I got laid off. I knew it was coming, the investment bank I work for lost money in Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 last year, whatever those are. People couldn’t stop talking about it, it’s coming, it’s coming, next week, for sure the week after that. And finally they did it. They called a bunch of us into the conference room on four and handed the person on the right side of the room a big stack of papers to sign and said take one and pass them to your left.

I didn’t really read the papers though I gathered from them that they said a lot of things about how wonderful it was to have us as workers and that the place was one big family and that it was pretty cool how we’d won the softball tourney three years in a row. The one thing I did notice was that we weren’t allowed to sue.

And then they told us the meeting was over and we were free to go but that we should form a line and hand our papers to H.R. Which is exactly what we did. And after we handed our papers to H.R. there was a really big surprise. It was Mr. Montgomery standing there just on the other side of the door shaking people’s hands like you might at a wedding or a funeral. I don’t need to tell you but I will anyway, he’s the CEO of the bank, the guy with the houses and the bonuses and a really soft and engaging hand shake.

But the best part about the whole experience was not the way he looked me in the eye and said, Pleasure, just like he’d said to the guy before me and the guy after me, but it was the way he pointed to his right where they had the stack of banker’s boxes that were filled with our severance packages. When I got there his assistant lifted one off the stack and handed it to me. I looked down at it and noticed that someone had taken a ball point pen and stabbed the box repeatedly. I was about to ask for a different one when I noticed that they all had been stabbed. My first assumption was that they were giving us second hand boxes, you know, hard times, but then I took the lid off my box and saw the rabbits.

“They’re Angora’s,” another one of Mr. Montgomery’s assistants said to me. “Good for sweaters.”

.

At first I was furious, and then I was angry, and then I was in complete denial, and then I was numb, and then I was accepting, and then I was calm. And these were the exact stages that were described in Dealing With Layoffs for Dummies, the partially chewed book that was rattling around in the bottom of the box, just underneath the rabbits. It said that I needed to assess my skills and make a Contact Tree, which is a list of people I know and the people they know with me being the trunk. I thought about performing this exercise but then I noticed that the rabbits were doing something to each other that at first I thought was fighting but then realized was almost the opposite.

The babies were born the exact day I went down to the Unemployment Office to fill out paperwork. They were little pink things with slits for eyes and the mother rabbit was tender toward them though it felt a little like she was doing it because she had to. I helped out as best I could, giving them fresh water on the hour and bringing grass home from the park for them to munch on. I gave them all names but the names didn’t really stick too well, I suppose because they’re rabbits and look pretty much the same.

More babies were born the month the checks from the government started arriving in the mail. And by the time the government stopped sending me checks there were enough rabbits that I couldn’t get an accurate count around the apartment. I remember really resenting Mr. Montgomery for a few weeks after I’d been laid off, primarily because I knew that he’d been given a bunch of money that last year and that he had a lot of stock options which he cashed in just before the company’s stock took that initial descent and that the sum total was just below a hundred thousand dollars for every single person at the company who lost a job. Dealing With Layoffs for Dummies said it was reasonable to hate your former employers but that it was important to try to see it from their perspectives, after all, they were with you in the good times as well.

And I agree with that. It’s not healthy to carry around emotional baggage, especially when things are so far out of your control. After all, a guy that punches numbers into a computer to see if orders have gone through and goes to a lot of meetings to learn the new system is hardly the guy who could phone Mr. Montgomery and say that maybe we should be making trades for things that seem a little more clear.

So, in a way, I’m quite thankful that I’ve found that clarity on my own. And there’s nothing clearer than rabbits. This is something I tried to impress upon my landlord, Manny, after I ran out of money for rent but it took him a little while to come around. That first month he poked me in the chest and told me to imagine him headed down to the dealer to trade a bunch of fucking chinchillas for a Chevy Impala, which I thought was very unfair since rabbits are much more versatile than chinchillas, I’ve read. The second month he completely changed his tune due, in part, because nobody answered his apartment listing and mainly because he got a taste of my rabbit apple sausages.

Toward the end of summer I traded wool for a spinning wheel and lessons and by the middle of fall I’d knitted my first sweater. They’re incredibly soft, come in a few easy on the eye colors and have a homemade quality that people seem to really appreciate. I say this with some degree of certainty because I set up a table on Main Avenue right across the street from my old bank and sales are pretty brisk. One of my customers told me that by turning the temperature of his house in Placeville down five degrees he would save nearly a thousand dollars a month. His wife was not so happy with this idea, he said, but that he thought having a warm sweater might take the sting out of the ‘new reality.’

I understood exactly where he was coming from, my heat and electricity have been off for a good while; the utilities don’t accept meat, skins or knitwear, only money. But sales on my corner on Main Avenue have gotten good enough that I’m getting close to being able to pay off what I owe. And being on this corner is exactly how I came to see Mr. Montgomery again.

He looked a bit different from that first and last time I shook his hand back when I worked for him. He had that same regal hairstyle and his suit and overcoat looked just as smooth as they always do in the pictures. He walked across Main Avenue from my former bank building to get a cab uptown. I suppose something about the table filled with sweaters caught his eye because he came over and touched each and every one. I told him that I had men’s and women’s, small, medium and large. I told him they were all-natural dyes and hand woven. I told him I tended the angoras myself.

And then he raised an eyebrow and looked at me. His face was much thinner than I remembered and more washed out. I told him that I took custom orders, as well, but that it took about three weeks. And then I reached into the cooler and pulled out a sausage sampler and handed it to him telling him that it was on the house, after all he was the one that gave me my start.

And You Can Too was originally published in Proof of Something, That’s For Sure on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Platitudes. What is a platitude? Well, I’m glad you asked. Passive attitudes. We all have them and they work against us. They eat at our souls. You want a burger, order a burger. You want onion rings with that, order them. You want new drapes, go out and get new drapes. You want to ask out some girl in the office, named Marlene, let her know this. Nine times out of ten, she wants to ask you out too.

You see, life is a set of decisions. One leads to the next and the next leads to the next. If you don’t make the right ones, you don’t go where you want to go. Or maybe it should be life is like a river. No, an assembly line. No, a boxing match.

.

“It was nice to work with you.” Earl is standing above, fake knocking on the invisible wall above the cubicle edge. “They let me go.”

“They let you what?”

“Yeah.”

Strange to see Earl with water coming out of his eyes. Hard to know what to say to a grown man in that stage so Marty rips the page out of his notebook and shoves it in Earl’s beefy hands.

“Is this more of the?” Earl says.

“It is,” Marty replies. “Chapter nineteen.”

“Okay, well, uh, you’re in the book aren’t you?”

“I am. Look me up sometime. We’ll have juice.”

“I don’t drink juice,” Earl says. “On account of the.”

“Oh yeah. Forgot.”

Notebook Fourteen sits next to Notebook Thirteen sits next to Notebook Twelve sits next to Notebook Eleven, etc. He runs a finger down the spirals, counting. Counting all the way down and then all the way up. Buzz buzz buzz kerchunk. Someone has just completed the purchase of a Mars Bar or a Milky Way from the snack machine. Marty looks up to note who it is and to try to catch a glimpse of which candy bar: Terrence Mann, Milky Way; 10:37am. Notebook Seven is opened and turned to page 59 where the information is recorded. This is Terrence Mann’s fifth Milky Way of the week but overall he still seems to favor the Twix.

Tiddle, tiddle, tiddle. Tracy Mullins X4309 is on the display. Tiddle, tid. “Hello?”

“Hi, Marty. Rough day, no?”

“Yeah.”

“They didn’t get you, did they?”

“Um.”

“Oh, of course, your extension wouldn’t have been working if they had. Never mind. Sad about Jake Nodruff.”

“Jake? For Real?”

“And Lane, and Marjorie Hennessey, and Thom, and Tom, and Earl Rawlings, and Madhavilata.”

“Oh Jesus,” Marty says, “what are we going to do when we need approvals?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t,” she says. “I guess we’ll find all that out at ten o’clock. Listen, can you tell me whether a job number has been put into the system or not. 6072052100aba.”

“Say that again?”

“6072052100aba.”

“Lemme check,” he says, pressing the on button on his computer, listening to the fans beginning to whir up to speed. “I’ll call you back in about ten.”

.

Rodd stands on the little riser at the front of the Auditorium wearing a headset. “We have a lot to cover but before we get started, there is a rumor going around that I took index cards with all of your names on them and put them up on the wall here and threw darts at them to determine who was laid off and who was not.”

“What?” someone says. “Why would you do something like that?”

“It was a rumor,” Rodd says. “Now, I want you to consider buying this book, Dealing With Layoffs for Dummies. They have a whole stack of them on the table when you walk in the Barnes and Nobel on Ridge Road. Some of you may be feeling guilty because you didn’t get laid off and others of you may be feeling elation. There is a chapter or a bullet point that pretty much covers the whole range of emotions.”

“Well why’d you get rid of H.T. from Sales and not Other People from Sales?” someone says.

“It came from New York. They said we had to shed a certain amount. We created a complex matrix using spreadsheets with personal as well as performance data and tried to sort through it as a core management team. Like I said, it wasn’t easy.”

“You never said that.”

“Well I meant it.”

“Will we get moved around now, you know, in the office? Like, get better seats and stuff.”

“That’s not in the budget,” Rodd says.

“But the bathroom smells pretty bad near my cube.”

“Like I said, I don’t make the rules.”

.

On Lunch, Marty drives to the Barnes and Noble to see if Rodd was lying. There is a stack of Dealing With Layoffs for Dummies on a table called Life Changes right when you walk in the door. Next to it is Eat Your Way Through the Global Food Crisis and on the other side, Arm Yourself!

A shelf full of fiction has been overturned and Marty has to off road it over the mini-mountain of books to get to the Self-Help section. He counts the titles: 4212. There are three new ones. A quick rescan of the shelves reveals them: Love Too Much: Heck Yes!, and Roll The Dice: Life Lessons From A Professional Poker Player, along with Live Like A Three Year Old: How My Son Derrick Taught Me To Live Again.

The Three Year Old book is your run of the mill anecdote-lesson-per-chapter book. Chapter Three is called Wet The Bed And Other Tales of Liberation.

.

Practice getting laid off. Your brain is like a muscle. If you don’t train for the Big Race, when Big Race Day comes you’ll have a heck of a time running. Same with your brain.

An empty conference room is an ideal place to practice. Imagine that there are three people sitting at the long table: your supervisor, the head of H.R. and someone who gives you boxes. Practice hearing the news. Nod a few times reverently as if the news is trickling like sand through your brain. Do not speak for a few seconds to a minute after they have finished. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Okay now. Be gracious but firm. This will be your last chance to tell them what you really think; don’t miss it.

Marty shoves his pen up the spiral into its resting space.

“Are you still working on Nine Steps to Happiness?” It’s Paul from Records on seven.

“Eighteen. No. It’s a new one. What are you doing down here?”

“Surveying the damage,” Paul says. “What’s this one about?”

“Layoffs. It’s called Get Laid Off Without Getting Ticked Off. It’s pretty fresh. I just started it after lunch.”

Paul scratches himself on the back of the neck. Big sweeping motions, like a dog. “You know there was a whole new round, right? Just after the lunch break.”

