indulge in retreats to sanatoriums to cleanse ourselves of all our stresses. And, occasionally, when we might’ve had a wine or two too many, we were convenient lovers, although he insisted it never became more than that.

Poor Barney – he had never been the strongest, nor most stable, to begin with (although he often accused me of being temperamental and impetuous). Several times, I feigned grave mental illness and would ask Barney to check himself into a mental health respite with me for the companionship and support. He thought it was him doing me the favor.

Inevitably, the workload had overwhelmed him, and he’d suffered a horrendous nervous breakdown. On this occasion, there was no need for a ruse. He voluntarily institutionalized himself, his belt and shoelaces were taken from him, and when he was unresponsive to conventional therapies, he underwent several radical, if not barbaric treatments, such as trial pharmaceuticals, electroconvulsive therapy, and a correspondence course in Scientology.

By right of succession (if there ever was such a right) his position should’ve been mine. I was the heir apparent for a variety of reasons – seniority, experience, and capability. But nothing was ever that simple – particularly at a multi-million-dollar publishing multinational like Gray’s.

“We’d like to release a new line of books,” Lippincott said. “But old ones.”

“Old ones?”

“Classics,” Morgan said. “Austen, Dickens, Stoker, the Brontës, and the like.”

“Collectibles,” Boggs said. “Something that can sit on a shelf.”

“And look pretty,” Morgan said.

“Do you have any ideas?” Lippincott said.

I couldn’t see their faces, but I could feel their expectation weighing on me and requiring an answer that would measure up to their standards, albeit standards that were so regularly amorphous that you could never be quite sure what you were meant to say. Be too daring, and you were seen as heartlessly shattering tradition; be too traditional, and you were seen as lacking progressiveness and innovation.

But they did need this. There had been talk (there was always talk, but more so recently) about a hostile takeover, so the Associates often bandied about patchwork fixes, if indeed they were fixes at all. Other publishers had released similar lines such as the one the Associates were proposing. I’d have to produce something special to market these classic books into something new, shiny, and exciting.

“They’re like gems,” I said slowly, drawing out the sentence because I needed to stall. “Precious … and growing in value … and … sparkling … yes, sparkling gems—”

“Gems!” Lippincott said. “Brilliant. We’ll take all those old classics that have fallen into the public domain and repackage them. Brightly. We need this. We need this fervently. What do you think?”

Before I could respond, Harlow interrupted with a wracking cough. Besides her antiquity, Harlow was emphysemic. Her coughing fits overpowered not only her, but the entire office, and the office building. She should’ve retired, or been retired, but nobody retires from Gray’s – at least not voluntarily.

“I think—” I began once Harlow had ceased, but she then reverberated us with aftershocks. Finally, she fell silent, although I waited – just to be sure.

“Come along,” Lippincott said. “What do you have to say?”

“I think it’s a marvelous idea, sir,” I said quickly, just in case Harlow set off again.

“This will take overtime outside of your other responsibilities,” Lippincott said. “But do a good job, and well …” His voice trailed away, as if he expected me to guess his mind.

“Yes, sir?”

“Well, what is it we say here? There are no black and whites, no colors, only grays. But put in the time, do a good job, and you know what!”

What could only mean the vacant position – or why else mention it?

I set to work at once, dredging our backlists, communicating with the estates of deceased authors, as well as designers and lawyers – every-body responsible to put together the Gems. I even solicited some popular contemporary authors contracted to Gray’s to write forewords for each book and then, as a novelty, commissioned them to write short stories set in the world of the book as an afterword. We released three Gems (of a planned series) in succession as big paperbacks with gold-trimmed covers, each meeting with commercial success.

When Lippincott next called me in to speak to the Associates, I was optimistic.

“You’ve done an exemplary job with the Gems,” he said. “And those gold-trimmed pages and covers …”

The other Associates murmured their assent – all but Sikes, who seemed so insubstantial, a breath might evaporate his silhouette.

“The new fiction publisher will be pleased!” Lippincott said.

I was pleased.

“He will be in tomorrow.”

My question of who that was exactly was lost under a salvo of Harlow’s coughing.

I went home, played “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano, and tried to rationalize why they hadn’t wanted me. Did they think I was too old? Or underqualified? Or overqualified? Perhaps they just liked me where I was.

Well, it wouldn’t matter. Life is full of disappointments.

I would make it not matter.

iii.

Over the next several weeks the police spoke repeatedly, but perfunctorily, with everybody – perfunctorily, because what was there to investigate? Certainly, Ivan had disappeared, but there was no real evidence of foul play; the rain had washed the parking lot clean of evidence, there were no signs of a struggle, and the company Beemer had not yet been found.

Some speculated that Ivan had absconded with the car. I recall loitering around the water-cooler (which, typically, was broken, but still the place for talk) with the other employees, and ruminating, “Do you think maybe he had a habit? Alcohol? Drugs? Gambling? Perhaps he’s taken the Beemer and gone on a bender!” And then, the next thing you knew, rumors were flying around the office. However do these things begin?

