James Langstonhewitt’s strange last name was a result of his mother’s superficial feminism screaming for attention and his father’s good sense not wanting his son beaten on the playground. The name was simply a hyphen-less combination of his father’s last name (Langston) and his mother’s last name (Hewitt). Early in her pregnancy, Ms. Langston-Hewitt had insisted on naming her firstborn Moonbeam, but that trend had fortunately died by the time James was born. A woman wealthier than Ms. Langston-Hewitt named Cheryl Bonapart-Clementess had bestowed upon her son the name of Sunray a year before and was the toast of the town because of it. Cheryl had been struck dead in an automobile accident three months before James’ birth, though, and Ms. Langston-Hewitt found no need to one-up a deceased woman. Hoping to please her parents she chose a biblical name instead, only to find out that God had blinded the original James, either because he was sinful or to punish the sins of others—she was never sure, months after her son had been born and his name was already officially assigned and legally documented. She hated the name and was terrified that her son would someday go blind because of it, but her husband wouldn’t allow her to have it changed.

“Just you see.” She would tell her him over and over again until James reached adolescence, always with a glass of wine in her hand, which she would use to feign gestures of fear and concern, “Just you wait and see. First he’ll need glasses for reading because the teacher saw him holding the book too close to his face, and we’ll take him to get glasses and everything will seem alright for a little while. But then those won’t work no more and he’ll need thicker ones, and then thicker ones, and then bifocals, and we’ll have paid that eye doctor thousands and then—then he won’t even recognize his mother. My little baby boy! He’ll not tell the difference between me and you, just you wait and see!”

James never went blind. In fact, he had incredible 20/10 vision that allowed him to spy textures and grains in fabric and view certain light refractions that most people could only dream of. He would always astound his optometrist, who relished James’ yearly visits as a chance to break out his difficult eye charts-- those designed to determine just how freakishly brilliant a person’s vision could possibly be. James could read the bottom line of an ordinary eye chart at forty feet with one eye closed, where as a person with 20/20 vision wasn’t expected to read the bottom line at ten feet with both eyes opened. Unfortunately, since his hand to eye coordination was very poor, there were few practical physical applications for James’ one and only talent. He could tell the exact moment when he should take a cut at a fastball, reach for a pass, or swing a tennis racket, but the transmissions of these thoughts from his brain to his hands and arms took too long to do him any good. Reading magazines over people’s shoulders across a room was the kind of pastime that quickly grew boring, and so being without any particularly interesting talents James decided at a young age that he would take over his father’s business when he grew old.

James’ father, Alexander Niklas Langston, was raised a waning Quaker whose non-practicing doctrine had been slipping towards a more lax system of worship for generations. Alexander, for example, was not allowed to date while in high school and had to go to a Sunday morning service every week with exceptions only during family retreats and when he was ill, and he had to work ten hours a week maintaining his father’s filling stations for no pay starting near the end of grammar school. In comparison, Alexander’s father was not allowed to so much as speak to a woman until his father had died, he had to attend thrice weekly services even if he was pox ridden, and he had to work ten hours a day on his family’s farm for no pay besides room and board. James had things comparatively easy, attending mass when he felt like it and working only occasionally, for good pay, at the pair of carwashes his father had converted the filling stations into.

James’ mother was raised Episcopal but had no problems in converting to Quakerism so long as she was assured that it would mean no change in her lifestyle. She taught her son not to be ashamed for being ashamed of his religion, and relished any opportunity to complain about it hindering the happiness of her or her child. She insisted on purchasing a flashy home, but her husband would not allow it because they didn’t have any money to spend on a home and a flashy house would have put other necessities, like food and electricity, out of the family’s reach. They lived in the suburban two-story white house where Alexander had grown up. When James was very young his mother painted the windows and doorframes of the house’s exterior bright pink to make it look as flashy as possible. She also installed faux-crystal ceiling fans in rooms that did not need them, either because they were well-ventilated enough without fans or their ceilings were too low to adequately hold them. Her aim, she said, was to make the house more tolerable by ensuring there would always be a breeze. Alexander, who was very tall, had to stay out of the laundry room and the house’s spare bedroom for fear of getting his head lopped off.

The house was comfortable and flashy but not extravagant and James’ mother would complain to Alexander endlessly because the floors were not made of oak or her closets weren’t big enough to walk in and did not smell of cedar or that their garage could only hold one car or that her son, her precious James, looked so poor in baby clothes that were not name brand. Alexander would remind his wife that greed wasn’t necessary to be happy and a life spent worshiping material possessions would only lead to emptiness and she would tell him that if he had made more money that he wouldn’t say things like that to her. That would make Alexander feel terrible, because he worked very hard operating and maintaining the two most successful carwashes in their area and they had been making more money than ever before. He didn’t see how he could possibly gain any more income from simply washing cars.

Alexander set up a plan to save a large portion of his profits earned from the carwashes and buy another business, either a franchised fast food restaurant or a fully staffed oil lube and tire change depot, depending on which had a lower overhead cost. Of course, this would have meant sacrifice from the entire family and it might have been years before significant profits were garnered, but he would make sure to pay his employees well and treat his customers with respect and he and his wife could then bask in the true happiness that would come with the success of owning an honest business. His wife would hear nothing of it.

“Instead of all this sacrifice talk why don’t you just go down to the bank and take out a loan?” She asked him.

“Because loans are usury and we are against usury!” Alexander’s voice rose and his face lost all color, not with anger but with a strange pride that his wife didn’t even notice, “We shall never issue or accrue interest as it leads to the stratification of society and nearly all of man’s injustices!”

“You’re never going to get anywhere in this world, honey, if you refuse to take in a little interest. I know it says in the bible that we’re not supposed to but that’s the way things are now and I don’t want to wait years until my precious little baby James is in college until we can move out of this dump and into a real nice house.” She cried before running upstairs and locking herself in her room.

Alexander went to town the next morning and tried to get a loan, but since he had no history of credit and his current businesses were making only enough money to support himself, his family, and three employees, the bank had to refuse his request. They offered Alexander a credit card so that he could prove to them that he was capable of buying things and waiting to pay for them, but he righteously denied the offer and scorned himself for having ever seriously considered usury as a way to achieve happiness. His story didn’t appease his wife, however, who was still locked in her room crying from the night before when he came back. She told him through their bedroom door and between sobs that she was starting to regret their marriage and wanted to be left alone. Alexander was heartbroken.

When his friend David came to him looking for help a week later it was taken as a sign from God. David was a compulsive and degenerate gambler who had two sons and a wife with cancer. He owned and mismanaged an electric wiring company and was in need of money, he said to make payroll, but Alexander knew it was to gamble with. David said that he would refuse any sort of “hand out” that Alexander would offer him and that he would not accept a loan that he was not allowed to pay interest on.

“You know that I cannot participate in any form of usury, correct?” Alexander’s voice rose, once again, and his face lost all color. This was the first time that David had ever seen him without a jovial expression on his face. His nostrils flared and his thinning hair seemed sparser than usual, the spots on his scalp where it was absent stuck out pink against the bright cream color of the rest of his face. Were he not so thin, and had his arms, resting stiff across his desk, not resembled chopsticks, David would have been afraid. He did not know what usury was, but he nodded his head anyways.

“Then you know that I cannot give you a loan.”