“What? Who?”

“Mainly from eight. Most of Communications and about half of Order Processing.”

“Marlene Thomas?”

“They have a list in the Conference Center. I’m sure they’ll pass out a copy at the one o’clock meeting.”

“Not another one.”

“Yeah, I think they just want to let us know personally.”

“How’s your sister doing?”

“Better, thanks.”

.

At one, instead of the auditorium, they meet in the Conference Center. There are about half as many people in attendance as there were this morning. Rodd is standing at the front near the big presentation screen. “We have a lot to cover,” he says, “please take your seats. Have a doughnut.”

Marty looks around the big table and into the back where people are sitting in folding chairs. Marlene is seated a few chairs over from the corner. She’s taking notes.

“There are a lot of rumors going around and so I thought it was important to have a meeting to dispel them. We had to have another round of layoffs at about noon. Corporate felt it was important to stop the bleeding.”

“Did you use a scalpel or a hatchet?” Rodd’s assistant asks, from the front.

“Scalpel,” Rodd replies.

On his way back to his cubicle, Marty stops to watch Hendrick and Luis loading computers onto a cart. An unlit cigarette dangles from Hendrick’s lips.

“Busy?” Marty says.

“My man,” Luis says.

“I suppose your jobs are safe,” Marty says.

“Guess so,” Hendrick says, the cigarette bobbing up and down. “Us and Rodd.”

“Do you think I could get a new mouse? Mine is sticky.”

“You need to call the Helpline for that,” Hendrick says, putting a mouse on the cart. “That’s a Work Order Request.”

“What if I just switched mine with one of these?”

“We’d know and then we’d have to fill out an Equipment Tracking Form. Please don’t do that to us,” Hendrick says.

Luis nods. “Yeah man, please don’t.”

When he returns to his cubicle, Marty dials the extension of the Helpline. There is a recorded voice at the end of the line. “You’ve reached the Helpline for Invecto Systems. Please listen carefully as our options have changed. Really changed. This is the last outgoing message I will be recording for the only company I have worked at since I got out of college. I can’t say it’s been the best job a guy could have, some of my friends have pretty cool ones, like game design and whatnot, but I can’t say it’s been the worst thing either. I’ve grown quite close to a lot of you and I’ll miss you. It feels a little bit like I’m walking around without my pants ever since I got the news just after lunch. If your call is regarding software or a system issue, turn your computer off and then on again. Nine times out of ten this will resolve it. If your call has something to do with hardware, you’re on your own. Kenneth Mansfield was laid off this morning. In fact, his computer’s up for grabs. It was a real beast, too, two terabyte hard drive, dual processor, half a terabyte of RAM. Fucker could really go.” There is a click and then there is a beep.

Marty hangs up the phone and looks around. The refrigeration unit for the snack machine kicks in, whirring quietly. He can almost hear the dust being blown out the fan in the back against the wall. There are footsteps on the floor above along with a rolling cart. Funny, he thinks, I’ve always thought the floors were, like, two feet of concrete.

He feels the urge to call Marlene. The urge sits there in the pit of his stomach getting hotter and hotter, then it travels to his throat and begins to radiate out into his arms. It turns into a tingling, a light feeling, then it tickles. He dials the phone, feeling apprehensive until the first ring kicks in.

“Marlene Thomas Manning,” she says.

“Uh, hi, this is Martin Benedict, uh, from Systems. I need to check on an order, if you don’t mind. Are you the right person to call?”

“I guess. It’s a little chaotic here right now. Not sure who’s fielding what at the moment.”

“It can wait, I, uh, yeah.”

“Can it?”

“Yeah, I don’t know. I suppose so. Are you alright up there? I mean with the layoffs and all?”

“Who the hell knows. It’s a mess. I don’t know where half of the files are.”

Take a memento on your way out. Nothing big, because that would be stealing, but you’re going to want something to remember with.

.

At three fifty-five in the afternoon a meeting request chime goes off and Marty clicks the question mark button to find out that it’s an all-company meeting in the conference room at four. Mandatory. He looks around a little bit, noticing for the first time that there is a big chip in the front edge of his desk off to the right. The woodgrain is sheared violently open, exposing particles that look a lot like cardboard suspended in milky clear plastic. Why didn’t I notice that before, he says to himself.

Always take an inventory of your immediate surroundings. Where are you? You are here. Be here. Know where you are. (Chapter 2 of Eighteen Steps to Happiness.)

In the distance, toward the other side of the building where Customer Service sits, Marty can see Jane Barnes standing up in her cube. She appears to be throwing her tape dispenser into a missing panel in the false ceiling.

Marty is the only one waiting for the elevator and then the only one standing in the elevator as it smoothly chugs its way to nine.

In Rodd’s Conference Room, Rodd paces uneasily near the white board, nodding with emptiness at Marty when he walks in. Wow, I’m the first here, Marty says to himself, taking a seat toward the middle of the table and fixing his eyes on the door. A security guard stands outside with a stack of papers in a manila folder.

Staring toward the back of the room, Rodd clears his throat. “Let’s get started, we have a lot to cover.”

Marty looks around at all the empty seats. He looks back toward the door at the security guard, who shuffles from foot to foot.

“There are a lot of rumors flying around and I thought it was important to get everyone together so that we could all get on the same page with regard to these rumors. Yes, we had another round of layoffs at around three forty-five this afternoon. Customer Service, Maintenance, Management, Security and a few other departments. We are hopeful, no we assume, no we are positive that this will put the company back on track. Are there any questions?” He blinks a few times toward the back of the room.

Marty straightens himself a little.

“Now, some of you might be having a hard time with this and I can’t recommend enough this book, Dealing With Layoffs for Dummies, there’s a whole chapter in here about what to say to your friends. My point, though, is that none of these decisions were easy or arbitrary. Or easy. And as for the rumor about me, it is, I’m sorry to say, not a rumor. I will miss you all very much. Invecto is like a family to me and I think we’ve done some great work together. But it looks like my time has come. You’ll do great and I look forward.” He chokes a little, looks down and then does a quick, furtive wave toward Marty and exits the room where the security guard hands him the manila folder filled with all the papers.

Marty sits there for a second, noticing that his chair has a little squeak when he leans back. He turns and looks around the room. The chairs all face in different directions as if conferring with each other in some confused manner. Marty stands and his chair gives a thump as it goes back to resting position. The AV system purrs in the corner.

At the doorway to the conference room, Marty can see across the entire floor all the way to the elevator bank. The security guard and Rodd stand side by side in front of the silver doors. Rodd is carrying a banker’s box with no lid. The elevator makes a ding that echoes across the building floor and the security guard and Rodd both get on. Marty watches the doors close. The air system kicks in somewhere in the building with a dull whirr. Marty can then hear the creak and expansion of the ducts overhead and the air pouring out the little vents at the base of the ceiling.

He walks down the hallway, past the Men’s and Women’s, past the kitchen and the break room, to Team N. The lights are on behind the giant company logo on the wall, though he can see that a bulb in the big S of Systems is not quite pulling its weight. Air pours in through the little vents above for a few moments and then it gently subsides. There is the slight crackle of a cubicle wall settling.

On eight, Marty consults the wall chart near the elevator to locate Order Processing. Their lunch room, he notes, is much more festive than the one on Six, with a poster that says Fiesta across the top and shows a big plate of nachos. A crepe paper ribbon is draped from corner to corner in the room, just below the light. On the Choking poster, someone has given the hero man, the one who knows how to save a victim, a handlebar mustache. The victim has Pippi Longstocking style braids, though he is a man.

He finds the cubicle with the nameplate that says Marlene Thomas Manning. A light chime emanates from her computer: a meeting notice that has been ignored. It says, “H.R.” On the page below this is an email that she was midway through with details about a shipment that had gone out on Monday that ends with “Is there a” and then a blinking cursor. Marty gently finds the button and switches her computer off.

On his floor there is a pile of shredded paper near the shredder and a packet of paper spilled out onto the floor by the copy machines. One of the fax machines is finishing spitting out a fax that says across the top, Refinance At Below Market Rates! and then at the bottom it says, NO REFUSALS. The cart that Luis and Hendrick were filling with computers is in the middle of a row over in Team N. Marty locates a mouse and pulls it off the cart.

His inbox has two emails. The first tells him that timesheets are due on Friday. The second tells him that the coat drive will be ending next week and now is your last chance to help people less fortunate.

Marty’s to-do list has five job numbers. He dials Ann Marie about the first job number, but his call is redirected to Reception. The phone rings and rings and rings and finally Marty hangs up. Raphael’s line does the same thing, as does Timothy McCall’s.

He remembers that first day when the sheer size of the place seemed bewildering and exciting. The orientation movies, the paperwork, the fingerprinting, the IT workshop. It all felt so extremely well thought out. Especially the moment, after IT was done, where he was met at the door by his supervisor’s assistant, Ray, and led to his cubicle, this cubicle, and shown where the bathrooms were, the snack machine (conveniently close) the break room and the kitchen. “You are a member of Team N,” Ray said, “Welcome. Welcome to us.” It was a weird turn of phrase, that’s for sure, and echoed around Marty’s head for a little bit.

Earl was the first to say hello. He was older and had a putty handshake and worked right there. He pointed to his cubicle, which Marty now stands over. Earl’s plant, Henry Louis Hatfield Johnson Harding, brightly stands at attention just inside the cube’s opening. There is a fine sheen of gloss across Earl’s desk and a lighter spot where his computer used to be. The papers are stacked in orderly piles off to the left.

Just outside Lanetta McMaster’s cube he follows a trail of papers down toward Team E to a box filled with financials stamped ‘confidential’ that has been overturned in a corner. Not far from there, in another cubicle he notices a color copied photograph taped to the wall. A little girl with chubby cheeks and fresh black eyes stares out toward him with a big fluffy cat in her arms. In another cubicle, a cup of coffee sits next to a slight spill, the light brown liquid slowly seeping into a stack of forms piled off to the left.

Marty looks at his watch. 5:27. He then begins to clean.

Welcome To Us was originally published in Proof of Something, That’s For Sure on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I show up at ten, Roy is standing against the back wall near the emergency exit nervously smoking because he’s never done a billionaire before. “What’d he look like?” I say.

“Sad,” Roy says. “Sad and very very dead.”

“Autopsy?”

“No, the family objected.”

“Did he have anything good in his pockets?” I ask.

Roy produces a few items. A flattened penny with Mount Rushmore stamped on it, a half melted army man, a swizzle stick and two business cards with phone numbers on the backs written in tight, adult but nonetheless girly handwriting. At first the items warm my hands, but soon they begin to burn so I give them back.

We peek around the side of the building and notice that the limousines and town cars are beginning to dock out front. Slow moving boats, barges and tankers filled with people of the loss sort. Roy throws his cigarette against the wall, it explodes into a ball of quick angry red. “I guess it’s go time,” he says.

.

Inside, I’m standing in my nonchalant stance, hands folded at crotch level, impassive face, trying to distract myself away from a potential boredom hard on. Roy stands beside me and beside us is the dead billionaire. He’s lying there in his coffin with a tight jaw, as though he were straining against the notion of death. Skin a shade whiter than sleep, he looks like a man that had to be convinced of his own demise. It’s a masterful job of reanimation which is what Mister Torrence is so well known for.