“It is time we move on!” Lippincott said, when I met the Associates that morning. “Tragic, this Ivan thing. But not to worry. We do have you.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“And we’d like to ask you … ”

“Yes, sir?”

“What do you think of Nigel Bentley?”

Bentley was a contemporary, a fifty-something senior editor who’d worked for many of the multinationals. He was a friend – or he had been a friend, for many years, before time and distance and respective career trajectories had wedged us apart. But if Gray’s had managed to land him, he would be quite a coup, and I told Lippincott that.

When Bentley arrived for work several days later, he embraced me and commended me extravagantly on the success of the Gems. I was naturally suspicious, sure that the praise was disingenuous, if not pointed – he wanted me to know that he believed this was my level, and he would be my superior.

Still, we fell into the begrudging rhythm of our friendship as if it had never been interrupted. We caught the train to and from work together. We had lunch together. We talked about authors, new and old, discussed and argued literature, and even empathized over poor old Barney, as if he had become a cautionary tale. And, despite his dubious opinion of me, Bentley leaned more and more on me, often dropping by my desk, asking (begging, really) for my advice on all matters publishing (and, more significantly, all things Gray’s).

It justified my disgruntlement – why had this job not been mine given how much input I had into the role? It’s like the Associates wanted me to be just another cog. That is the way here – everybody knows they’re a cog, but one no more, or no less, significant than any other. In actual fact, Gray’s perpetuates an environment of spiritual and emotional communism. Perhaps it was the Associates’ way of maintaining the status quo.

I commented upon this to Bentley one chilly and misty Wednesday morning as we waited for our 7.36 am train amongst a throng of commuters.

“Yes, yes,” he said, but whilst his tone was interested, his manner was distant – although that was to be expected. Bentley was in the process of an agonizing (and financially draining) separation; he’d taken this job as a means of pursuing a new start. “The Associates do exercise a form of elitism,” he said. “But possibly no more than any employer.”

“But I feel it deeply,” I told him, as our train rumbled into the view, a silver blur punching a hole through the mist. “Particularly …”

“After the Gems?”

“Yes.”

When Bentley had told me about his separation, I had felt obligated to tell him something in return – and had thus told him about the Gems, and what the Associates had implied if I carried out the task successfully.

“Really,” Bentley said, “promotion isn’t the be-all end-all of existence.”

Of course, he would say that.

“Do not scoff, my friend!” Bentley went on. “I tell you this for your sake. You must really let it go, or it will be your un —”

I shoved Bentley as our train rattled up, the driver’s eyes widening as he saw Bentley sailing in front of the windscreen. Then the awful collision. Bentley made – quite literally – a splat as the train hit him. The sound was like a hardback book hitting the floor. The curious editorial part of my mind wondered if it would’ve been visually similar, or if Bentley would’ve been flattened more like a bug on a windscreen.

But I had not much time to wonder as Bentley was lost from sight.

There was a mixture of cries from the other commuters: shouts from the more level-headed that somebody had been hit, screams from the panicked, and even a handful of astonished exclamations.

Lamentably, there was nothing to be done.

iv.

Afterward, the police came, and asked for my account. I told them that Bentley had been distraught – his wife had left him, and he was having trouble assimilating into a new job, as well as a new town, without her. The police nodded sympathetically; they talked to colleagues, who assured them that Bentley had relied unhealthily on me, and later, I imagine they talked to his wife (sorry, ex-wife – the shrew!), who would’ve at least corroborated that Bentley was distraught.

“Tragic, this Bentley-thing,” Lippincott said, when I met the Associates that afternoon.

“Yes, tragic.”

Harlow’s coughing dominated the rest of the conversation.

Unfortunately for Gray’s, and several fiction publishers, the tragedies continued. Harrison Erskine, who had forty-five years’ experience, was brought in from interstate to fill the vacancy left by Bentley’s apparent suicide. But Erskine was only in his second day on the job when, on his way to see the Associates, he slipped down the stairs (most unfortunately, the elevator had short circuited that morning, and the single bulb in the stairwell was out) and broke his neck. Wilhelma Sorenson, a driven forty-six-year-old career editor, never even made it to work. She was the victim of a hit and run driver. Bizarrely, when police later found the car responsible, it turned out to be Ivan Kerkow’s company Beemer, (and this sparked a search for him). The bullish Thomas Whitton came next. At thirty-five, and a fitness freak to boot, he thought he was invincible. But one night, just after he’d returned home and was on his way to the front door, an unknown assailant beat him to a bloody pulp – forensics later speculated it was with a sack full of blunt objects like blocks or bricks or maybe possibly even books.

Police were intrigued by the spate of misfortune that befell Gray’s and here I must admit I may have inadvertently given them the impression that Barney Sacks might be responsible. When the detectives spoke to me, when they asked who might have it in for Gray’s fiction publishers, who might be so “deranged”, I responded, “Deranged? Deranged? Are you attempting to impugn Barney Sacks, the former fiction publisher, who recently had a nervous breakdown? If that’s what you’re trying to imply, trying to have to me acknowledge, and concede, never!”