David started to protest, but Alexander raised his hand to silence him. He couldn’t give him a loan, no, but he could buy something from him and then sell it back later when David had the money to repay him, which he correctly suspected would be never. A deal was worked out that evening and Alexander took control of David’s wiring company with the promise that his investment would be returned two-fold in a matter of weeks. A year and half later the company was renamed Langston Wiring and was making more of a profit than ever before. Alexander knew nothing about wiring so he left all technical duties to the man with the most tenure at David’s company. All he did was manage the accounts of the business and use his family’s influence as known champions of the poor to secure hefty city contracts to provide the needy of the inner city with high quality electricity at low costs to his company. He always made sure that the greatest care was taken in wiring the apartments and homes, even if the people living in them may have been poor, he would always say that they deserved electricity as much as did the wealthy. Alexander would pay his employees very well, too, sometimes more than twice what other wiring companies offered. Satisfied workers worked harder, he figured, and he was correct. Alexander’s business was recognized by the city government as an asset and he was awarded a plaque for his achievements. The wiring firm filled him with pride and joy. By simply owning Langston Wiring and loosely guiding its operations he felt that he had managed to not only find wealth without usury but to improve and enrich the lives of many other people.

James’ family moved into a larger two-story home deeper into suburbia. This one had big stone pillars in the front and a wall of dark green shrubbery lining the rectangular perimeter of their ridiculously wide front yard. A set of two maids were hired and spent two to four hours a day cleaning the home, to insure that Alexander’s wife would not have to worry about housework, and a professional chef who normally worked at a French restaurant in the city would come and cook the family dinner three nights a week. The whole house was decorated and redecorated often and to the whims of Alexander’s wife, even the closets, which periodically had to have more cedar added to increase the potency of their smell, and the garage, which she absolutely refused to let get dirty.

“I spend hours in that garage, hours!” She would say to company, holding a crystal flute filled with fine champagne that she would use a prop to enhance her gestures, “I know it’s where the man goes, right. The men go in the garage, but Alexander isn’t the kind of man who’s in the garage a lot and there’s no reason for it to be filthy. Most garages are like holes in the wall where people keep their cars with oil spills and disgusting posters of naked women on top of cars and motorcycles. But not my garage, I keep it nice and tidy.” She told this story often so that people would know she was serious about keeping a clean garage, and that her efforts had not caused her any small amount of pain.

In truth, she had never spent more than a minute in their garage and she had never done anything to it that even resembled cleaning. She seemed to harbor an irrational fear of the garage; she refused to park her car in it and if she needed something from it she would wait until someone else could go get it for her. A garage was not the place for the woman of the house, she would say, and she would never violate a man’s place. She made Alexander tidy the garage every evening and refused to let the maid so much as set foot in it. The garage was a man’s place, she told him, and her man was going to take care of his garage. Every night before bed she would inspect it for anything out of place or dusty or spilt and if Alexander had failed to clean properly she wouldn’t speak to him for the rest of the night or let him go to sleep in his own bed. Long evenings at the office had to be interrupted by a drive home to the garage where Alexander simply had to clean, even if there was just a jar out of place or a framed picture hanging crookedly, he had to clean it.

After a series of glowing articles in the local press praising Langston Wiring’s humanitarian efforts, business boomed and workweeks grew longer. Alexander hired more electricians but refused to let anybody else do the paperwork for his wiring company or carwashes. You couldn’t have an honest business without honest books, he would say, and the only person who he knew that was good with books and honest was himself. All day he would sit in a small office in the larger of his two carwashes, accounting for payroll and expenses and securing wiring projects. His office was nearly a perfect square, twelve feet by twelve feet. There were no windows and the walls were completely bare save for a light switch by the entrance and a calendar that hung behind Alexander. His oak desk was located dead center in the office and flanked on both sides by large metal filing cabinets.

Business with the city and state governments paid well but there was much paperwork involved, so much that it would take up the full working day of most men and at busy times there was enough work for three people. Alexander’s office became horribly cluttered as forms and paperwork piled over his desk and spilled onto the floor. His wife felt, however, that no matter how much work he may have had to do there was no excuse for absence when it came to his patriarchic duty of cleaning the garage.

Soon after James had entered grade school his mother developed a panoply of problems. With her son no longer at home during the mornings she had nothing to distract herself from the drabness of her house. She asked her husband to hire some full time help to clean up the house and keep her company, and he did, but that wasn’t enough since all the help he could afford to hire was Spanish and she wasn’t comfortable talking to Spanish people. She wanted a hobby so she asked her husband to buy her some books on bird watching and stamp collecting, but neither proved interesting enough to hold her attention for the duration of a whole illustrated beginner’s guide. Over a span of three years she took up aerobic exercise, gourmet cooking, karate, sewing, wood carving, tennis, crochet, computer programming, and micro brewing, though none of these pastimes held her interest for more than a week or two. She realized one evening that her restlessness must have been due to her lack of material possessions and so petitioned her husband for money to buy furnishings and appliances while he was cleaning up a small spill of petrol in the garage.

“Darling,” she called, poking her head in the door, closing her eyes to make sure that she didn’t violate her man while he was cleaning his man space “could you come into the kitchen so we can talk?”

Alexander was on his knees, putting a fair amount of elbow grease into his efforts of sponging up the pungent spill. “What do you want, honey? I’m kind of busy.” He said, not looking at her.

She took offense at his annoyance and shuddered with anger. “You need to come in here, now!” She slammed the door and walked into the kitchen, her husband followed soon afterwards. “Look here,” she stammered, gauging his concerned face and formulating the proper way to phrase her apophthegm for the best effect. “I-I cannot take this anymore!”

Alexander jumped to concern. “What can’t you take, honey?”

“This house and that garage.” She sat down her champagne flute and started to cry. “This house and that garage! What is there for me to do in this house and you take care of the garage? There’s nothing left to paint and I need to decorate this house and I need to- -“ She started to wail unintelligibly.

“What can I do honey? I’ll do anything! What can I do?” He was serious, too. He could not stand to hear a woman cry, no matter who may have been crying and for whatever reason, and he would do anything to make the noise cease. Normally, he could just leave the room when a woman started to cry but since this was his wife her crying was his responsibility, he figured, and he had to make it stop.

His wife stopped crying when he made his offer and let out a little sniffle. This was the hardest part, pretending to still be upset when she was so close to victory. She cleared her throat meekly and spoke the mousiest voice possible “Well. I-I need some things, for the house. We need more furnishings. And appliances, we need appliances, too. Oh, our baby James so big in school and I’m here all alone! When he comes home he should have the all modern comforts that are available!”

“But honey—“

Her eyes swelled with tears.

“How much more do you think you’ll need?”

“Much more! As much as we can spare! This our happiness we’re talking about!”

“Of course, dear. Of course… I’ll take a look tomorrow and see what we can spare and give it to you.”

She ran to her husband and kissed him. “Oh, thank you Darling! Now, you get back to cleaning the garage and hurry up to get to bed, you have a long day ahead of you tomorrow!”

The following day at work was, indeed, very long. Alexander needed to prepare tax reports for work that was to begin on a low-rise apartment complex in an Hispanic suburb that had been deemed a fire hazard a week before and so had to be completely rewired within two months lest all the building’s tenets be thrown onto the streets by a city commission looking after their welfare. Two months to rewire a predicted fifteen apartments required febrile efforts from Alexander and his entire staff, with all other projects on hold so Alexander could quickly file the necessary papers and get the project in motion. At midday his wife called, asking him how much money there was that they could spare her for modern necessities. He told her that he was still trying to figure it out and that she should call back later, which she did the next hour. I’m still figuring it out, he said, and told her to call back later. An hour later the phone rang again and before picking it up Alexander made a quick count of his papers. He was only a third of a way through them. On the phone was his wife, asking him if he was finished calculating how much they could afford to give her. He said no, not yet, and she started to cry.