Mister Torrence greets people, wading into a sea of black, shaking hands, offering best wishes. He is a Goliath of a man with deep pocks on his cheeks and a paleness which advertises his profession. Now he’s speaking to clearly The Wife, a sprightly but serious looking woman with a sixty year old neck and forty year old eyes. She is taking him aside and he pats her on the arm in that never you worry way.

Roy leans into me and nods in the direction of behind The Wife. “Get a load of the daughter.”

Long black gloves, long dark pantyhose, a thick veil pinned to a big broad black hat. She makes a sound that reminds me of the cats who fight in the backyard; anonymous turf wars that set off the back of my mind like fireworks in the middle of the night. She is falling to the floor and being helped up, she is falling back again and finally being held on either side by serious looking man boys. “Jesus Christ,” I say.

Next to us now is Mister Torrence who, instead of saying hello says, “Boys, I need to see you two in the back.”

“But of course,” Roy says with a politeness just this side of insolence. He’s been here five years and knows the line.

We follow Mister Torrence through the curtain and down the hallway to the little council office for private breakdowns. Mister Torrence turns and looks at Roy. “Something’s come up and I’m going to need you two to take care of it.” He likes Roy and Roy likes me. This is how we all fit together.

“Whatever you need, boss,” Roy says.

“I’m being told now that the gentleman will be buried on the East Coast.”

“What happened to Clearview?” Roy says.

“I don’t know,” Mister Torrence says. “It’s a pretty strange request at this hour.”

“I’ll call Carmichael and Chrystie,” Roy says.

“The family doesn’t want any vendors involved. This is, apparently, quite a big secret. We’re going to have to drive him ourselves.”

“Drive?” Roy says, pulling out a cigarette.

“We?” I say.

“He was afraid to fly.” Mister Torrence nods at Roy’s cigarette and says, “please.”

“He built planes. And besides that, he’s dead.”

“I know,” Mister Torrence says.

I am reading the spines of the books on the bookshelf, something which I’ve never done before. There are three Hardy Boys mixed in with a lot of scripture. “When?” I ask. “When’s this all supposed to go down?”

Mister Torrence looks over at me with a where’d he come from expression on his face. “A-Sap,” he says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “The body has to be there Sunday.”

“Be where?”

“Just outside of New York City. A family plot.”

“But I,” Roy says, motioning to the office where he and Mister Torrence sat across from the family and sold them the arrangements.

“I know,” Mister Torrence says, in the same voice he talks to the bereaved.

“I have to smoke on it,” Roy says.

“Me too,” I say.

“Keep in mind that I’m not really asking.”

.

Outside, Roy noses his shoe into the concrete step and says, “It’s too much for a man in my condition. I have beans soaking back at the house. I have a stew in the crockpot with carrots and a delightful tomato stock. I highlighted stuff in the TV Guide, good stuff, educational things.” He tosses his cigarette on the ground and then lights another. “I’m going to go tell him. I’m just going to put it plain and simple.”

“Tell him for me,” I say, lighting another cigarette and watching Roy climb the concrete stairs.

I catalog the reasons I don’t want to do it. I am comfortable with smallness, with walking to the bar after work and walking home after that. My room is clean and my mother has recently either come to grips with the question Why Me or has perhaps begun to understand that it is far too complicated. I cashed my paycheck last night at the bar and bought two rounds and that is the kind of investment in goodwill that loses value the minute memory fades which, in this particular bar’s gut hardened case, is a day or two max.

I say I won’t do it several times, perhaps as many as twenty but then there she is, The Daughter, stepping out the back door and unsurely down the concrete stairs. “Are you the driver?” she says, stopping on the last step and leaning down into my face. Her veil is lifted, showing a hard face pinned together with wraparound sunglasses. I am noticing her cheekbones, how tight they are. I am noticing the way the high heels press her leg into perfect tension. I am noticing how her jacket folds back to reveal just a touch of lace that shows perhaps a hint of sweet breast foothill.

“I am,” I say.

“It’s a long trip,” she says, taking my cigarette and putting it between her dark red lips.

“I’ve tripped longer,” I say, looking up at her.

She finds this funny. She throws her head back and laughs the exhausted joyless laugh of a woman on her tenth rum and Coke. “It is a tragedy, he was too young. The poor die at sixty-five, the working class, men who dream of retirement only to find themselves dead in front of the television. Not my father.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“He deserves dignity. He deserves special handling. He started an empire.” She looks at me over the tops of her sunglasses. Her eyes are tight and dark with flashes of passion, or is it anger? She is wholly not the kind of woman I’m used to talking to.

“I will,” I say. By this I mean that I will guard that which is most dear to her, that I will not rest if she is not rested, that I will protect her heart. I touch her on her cigarette arm, the lit end burns into my wrist and I shake the sting out my fingertips. “You have no worries as far as I’m concerned.”

And then she is leaning closer to me. And then I am noticing the lacelike string between her breasts. And then we are together. And then she is telling me that she’s self destructive, goddamn is she self destructive. And then her tongue is deep in my mouth. And then I am sliding my hand between the buttons on her blouse. And then she is telling me to take her somewhere, anywhere, anywhere but this rotten place. And then I am realizing that I have the potential to be for once a rescuer and not the cause of the need.

.

Roy, the dead billionaire and I cross the state line in no time. It has the ease of injection, the before you know it you’re there. This is a four lane highway we’re on, two coming and two going, and there is no variation to it except the odd outcropping of tract housing and superstores. The trees, the fences, the scrambled glistening lumps of red fur and gristle all look the same.

I’m driving because not long ago Roy pulled over, put his thumb where we were on the map and his finger where we’re supposed to be going and told me that if it was true what I said about duty that I had to take my turn at the wheel or fate would catch up with us. I never called my mother to worry her any further with our plans, yet I don’t feel that pinch of ambivalence that makes me sad for her whenever I end up somewhere that I should not. I think it has something to do with how The Daughter told me she hated herself and how I felt a strange itch in my spine that seemed like recognition as I pulled her close to me.

The night is starting to announce itself in front of us and the large ball of fire behind seems determined to dip below the horizon. I snap on the lights and look over at Roy who is making lazy circles on the glass of the passenger window with his pointer finger. We’ve long since run out of vodka and Mountain Dew and the clutch-brake feeling it gave me that I thought might tear me in half has faded with the daylight.

What is true is that godliness is so big that cleanliness is only tying up a little spot on one small side and that there’s plenty of room for the rest of us if we feel the need to snuggle. What is true is that I’ve shouldered a lot of disappointment in my life, not mine but others’, and that I’m ready for that aspect of my being to be over. What is also true is that the trip gets us out of work for a little while and doesn’t count against our time off. Night is coming, it’s almost like we’re driving right into it, and I feel the calm of a bedtime story because I see The Daughter somewhere at the end of the darkness.

.

Now Roy is asleep, his face pressed flat against the glass of the passenger’s window making a nicotine grease stain that I suppose will be hard to rub off. The night has gotten the best of me. I press the find button on the radio and the numbers run laps over and over. There is nothing out here in the middle of the darkness except flatness, the outlines of cactus, and the occasional determined semi tractor trailer. I am tired in my entire body except one part which is the part that is either the cause or the effect of thinking about The Daughter.

Roy speaks from his dream, blowing yellow mist on the window. “Candy store,” he says, “Trinidad and Tobacco.” Underneath, the road churns, and I can’t help but feel the insatiable burning immediacy that makes most men quiver.

At the next town the gas station is closed but there is a dilapidated phone booth out near the air hose. I pull up and I see in the sweep of headlight a pair of eyes looking at me. A pair of red eyes, red like hate, red like starving and angry. “Nice puppy,” I yell as I get out of the hearse. The dog shifts its weight from one foot to another. I watch this as I walk over toward the phone, knowing that the only thing separating me from that disgusted knot of generalized hatred is the good grace of a rusted engine hoist chain attached to a massive choke collar. For just a second I decide it would be prudent to get back in the hearse and head out, but I’m propelled toward the semi-collapsing phone booth.

The operator on the other end of the line tells me that it’s unreasonable to expect the exact number. That it would be a borderline miracle if she could just type the name into the computer and get the person I’m actually looking for. I tell her I’m no stranger to disappointment, having been called that by my father as a near nickname for most of my life, but to nonetheless take her best shot at it. She goes away for a second and I notice that the dog is now straining against the chain, causing it’s enormous chipped up head to bulge.

The operator is back with my number, “I’m pretty sure this is the one,” she says.

I thank her and repeat it back for safety’s sake, ignoring the fact that the dog is now releasing a low guttural roar that sounds more mineral than animal.

It’s The Daughter alright, I can tell by the scrape of her voice when she picks up the phone. She sounds the kind of tired that coffee and sleep do not cure and this causes me to feel helpless in ways I’ve never felt before. I tell her my name and she says, “Who?” and I say, “Remember. The funeral home. Your father.”

“Where are you?” she says.

“I’m not certain,” I say. “It’s dark and flat. It might be Nevada. Every time I close my eyes, I see you.”

“Well keep them open,” she says. “You’re driving for fuck’s sake.”

“Back there?” I say.

“Back there was an aberration,” she says, “a random turn of events.”

“Can I call you?” I say, “I mean when a reasonable amount of mourning time has elapsed?”

She blows smoke into the phone, a long cool river of sound. “Call me?” She laughs.

“Yes, call you,” I say, “as in at some point this all makes sense from a remember when perspective.” I hear the dog’s chain making a rusted screaming sound.

“Let me be clear about this,” she says, “if anything happens to my father, I will find you. I will find you and I will do things to you that involve the kind of pain that makes hellfire seem like day old bathwater. You are not my type. And I mean that generously. Do you understand me?”

“I get your meaning. But my mind’s made up,” I say.

On my way back to the car Roy yells, “Batten down the hatches, batten down the hatches.” This is when I hear the crisp sound of chain snap.

What I’m thinking about is not the thunderous buffeting of paws on oil slick concrete. What I’m thinking about is not the saliva drops or the deep hellish growl as the dog approaches. What I’m thinking about is that The Daughter holds some kind of connection between the chips and fissures that skate along behind me and a future of surefootedness. This is approximately the moment the thing tears into my leg.

I have read about shark attacks. I have read about men falling into lava. I have read about gorillas pounding environmentalists like ragdolls. You smell the blood before you see it. You feel the heat and the pressure before the pain. There is a calm sense of panic. It is not the panic of forgotten keys or lost wallets. It is not the panic of fathers seeing grade cards or hearing from bosses that you never showed up to the jobsite in the first place. It is the panic of the stomach slipping into your groin on a ride at the fair on the beach and the fear that your stomach may end up there forever.

But then the pain comes. The white searing, urine seeping visceral glow as the thing, nearly as big as I am, seems to grow more teeth by the second and relentlessly tears at my flesh. My mouth is watering, my eyes are flowing, I am tense and hot. The dog is over me and on me at the same time. I kick the air with my free leg, I grab the concrete with my nails. My stomach is full of churning fear.