This was a most inopportune turn of events for poor Barney. He had just been released from voluntary institutionalization, had just been given back his belt and shoelaces, but the police interrogation drove him to another breakdown, and he hung himself in his cell with his recently reacquired belt.

Poor Barney, a dangling modifier.

v.

First thing the next morning, the Associates summoned me. While they remained silhouettes, I could still feel their eyes upon me, keen and speculative. They may have been seeing me – truly seeing me – for the first time.

“We have had the most wretched luck,” Lippincott said, “just the most wretched luck! It hasn’t been very good for Sacks, Kerkow, Bentley, Erskine, Sorenson, and Whitton, either. In fact, this whole sordid affair has been very … very … very … what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Tragic?” I suggested.

“Yes! Tragic. But it now behooves us to do what we should’ve always done. Whilst you’ve been at Gray’s for thirty-five years, there’s been something about you lately that has impressed us, something ineffable. Well, what do you say? How would you feel about being fiction publisher?”

“I would,” I began, beaming with pride, “be most magnificently, and most humbly—”

Harlow’s coughing overrode the rest of my answer. I waited for it to abate, as usually it always did, but on this occasion her coughing deepened and deepened until it bounced off the walls, only to end abruptly when she keeled forward, and her face slammed into the Associates’ marble table. Then she was still.

“Shit,” Sikes said.

vi.

The paramedics came almost immediately, but nothing could be done. Harlow was pronounced dead, loaded onto a gurney, covered with a sheet, and wheeled from the conference room.

I remained seated with the Associates. Death is such a rude visitor – rarely invited and often boorish. But how much death had Gray’s seen recently? It was strange that this death, more than any of the others, helped contextualize what had happened and made me wonder whether it had all been worth it. We’re all but stories that take on many twists, which unfold with hopefulness, and yet, inevitably, despite the happy endings that often occupy the final page, we never really know what comes after.

“I do suppose,” Lippincott said, “this creates an opening, doesn’t it?”

I swiveled in my chair. “An opening, you say?”

In hindsight, I think we have it about right here: when it comes to life and the choices we make, there really are no black and whites, no colors.

Only grays.

Lenny Dodd didn’t know where to start. The beginning – that’s what Dr. Paxton used to tell him. And the beginning would’ve been logical, only he wasn’t sure where that was anymore.

Dr. Bruner waited, his face – with its deep, craggy lines – grizzled and embraced in a pair of outrageously shaggy sideburns. His large lips were pursed, his matinee blue eyes unblinking, making Lenny wish Dr. Paxton was still here with his big, crooked grin and his explosive, infectious laugh. Or even Dr. Cook, who was stern but reassuring and reminded Lenny of his grandfather. But, nope. It was Dr. Bruner, whom he’d never seen before, and whose look made Lenny feel as if he was crazy.

And Lenny knew he wasn’t crazy.

Lenny shifted his gaze to Dr. Bruner’s mahogany desk, which was big enough to play table-tennis on. Between Dr. Bruner’s phone and a word-a-day calendar sat a cradle of balance balls. Lenny wanted to pull on the ball closest to him, to see it cannon into the others and so they could begin their dance.

“You see,” Lenny said finally, looking up, Dr. Bruner’s blue eyes capturing him like twin spotlights, “there’s a problem with my brother. Malcolm.”

“Your brother?” Dr. Bruner looked down at the overstuffed file in front of him. Lenny knew it was his, although it was so out-of-date it might as well have been obsolete. How long since he’d been here? Since Dr. Paxton and Dr. Cook? Six or seven years? Longer maybe? Lenny was a new man now. It was Malcolm who needed the help. He needed to make Dr. Bruner see that.

“He’s out in the waiting room,” Lenny said, half-rising. “I can get him, if you don’t believe me.”

“How about first you tell me what the problem is, Mr. Dodd? Then maybe we’ll bring him in and have a chat.”

Lenny sank back into his seat. Have a chat. Lenny hated the vernacular. So patronising. So condescending. So … so … he didn’t know what else it was so, but he knew he didn’t like this doctor who was judging him on his file, on the strength of stark black words on old white pages. At least Dr. Paxton and Dr. Cook understood the context behind what Lenny told them, although they’d never had to deal with Malcolm.

“My brother,” Lenny said, gripping the armrests of his chair, “hears voices.”

“Voices?”

Lenny nodded so vigorously he felt his forehead judder. “He sits there, in the corner of the room and holds a conversation with somebody that nobody else can see.”

‘And what’re the nature of these conversations?’

Lenny shrugged, his chair creaking as he clawed the armrests. He could imagine the chair coming apart in his hands – not that he was a violent or destructive person.

“I don’t know,” he said, forcing his hands to loosen, his shoulders to slump. He needed to relax. His eyes returned to the balance balls, and he quelled the urge to pull on that last one. “Most of the stuff I hear … it’s … it’s …”

‘Inconclusive?”