“It’s like all you care about is your work and giving people their electricity and I’m here with your only son and he has to suffer! He has to go without so many things that other advantaged children have and I am not going to raise a disadvantaged child!”

Alexander could have told her what he had told her a hundred times before, that she had to understand that government contracts came with a lot of paperwork which took a long time to fill out and that if he were to leave it to someone else then corruption would abound and he would have to cut costs, not have as thorough an installation performed in the low rent housing and decrease employee pay. He didn’t tell her this, though, because he knew that it would just make her cry even more. Instead he chucked his file of government papers onto the floor, called his friend downtown and told him to find another electric firm to take over the housing project, fired his lowest level employees, and brought along a thick cotton bag filled with cash when he came home that evening to clean the garage. Never again did his wife come to him when she needed money, she just took from the company till. The wages of all of Alexander’ employees were cut. The government contracts kept coming, although the exemplary attention to detail that he used to insist was paid in wiring even the most desperate of slums was replaced with cost cutting measures, cheap wiring, and projects left half finished to cut down on employee hours. Ms. Langston-Hewitt could not have been happier.

His wife added a second pool to their home, this one was much deeper than the first and replete with two diving boards and a specially made machine that would inject into the water a non-toxic stream of dye, any one of four colors, at the push of the button, making the diving pool a lavish centerpiece for her invitation-only holiday gatherings. The wall of shrubbery that lined the front of house was replaced with a tall wooden fence that could only be penetrated through a chain link gate. A topiary garden lined the home inside of the fence, and the whole house was painted with Dalmatian spots. Langston Wiring’s profits soared, forcing most of their competition out of business and making profits soar even higher. An addition was built to their home, which his wife had painted light pink with black spots and a dark green trim, to resemble a watermelon. This was where James got to live, because his mother felt that he had always wanted his own home apart from theirs where he could play. He had a bedroom, a kitchenette, a den, and a bathroom, all fully furnished and to himself. The electricity was a little sub par, though, since his father’s employees were told to wire the building as fast as possible and managed to come in two thousand dollars under budget. Nothing that required more voltage than an alarm clock could stay plugged in for more than two hours for fear of fire, but James learned to manage in exchange for the privacy of what was, essentially, his own home.

When James was old enough to need more spending money than Alexander felt absolutely necessary, (one hundred dollars a week to keep his miniature home stocked with food and toiletries) he had to work a few hours each weekend at the larger of his father’s carwashes. He earned an hourly wage that was three times what the tenured employees of the carwash were paid in exchange for filling vending machines with pine tree shaped air fresheners and small scented rags. He also emptied and filled the machine that gave quarters and on weekend afternoons in the summer he helped out in the manual carwash by sponging dirt and grime from hubcaps and bumpers. Summer was the hardest time of the year for the carwash staff, which consisted of two men in their middle sixties who only on worked alternate weekday afternoons the rest of the year and weren’t fond of one and other because of military affiliation, one had been in the Army and the other the Navy. They had both taken their positions years earlier to earn extra money and help soothe the boredom of retirement and since they both claimed to be decorated veterans Alexander had originally paid each man enough to support himself only working ten hours a week. Each man accepted without complaint massive pay cuts when Alexander told them that the carwash had fallen on hard times and each man didn’t complain when they were told that they would have to start doing comparatively hard labor, together, on weekend afternoons in the heat of summer to earn their abbreviated pay. James would quickly get tired of scrubbing and set on the pavement away from the cars where he used his sharp vision to scrutinize the work of the men, pointing out where they had mistakenly neglected to clean. The two old men didn’t like a twelve-year-old boy telling them how to scrub cars for just over minimum wage. James would tell the men that since he made three times what they did they should have to listen to him. The men went to Alexander and told him that through military training and war they’d had to put up with many hardships in their lives, but that they’d never done anything as difficult and trying as working with James. It’s simple, they told him, either the kid goes, or we go. Alexander decided to have his son start helping him out in the office rather than working outside.

Alexander told James that he had to work in an office because he was bred above the kind of people who enjoyed working outside. At first he told him this just to spare his feelings, since the boy was at the time incredibly sensitive and would have been very upset if he knew that his father’s employees didn’t like him. The more time he spent working with the child, though, the more he came to believe his white lie. James moved about the office as if it were his natural habitat, tackling medial and fairly important tasks with the bravado of a motivated boy twice his age. Though he behaved lazily when working on the outside of the carwash, in the office James filed papers, signed forms, and organized indexes perfectly without being instructed on how to do so. He was, by God, made for white-collar work and watching his son, still short but putting on weight before a pubescent growth spurt, his full, brown hair without the sun highlights of summers past, maneuver through paperwork like a graduate fresh from business school filled Alexander with warm pride.

James knew that the old men who worked at the carwash didn’t like him. When he worked with them they would tell him that that he didn’t belong there and that they didn’t appreciate his company. When his father informed him that he was going to work exclusively in the office he knew that it was because the old men could no longer stand his presence. His mother told him not to be sad and that the judgments given to him from such trash people should not be taken seriously. He did belong in the office, she told him, because that is where young men of his fine breeding were supposed to work.

“You mean, my whole life, I’m going to have to work in an office?” He asked.

“If you want to be happy and successful, you will.” She told him with a smile and a nod.

Alexander grew to see his son’s presence in the office as a blessing. Not only did it help weather the burden of his ever-increasing stream of office work, but he could place the full trust of his accounts in the hands of James. He knew he son wanted to inherit the company, even at that young age, and so he wouldn’t dare to steal from his own father and jeopardize his position as heir. He had originally started working only on weekends, due to his mother’s edict that grades came before all else because she was unable to bare the shame of raising a drop out, but with the promise that he would maintain his grade average James was allowed to start spending weekday afternoons with his father at the carwash. To accommodate for his new full-time assistant, Alexander pushed his desk to one corner of the office and bought his son an oak desk, which he placed directly across from his own.

Though they sat facing one and other the two rarely spoke. Here and again Alexander would make a banal comment regarding the weather or the amount of work they had to do, and his son would only respond with a nod of his head. James had never been a talkative child, but he became almost entirely mute when he started his work in the office. He would only talk when he had a question regarding school or work, and when he did so he would never let his personal feelings or emotions enter into the conversation. He had no friends his own age to converse with at school, and he rarely saw his mother since he usually had no need to go from his miniature house to hers. His father was the only man he could speak to, and his father wasn’t one for speaking, so James learned to keep entirely to himself.

James grew into a man under the sterile fluorescent lights of the office, tall and stringy like his father only with thick brown hair and a crooked nose that would cast in dim light a shadow upon his high cheekbones no matter which way he was facing. Alexander had been steadily bulking since his business had started to turn significant profits years earlier and any hair that might have once adorned the man’s head was a distant memory, and as James’ desk sat five feet away from his own he would often catch himself staring at his son, jealously longing for his bony old self and a full head of hair. His son was wasting his youth, he realized, although James hadn’t been forced into business solitude by homeliness, as had his father. A proper son would have followed more closely in his father’s footsteps and have had to of wasted his youth, so Alexander could not be blamed for making sure that his son kept his full attention on the office and school. The boy could not be distracted from his duties with the petty matters of adolescence if he wanted his father to trust him to take over the business.