I am forming a ball with my body when I hear the sound of the thud. It is a full hollow crack that enters my heart before I feel it tug the mouth that is around my calf. One last pulse of jaw and then slack, the dog rolling off and then a tremendous billowy roar as it collapses onto the ground expelling a sea of air from its lungs like the cloud after an avalanche. I smell the ancient rot of liver and 10W40, the tender sweetness of shop rats and engine coolant. I listen as the growl becomes a whine and then a cozy little squeak as the thing travels back in time to the moment it was an eyes closed little ball of potential.

Roy’s standing over the dog with a two by four that has a six inch nail sticking out of it. “I now pronounce you dead,” he says.

.

Roy is driving because my right leg is slippery with blood and stiffening rapidly. “I need something to blame the double vision on,” he says. “I need a reason for my paranoid streaks and my xenophobia, my irrational hatreds and my personal hygiene issues. I was too young for Vietnam, I missed it by about five years, and nothing came along afterward in the way of American conflicts that involved bottom of the barrel people like me.”

“The war on drugs,” I say.

“I’m talking about jungle and heat, the rewriting of rules, animalistic behavior.”

“I was in the Boy Scouts,” I say.

“I’m talking about survival on the most basic scale. Not merit badges and knot tying and fucking one match bonfires.”

“The one match fire was probably my last success,” I say.

“That was good back there,” Roy says, banging his hand on the steering wheel. “That was really good. We made decisions with weight and consequences.”

“You made decisions,” I say.

“There was a dividing line,” Roy says, “and at some point we crossed it. The line that nature provides special for these kinds of occasions.” He bangs his fist on the steering wheel again. “I feel so alive, I feel so fucking alive.” He looks over at me. The horizon is just beginning to separate itself from the night and I can see dark hills all around us. The dashboard seems too bright, it lights up Roy’s face in an odd way. His eyes are explosive black dots and I don’t seem to recognize them.

Hot liquid runs from my forehead down my cheeks and I feel the need to close my eyes. When I do I float just a little bit. I tear my eyes open again. Roy is staring at me, licking his lips. He says something about the heart. He says something about the eagle. He says something about the devastating moral plane. “I’m going to die,” I tell him.

“We all are,” Roy says.

.

You feel a growing sense of unfairness and yet at the same time there is a warm resignation. There is even a little bit of excitement. You let go, first of your toes for they are curled deep in your shoes, and then gradually you unknot your body. The last thing you feel is a stream of urine letting itself out and the relief at that moment is so deep that you understand you’ve been pinching that muscle for the better part of your adult life.

I am above the car and then I am standing on a plane of impenetrable water that appears to extend forever. My body doesn’t feel feverish or heavy. My skin doesn’t feel like it is a wet bag.

The dog is here, all of a sudden I notice her. For some reason I know that she’s a she. A big red, white and black dog, a Doberman and a Rottweiler and some other jowly creature all mixed together. She sits in a comfortable repose about sixty feet away. Clean looking. I am moving closer and closer to her. At first I’m afraid but for some reason this leaves my body, the fear running out of my fingers. We are speaking from a place deep inside our heads.

“I waited for you,” the dog says. “There is a long distance to travel and you seem the type that needs a companion.”

“How did you know I was going to die?” I ask. I move closer to the animal. She’s amazingly big, almost my size.

“I got you pretty good in your femoral artery. Your lifeforce came unattached.”

“What made you think we’d go to the same place?”

“I’ve been studying this shit for years.”

We walk together, side by side, for quite a long distance. The view never changes.

“I’m sorry about back there. The death. It must have been a crummy way to go.”

“Any better than bleeding to death?”

“Why’d you do it?” I ask. “I mean, attack me like that. You don’t seem the type.”

“Funny, I’ve been pondering that myself. I was chained up behind the station for so long my brain was so sun baked and I’d been hit with so many rocks that I had trouble separating the different realities. You get bent up enough that things just get kind of automatic.”

“Automatic?”

“Choices are not really made, they just happen.”

We’re silent for a while, but it’s not a long silence that happens because all of our words are collapsed in on themselves, folded or crumpled, layered.

“Do you have any regrets?” I ask.

“I never lived my life like that. You?”

“I haven’t been successful as a man which is to say that I haven’t killed and eaten my own food, I haven’t spawned as frequently as the hips have suggested I should, I haven’t protected my territory or found my place amid the fallen timbers that spell out the history of my species.”

“You were young yet.”

“I was thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two divided by seven is four point five seven something. That is young.”

“How long is this journey?”

“That question signals the fact that you are not patient.”

“It is true that I have the sensation that I haven’t gotten where I need to go. But patience is related to time and I am feeling devoid of time.”

“Acceptance is a form of patience and it doesn’t feel like you’ve accepted.”

“I would agree with that with one caveat which is to say that I was never made aware of the rules.”

“Goals are traps.”

“But how will I be remembered?”

“Success doesn’t have a universal measure.”

I am noticing how much lighter I am than the dog. I pass my arms through themselves and say, “This is strange.”

The dog looks over. “The tag on your collar is only useful if it has a phone number or an address,” she says.

It is light, bright like, hot even. My body is soaky hot wet. It is bright and I am hungry, painfully hungry. It is bright, I know I mentioned this but boy is it bright. Roy is tapping on the window, he’s outside the hearse. My eyes are blinking open and closed and things are swirling into place. I feel the weight of my body on the seat. Roy does the sign language for roll down your window. I press the button and it glides down elegantly.

“Good morning sleepy head,” he says. “I put a tourniquet on your thigh. I hope you don’t mind that I took your pants off. It was strictly in a non-amorous, life saving capacity. I didn’t look at your package or anything like that, you have my word.”

“How long have I been out?” I say.

“Long enough for questions to be answered and decisions to be made,” Roy says. He’s leaning against the outside of the hearse, carefully smoking.

“Where are we?” I notice that we’re parked on the side of a dirt road and I see a long fence and the flat expanse of a field. Cows stare at us from a distance.

“We isn’t the right word for that question.”

“It appears as though you’ve saved my life,” I say.

“Yes, it does appear that way,” Roy says. “I don’t suppose you understand what that means as far as indebtedness and such?”

“One can assume,” I say.

“The electric grip of the city has been released,” Roy says. “I have fallen in love with this place.” He points his cigarette into the distance.

I see a house and a very tall tree. I see the way the dirt road we’re on travels over a hill and then stops, over another hill and then stops, all the way out into the sky.

“Do you feel the peace?” Roy says. “Do you feel the way the electricity has been drained and we are now relying on the pull of the soil, the sky, the earth?”

I am trying to get myself out of the hearse. My leg feels like it is one long piece of pain. I touch the flesh, it’s bluish and dark, there are many small pocks of blood, the thing feels like it isn’t a part of me. I want a cigarette and wonder where Roy got his because the last time I checked we were out.

“An important thing to notice is the way the grid conforms to the earth. High tension wires follow geographical features. Roads go where they can, not where they want.” Roy points with his cigarette. “Birds, hear the birds?”

I listen. The rack of noise must be coming from one of the adjacent fields because I can’t see any winged creatures.

“Leaving aside generous portions of the arthropod world, that was back there the first time I’ve killed. I’m referring to the dog whose skull I caved in with a blunt object. I’ve tasted blood.” Roy stubs his cigarette out against the hearse. “It was the testimony of my passage. I will not be continuing the journey,” Roy says.

“I can’t drive with this leg,” I say, “and we need to get this gentleman.”

Roy cuts me off. “You are not invited to stay. I want to start fresh and alone. I believe I have a good chance of making it.”

“But we have an obligation.”

“Technically yes, we do have an obligation. And I appreciate your efforts on my behalf. You have quite a bit more distance to go. You’ll make it, most definitely, but you don’t have much time to waste. I hate to be such a taskmaster. I’ve been acutely aware of the time you were out. Another five hours and the Minnow would have been lost. You have no idea how many times I’ve looked at my watch. So yes, I am on your side as far as the obligation of which you speak.”

I picture the dead billionaire. I only saw him the two times. The first after Roy and Mister Torrence had him dressed and I helped put him in the coffin. The second time after I wheeled him out of the back cold cabinet and into the viewing room. I remember thinking, as I closed the coffin the last time, that he looked restless in a way I’d never seen a dead person look before. His face was pinched, almost in a wince, like he were waiting for a shot in the arm. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time except to say that it felt like he needed some calming.

.

Now the sun is up in an official, quietly optimistic manner and the road nods up and down, rising and dipping in lullaby fashion. As long as the leg remains a dead branch pressed against the accelerator, we’re in business as far as the pain is concerned. I can’t help feeling this momentous lift, as if I’m tipping upright a monument which has been dreadfully off kilter for many years. It’s a feeling that makes me terribly sick to my stomach with longing for my mother. I see her face in it’s younger incarnation, a tight jaw and flat lips, exhausted yet lively eyes. There was a time when she was beautiful, I’m sure of it because I’ve seen the pictures, and I wonder about my role in the crystallization.

The Highway Patrol crests a hill behind me, a full, lights ablaze regatta of, I’m counting, ten, eleven, twelve cars tacking their way through the traffic toward me. I am noticing this and then I am noticing that there are no cars on the other side of the highway. It’s just a long bare line that rises slowly over the hill and rises quietly over the hill further on.

In the distance I see a large trail of thick black smoke. So do the people ahead; the blaring red snake of brake lights sends bubbles from my crotch all the way up my chest and out into my arms. When I press the leg inexactly onto the brake pedal the leg screams like a raw tear.

Semi-tractor trailers have pulled off, drivers standing on the running boards looking toward the smoke. Cars are pulling off too, families appearing to have given up. I feel pressure in my chest. I’m thinking about the man in the coffin in back, his strangely strong nose, his clear skin. He felt well cared for when I saw him that first time, broad smooth nails and perfect teeth. He seemed like a man capable of great love yet probably unable to adequately present his case. Where is she at this very moment? Is she sleeping, is she weeping, is she staring at her watch thinking about the journey I’m taking with her father in tow? I want to do something. I’m noticing the cars behind me slotting themselves into place as this has the feel of something that might take a while. I don’t have that kind of time.

.

I stop the hearse half on the shoulder of the highway and half in the dead grass next to it. The road is now a parking lot. I leave the engine running to keep it cool in the back for the shocked looking dead man whose head is not four feet from mine, a man, but for different circumstances, I would probably have sucked in my stomach for and tamped down my fear of the large to ask for his daughter’s hand. My pants are as ragged as an abandoned flag and I struggle in the semi-privacy of my door to pull them over this useless leg that feels like an unanesthetized amputation. The black smoke ahead flows upward in a raging wagging fist. I believe for a second that I can see flames shooting up the dark arm like a biker’s tattoo.

I limp a bit in that direction feeling that my bravery is being forced through a funnel in the wrong direction. I watch as a boy and girl sprint playfully, weaving through the buses and trucks as the cars plink, plink, plink, the metallic settling sound of cooling automobiles. A man in a Custom Van has set up a cooler on the ground and stands over it with a small crowd, drinking sodas. Umbrellas have been unfurled, families have walked out onto the grass beside the highway and spread picnic blankets. A young couple lay on the hood of their Plymouth, watching the smoke turn from a fist into a mushroom. He has his shirt pulled up, revealing the half moon scar of a great white shark attack. She has sunglasses and a cigarette. It all feels like a celebration I didn’t get the invitation for.