“Yeah, that’s it! It’s inconclusive. Most of the time he’s just yeahing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah—"

“I get the idea, Mr. Dodd.”

Lenny froze as Dr. Bruner consulted that damn file again. Why did he need the stupid thing anyway? This wasn’t about him! It was about Malcolm! Surely Dr. Bruner couldn’t think Lenny was making him up, not when Malcolm was sitting in the waiting room.

“Maybe I should get Malcolm—”

“A moment, Mr. Dodd.” Dr. Bruner’s head remained tilted toward the file, but his eyes rolled up to look at Lenny. “Have you ever asked your brother Malcolm what these conversations are about?”

“He doesn’t tell me,” Lenny said, recoiling, the front two legs of his chair briefly leaving the floor, but his eyes fixed on that balance ball. It was so tempting. “He just babbles. Like an idiot. I have no idea what he’s on about at the best of times. Because this is him. He’s all over the place. He never listens to anybody. He does what he wants. And he babbles. Did I mention that?” He scowled at Dr. Bruner. “All. The. Time. You try asking him a question, and who knows what you’ll get?”

“From your observations, Mr. Dodd, do you have any idea what these voices are communicating to your brother Malcolm?”

Lenny remembered his own voices years ago. They’d only ever been indulgent. He could’ve just as easily been talking to friends over a beer. Sometimes, they told him to do things – good things, like to help a little old lady load her groceries into her car. But doctors had told him the voices were bad, they were wrong, they were destructive, so they’d been medicated and shocked into silence. He missed them … sometimes. But they seemed back now. With Malcolm.

“No,” he said. Then he shrugged again, his eyes darting back to the balance balls. “I don’t know.” He shrugged once more, his whole body rocking. “But they’re not good, are they? That’s what …”

“What, Mr. Dodd?”

“That’s what Dr. Paxton and Dr. Cook used to tell me – that the voices were no good. If they weren’t good for me, how can they be good for Malcolm?”

Dr. Bruner’s big lips puckered almost as though he was preparing for a kiss. He turned a page in the file; he was reading what Lenny had told Dr. Paxton and Dr. Cook about his own voices. But there was nothing bad there – other than for the existence of the voices themselves.

“Does your brother give you any idea who’s speaking to him?”

Lenny snorted through flaring nostrils. “Who knows? Could be anyone. Anything! He has no concept of reality! Like … he’s always seeing things. Things that aren’t there, Dr. Bruner! I don’t see them! He does.”

“What sort of things?”

“I. Don’t. Know. I ask him sometimes. I push him! Like those lawyers you see on television when they’re in court with a witness. I push him and I push him! But then he gets upset. He screams at me! Sometimes he even attacks me.”

“He attacks you?”

“He attacks me all the time, Dr. Bruner! I’ll be sitting there and he’ll jump on me, or wrestle me to the ground. He wants to prove he’s stronger than me. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the morning and he’ll be sitting on my chest, choking me and laughing!” Lenny leaned forward, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “I think he hates me.”

“Hates you?”

Lenny nodded once more. “I’m sure of it. He’s always bad mouthing me. To my friends. To our parents. To our cousins and everyone! Always telling them I’m stupid, that I’m crazy. Do you know what that does to me, Doctor? They believe him … I’m sure they do.” He pointed repeatedly at the file in front of Dr. Bruner, his finger just a blur. “Because of that. And him? Nobody ever doubts Malcolm! It’s me. I’m the crazy one! Not him! Me! He’s trying to break me!” Lenny pitched his head into his hands, palmed his eyes, and repeated almost inaudibly, “He’s trying to break me.”

“Mr. Dodd?”

Lenny didn’t move. His mind fixed on just this morning when Malcolm had grabbed him in a headlock, had choked and choked him while cackling in his ear. But that was also Malcolm. He didn’t care who he tried to hurt, or what he did; it was all fun to him.

“Mr. Dodd?”

Lenny pulled his hands down and, through the line of balance balls – oh, he so wanted to start them rocking – and looked at Dr. Bruner, his face as aloof as ever. But now his big froggy lips arched into a smile, and for the first time this session Lenny felt a connection, felt hope, felt that maybe all this might just be okay.

Dr. Bruner closed the file. “How about you bring your brother in?”

Lenny was bouncing out of his chair before the sentence was finished. He thought Malcolm might’ve gone – he did that. He never listened. You told him to do something, and he wouldn’t, or would do the exact opposite. He was always bucking authority. But when Lenny opened the door, there Malcolm was, right where Lenny had told him to sit and wait, swinging his legs back and forth idly.

“Malcolm, the doctor wants to see you.”

Malcolm didn’t move. Lenny thought maybe he’d be trouble. But then Malcolm jumped from the chair and waltzed ever-so-sweetly into the office. Lenny clenched his teeth until they grinded in his head. So this was the game Malcolm was going to play. He did this – play angelic, and let suspicion fall back on Lenny.