James kept growing, though, and Alexander found himself being more and more jealous of his youth and mildly attractive face. Staring at the boy enraged him, filled him with the kind of panicked hatred that only the realization that one’s long-held expectations have been unrealistic could bring. He wanted to corrupt his son, make sure that he had to dedicate himself to work and get as little joy out of life as his father had. He repeated business school clichés to the boy every day, hoping to needlessly trick him into believing that office work was the true route to happiness. Work hard, stay focused on the bottom line, separate work from pleasure, always take care of your needs first. James would always nod in response and say “Yes dad” to prove that he understood.

“Be sure to keep your keep your eyes on the prize now, son”

“Yes dad.”

“Remember to document everything, even if you want to forget it.”

“Yes dad.”

“The bottom line is the only line.”

“Yes dad.”

James grew more and more dedicated. When he needed solace, he would find it in his father’s clichés or what he remembered of his mother’s happiness. When he needed companionship, he would remind himself that it would be easy to find love once he had established himself in the world of business. He never needed inspiration and he never need drive. He had his father’s warm stare every afternoon to take care of that. He graduated from high school a semester early and near the top of his class with enough money saved from working to pay his way through business school and learn things that his father could only dream of. When he left for school he was promised that the business would become his when upon his successful completion of his Masters degree so that his father could “settle down.” He didn’t thank his father for the offer, as thanks was not expected. He had earned his position.

Alexander had a bit of trouble adjusting to his son’s absence and had to start during busy times of the year staying at the office twelve to fifteen hours a day again. He worked each day happily, though, with his son’s return looming only six years away (along with brief reunions every Christmas, and summer), Alexander felt that he had for the first time in his life something better, something certain to look forward to. His wife didn’t mind what he or his child did one way or the other, so long as her husband was always home before bed to clean the garage, which he always was. Indeed, the Langston/Langston-Hewitt/Langstonhewitt family had never been happier.

One evening in early April Alexander received a phone call from James. This was unusual, since his son wasn’t due to come home for several more weeks and he never called unless it was to arrange or double check travel plans. His voice sounded different than it usually did, higher pitched, though it may have just seemed that way because he was talking over quite a bit of background noise, something else that was out of place.

“Dad, I was wondering…”

“Yes, what were you wondering?”

“Well, I know that you always said that I should completely focused on business and school and I really think that’s right, dad, and I am completely staying focused on school right now. I’m getting straight A’s.”

“That’s very good, you know that. What were you wondering, then?”

“Well…It’s just that, when I come back, this summer, I’m probably going to be really tired from all this school work I’ve been doing. I mean, it’s probably going to get easier later on, like when I’m a junior and I only have to take classes for the stuff I’m good at, but they have me doing everything right now and I’m really working hard to keep getting A’s.”

“Hard work is necessary to get where you are going, son. A boy of your stature must work to become a man of mine. You know that.”

“Oh, absolutely, Dad. Absolutely. It’s just that—it’s just that I’ve met this girl.” Alexander dropped the phone to his side while his son continued to talk. His head felt pressured, physically, like he had taken in a deep breath that went entirely behind his eyes. After a moment he raised the phone up back to his ear but heard only silence on the other end. Then, seconds later James’ voice “Well, Dad? Are you there?”

“Yes. Yeah, I’m here.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

“About me and Jenny. Just for the first three weeks this summer and then I’ll come down. Just to, you know, give myself a break.”

“What do I think about that?” He said in a hushed tone. He thought nothing of it, actually, his head was as blank as it had ever been, though he wanted to sound like he was thinking. “What do I think…” he said, trailing off into silence.

“Well, what do you think?” James’ asked after several seconds passed.

“I think… I think that you’re a selfish, greedy, demanding little bastard who doesn’t know how good he has it, that’s what I think.” Alexander spoke in the most relaxed and plaintive of tones. He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t even upset, but he felt that he should have been and so he put forth a half-hearted attempt.

James had never been spoken to like that, not from his father. He wasn’t disappointed so much as he was shocked. He mouthed “but, Dad?” before being cut off.

“But nothing.” Replied his father, now summoning enough emotion to sound convincing. “You’re going to be here when you said you would that’s that. The whole goddamn company is counting on you to get your lazy ass down here. You can tell your little whore to wait until you get back in the fall.”

Alexander didn’t wait to hear his son’s reply. He slammed down the receiver and was very careful not to give the matter any further consideration for the next three hours, until while staring at the wooden office door he dropped his pencil at his feet. He watched as it bounced off of his loafers and onto the floor, where it rolled under his desk and out of sight. He didn’t bend to pick it up, he just stared at the ground hoping that it might roll back. It didn’t. He kept staring. Soon the ground had lost all meaning and the carpeted floor on which he sat that was in need of a vacuuming might as well have been a surrealist’s canvas or a tobacco company’s billboard promising full flavor in spite of having less tar. Alexander pictured his son as an infant and again as a child. He remembered being at home before sun down and hearing his son’s first word while his wife was upstairs in the modest home where he grew up sleeping. He could see the peeling white paint around the window in his room that lead to a sturdy awning on which he and his mother would sit and watch Memorial Day fireworks. He blinked and remembered the expected and proud lack of expression on his son’s face when he was told that the family business was as good as his. He remembered then that his pencil was under his desk and he bent off his chair to pick it up. His reports for the day were filed, on time despite his lack of aid. He had nothing, therefore, to examine, consider, or ponder but himself, whom he found now slumping in his chair, his doughy midsection straining against his immaculate white shirt and nearly spilling out onto his desk. The room was bare and quiet, no ticking clocks or humming lights. Free from windows and natural lighting, there was nothing to keep track of time besides the digital wristwatch he kept in his desk drawer that was equipped with an alarm programmed to go off when he needed to go home to clean the garage. The lights of the office were as bright at noon as they were at midnight, and sitting in them now he realized that he had no idea how long he had been there; not just for that past day, but for the past years. More memories flooded back uncontrollably. Being in love with his wife. Being a child himself on his father’s knee being spoken to but not paying any particular attention for what was being said. His wife’s kiss, lord how she used to kiss! James, his son, his handsome son realizing one afternoon that he had to shave for the first time and him doing nothing besides nodding and telling the child that he had better save his pay for a razor. His son asking to enjoy his summer vacation and his request being denied.

Alexander put down his head and wept. He wept for his son and for himself. They both had lost James’ childhood and they both could place the blame squarely on his shoulders. It was his fault for his letting slip by his own life and his fault for the letting slip by the life of his child. Crestfallen and swollen with tears, he mouthed his realization to himself silently. “Nobody’s fault but my own. Nobody’s fault but mine.”

The door to his office made the squawk of being opened and Alexander quickly looked up.

A child, aged twelve or maybe thirteen years, stood at beneath the embrasure. He was very short for his age, Alexander could tell, and shielded under a tattered orange baseball cap he held a blinding white grin that stretched ear to ear. Alexander could only see each end of the smile but it put him on edge like no other facial expression ever had before. It was so white and antiseptic yet it was set on the face of dirty child, a slant eyed hooligan who smelled like stale sweat and would not remove his glare from directly above Alexander’s head. He turned to see if there was something behind him that the child might have been looking at but spied nothing aside from a bare white wall and plain calendar that had no picture save for a Langston Wiring logo and was covered in handwriting that would have been too small for the child to read. He turned around slowly and faced, once again, the unmoved child, still staring at the same spot above his head.

“This is a private office.” Alexander managed in his most authoritative tone, letting only a small spot of fear enter into his speech. “Can I help you?”

The child did not flinch and kept its smiling gaze prone, pointed directly above Alexander’s head.