Rumors filter back, anything from a delicate hostage situation to a bridge collapse, but the general consensus is that a truck filled with highly toxic chemicals jackknifed and rolled somewhere up ahead. They’re saying that the highway is melting and that it’s possible we’re going to be here indefinitely. They’re also saying that at some point soon those of us that need to are going to be allowed to drive by but that they can’t guarantee our safety. It is suggested we hold our breaths for as long as possible when we pass.

I see a man and a woman next to a Winnebago. They’ve spread a tattered looking Indian rug on the warm highway and set out four poles with some kind of sunshade tarp. Underneath, the man sits in a folding chair and the woman wrestles hers open. “Need help?” I say, grabbing her chair’s aluminum legs.

“Thanks much,” she says. Her face has a puffed cloudy quality, a grandmotherly softness with a light layer of peach fuzz.

“Chet Marker,” the man says, thrusting a hand up toward me. “This is my wife, Martha.” They’re both tan enough that it’s clear their priorities are straight and have been for some time.

Martha sets herself down into the chair with a little winded commentary. She’s the active form of hefty, with a body much the way my mother’s is headed. Chet looks like he might still lift weights. His body has a trim keg thickness with faded bluish and black tattoos on his wrists and arms that look spur of the moment but not regretted.

“Sit?” Martha says. “There are four more chairs bungeed to the back.” She points in that general direction.

I shake my head. “I’m trying to give my leg a little exercise,” I say, pointing down at the stiff log of uselessness and pain.

“Yes, what happened?” Chet says while Martha mouths the same question.

“A dog got me.”

“Looks like you’re bit up real good,” Chet says.

“Feels like it, too,” I say, smiling in a way meant to erase the subject. “Where are you guys headed?”

“No particular place for the time being,” they both say, which Chet follows with, “but we’ll eventually end up in Mexico when the weather gets cold.”

“Mexico,” I say.

“There are entire communities of people who never fit in up north, you just need to know where to look,” Chet says.

“The dollar goes much further,” Martha says.

I nod and we watch as the boy and girl who were sprinting down the fast lane come racing the other way. A man struggling to light a bar-b-que stops momentarily to cheer the kids, his white chef’s hat bobbing up and down.

“Disasters bring out the best in us,” Chet says.

Martha hums in agreement.

A man in flip flops and a business suit straggles up to us. “It’s a chemical fire,” he says, kicking the corner of the Indian rug so that it lays flat on the pavement.

“Chemical fire?” Martha says. “You don’t say.”

“How do you know?” Chet says, his gaze settling lazily on the man’s chest.

“I overheard someone talking to a trucker,” the man tells Chet.

“Is it true they’ll let us go if we need to get by and that we’re going to have to hold our breaths?” I say.

The man looks at me and narrows his eyes. “No, but I’m glad you asked. If the wind shifts we’re gonna have a good sized class action lawsuit on our hands.” He pulls three business cards out of his pocket and hands them to us. They say, Tom Franklin, Senior Sales Manager. “There’s a toll free number because I’m in ten states,” Tom Franklin says. “Keep a detailed record of your symptoms. We’ll get the bastards.”

Chet says, “Sounds like a winner,” in a very practiced way, and puts the business card into the breast pocket of his short sleeved old man shirt.

The three of us watch Tom amble up to the maroon Crown Victoria behind. There’s a family sitting near the trunk, two boys and a girl, a sweaty mother and a stringy husband who stands a few feet away. Tom Franklin leans on the maroon Crown Victoria and shakes the man’s hand.

“Lawsuits will one day replace the lottery,” Chet says.

Martha hums.

Overhead, three Army helicopters march dutifully toward the smoke, their rotors cracking the wind.

Martha points at my leg. “You need to get that looked at.”

“Absolutely,” Chet says. “Where you headed?”

“I don’t have time,” I say. “I’m supposed to be outside of New York City by Sunday noon.”

“You look like the rough sketch of a good man,” Chet says to me. Then he looks down toward the ground. “I’m wondering if you’re going to make it.”

“It’s a body I’m driving,” I say, as if this will make my case stronger. “The father of a friend.”

We look at each other for a little bit.

“Your friend, I’m sorry,” Martha says.

“Yes,” Chet says.

“These things are hard,” Martha says.

I find myself wanting so badly to get in the Winnebago and curl up on the couch, wondering if there even is a couch.

“New York’s a long way away,” Chet says.

“Oh, I’ll make it,” I say, “I’ll make it for sure.”

Chet looks at his watch. It’s one of those big broad things with fifteen different dials and appears to weigh more than the arm itself. “Sunday noon,” he says, “is an impossibility.” He rattles his arm and the watch falls against the base of his pudgy hand. “Sunday night, if you have the wind at your back, but even then.”

“You sure?” I ask.

“Son, I was a long haul trucker for twenty-eight years,” Chet says. “I know my roads.”

Martha looks at me. She has gray eyes that are bright but unfocused. Her face has a familiar assumptive concern. “Honey,” she says, sadly. I hear my mother in her voice, many years back, before the sandpaper of delinquency rubbed it into a mournful whisper.

Right about now she will poke her head into my room after an increasingly bold and bothered knock. She will tell herself that things will have to change at some point soon and that I can’t count on her goodwill forever. I am wondering whether the constant trickle of dirt that makes it hard for me to pull myself out is something preordained or built out of expectation. It was never my intention, I’ll tell her when I finally get around to writing.

“There’s always hope,” I say to Chet.

“I never beat the scales on hope,” Chet says, “not once.”

Martha’s head is tilted just a little bit, she looks like she might stand up and hug me. “You really should have that leg looked at,” she says, “it doesn’t seem like it feels very good.

“I’m going to go wander a bit. I’m sure I’ll see you on the way back.”

“Well thanks again for the chair,” Martha says. “Want a pickle sandwich for the road?”

“If you ever get to Mexico, look us up. Go toward the Pacific Ocean and ask the first gringo that looks tan and comfortable for directions,” Chet says, squinting up at me.

I nod politely and walk ahead toward the smoke. I have the distinct impression that there’s not a chemical spill or a mutant bomb but a crack in the earth that has opened up and threatens to swallow humanity. For a second I toy with the idea of talking myself past the makeshift security zone and throwing myself into the chasm. I wonder if I have enough good in my body to satisfy the gods. I am not a virgin, not by a long shot, but I don’t believe that the path from junior high until now has led that steeply down the valley. I picture the angry asphalt zipping itself up after me and the emergency workers shrugging at each other. I am not a believer in reversal but for some reason at this moment I’m convinced of its existence. I have no idea where Mister Torrence is right now and my speculation about what is pulsing through his knobby head ranges from blind hatred to paralyzing fear. In the end he is not a very good judge of character, I’d say, the references I listed at the bottom of my application were from John Coltrane, Stretch Armstrong and Niels Bohr. I did not really want the job in the first place, therefore some of the blame of this surely has to originate with management.

The leg is turning my walk into a limp into a slight one-footed drag. No matter how far I tamp the pain it seems to have gotten into my gait. A kid on the shoulder of the road playing catch with his dad stops in mid-throw and points at me. A woman leaning on her family’s station wagon touches my arm. A girl follows me the lengths of about ten cars. There are helicopters massing near the smoke. There is the distant throb of alarms. The other side of the highway is abandoned and shines with a sense of purity and calm. I want to go lay down there.

I’m now hearing the daughter threatening to track me down. I have no doubt about her forthrightness or her abilities in this area and though I am not one to prepare speeches, one does pop into the back of my mind. I will say that I did my best, but in the end my best doesn’t have a current earthbound corollary. I have some idea what it’s like to be cheated by death but I’m assuming I haven’t made the mourning process any easier. Then again, the largest part of saying goodbye is the letting go part, even when there’s injustice involved, and so in a way I’m proud to have been the welcome mat. I will tell The Daughter that I’m sincerely sorry and that I hope my voice as well as my presence has a restorative property. I will tell her that she strikes me as a woman who is, like me, intimate with inevitability.

And then I will tell her welcome to paradise, please make yourself at home. It is a little different down here but the beaches are clean and the dollar goes far. You get used to it pretty fast and before you know it you’re home.

The Heroic Part of Failure was originally published in Proof of Something, That’s For Sure on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bobby and I are standing out in a field of godforsaken overgrazed scrub ass brush waiting for the Shrimpy Brothers to drive up in whatever luxury automobile they happen to be favoring today so that we can unload on them the land that stretches from here to the abandoned farmhouse all the way to the long drainage ditch just over the wavy curve of the horizon. I begin to get The Feeling real badly. The Feeling is that same alkaline rush of extra cool air inside my head that I felt when I got my skull bashed in with a baseball bat that one time, the same time that after that I began to get The Feeling in the first place.

Bobby is dancing back and forth the length of the car, his long feet slapping down like paddles. "I'm putting a curse on the land," he says.

"Don't do that until we've sold it," I say, though I know he is limp in the area of hoodoo.

"That's just a technicality," Bobby says. He wanders around to the back of the car and opens the trunk. Inside, he grabs his daughter's one eyed, hair needs washing doll and reaches into a dug out place in the thing's back and pulls out a mallet bat cut from three inch steel plate with a handle wrapped in genuine cow leather. "May I introduce to you," Bobby says, holding it up to me and flashing one of his big silver toothed grins, "The Convincer."

"Jesus, Bobby," I say, "You're going to get us killed."

"I made it myself," he says.

He puts the thing in my hands and when he lets go it nearly pulls me to the ground. I take a few limp wristed swings, feeling the weight jerk my shoulder roughly. The words, The Convincer, are burned into the handle with an unsure third grade script. "It's nice work," I say, handing it back to Bobby, The Feeling stronger than ever, "but it won't be necessary. This is a ten minute deal."

"Yeah, well, it's just in case," Bobby says and he shoves The Convincer into the doll's back and tosses the doll into the trunk like it was forgotten by his daughter the last time the court granted him visitation rights.

Overhead, the sun is regarding the ground with a predatory glare. Bobby announces that he needs to urinate and walks around the side of the car. He tries to write Bobby Ray Devlin was here with his pee but doesn't get the last e and so it says Bobby Ray Devlin was her.

I keep a lookout for the dust trail of a car approaching and all I see is a jackrabbit. "Look, there's life," I say, pointing.

Bobby shoots at the jackrabbit with a fake rifle making the same, pyoing, fake rifle noise from when we were kids. "Got it," he says, blowing fake smoke off the end of his finger.

I kick the dirt with the toe of my boot. It's like kicking concrete. The sun and the drought, evil brothers, have not been kind to the worms, and the grasses, and the lady bugs. The grasshoppers, however, seem to like the little canyons of cracked topsoil and blistered ruined earth. And, I guess, the jackrabbits.

.

"Say, which one is the shorter one?" Bobby asks me.

I'm in the middle of my dream, the dream about how it rains gentle droplets and the water soaks into the earth until all the pieces go back together again and the soybeans and corn and cantaloupe and cattle return and then go out again and crops turn to deep grasses, the buffalo sprout up as if they were seeded, and range until the earth grows cold and the glaciers creep in. "Shorter what?" I say.

"The shorter brother?"

"Wayne is the shorter brother," I say.

"Darrin's the one with the mini arm then?" Bobby says.