Lenny watched as Malcolm clambered into the chair Lenny had occupied just moments earlier, sat up straight, and beamed at Dr. Bruner.

Dr. Bruner gaped, his eyes like big saucers, his mouth hanging wide open like one of those ceramic game clowns you might pop a ping pong ball into at a carnival.

Lenny’s hands balled into fists. Dr. Bruner’s expression was exactly the same as everybody else’s. The moment Malcolm had looked at him, whatever credibility Lenny had built, had enjoyed briefly, evaporated. It always happened. This was Malcolm at his best.

“Mr. Dodd?”

“Yes, Doctor?” Lenny asked.

“Your brother …?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

‘Your brother is a child.’

Lenny frowned as he came to stand behind Malcolm, gripping the headrest of his chair. “Excuse me, Doctor?”

“Your brother, Mr. Dodd. He appears to be a five- or six-year-old child.”

Lenny’s frown deepened until his eyes narrowed into slits. He thought of Malcolm holding conversations with thin air, of Malcolm interacting with things only he could see, of the way Malcolm would jump on him and laugh and laugh and laugh.

“So?” Lenny asked.

“So? So?” Dr. Bruner shot to his feet. “You’ve described symptoms common to a childhood’s imagination, common to a child playing, common to … to … to childhood!”

“So when I lose touch with reality, when I hear voices and talk to things that aren’t there, then I’m crazy!” Lenny shook his head indignantly. “But when Malcolm does it, it’s because he’s a child?”

‘Mr. Dodd—?’

“Malcolm, come on, we’re leaving!”

Lenny turned for the door, then twirled back to Dr. Bruner’s desk, leaning over and plucking the last balance ball so that it clicked into the row of others and started their merry dance back and forth, back and forth. Then, he spun, pausing only to call to his brother once more.

“Malcolm!”

Malcolm got down from the chair and looked at the doctor. “Just between us, Doctor,” he said, “I do believe you have your work cut out for you.”

And then he led Lenny from the office, Lenny quietly closing the door behind them.

i. “actors.”

“Don’t get me started,” Mazar ground out from between clenched teeth but, by the deepening furrow of his forehead, it was obvious that’s exactly what was happening – he was getting started. “I mean … do I want to be a prick?”

Seated opposite him, Roche opened his mouth to say, No, that wouldn’t be you at all. But it would. That was Mazar, who was rage and indignation bottled up inside designer clothes and stubble mixed in with a liberal dose of theatricality that smacked of martyrdom. And while Roche knew that his place was assured courtesy of THE PLAN, he still couldn’t help feeling he needed to fit in.

“No—” Roche began.

“The facts are simple,” Mazar said. “Tell me how the fuck anbody justifies a salary of millions for doing something they love?”

“Heh,” Hennick said. Seated parallel to Roche, she was all angles, sharpened through exhausting gym work, and assembled to be tall and imperious and unapproachable, face twisted into sultriness that transcended any physical objectification. Her black suit with its high shoulders and pointed lapels could’ve been armor she’d donned to ride into war. “You see the budgets I’ve overseen and ... It’s bullshit. You don’t love it, don’t do it. You do, then don’t charge us millions.”

“Right!” Mazar said. “Run into a burning building, risk your life saving people, be a cop and capture murderers and other perilous fuckers, even a teacher teaching the brats and twats of tomorrow. These are the sorts of people who should be getting the big bucks. But that’s not the way it works. That’s not the world we live in. We overpay athletes for playing fucking games, we give so-called musicians fortunes when real talents like Mozart and Beethoven died in squalor, and we financially bukkake actors for pretending to be somebody else. And why? For what? We’re making movies. Right? Movies.”

Mazar gestured lazily to a few of the original framed film posters of classics – Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind – that littered the walls of his tiny bungalow-cum-office. The fluorescent lightning flickered above them, like it was pleading to be put out of its misery.

Roche shifted in the director’s chair, trying to find a way to balance his portliness, while still coming across as comfortable and familiar. It wasn’t easy, given he was twenty years older than his two companions.

“I’ll tell you—” he began.

“What’cha going to do?” Hennick asked, rhetorically. “We’ve been in the system. We know the way it works – when it lets you try to work it. Is that our experience, though?” She snorted. “Remember I tried to get that feature up? Wanted to do it right. Good. No names. They took it from me and pumped it so full of names that every single scene oozed shit.”

Mazar slammed his fist onto his small particleboard desk. The pristine leather attaché case that sat on the end jumped, almost as if startled. “We should take a lesson from the porn industry. Their talent,” Mazar paused to clarify the noun with air quotes, “gets paid fuck all. And you know why? Because, for the most part, they’re still operating with studio systems, like Hollywood used to. Talent,” more air quotes, “is contracted to the production company and told what they’re making and when they’re making it. No debate. Fuck ya,” he shrugged, “you don’t like it, out you go, because there’s always some other fucker, hotter and hungrier, hopping off the bus hoping to make it big.”