Alexander trembled. He could see himself rising quickly to a stand and pointing at the door to the office, yelling at the child in a menacing tone that would make anybody leave. Instead, he did not stand and he did not menace. He patted his brow with his bare hand and shook a bit. “Come now. What do you want?” He asked the child in a whimper, all signs of authority having left his voice.

The child looked down and Alexander’s eyes followed his to an extended arm adorned in baggy flannel. Poking through his sleeve was a brown and white hand; bony fingers with muddied nails were wrapped around what looked like a small egg. The child cocked his arm and set it forward, throwing the egg directly between Alexander’s eyes where it landed without noise and splashed, it seemed to happen very slowly, separate lines of white and yolk that flew to atop his head, onto to his shirt, and into both his eyes, burning like sulfur and taking away his vision. The child screamed with laughter and ran out of sight as Alexander raised quickly from his chair and stumbled about the room for something to clear his face with. Eyes shut, he managed into the small bathroom adjacent the office where he turned the faucet and splashed some water from his hands into his eyes. Vision returned, but the pain remained. Careful not to catch a glance of himself in the mirror above the sink, he bent he knees and strained his neck to stick his head underneath the stream of water, letting it drain down his smooth scalp and onto his face, over his eyes and past his nose, down into the wash basin. After a few moments the water started to turn from lukewarm to cold and Alexander realized that his eyes had stopped burning. He rose to his feet and turned off the water. He unbuttoned and removed his egg-soaked shirt, leaving only a tank top to cover his doughy, snow-white midsection. He folded his shirt over his shoulder and walked out of the bathroom, then out of his office.

The entire carwash was covered in egg. The row of three vacuums specially designed to clean rough automobile upholstery that was stationed ten feet from his door was what Alexander noticed first. Their nozzles had been detached from the canisters and each one was almost entirely colored white from thousands of tiny bits of eggshell clinging to them. Piled directly in front of his door were two dozen empty egg crates that Alexander kicked away as he walked to the vacuums to get a closer look at the mess. When he reached the vacuums he felt a cold breeze brush across his bare head and turned around slowly. There seemed to be not a single spot on any of the walls of the rectangular building that was dry. Whoever had thrown the eggs did so strategically, aiming for the very top of the building and letting the slurry drip down to cover the rest of the wall. You could tell where the eggs had landed, and Alexander couldn’t help but marvel at the precision in which the impact sites made an almost perfectly straight line. Where the dripping stains of ooze started to taper off near the center of the wall there was another line of impact marks that dripped down past the bottom of the wall, onto the ground. Every wall of the rectangular building was dripping wet with white and yellow slime, even the insides of the areas where cars were actually washed.

There was only one set of yolk footprints throughout the lot; all markings had the same shape and size, considerably smaller than the marks Alexander was leaving as he walked. How could one child have thrown so many eggs without anybody noticing? He followed the footprints out of his lot and down the block, but they became too dim be of any assistance after a few hundred feet and Alexander assumed the perpetrator to be as good as gone. The sun was setting and so Alexander turned on the overnight lights to the carwash. He hung chains at both entrances to block access to potential customers and set about cleaning his lot. The areas where cars were automatically washed were easy to clean, of course, and the semi-automatic wash kiosks were simply sprayed down with the high-pressure water guns contained within. Unfortunately, the cords that connected the guns to their water supply was too short to spray down the outside of the building (a design feature that was, ironically enough, intended to prevent vandalism), so Alexander had to repeatedly fill a gallon bucket with soapy water and splash it on the walls. Once the whole building had been soaked twice, Alexander began scrubbing the walls with the aide of a small wood-handled, hard bristled brush and a three-foot stepladder. The process took hours and was still not complete, but Alexander grew too tired to work any further and decided to go home. His wife had stayed up late to greet him, and she was furious.

She stood in the doorjamb connecting the garage to the rest of the house, her legs exposed below the knee where her pink and silky but completely non-sexual nightgown cut off. Her right leg was laboriously extended so that her husband would notice her tapping foot as he pulled his car into his man space. Behind his steering wheel he could see only her foot and thigh extended from the shadowy corner and reflecting ghostly white from the glare of his headlamps. He turned off his engine and could hear her yelling unintelligibly from her shadows. He listened to the muted meddling through his windshield for a little while, appreciating the bevy of slowly rising and rapidly falling pitches and wildly varied tones that accompanied his wife’s speech, as they usually went unnoticed as an unfortunate result of him having to block her voice out of consciousness every time she started to speak. Listening to her voice without having actually to hear her say anything though, he found fascinating, and he decided to listen for as long as he could before she came to get him out of the car. She became a muffled symphony. She communicated to him without words sheer emotion that he was allowed to interpret as he pleased. She was despairing, angry, upset (not in a sad way; more volatile than anything), forgiving, cautious, angry again, and finally very sorry for herself. Along with the symphony Alexander saw a woman as beautiful as his wife once was bedecked in a scarlet robe with her hair done in a modern style, wearing on her feet the cheap cherry-red pumps of a prostitute. She was riding a solid sable horse lightly against a gray backdrop of chilled clouds and bare trees. She reached a lone grave that lay between two very wide oak stumps and was marked only by a smooth wooden dowel with a lime green plastic flag tied around it blowing softly with the wind. She dismounted her horse harshly and the creature ran out of sight; her hair was in perfect order and did not move as she pounded her fist onto the fresh soil of the grave, screaming through tears at the loss of whomever. In the distance, she spotted a yellow and pink flower growing alone in the autumn chill. Forgetting momentarily her sorrow, she ran over to study the flower, only to have it wilt before her eyes when she reached it. She started again to scream through tears and pounded the fallen leaves and moist, packed soil where the flower had just fallen.

The symphony ceased suddenly and Alexander was ripped out of fantasy by the metallic click and clank of his wife trying to make her way into his car. He could understand her every word as clear as crystal now, and she was fuming. Far from the slender blonde goddess pouring into the scarlet robe of his fantasy, the woman facing him was leathery and caked with fake colors. Her eyes were glossy, not bright, and pointed at sharp angles instead of being welcomingly round.

“What are you doing sitting in there? Get out of there! Get out! Open this door right now!”

He reached over to the passenger door and let her in. She sat down and closed the door.

“Is something a matter, honey?” He asked in the most monotone voice he could manage.

“Is something a matter?” She repeated with shock “Is something a matter” She let out a petulant giggle. “I should certainly say that something is a matter. You! You’re a matter-- what’s a matter. You are!”

“Why’s that, dear?”

“You stay out until all hours of the night and then you come home and sit in this car like a retarded child staring at the ceiling! You have no idea how much time I spent on arranging this garage, and if you did then you, you—

“—The carwash was vandalized today. Very thoroughly. I had to stay late and clean it up.”

Her victim-hood suddenly snatched, she stammered for a response. “V-Vandals?”

He nodded.

“Oh darling! Were you harmed?”

“No, no. Nothing was harmed, just covered in egg. The whole building. It must have taken him twenty or thirty dozen to do it.”

“Him?”

“Just one kid, he threw an egg at me in my office.”

“Did you call the police?”

He shook his head. She stiffened, beginning to feel that she was the butt of some sort of cruel joke, or, even worse, he was lying to her and had been out this late doing god knows what.

“You’re telling me, honey, that one child covered your entire building in so much egg that you had to stay four hours past when you knew that I would be going to bed and checking on the garage, one child? That this single child was able to throw hundreds of eggs and cover and entire building, a very large building, without anybody noticing him and then he threw an egg right at you and you didn’t even call the police to report him?”

“Yes. I didn’t even think to, it was just egg.” His face was clean. His clear, round eyes presented no sign of subterfuge and she spied no sly grin of sarcasm. He was either telling the truth or he was crazy, maybe both.