"Exactimento," I say.

"What if they don't show up?"

"They'll show up," I say. But I have my doubts so I summon them. I hold my breath and do the incantations: words so deep they are not written, words so ancient they are not spoken. My eyes roll back and my head points skyward. I stretch out my arms and then I kneel. I would grab dirt but I have to settle for prying a patch of grey skin from the earth.

I want rid of this land. I want to slip out from the rope of the voodoo charm that was set on it many generations ago sucking the life right out from underneath. We bought it, me and Bobby, because of information; you can learn a lot studying the yellowish pages of that big book in the County Seat. But you never really know what you're buying until you walk barefoot, letting the soil become a part of your blood. Here, there is no soil, just hateful hardened flakes.

We bought the land from the man whose grandfather ran the Indians off of it. The man who told us, when he was signing the deed over to us, that the land just didn't work anymore and he didn't understand what we could want it for. "Something's broke," he said, his blue eyes drained of color.

I wanted it in part because I knew what the Shrimpy Brothers knew, that a few years of paying the taxes on this worthless stretch of rock and forgotten grass would pay itself off the minute the legislators got their act together down at the State House. But more than that I wanted to talk to the ancient ones. I wanted to ask the question that I already know the answers to, the one about why it all went down the way it did.

A couple times I tried to come out at dusk and listen to the wind talking. The coyote spirits told a harrowing tale of starvation and abandonment. There were whispers from the people but their messages were drowned out by the call and response of insect buzz. What I did get was cold and windblown with a genuine feeling that the land, this land anyway, has nothing left to offer.

.

There in the distance is a trail of dust flying 80 miles an hour. I get The Feeling really strong now, so strong that it makes my stomach shoot sour taste up into the back of my throat which, when it combines with the alkaline in my mouth makes for a candy bar of fear.

"They're here," I tell Bobby, my throat closed near to a whisper.

We watch the dust rising on the horizon, a small puff blowing out into a larger train, kicking up, the disturbing of the tortured earth. The dust is right across our field of vision and then it makes a long slow curve and comes straight at us. The Shrimpy Brothers are driving a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, I can now see the grill in the heat waves as it races toward us. I can hear the high pitched whine of its souped up engine, growing bigger and bigger with every piece of dead bush it passes, every rotted and forgotten fencepost blown by, every starved cow skeleton crunched underneath.

I can see now that there are antlers, horns, antlers, some kind of pointed and curled animal head part attached to the Cadillac's front grill. And then I see the standard poodle with its head stuck out the back window, its floppy ears riding the air currents.

They hit the brakes running and skid along the dirt for a good fifteen feet, coming to a stop not too far from our car.

Bobby yells, "No dogs. That's not part of the deal."

Darrin Shrimpy steps out of the driver's side, his long, scuffed snakeskin boots landing on the soil like hammers. He slams the car door with his good arm, the shrunken one perched in front of his stomach.

Wayne gets out on the other side. The dog, now that I get a closer look at it, is some variation on a Standard Poodle and a Lassie dog. It's limping in its hind quarters.

"No dogs," Bobby says, again.

"The dog goes where we go," Darrin says, his voice cutting down the heat.

"Jesus, Bobby," Wayne says, pleadingly. "We just thought it would be nice for her to run around." They're standing now in front of the Caddy. Wayne has his little fist looped around the dog's collar.

"Bobby's been bitten by just about every four and two footed pet on the planet," I say, helpfully. "Ferrets, iguanas, macaws, gerbils, parakeets, guinea pigs."

"Dogs," Bobby adds, in a reminding tone.

"She's harmless," the little brother, Wayne, says. "She's twelve and twice hit by cars."

"If the dog goes, we go," Darrin says, narrowing his eyes.

"Just keep her tied to the bumper of the car," I say, diplomatically.

"A half hitch," Bobby says.

"I wasn't in the boy scouts," Darrin says.

I walk up to the dog and put my hand near her snout. She sniffs it and then immediately plunges her nose past my hand and into my crotch. Bobby has one foot up on the bumper of our car, ready to leap onto the trunk if the beast were to get loose. Darrin pulls her back by the collar and then leashes up the dog by making a loop over his flipper arm.

"What's her name?" I say to Darrin.

"We've been calling her Boy."

"As in Good Boy?"

"Yeah."

"But she's a girl."

"Yeah, I know."

"As long as you know," I say. Then I turn toward Bobby and yell, "It's cool, she's cool."

"Better be," Bobby says.

.

We begin the real estate deal with the ritual naming of who looks like what actor. The brother with the shrunken arm, Darrin, starts since they are our guests on our land. "Tony, you look like Peter Falk," he says to me.

I bow deeply, thanking him. Then it is my turn. "Wayne," I say, "Wayne you look like Roman Polanski in Chinatown."

Wayne removes his sweat stained cowboy hat and bows deeply. I notice that he has a little half dollar sized bald spot on the top of his head. It is now his turn. Wayne puts his hand on his chin and props his arm up with his other arm. "Bobby, Bobby you look like."

Now Bobby knows, and I know, and just about everybody knows that they don't let cats as ugly as Bobby into the movies and so there aren't any actors out there that he looks like. We've worked this to our advantage on half a dozen real estate deals because it sets the procedures off on a crooked stance. The same way you can't concentrate at a restaurant when the table is short in one leg. So there's Wayne with his hand propped up, sizing Bobby up and down, and Bobby begins to laugh. It's not a giddy laugh and it's not a cruel laugh. It's not uncomfortably, or cynical knowledge either. It's this little he he he, like you might hear at a child's birthday party.

"Burt Reynolds," Wayne says. "Definitely Burt Reynolds." And then he starts Qualifying. "But with gold and silver teeth, and shorter, and with pocks on his face, and with one crossed eye, and a scar over his brow."

Bobby bows quickly, bless his heart, and says, "Darrin, you most certainly, especially in profile, look like the Spanish actor Umberto Cruz."

Darrin smiles widely and then bows. "I thank you very much" he says.

"Okay, break," I yell, and clap my hands once.

When we are in our huddles I say to Bobby, "Who the hell is Umberto Cruz?"

Bobby shrugs. "Made him up," he says.

"You can't make up an actor."

"I just did," Bobby says. "There ain't no motherfucker on the silver screen that has a paddle for an arm and the looks of a battle tank."

"Well you could use TV."

"TV either."

"What about that actor that played the Thalidomide Kid in Not Everybody Gets Roses?"

"Number One, those were prosthetics, and Number Two, he was basically as handsome in the face as they come. Deep cheeks, amazingly full curls, sensuous eyes. You're playing to their strength," Bobby says, "you're concentrating on the arm and not the man."

"Dustin Hoffman from Midnight Cowboy," I say, helpfully.

"Yeah, if he fucked a rat weasel," Bobby says.

I give a quick glance over to the Shrimpy Brothers to see if they are ready. Darrin pets the dog with his flipper and it makes my stomach go upside down.

Schedule A

It is this patch of scrub ass brush that the Shrimpy Brothers are after. The entire rest of as far as you can see they own as Darrin Shrimpy is convinced, and has been for some time, that this is the place, smack dab here is where the new airport is going to be built.

We have that to our advantage. The fact that they own practically the entire side of the Monopoly board in flat overbaked land, and we just so happen to have Park Place. I'd sit on it but for the Information.

The Information lays out as follows. Because I am the pedestrian type, because I dress the way I do, because of the knotted hair and the limp and the little stains on the front of my trousers, I am invisible to the legitimate world. Because I drank in the bar across the street from the supposed airport's developer's supposed office, I was privy to certain conversations by supposed developers about said pieces of land, one of which we happen to be standing on right now. Conversations which lead me to the conviction that this hardened stretch will not be bulldozed, will not be built upon, that no airplanes will kiss this ground when landing.

They used the term Loser's Land, but I beg to differ. I am not a loser, au contraire, I am a winner. I am a winner because I am smart. I am a winner because I use my weaknesses to my advantage. I am a winner, despite the schoolyard chants to the contrary, despite the halfbreed status, despite a life's worth of deprivation by way of physical abnormalities. And when the Shrimpy Brothers consolidate their holdings across this abandoned plane, handing me and Bobby a tidy profit, well that little triumph will make me a double winner.

.

We are walking the perimeter. Bobby leads, reading from a map that we stole from the public library of the original division from the original farm. When he finds them, he bangs down on the ends of the steel fence posts with his palm. I can tell by the way he does this that he's trying to put a curse on the land, either that or it's part of a kidlike superstition. Every once in a while he looks back at Darrin and the dog, who are walking three horse lengths behind, and yells, "Don't you dare."

I'm walking next to Wayne. He's leaning forward and throwing his elbows out chicken style, trying to keep up. I spend a little time laughing on the inside about this but then I realize that his limp's just about as bad as mine. He keeps telling me that Bobby is a Liability and that without him I'd be as successful as the Shrimpy Brothers have, knock wood, been.

I don't tell him that as soon as we're done walking the perimeter I'm going to take off them a suitcase full of money, Liability or not, and give them in return a dog of a parcel of land that has been kicked so many times it growls at its own tail wag. Instead I say to Wayne, "I've been thinking much the same thing. He's a good man but he's just not cut out for this."

"What'll you do, then?" Wayne says.

"What do you mean?" I say.

"I mean, you have some big decisions to make," Wayne says.

"In what way?" I'm playing dumb and wondering if Wayne is dumb enough to recognize this.

"Well, you're going to have to acknowledge the liability. Acknowledge it and, you know, make some according adjustments."

"Oh I will, I will," I say.

"Well why don't you start now?" Wayne says. He looks over at me, his cowboy hat is cocked back just enough that I can see a nicotine yellow, hatbrim stain line tattooed across his forehead.

"Can't," I say. I'm feeling strangely out of breath here and I look ahead at Bobby for signs that we're rounding the back end and heading toward the cars. Bobby leans into his steps like he's trying to lose us.

"Why not?"

"Well, for one, Bobby's name's on the deed. Right next to mine."

"That doesn't mean he has to be involved," Wayne says.

I think now about how Bobby was the first kid to come up to me that first day in first grade. His body was much the same way it is now, a little squarish and slightly overlarge compared to his head. I think about how he said, "Want to play?" as if the rules were perfectly understood, and how I felt rescued somehow at that moment from things that had yet to be.

"This is the way it is," I say, "in all it's bumps and glory."

"But how much are you willing to pay for his presence?"

"I don't get your meaning," I say. But I do.

"He's going to cost you some money today," Wayne says. "At what point do you decide it's not worth it?"

I think about this for a second, listening to the ground aching underneath my feet. "I guess that's the kind of thing you just feel out," I say. "Like I said, his name's on the deed." I'm traveling the little sketchy paths from first grade to here, wondering how it comes to pass that the two of them are always so easily cut from the herd and whether this kind of thing is just an inevitability.

"We could shoot him for you," Wayne says, with a sun hardened smile. "I've got a gun right there in the suitcase with all the money."

I feel a prickling inside my throat. "I don't think that would be necessary," I say.

Wayne doesn't say anything. He looks down at the ground and we shuffle along together for a little bit, the soil crunching unevenly below our boots. I am, in a fanciful and unrealistic way, reviewing our options which include levitation as well as previously unknown super powers. Running is out, not just because of my leg limp but because of the fact that the land does not rise or curve for as long as a bullet needs to travel and still be considered a straight shot.