“Problem is when you get a star,” Hennick said. Mazar was taken aback so violently by the notion, it was like she’d swung the flat side of a shovel blade into his face. “They do happen,” Hennick continued. “For whatever reason, audiences decide this guy’s a star, this girl’s a star. Whatever.”

Roche nodded vigorously. He’d seen it happen time and time and time again.

“Stars are fine,” Mazar admitted, “provided you keep a rein on them. And provided they are stars. I mean, how many true A-graders are there nowadays?” He shot a finger at Roche. “Name one!”

Roche could’ve named every star, every up’n’comer, and every flavor of the month just a second ago. Now the names flitted from his head.

“That’s right!” Mazar said, taking his silence for ignorance. “Filmmaking’s become such a marketing exercise, you can turn any hack into a celebrity, and purport that any idiot with a couple of hit movies is a star. Then we’re back in the spin. Because stars, even pseudo stars,” Mazar rubbed together his thumb, index finger, and middle finger, “want real money.”

“So that’s what it comes down to,” Hennick said.

“Yeah,” Mazar said. “Money.”

ii. “money”

Mazar stroked his stylized two-day-growth and studied Hennick, and then Roche. Hennick was unmoved, but Roche felt the fire of Mazar’s gaze – a fire that burned away all trappings of affectation and revealed Roche for what he was: a writer who’d never been anything but a plodder. Well, at least that was what Roche feared. Mazar grunted, and Roche braced himself for condemnation. Surely it would come.

“And who pays for that?” Mazar asked.

Roche blinked, failing to digest the question. Then it hit him: Mazar was still following his original line of thinking.

Money – who pays the money?

The office became too stuffy. The collar on Roche’s plaid shirt grew too tight. He should know this. He was the veteran here. He searched his three decades of experience. The answer was obvious.

“The public,” he said.

“That’s right!” Mazar said.

Roche grinned.

“The studio!”

Roche’s grin flattened.

“We have movies where fifty million of the budget is a couple of actors’ salaries,” Mazar said. “That’s fucking ridiculous. For the love of fuck, I can’t fathom anybody who deserves a fraction of that for any job.”

Hennick nodded. “Bring back communism,” she said.

“Why the fuck not?” Mazar said. “Why … the … fuck … not?”

“Or,” Hennick held up a finger to halt Mazar’s wind-up, “better yet, filmmaking communism.”

“Even better!” Mazar said. “When I was trying to get my feature up, I struggled to get a cent. Meanwhile, the latest cunting mockbuster on the studio’s slate was operating on two hundred million. They spent fifty fucking grand on donuts! Fuck me! And why? Because of the stars. Put a ceiling on how much these actors can earn per flick. They do it in sports. Salary caps! And what did we used to call actors?” He clicked his fingers and pointed at Roche.

Roche opened his mouth, as if ready to answer, mind racing. Actors, actors, actors…! Wait, they used to be known as—

Before Roche could verbalize a response, Hennick clicked her fingers and pointed back at Mazar. “Players!”

“Right! Same principle. Let’s cap it. Sure, they’ll bitch and whine they have to wake up four in the morning, work until midnight, maintain the routine for sixteen weeks, but like they say in the fucking mob, This is the business you’ve chosen. You don’t like it, get out. You want to stay in it, stop your bitching or develop a speed habit to cope and keep up.”

“It’s the Bitching Age,” Hennick said. “People bitch because they’re given too many forums. Newspapers, magazines, paparazzi, therapists, social media, the list goes on.”

“And fucking on. And … fucking … on. Bitch-bitch-bitch, I had to wake up 3.30 in the morning just to get my make-up done. Neglect to mention the money they’re being paid, the mansions they go home to, or their million-dollar bank accounts. Fuck ’em.”

“Fuck ’em,” Roche agreed.

Mazar grinned viciously at him. “Fuck ’em all.”

iii. “directors”

“Directors, too,” Mazar said, almost as an afterthought. “Playing with studios’ and investors’ money, running around like tyrants, and then they take all the credit. Why? Because the actors did their job? Because the actors said the lines written for them – written for them and sometimes fucking spelled out phonetically for them? I mean, there’s a fucking thought: what about the writer? We remember Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Tolkien, and all these great writers. How come screenwriters never get that sort of reverence for being the genesis of a movie? You know who gets it? It’s always some cuntabulous director.”

“For the love of fuck,” Hennick said.

“What about you, Roche? Aren’t you pissed by the lack of recognition?”

Roche considered the question. Recognition for what? A string of movies that experienced moderate or no success? Jobs on average television shows? Failed pilots? Roche was glad for the anonymity. Recognition might mean people started holding him accountable for his body of work. Of course, he couldn’t admit this to Mazar. Mazar thought he had something because he’d come to them with THE PLAN – his one truly original idea. But he had to tell Mazar something. Something. Something.

“Fucking speechless!” Mazar said. “See? Because this is the system. We laud directors, but what are they? For the most part, what the fuck are they? I mean, it’s like TV shows; they’re all the fucking same. It doesn’t matter who directs any given episode; they all come across the same. If one episode surpasses another, it’s because of the writer, not the fucking director. The director’s just a landlord.”