“What did he look like then, the child?” She asked, finding herself suddenly very interested in, of all things, her husband’s day at work.

“He couldn’t have been more than twelve maybe, looked like he was just starting puberty. Real stubby, but he had long arms and his clothes didn’t fit him. He was dirty, too, just covered in dust and dirt like he hadn’t washed his clothes in days.”

“Is that all you remember?”

“Well,” Alexander, excited with the apparently selfless interest his wife was taking in his day, tried to remember the face of his assailant. “his eyes, they were spaced really far apart and his skin was kind of yellowish. He was wearing a baseball cap.”

They both got out of the car. Before they reached the door, he leaned to kiss her. She pushed away and sighed. “You really should have called, you know, I’ve been worried sick. I could have gone to sleep hours ago, but now I have to wait until you get the garage clean. One of the maids had a friend over today and he accidentally drove into here without asking so there’s some mud tracks that you have to scrub up.” She handed him a brush and bucket and then went to bed.

The next morning, Alexander advised his employee to keep a look out for any suspicious looking kids with orange baseball caps who might wander into the lot and may or may not be holding cartons of eggs. The employee said “ok” and didn’t ask why his boss made such a strange request. When Alexander walked away the employee spoke aloud, to himself. “He can just go fuck himself he wants me get up and tell him about some kids. Asshole.” He spat on the ground after his dialogue and raised fist in the air, violently pumping it towards his boss’ office.

No children came anywhere near the carwash that afternoon.

Or the next afternoon.

Or for the next two weeks.

Alexander had been having trouble breathing since the egging. He didn’t have asthma, because as he knew them asthma attacks were only occasional and violent. His trouble was persistent and very slight. There were no acute incidents of respiratory failure that warranted a trip to the doctor or the attention of others, Alexander had just been generally not breathing well. Most often it felt as if his nostrils were closing in and so he would always be squeezing his nose when he was alone to clear the passageways. This never worked, though, so he had taken to keeping his mouth open slightly and taking a supplemental breath through his mouth every ten seconds. This had made his bottom lip chap severely and it looked from a distance like he had painted on an extra lip with red marker. An elderly woman he passed on the walk from his car to his office that morning had told him in a sincere voice that it was a mark of guilt and asked him if he felt guilty about anything. He didn’t answer.

Later that day, James telephoned his father at the office. It was late in the afternoon, and Alexander knew that it was going to be a struggle to finish all of his work before he was due home. If he had so much work to do that a second trip to the office that evening, after he was finished cleaning, was inevitable, his son’s call wouldn’t have bothered him, but since there was an equal chance that he would have his work done in time and that he would have to return later on, his son’s call struck him as an incommodious insult to all the hard work he had to do.

“What do you want?” he asked. His annoyance, he made sure, was very clear in his tone of voice.

“I was just calling to ask you if you’d put any more thought into what we talked about last time.”

Alexander had to think for a moment before he remembered the last time he had spoken with his son, as he had managed to eschew all thoughts of that conversation ever since he had first caught sight of the child in the dirty baseball cap. When he did remember that last conversation he was struck down with the same paralyzing flood of memories that had caused him to weep weeks before James in a pale blue smock, being carried by a nurse and smiling when he recognized his father in a hospital waiting room after his colic had been mistakenly diagnosed as typhus after rumors of an outbreak had swept their community. His own father wearing faded flannel checkered red and black, running across a dirt road at dusk, his heavy boots kicking up dust and leaving behind pleasantly shaped craters that reminded him of a waffle iron. His wife’s eyes, from when he couldn’t tell for sure but long ago because they had no wrinkles and were surrounded by skin her natural shade of white, blinking fast as a humming bird as a gesture of mirth. The sky around him like he were in a glass ball, spinning around and around as fast as he could before falling into sweet smelling corn. “Dad?” a voice called out. bringing him back to his desk, his office, his son on the phone. He laid his chin against his chest as his eyes swelled with tears.

“James,” he breathed into the receiver. “Oh, James. Did you—do you still want to go away for a couple a weeks with that girl?”

“Yeah…. I was wondering if you put anymore thought into it.”

His father’s face came into vision and nodded at him. His mother smiled and wiped away a tear, she was wearing the blue dress lined white that she wore every day in the summer except Sunday. He knew what to do.

Alexander cleared his throat and wiped his eyes. Very carefully, he spoke into the phone.

“I want you to go and have a great time.”

“Are you sure, Dad?”

“I’m sure, and when you get back we can get to work.”

James laughed and thanked his father. Alexander laughed as well. James thanked his father several times more and promised that he would work harder than ever when he returned and assured his father that he was doing well at business school. There was laughter and joy from the background on James’ end of the phone. Alexander told his son to take good care of himself and to say hello to his girlfriend and hung up. He decided then, after a quick look at his paperwork, to hold things off until the next day.

He left his office that evening and did his usual rounds of the carwash before leaving for home. This consisted of, more or less, a quick check to make sure that all the necessary doors were opened, and that the coin slots in the automatic washes were not jammed. When he was in the final wash kiosk clearing out a chewed piece of pink bubble gum from the coin slot, a mess that he found more often than one might think, he heard from above a child’s cough. Looking up, he could see that lying in the corner of the room, perched atop some crates that held machinery and taking cover behind a round bristled roller, the figure of a child, aged twelve or maybe thirteen, wrapped in a sleeping bag. The child was wearing a dirty baseball cap.

Careful not to make any noise, Alexander grabbed a hard broomstick and crept over to the crates. He raised the stick carefully and positioned it over his target, holding with both hands as he cocked it all the way behind his back and swung forward full force, only to have it catch the low hanging ceiling on the peak of its slope and crack in half. If the noise hadn’t of woken the child, Alexander’s scream would have. The boy scrambled to roll off the crate and started to run away while Alexander was still clutching his hands between his legs, reeling in pain. The child left behind his shoes, pants, and sleeping bag as he ran out of the kiosk and into the lot of the carwash, not looking before crossing the street and nearly being hit from the side by a large Pontiac that squealed to a halt and honked its horn. The child stood stunned while the driver of the Pontiac screamed an obscenity. Alexander’s arm wrapped around the boy from behind, picking up all eighty-five pounds of him and holding him in his armpit the whole walk back into the office. Alexander threw the half naked, sobbing child onto the floor and stood blocking the entryway.

The child didn’t get up. He just lay curled on the floor, crying softly. Alexander didn’t know what to do with the boy. He had no idea. When he first saw him he was angry and wanted to hurt the child, but that was when he was lying in his wash kiosk, disdainfully thinking that he had put one over on the owner of the building. Lying there, asleep so peacefully, he looked smug; far more comfortable than any child of his stature should have been. Now he was a helpless and sobbing fetus burying his head into the office floor, not smug, not hurting anybody or feeling very smart. Alexander was the smart one, now, and he hated it. He braced one arm on his knee and slowly lowered his bulk onto the floor where it rested between his two knees. He was exhaling heavily from having exerted himself so much in carrying the child, making his bottom lip burn. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his bare hand and closed his eyes, dipping his chin against his chest and rubbing his lip with his wet shirt.

“Where are your parents?” He asked, in what he hoped sounded like a concerned voice. The child didn’t move, he just kept weeping into the floor. With his eyes still closed, Alexander asked his question again and still did not receive a response. “Look, “ he said, raising himself and limping slowly around the child and to his desk, opening a route for the child to the door. “I can’t have a kid living in here. If you get hurt or something they’re gonna make me pay for it and I can’t afford it. Get your stuff and get out.”