"I was just joshing you," Wayne finally says. "Back there about Bobby."

I let it float out into the air and settle down before responding. "It's alright," I say, immediately realizing that he hadn't apologized.

.

When we get back to the cars, Bobby starts doing jumping jacks, clapping his hands really loudly at the top. "I'm ready," he yells, "I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

I watch Darrin and Wayne give each other a look which constitutes a pulled-up forehead and this sort of I-told-you-so sourness across the lips. I then watch the ground, feeling myself sinking toward it. I am not being absorbed by it because it's far too hard, but I am, rather, melting on top. I am not a protective coating for the sun baked soil, I am just one more thing that died trying to get back in.

Bobby slaps his hands on the front of our car and shouts, "Let's do this."

I look at Wayne and Darrin and ask for a second.

Darrin nods.

As I lead Bobby around the car toward the back to a place that feels more private, I tell him about the gun.

"I have a plan," Bobby says.

"I have a plan, too," I say, hoping this will end the discussion.

"You go first."

I don't really have a plan, to be honest. What I do have is a sense. I see several flashes of the future. One has us lying there bleeding together as the dog licks our faces of any remaining salt. Another has us gratefully signing over the deed with a whole lot of loss taken, ballpoint signatures on the hard top steel of the car hood. "Let's just get the fuck out of here," I say.

"If we leave now, we'll never sell this land," Bobby says. He's right, of course, these are my words he's giving back to me. I told him as much when he objected to my phoning the Shrimpy Brothers a month or so ago and suggesting that we were ready to sell. They'd called him a kike faggot some years ago, an assertion that has truth along the sides, when you consider the religion of his grandmother and the fact that he once let a drunken sailor suck on his dick, but is a ridiculous thing to say. He'd never forgiven them in the way you don't make eye contact with the sixth grade bully; those words they'd said in passing at a bar meant to cause a streak along his brain like staring at a hundred watt bulb for too long.

"How prepared are you?" I say.

"I feel rested, if that's what you're asking."

"It's not." I look sideways back at the Shrimpy Brothers. Darrin is playing with the dog. She's jumping up lamely and putting her paws somewhere on his torso. He's pulling at something in her mouth by clamping it between his good hand and the shrunken one.

"Where's the gun, you say?"

"Wayne told me it was in the bag with the money."

"I'd be surprised if it were the only one," Bobby says, in a way that sounds like I've led us down a path that's far too deep in the woods.

"I don't want to get killed. Especially not over this piece of scrub ass brush," I say, apologetically.

"We're a little too far into the proceedings," Bobby says, with a harshness that makes me think I might pee. "Besides that, I already spent the money." He looks at me carefully and I see a trail of earnest panic all the way back to first grade. The same trail he followed to the principal's office on my behalf, the same trail he followed to juvenile hall, the same trail he followed to jail. His face has never lost its boyish pudge, no matter how many two-by-fours were smashed across his nose, no matter how many times he stepped in front of a drunken set of fists, no matter how many times he owed the wrong guy the wrong amount of money. I want, in some way, to go back to that moment we met and tell him that it is okay, that I'll be alright on my own. I want to be a better friend, a safety net instead of a leech.

"I don't know much about chess," I say, "but this feels like that moment when you know you're fucked."

"I've never lost a game of chess in my life," Bobby says.

.

I'm standing next to Bobby, leaning on the hood of the Shrimpy Brother's car saying numbers back to Darrin, numbers which are fairer and higher. Darrin's returning numbers which are dreadfully low, low enough that I feel a little insulted for my intelligence despite what I already know.

"You're lowballing us," I say, when there is a break in the action.

"This is a true valuation," Darrin says. "You see what it looks like."

Bobby starts tapping his toes. He keeps pinching his eyes tightly closed and then blinking them open as wide as possible like there is a flick of dust in them.

I watch out of the corner of my eye as Wayne walks around the back of the Coupe de Ville, opens the trunk and pulls out a big alligator skin bag. He closes the trunk and sets the bag in a crumpled heap on top and I think I hear the chunk of the gun settling at the bottom.

"Still, Darrin," I say, "you have to be kidding us both."

"I'm not," Darrin says.

I say the last number. I say that number again.

Each time Darrin shakes his head. He says the last number he said and then he says, "Final offer."

"Final offer?" I say.

"Final offer," Darrin says.

"Final offer?" Bobby says.

"Final offer," Darrin says, turning to look at Bobby for the first time.

I stare at Darrin, those little black dot rat eyes, that long needly nose. His flipper shakes with strained excitement. I'm listening to the pale brush of wind across the colorless grass tips. I'm listening to dead bug carcasses blowing along the crispy ground, little plastic scrapes that go on until the earth turns dark at its edges. I'm listening to the pneumatic hiss of the sun headed toward the horizon.

The money he's offering is half what Bobby and I shelled out for the land in the first place. I feel shame that's rooted in third grade ritual beatings, the way the bullies would separate me from Bobby because I was small for my age but not small enough to be invisible. I feel the nakedness of being alone amid the circle of witness on the blacktop. When I look from Darrin to Wayne, I begin to realize that the Shrimpy Brothers have this unassuming look on their faces, the malevolent curiosity with which a coyote regards a bunny rabbit, and I know that we're going to be doing this deal whether I like it or not.

This is when I hear the trunk of our car slam and a sudden spike shoots its way up into my balls. "Don't worry," I think I hear him whispering.

I look now, taking my eyes off of Darrin's little hateful face. I turn to see Bobby with his daughter's doll cradled in his arms. He walks around the car toward us. His feet hit the ground with a deliberate slap. His body, which has always had a sure solid balance, born mainly out of it's strange egglike proportion, seems purposeful. I get The Feeling and it's almost like it never bothered to go away in the first place. Saliva rushes around my molars. My mouth feels like it's being charged with a nine volt. What I'm thinking about is the way time slows. What I'm thinking about is the amazing failure this land is, was, and will always be, and how I don't want to be wrapped up into that fortune. I'm watching now, as if it were on television, as Bobby takes the odd way around the Shrimpy Brother's Coupe de Ville, holding his daughter's stained and yellow doll, and stands next to Wayne.

The dog makes a low, deep throated noise that must be a growl. Bobby turns and smiles at the animal.

A crow floats by on a hot wave of air with its eyes to the ground looking fruitlessly for roadkill.

The car's engine makes a tink, tink, tink steel settling sound.

.

I am raising my hand in a motion that is half shielding and half stopsign at the precise moment Wayne is brained by the child’s doll. His legs drop out from underneath him and his body hits the ground like laundry falling from the sky. Bobby now has the gun, which he is cracking open to see if it’s loaded and then cocking, setting a bullet in the chamber. Darrin begins to sing such a high note that it causes the aged, twice car hit, limping dog to rear up and howl like a maimed donkey.

Bobby levels the thing at Darrin, who is crawling backward using his good hand and shielding his face with his flipper, and I yell, “Bobby,” without finishing the sentence.

Bobby’s head is tilted down. He’s staring straight out the top of his eyes at Darrin, who now jerks his feet up and pulls with his arm as if he’s swimming on top of the concrete soil. “Just a minute,” Bobby says, sweetly, “I’m busy.”

Darrin says, “Bu, bu, bu, bu,” and the dog makes a slight cry.

And then there is a great crack and I watch the bullet spin it’s way out of the gun barrel, pushing aside all of the air until it punches into Darrin’s face. His head goes purple almost immediately and I feel the near release of my bowels.

“I don’t play chess,” Bobby says to me, “I never have and I would think you’d know that by now.” Bobby walks over to Wayne, who appears to be sleeping, cocks the gun once more and shoots him in the head.

It is the electric chair in this state, I know because they took our class on a trip to the penitentiary in sixth grade and Bobby and I pressed our faces to the glass that separates the witnesses from the guy being fried. I’m crying now, little immature droplets falling from my eyes toward the ground. Take-backs are not allowed. The teardrops land with an echoing thud and are absorbed gratefully into the soil. Now it’s raining, I can hear the droplets beating the ground all around me.

This is the scene for what seems like forever. And then I fly up into the air watching the sky as a thick knotted blanket of clouds pulls itself across the sun, and thunder begins rolling down the long valley. In the distance, the rain pounds the ground like drums, like a stampede, and I can hear droplets joining droplets, first a trickle and then the flow of gathering force. Then I look down as the cars take on a toyness and the people surrounding them — Darrin and Wayne resting on a blanket of seeping red, Bobby wiping the gun off and putting it into Wayne’s hand — become part of the landscape. Then I see the fenceline, then I see the disgraced and crumbled farmhouse, then I see the now filling streambed, then I see the back pasture, then I see the hill, then I see the lone cottonwood, then I see the edge.

The Opposite of Loser was originally published in Proof of Something, That’s For Sure on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In New Orleans, hours bend with the topography

by Craig Damrauer

If you stand on a rooftop along the East River in Brooklyn in the evening and look down past Governor’s Island, down toward the Verrazano Bridge, you can see time. Time as a dimension. Up above your head are lights that seem to be hovering. There’s one close, one a bit further behind, one behind that. They twinkle in the distance and you know, because you know, they’re planes. These planes are lined up for landing at LaGuardia. The space between them is about five minutes, I’ve noticed, which must be the amount of time between landings on whatever runway they’re headed for. And so if there are three planes hovering patiently in the air down the river, you’re looking at a perfect vector that consists of fifteen minutes. If there are five twinkling dots in the sky, you’re seeing twenty five minutes unfurling just above.

What catches me when I look at this is how inevitable these stretches of time are. The planes must move at a certain rate. The line cannot, for the most part, stop and therefore this is a fairly true representation of time. And what catches me as well is that there is diminishment in the size of the planes. The one three back is smaller than the one in the front. The fifth is a distant dot. Visually, it appears quite far away, a small blip on the horizon. Twenty five minutes, from the looks of it, is a good ways away.

Time is a dimension. Einstein gave us this thinking in General Relativity. This is apparent when one is wading through the blinding murk of grief. It initially feels like an impossibility, something so large, so heavy that it might be impassible. But then you’ll notice that the pain gradually lifts in an almost linear fashion. Day by day the feeling gets smaller as if you’re viewing it from a moving vehicle headed the opposite direction. What was once a monument turns into a mere signpost as time drives us away.

But the other thing Einstein gave us was Special Relativity. Time is relative. Verlyn Klinkenborg describes this beautifully in The Rural Life, saying that from a distance ‘summer looks as capacious as hope” and yet it contracts the closer we get. Time’s relativity is completely clear in New Orleans. Something strange happens to your clock the moment you arrive, as I did a few years back. It is as if your rigid time piece has melted.

When I describe this to northerners, they immediately equate it with far off ideas about southern heat and slowness. But I don’t think that’s quite right. I actually think I perceive time differently in New Orleans. A New York minute feels a good bit different here. Same with a Denver minute, a Tucson minute and a minute in Maine, all places I’ve also lived.

It’s easy to dismiss this. Even as I type the words I worry that Rod Serling is outside my door, hands clasped, head tilted slightly, talking to a camera. But this isn’t Twilight Zone shit, I swear.