“And the writer writes a better show,” Hennick said.

“That’s right,” Mazar said. “The writer writes a better show! Same with movies. You have thousands of romantic comedies, thousands of mindless action flicks, thousands of dramas … the list goes on. And what separates them?”

“The writers!” Roche said.

“Nothing separates them!” Mazar said. “They’re all the fucking same. How often does one stand out more than another? They’re all competently made trash. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with being commercial and making a living – that’s what life’s about. But don’t tell me it’s an art-form, don’t laud the actor, don’t laud the director, and – for the holiest of fuck’s sakes – don’t laud a single one of them for doing the job they’re getting paid too much fucking money to do.”

“If you’re going to laud anyone, laud the writers,” Hennick said.

“Right! As far as this example goes, they might be writing wholly formulaic tired old shit, but they’re only writing what they’re being told. And until you break their hearts and shred their spirits, they try. They. Fucking. Try. Give them free reign and somebody always butts in – studio or director, telling them what they’ve got to include. You’ve got to feel for the dumb fuckers. No offense, Roche.”

“None taken!” Roche beamed.

“They’re like dogs on a leash, horses under the whip, cocks in a condom. They’re told the shit to write, it gets bastardized from gestation to birth by too many fucking opinions and unqualified interlopers, and then at the end of the unholy mess we deify directors and actors. It’s the ungodliest of fucks.”

iv. “writers”

Roche rolled his shoulders, feeling the tension in his back. The director’s chair was comfortable, but not orthopedic. How do directors survive it? he wondered. Of course, they were puffed up on their own self-importance. That was a good one – he needed to segue it into the conversation.

“This chair—” he said.

“It reinforces this cycle!” Mazar said. “This cycle which has become this whirlwind of bullshit. How many reboots do we make? How many franchises do we chase up? How many comic books do we pilfer? We’re fucking archaeologists of bastardizations of some greater form that has real cockplosiveness. Just like with … with … with …”

Roche struggled to find another analogy that fit Mazar’s parameters.

“Computer games!” Hennick said.

Mazar thumped a fist on his desk. The attaché case jumped again. He rested his hand atop it, as if calming a jittery dog.

“That’s an interesting one,” he said. “Collaboratively, games can tell epic stories. Why? Because they’re on the same fucking page. Nobody butting in. Imagine Monet was painting a landscape and some director came along and told him what he needed was to paint in a talking dog? Or, God forbid, a fucking love story! Or for the almighty fuck of cuntification, let’s write to address market demographics.”

“When I was in the studio system, all you got was …” Hennick lolled her tongue out, tilted her head back, and jerked her fist back and forth over her neck in a mock hanging. “You know how many fuckers I pitched that they bastardized into some unholy mutation?” She opened the fist into four fingers. “For the love of fuck.”

“The. Love. Of. Fuck,” Mazar said.

“I got that freedom in indies,” Hennick said. “But for what? For what? To operate on a shoestring? I love my roots, but indies look like indies, like publishing a book on a roll of toilet paper. If a writer has some grand vision, how the fuck can it be realized? On an Etch A Sketch? Where’s the justice?”

Mazar nodded. “Instead, we’re left with the shit-churning industry – paint-by-numbers franchises, derivative mockbusters, and misguided adaptations that we pour diarrhea into and expect to hold shape. We used to have classics.” He gestured again at the framed posters displayed on the walls. “In a hundred years, people will still remember these movies. But what the fuck’s anybody going to remember from this era?”

v. “quality control.”

Roche had to fight hard to make sure his grin didn’t leap out onto his face. THE PLAN was THE PLAN was THE PLAN. He’d been right – especially in pitching it to these two. He leaned back, feeling now almost as if he belonged in the director’s chair. Not that he ever would direct. Or aspire to direct. Or aspire. But he’d been the architect of THE PLAN – his one moment of true artistic genius.

“As far as filmmaking goes,” Mazar said, “what we need to do is create a utopian environment. First, our own crew. The best there is. And we treat them right. People treat you the way they’re treated. And they stay where they’re treated right. We don’t want anybody who’d jump for a mercenary offer. Fuck that.”

“Makes sense,” Hennick said.

“Then, inflation aside, we have a fixed budget,” Mazar said. “And fixed salaries. Actors coming in beforehand know what they’ll be paid. Minimum negotiating. Like real jobs.”

“You think that’ll work?” Hennick asked.

“You can hope. I don’t think it’s impossible. After all, every now and again, some dick of a star takes a pay cut to appear in some indie or quality low-budget flick. So I think the attitude’s out there. They’re just scared of chasing it full-time because it depreciates them, and they get worried if they’re depreciated, they’ll lose their marquee. Not with us. There is appreciation in measure. You want more, shove a firework up your butt and blast the fuck off my planet. You want to be in something great, then here we are. Obviously, I’m not talking about anything unreasonable. But nothing fucking absurd, either.”