The child looked up from the floor and towards the entryway, where he assumed that Alexander was still sitting. Not seeing him there shocked the child, who quickly jumped to his knees and turned around to Alexander’s desk. His cap had fallen off and his face, now completely visible, was covered in purple and red bruises. His hair looked like it had been cut with a rusty pocketknife, and there were scabby knots speckled about his scalp. “What are you waiting for?” Alexander barked, “Go on, get going.” The child scrambled fully to his feet and ran out, leaving his hat and a rust-colored spot on the carpeting behind him.

Alexander brought the child’s baseball cap home with him that evening and sat in on the dining room table before he cleaned the garage. It was three days before he received a phone call from his wife, at work, asking him about the cap. It came from a child, he told her, and she wanted to know what child. A child that I found sleeping in the car wash, he told her, and she wanted to know why a child was sleeping in a carwash. He told her that she asked too many questions and she started to scream. He told to her scream louder, and she did. He told her to stop screaming, and she screamed even louder. There was a crash and the clanking of a dropped phone, and he could hear her crying. When he came home to clean the garage that evening a maid informed him that his wife was in the hospital, she had broken her leg after drinking too much and falling down the stairs. Nobody was home when she fell, and she hadn’t mentioned being upset about anything besides her broken leg.

Figuring he could make up for the lost time at work since he had no obligation to clean the garage that evening, Alexander visited his wife at the hospital the next afternoon. She was on the third floor and should be able to come home later that day, the doctor told him, and Alexander asked the doctor to arrange a cab for her. When he reached her room she was surrounded by Mylar balloons and wearing a dirty orange cap, talking into a phone cradled under her ear. She was talking to someone she hated but pretended to like, he could tell, because her facial expressions didn’t match her speech. If she had liked the person on the phone she would have made a grimace while she described her death-defying fall, patted her eye with a tissue while she told of her pain and suffering. Instead she spoke with no expression, staring forward and scratching her nose inattentively.

He coughed, accidentally, making his wife realize that he was in the room. She apologized to whomever she was speaking to, but she had get going. She glared at him angrily, displaying an intent that he found very frightening.

“How are you fe—“

“--Who is she?” his wife snapped in a tone he couldn’t immediately recognize. It was a concerned, angry voice that didn’t at all fit his wife’s usual, self-serving vocal palate. Of course, he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Who is who?”

“The woman who this cap belongs to.” She said, pointing towards her head, “Who is she?”

“I told you yesterday that it belongs to a child.”

Her eyes turned to slits that jutted towards one another at opposite angels. “The same child that somehow covered your whole carwash in egg?”

“Yeah, he was living there. I don’t know for how long, though.”

“That’s a funny story, because I just got off the phone with your son.”

His son? His son! His happy son who had been given, by kind and benevolent hands, the chance to experience a two-week vacation with a young lady he said he loved. Alexander smiled wide and his face flushed red. His wife snapped at him.

“All of a sudden he says you tell him to go run off with some slut. He says that you sounded like a completely different person on the phone, like you had found ‘true love’ yourself, behind my back. I have been suffering in this hospital!”

“I was just happy for him, that’s all. I was glad that he’s going to get to enjoy himself.”

“Well, you can quit being happy for him because he has to come home and help his mother as soon as his classes are done with!”

Her words hit him like a sack full of doorknobs. He stumbled for a response. “You—you told him that?”

“I most certainly did! The doctor says that it could be months before I’m fully mobile again and I’m going to need somebody to take care of me. Of course, you’d be too busy to do it, so I had to get my only son to help me.”

“We can hire a maid. Someone to watch after you full time.”

“I am not having a maid bathe me. That’s something that my son has to do. There’s a very close bond between mother and son, you know, something that you will never understand. He’ll have a much better time with his mother than on some vacation.”

Alexander didn’t argue any further, he knew that it wouldn’t do any good. He left the hospital without saying another word. His head was spinning the whole drive home.

When his wife was escorted to their front door that evening by a smelly and put upon cabdriver that Alexander refused to tip she stood leaning on her crutches in their foyer as her husband returned to kitchen, where he had been before having to answer the door for her. She called him back and demanded his assistance in crutching to the living room sofa. He obliged, but returned to the kitchen as soon as she was seated. She called him back into the living room and he returned, surprisingly, to her, not showing any signs of annoyance. She was hoping to yell at him for his acting burdened, and with a scream on the tip of her tongue she had to close her mouth quickly and pointed towards the coffee table with a clenched fist and started to make a pained noise from her throat. He picked up a magazine from the coffee table, dropped it on her chest, and started to make his way back into the kitchen.

“Just what are you doing in there that’s so goddamn important?’

He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting at the table, but it was much more pleasant than standing with her. “Nothing, what do you want?” He said, and she seized at his annoyance.

Bracing her cast with one hand, she slammed her broken leg against its side, forcing up tears. She pulled at her hair and bellowed a screech, something about him not loving her and needing a glass of wine to relax after such an ordeal. He fetched her a bottle and a glass and went back to the kitchen. He sat at his table and thought. It wasn’t usual that he was home this early and the room looked different illuminated by daylight; golden, more alive. Daylight only seems to shine only on the things you want to see, he thought, cobwebs and dust are only shown under synthetic light. His office was kept plain to prevent filth. Maybe he needed some windows. Ever since leaving the hospital his head had been swimming and his lip was burning as painfully as it ever had before. His thoughts were racing and he could not, no matter how much focus he tried to put forth, pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds.

He looked down at the yellow legal pad laying on top of the table. He had drawn a table of two rows and three columns. The table was completely blank. He tore out the front page of the pad and wrote on the clean page:

“Things to do:

Save James

Save James

Save James

Save James”

He tore the page from the legal pad and folded it in half as many times as he could. What remained was a thick and shapeless yellow wad of paper that Alexander put into his mouth and swallowed without chewing. From the living room he heard his wife screaming for him.

She had finished her bottle of wine and decided that it was bath time. Not in the upstairs tub, that would be too much of chore, she preferred to bathe elegantly, in the Jacuzzi of the newly added “healthroom” that could only be reached using the same walkway that connected the kitchen and the garage. If, from the kitchen’s back entryway, you walked into the door directly ahead, you would enter the garage, if you made a sharp turn right as you entered the health room. The room was very large and carpeted, all the walls were mirrored. In the corner of the room closest to the entry was a treadmill still sealed in factory cellophane, near the treadmill was a set of wrapped free weights. Directly across from these, in the adjacent corner and against the wall that the healthroom shared with the garage was the hot tub and a rack of accessories. The other half of the room was empty, as his wife had abandoned decorating the healthroom when she grew bored with it. The water in the Jacuzzi had to be refilled, she told him as he lowered her onto a wooden chaise lounge near the tub. He flipped what looked like a light switch near the machine and its automated mechanisms started to fill the pool with hot water. The machine was very noisy and so as his wife was giving him unintelligible instructions he stood over the tub and watched while it filled. It was very wide, a deluxe model, with two humps on either side designed to seat three people apiece. The humps gently sloped into the middle of the tub, about five feet deep, and bathers could easily slide from their seats into a stand and stay submerged up to their shoulders.

The lights in the healthroom were adjustable and on a low and pleasant setting. No reflections could be spied in the water, but Alexander’s shadow cast almost completely black, though it still rippled with the foamy water against the dark pink tiles of the hot tub. He raised his arm to see its silhouette against the froth. His wife threw a coin at the back of his head to get his attention and he quickly undressed her. He removed her shirt and was immediately hit with a bevy of feminine odors that he might have once found appealing but was now appalled by. He paid no attention to her sagging breasts and was careful not to make any contact with her tan and seamed skin as he pulled off her widened shorts and underpants. He didn’t need to wrap her cast in cellophane as he assumed, because she was just going to lay on the hump of the Jacuzzi with her leg hanging off the side. He sat her down and was sent to the kitchen for a bottle of wine.

Her cast hung out of the tub, her back was pressed against the slippery hump, and her good leg touched the deep bottom of the pool, providing her with balance enough to keep her head crocked above water with minimal effort. Her skin was saggy beyond her years and her legs were covered in cellulite, but she could not have weighed more than one hundred and ten pounds. Moving around in the heavy cast was very laborious for such a small woman, and laying in the tub she found herself having trouble balancing the enhanced weight of her broken leg outside the pool against the rest or her body inside, so she had to keep readjusting herself by bouncing her good leg slowly from side to side in the water. She held her head angled so that her chin was almost touching her neck, and from her vantage point she couldn’t see herself inside the foamy water, save for her breasts, which floated seemingly detached for her chest and flaccid like a wilted flower petal caught in an updraft, along the top of the pool.

The bottle of wine she had drank earlier was starting to leave her and the cold pains of withdrawal ached in her head, behind her eyes and aggravated by steam rising from the water. She cursed her husband’s dawdling. He knew that she was in pain. She closed her eyes and massaged her forehead with a wet hand. The heat seemed only to intensify the chilly pressure through contradiction, and so she placed her hand back into the tub and focused on her good leg jumping right to left, left to right. The pattern soon grew boring, and so it was changed, up and back, right to left, back and up. This helped, but prickly sensations of cold pressure kicking behind her eyes would break her concentration every fifth step. Up, back, left, down, pain. Right, down, up, left, pain. She took in a deep breath and grinned with genius before starting the next set. Up, right, left, back, and before she sat down her foot to trigger the pain she let her neck go limp and submerged her head under the hot water, opening her eyes. The pressure was drowned in heat; the pain was gone. She could see nothing but pink light and foam. The comfort of equalized temperature, in back and in front of her eyes, was joyous and she writhed her head around like a slithering snake in the water to fully experience this blessed relief. Bracing with her back she slid towards the wall of the tub and then to the side, over the hump, falling into the deep center and taking with her body her cast, weighing her down in the water.

When Alexander came back into the healthroom he could not tell if there was any more splashing in the tub than there was when he had left, but he could tell that his wife wasn’t where he had left her. He called out for his wife. There was no answer. He walked to the Jacuzzi and could see nothing inside the pool but bubbling water. He reached in.

A hand brushed against her face and she grabbed onto it. Pulled up, she gasped for air without making any noise. Her fingers were clamped around his thick wrist, digging her nails filed blunt hard into him, turning his pink skin white where contact was being made. She was trembling from fright and cold. Her skin had contracted tight around her eyes and forehead which made her look exceptionally vulnerable, pathetic like a wet cat only contemptuously human, a tanned and torn lifetime of lost opportunities that children with cancer would have killed for. Frightened and weak, like an anorexic; her being was a pathetic and unfortunate side effect of her own life. His whole body flushed white, his arms and his face, and he was filled with a pride that was neither vindictive nor scornful. He was a self-righteous ghost, one hundred percent certain, one hundred percent holy, feeling the chills up his spine and tingles along his scalp of man religiously without consequence, free from hypocrisy.

Alexander’s eyes grew slant from disgust. She knew his intentions seconds before he threw her up into the air, back into the pool, but she did not scream to protest. The water was warm and the temperature was congruent both in front of and behind her eyes. The first breath of foam stung with pain. Soon after came euphoria, dim and pink.

James was rusticated three weeks before final exams with the news that his mother was dead and his father had become catatonic. He had been in charge of the carwashes and wiring company ever since.

He was still in the same office at the same suburban carwash and using the very same desk that his father did, many years later while on the phone with Nathan. Nathan worked in the city, for Lanwire, and was the effective manager of James’ employees. He had no real power or job title other than non-union electrician, but James often used Nathan to relay messages to the other employees and it was Nathan’s job to give James progress reports every Monday and Thursday. They were discussing the new man, Phillip, and how Nathan thought he was working out.

“You can’t talk to Terefy anymore about this kind of stuff.” Nathan told James.

“Why not?”

“Because you just can’t. He’s not the kind of person that tells you when somebody’s been screwing up. It’s like he don’t want to piss nobody off so he just don’t talk about anybody. For all I know this kid could be working his ass off or a total idiot, there’s no way to know from asking Terefy.”

James groaned and reached around for a cigarette. With the phone away from his ear he asked Nathan to press Terefy for answers, but Nathan misunderstood and suggested that Phillip come work with him and his partner for a couple of days so that they could see him for themselves.

“No can do.” Said James. The project Terefy and Phillip were working on wasn’t horribly important, but the building’s owner had to see people working there everyday or he would complain.

“Well then maybe just send Terefy over here and I’ll come down there and watch the kid?”

James found himself annoyed with Nathan and explained to him in the condescending tone that he would have used to speak to a child. “Can’t do that one either. That area, it’s Terefy’s element. He’s real good with darkies, even married one. It’s been his from start to finish.”

James was out of ideas and Nathan was afraid to suggest anything. It was decided between the two to just let Phillip and Terefy work together and to see how soon and how well they completed the apartment. If the results were favorable, then there really wouldn’t be a need to separate them.

“Even if the kid isn’t great, so long as he’s tolerable.” James said. “Terefy seems to me like he just might need a friend.”

And yes, he certainly did.

Work on the apartment was back onto Terefy’s original schedule, and Phillip’s presence, not his workmanship, was what had gotten it back on track. Phillip was functioning more or less as would a child helping his father with wiring, like he used to, fetching Terefy’s tools, performing only the simplest of tasks, like caulking and unscrewing, and generally providing Terefy with company. Terefy figured that Phillip’s ineptitude was a result of shaky nerves or poor schooling, and he had come to find it endearing. Phillip was a fast learner, and when he paid attention to Terefy’s slow-paced demonstrations he would catch on pretty quickly. Terefy secretly fancied himself a well-respected teacher, like the ones that he had seen on Television, and he certainly treated Phillip more like a pupil than a coworker. Not that Terefy, or Phillip for that matter, really knew what proper coworker conduct was.

Phillip had no friends, and had never made a friend at work. He had been fired from his previous four jobs because of his lack of “people skills,” failure to communicate properly with his coworkers, and twice for failure to communicate properly with customers. All of them boiled down to the same thing: the just never knew what to say or when to say it. He was almost always aloof, and when he found it necessary to speak he wouldn’t merely come off as awkward, he was mean and offensive. Though he didn’t want to be. Terefy was very nice, very forgiving, and never spoke of word of question of Phillip’s frankly mediocre wiring skills. Slips of the tongue were permissible, Phillip felt, when a woman he cared nothing for asked him if her butt looked big and he gave her an honest response, or if when being yelled at for incompetence, be it real or imagined, he told his superiors exactly what he wanted to. But Terefy was different. He was, by all standards, a good guy; business didn’t factor in to it. Terefy seemed to genuinely enjoy being around Phillip and asked nothing in return, and so Phillip tried his hardest to never slip up and hurt him.

The day’s work was over with, and the pair were packing up their equipment for the ride home.

“Would—would you like to come to have dinner with me?”

This was unexpected.

“At your house?”

Terefy nodded.

Phillip nodded.