Roche loved the idea … in principle. But he’d been around long enough to see the way things could spiral out of control. An actor worth a pittance could demand a ransom if their movie boomed. And studios knew ransoms could bring people in.

“Stars draw,” he said tentatively.

Mazar and Hennick glowered at him, heads shaking.

Roche wanted to shrink, wanted to be swallowed into the very canvas of his chair. To have come so far, only to belittle himself now. He smirked nervously, as if to show he was only joking, but it came out as a toneless grunt.

“Where do you keep coming up with this unmitigated bullshit?” Mazar asked. “Stars drawing is a gimmick. Like a circus having a freak. Come see the fucking movie with a star. It’s a gimmick, a fucking gimmick. We hype these fuckers and everybody believes our bullshit because that’s what we are – the masters of marketing. That’s the anal glitter we spray onto the faces of the public.”

“The truth is, you get a good movie, people come,” Hennick said. “The movie makes them. The story draws the audience in. It happens. Yet nobody seems to learn from it, or use it as a springboard to continue to do something original, to tell a good story, to break fucking molds.”

“Let’s use our power to create a new gimmick,” Mazar said. “This one. Maybe it doesn’t work the first time, or the second time, or even the third or fourth time, but we keep pushing it, we keep going at it. It’s like a training a dog – through sheer repetition we drive the point home. That’s what people come to learn about us: we don’t spend a lot, we don’t use stars, but, fuck! our movies are good!”

“So that’s the hook?” Hennick said. “Quality?”

“That’s right. But to make this work, we have to start again.”

vi. “the plan”

Roche sat there, teeth sunk into his lip, as if he was anchoring his mouth for the night. Let Mazar and Hennick thrash this out, he thought. They’re the dynamos. They’re audacious. They’re visionaries. And, quite possibly, they’re insane. Then again, who isn’t in this industry? Roche knew that, over time, those who weren’t insane were driven to insanity by the industry’s machinations. And there was genius in insanity anyway. Roche knew that well enough.

Mazar unlatched the clasps of the attaché case, snapped it open, and spun it around, as if showcasing a game show prize. Inside, the case was filled with plastic explosives, as well as a timer with red digital numbers – currently on forty-five seconds and counting down.

“It’s no good implementing a new system atop of an old one,” Mazar said. “That’s why computers are fucked – too much baggage from shit that wasn’t working in the first place. Build shit on shit on shit, you know what you get? A shitstorm waiting to explode. It’s similar to installing new software. It works, but the baggage is always there, cluttering everything and building to the inevitable fuck up. But if you wiped all that shit clear, laid new foundations, started all over with a different system …”

“… then you create something truly original,” Hennick added. She laughed, her face softening to hint at whatever love had driven her into this business in the first place. “When we first discussed THE PLAN I wasn’t sure. But you’re right. You are fucking right. I just wish we had enough C-4 explosives to take out all of Hollywood.”

“This is just as good,” Mazar said. “Let’s target a film festival where all the so-called cream will congeal. That’s what they do. They congeal.”

“Into muck,” Hennick said. She grinned and her sultriness twisted into a cold, loathsome beauty. “What a plan!”

“And who do we have to thank?” Mazar asked. He pointed at Roche. “Our extraordinary friend, the writer!”

Roche grinned.

vii. “action!”

Within the Capra Screening Room of the prestigious White Star Film Festival, thousands of celebrities watched the unfolding short film with growing disgust. Black humor was one thing, but most in the audience found the subject matter to be extremely distasteful. Numerous producers and directors made mental notes to have the trio responsible for what they deemed a piece of unadulterated trash blacklisted. Actors vowed they’d never work for the triumvirate.

Hennick frowned. “So have you got a night in mind?”

Mazar broke the fourth wall and looked directly at the camera to directly address the audience. “How about tonight?”

He lifted the lid of the attaché case to show the timer, which was presently on three seconds. Mazar held a thumbs up.

Hennick turned to break the fourth wall and held a thumbs up.

Roche turned to break the fourth wall, and started to raise a thumb, but never got a chance to finish.

viii. “fire in the sky”

The detonation that engulfed the White Star Film Festival in flame was heard across the coast. Many who were indoors at the time mistook the reverberation of the explosion for an earthquake. But those outside at the time made no mistake about the source, courtesy of a blinding fire that mushroomed into the sky and spread across the night.

Most were surprised by what had occurred, and by the sudden wailing of sirens in the distance, the sound of emergency services rallying, the choruses of astonishment from passersby, the orange glow on the horizon.

Mazar, Hennick, and Roche weren’t surprised at all. The trio sat on the hood of Mazar’s old Mustang, which was parked on the beach. Each enjoyed a glass of champagne, and Mazar and Hennick puffed on cigars. They watched the tide come in, lap around the tires of the Mustang, and then ebb out.

“So,” Hennick said, “what do we make first?”

Mazar blew a smoke ring, then clapped Roche on the shoulder. “What’ve you got for us?”

Roche frowned and, for once, didn’t have a single thing he wished he could’ve said.