New Orleans is a city perfectly designed to warp time.

Time is an unusual concept for the human being. We don’t have any senses that directly perceive it. It can’t be seen or felt or tasted or heard. It has to be noticed. And therefore time requires a certain kind of thinking. In his essay Symbolic Representation of Time the noted anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach explains, “We recognize repetition. Drops of water falling from the roof; they are not all the same drop, but different. Yet to recognize them as being different we must first distinguish, and hence define, time-intervals.” A day is accepted as following the previous day because we have noticed and noted the night between. Years and longer periods are denoted by tracking the rise and fall of seasons. The moon helps, too.

It goes relatively unmentioned but one of the firmest demarcations of human progression is the way we’ve dealt with time. Agriculture is time based. Science begins only when we have an appropriate measure for time. The development and transmission of ideas, the organization of people, all of this happens when we can place ourselves within time’s dimension. The built world folds around time, whether it’s the clock tower, bus schedules or that number you called for the atomic clock every time the power went out and you needed to reset your stove. The more sharply we can position ourselves, the more precise our thinking and actions are. Consider meeting someone at sundown versus, say, 7:22. Consider an assembly line where things are put together, oh, whenever they get there. Technology progresses with our ability to accurately subdivide units of time. Processor speed is a good example of this.

And though it’s critical to our existence, our understanding of time is based on systems humans have imposed. Imagine what you’d know of a given day, month or year if all your traditional time marking were stripped away. No watch, no computer, no meetings, no classes, no train departures, no appointments, no picking up the kids, no evening news, no bedtime. The rigidity of our systems is what helps us understand our clock. These systems fold together to reinforce how we actually perceive time.

In New Orleans, the city itself has responded to an unusual ecology, geography and relationship with randomness. What’s come out on the other side is something more akin to cobbling than calculation. And it has the effect of accordioning the way a given minute feels here.

Geologically, New Orleans is a newborn. There are churches in Europe older than the land underfoot the French Quarter, “whose crust dates to the Mississippi’s last shift in course. . . around 1400 C.E.,” according to Lawrence Powell’s excellent history, The Accidental City. It’s a place that doesn’t have geologic inevitability. While most other port cities were founded in obvious places, their address with a river and surrounding body of water clear from the get go, New Orleans was a discussion. The elevation drop for the river’s last 70 or so miles is so slim that the river never really gave itself a carved place. Instead it slithered whimsically, choosing one course then another the way water might flow across your kitchen counter. “Why Bienville selected the river crescent as the place to build the principal town of a revamped colony is really a matter of conjecture. It wasn’t a choice he had been mulling over for months or years. It feels more like a spur-of-the-moment decision,” Powell writes.

When you look at a map of New Orleans you’ll see an extreme bend in the Mississippi River that defines the city. And while the river makes many significant curves as it snakes its way through the continent, it never does this quite as dramatically around another metropolitan city. In Memphis, for example, the Mississippi lays itself fairly flat and then gently nudges alongside. It’s a kiss rather than a wrestling move. In St. Louis the river is half as wide and its curve twice as open. As an aside, do at some point follow the river on a map. You’ll find this incredible point where Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee all meet each other and the river makes a sharp arch that carves land for Kentucky that logically would fall Tennessee’s way. A little Kentucky island nestled between Missouri and Tennessee.

What the Mississippi gives most of New Orleans is its city plan. In places, the streets and avenues make slow, graceful arcs that parallel the bend. Incidentally, we don’t use compass directions here, we use the river and the lake. We’ve chosen water over René Descartes. Therefore, to ride the Saint Charles streetcar from the west toward downtown is to head “downriver.” There is a “lake side” of New Orleans and a “river side.” On the river side, as you pull up and around the French Quarter, according to John M. Berry’s Rising Tide, the Mississippi’s “turn is so sharp that the water surface on the outside of the bend rises a foot higher than on the inside, as if banking around a racetrack.” A container ship coming the other direction will slide itself sideways, seemingly headed straight sidelong into the bank, and then gun it the second the bow is pointed upriver, its back end fishtailing away like Jim Rockford’s Firebird. The first time I saw this I assumed I was just about to witness a major accident. Every time after this it sends my heart soaring, the lithe mass and near catastrophe.

Because the streetplan is as undulating as the river itself, A to B in New Orleans includes a few other stops as well. You’re either traversing a curve, traveling a street that radiates outward or dipping up onto the highway. This makes it difficult to intuit how long it’ll take to get somewhere. One route is not necessarily better than another. Often there is a series of best ways that can suit your particular mood. Do I want to travel along the river? Would it be fun to go through the French Quarter? Should I just hit the highway? That’s structural. It gets further complex when you sift in people. I’ve been caught by impromptu parades. I’ve been zigged and zagged by pop-up one-ways, or blocked streets due to sewer repair, a moving truck, two old friends chewing the fat, tree trimmers or any other unpredictable-yet-wholly-unsurprising surprises. The time it takes to travel from one place to another in New Orleans wears the guise of approximation not assurance. And this does something to our minds. Since humans don’t sense time directly, we use our daily life to align our internal clocks. Psychologist John Michon explains in Implicit and Explicit Representations of Time, “humans normally have access to a large repertoire of temporal standards for concrete, everyday, “natural” events, associated with scenarios, not only in order to efficiently execute routine activities, but also in order to explain and communicate.” Remember, this is a place where water is our compass. And while nothing in New Orleans is terribly far physically, the one thing you can expect is that it’ll be a journey to get there no matter how routine.

To walk any given sidewalk in New Orleans is an exercise in navigating tectonic shifts, fissures, crevasses. Sidewalks are less slabs than puzzle pieces. They undulate and wind. The same holds true for streets which are just the asphalt side of dirt with gaping holes in random places. The other day I was barreling up a street in Uptown New Orleans — and by barreling I mean driving about 17 miles an hour — when I had to come to a complete stop because there was a large, square hole in the middle. I advanced gingerly. My car rocked, it bottomed out, it scraped a side and somehow managed to get through the pit. I’ve seen cars that weren’t so lucky. Not far from there I once saw a fancy pants German wagon tilted as if it’d slipped precariously off the side of a cliff’s edge, its remaining two tires in the air and its owner scratching her head.

The roads subside because the ground underneath is constantly settling and shifting. We don’t have a lot of structure in our infrastructure. Look up any telephone pole and you’ll see a winding mass of vine. Wisteria has engulfed one a few blocks from my house, a torrent of soaring fingers that split and head both directions down the wire. It reminds me of an abstract crucifixion painting. I once asked the telephone repairman who had his ladder propped against this mass and was half buried by it, “How’s it going?” He took so long to respond that I doubted he’d heard me. Finally, he said from inside the bramble, “it’s going.” Across the street from there the one-way sign barely peeks above a beard of jasmine. A stop sign not far from my favorite cafe has been bolted to shorter pole segments and canted to the side so that it can see around the oak that stands in front of it. I am thrilled in a BMX way when pavement rises sharply over roots. And it’s impossible for my thoughts not to change course when a sidewalk, or even a street, veers off path and around a tree.

To navigate the city is to be guided, shaped and somewhat bossed around by nature. One cannot escape it. And we all know that nature doesn’t wear a watch. Or at least not the same watch we do. Its pacing and concerns are different. “Ecological time narrows the present to the utmost,” the sociologist Georges Gurvitch says in The Spectrum of Social Time. Nature is in the now and so it forces our perception into the present as well. Consider how you feel when you’re in the middle of a forest or laying on your back staring at clouds overhead — that heightened awareness and partial surrender: that’s what it feels like everyday in New Orleans.

A friend here who spent time living in Hawaii and on various Asian archipelagos says he thinks of New Orleans as an island. And when it was founded in 1718 it was an island. L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans. On one side lake, on another river and the rest was swamp. Access to the city was by boat alone. This is still ostensibly true. It would be very dangerous to try to walk out of the city. You’d spend an enormous amount of time on the shoulder of an elevated highway or wading through alligator homeland.

Being surrounded by water creates a special relationship with randomness, different than, say, snowbound Maine or high Rockies, it’s less about building shelter than about bending if and when the storm comes. Laissez le bon temps rouler is a statement of values but it’s also the state of the union between humans and nature here, our power and ability to control. We’ve been lashed by hurricanes, we’ve been underwater, we’ve been nearly wiped out by yellow fever. The future feels uncertain, we have a past that confirms this, and so our clocks are deeply synchronized to the present. Our brains are set to slow down time and open our perception because we’re inevitably faced with new things. In Models of Psychological Time Richard Block says, “If a person encodes more stimuli during a time period, or if the person encodes the stimuli in a more complex way, the experience of duration lengthens.” This is why the trip out usually feels longer than the trip back. Your mind is absorbing and recording more. On the way back your brain slips into a been-there-done-that mode. In New Orleans, everything feels painted with a random brush. A man crossing the street in a royal-purple, three-piece suit complete with tophat. A cobweb stretching from a stop sign all the way to a house. A man riding a weed-wacker powered bicycle. A gold medal worthy sunset.

It could be argued that in some ways the built environment is an attempt to take command over ecological time. Gurvitch says we’re constantly struggling to master time and submit “it to human control.”

What this gives most cities is a very specific and predictable meter, from rush hour to the timing of lights to the distribution of services to the layout of street trees. What’s attractive about New Orleans is that here the opposite is largely true. Predictability in New Orleans comes in very small sections and for brief moments during the year. The city lives in a precarious balance between solidity and shift, between improvisation and planning, between magic and logic. All of this with its attendant effect on how we perceive time here.

Not long after I got to New Orleans we found out that a power outage at the plant where they treat our water made it inadvisable for us to drink from the taps. Babies, old people, school children were all at risk and we were told to boil any drinking water. We found this out five hours after the power outage. Five prime water drinking hours. I cannot tell you how many times this sort of civic breakdown scenario has happened since, I’ve lost count, it doesn’t surprise or register. And while my shift in mindset represents a certain shift in expectations for what a city and a government are supposed to do, it also represents a shift in how I deal with emergencies and the unexpected. I was told, not long after this happened, that I shouldn’t consider New Orleans a third class American city but rather a first class Caribbean one.

One way to read this statement is a kind of fatalistic optimism of the grin-and-bear-it genre. I prefer to think of it as highly instructive cultural information. New Orleans is a city whose sympathies lie with being as opposed to doing. It’s no wonder Old Bull Lee in On the Road lived here. After all, Old Bull Lee “had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore with prescription and Chinese smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free.” Writing about New Orleans, the photographer Richard Sexton says, “There are places like it; it’s just that none of them are in the United States. Rather, they are the places I first saw as a twenty-year-old traveling through Latin America and the Caribbean.” He explains the link this way, “Creole history and identity — despite their permutations and nuances over time — contribute to New Orleans’s “otherness” in the United States while connecting it to Caribbean and Latin American cities with similar colonial histories.”

One doesn’t come to New Orleans to claw oneself up the ladder. There is no dog eat dog here. Instead there’s that blue sky feeling where one might rather roll up the pants and wade into the water on a given Thursday afternoon as opposed to, say, building an industry.

The Martinican writer Edouard Glissant notes that Caribbeans and other “composite peoples” persist “in considering time in terms of a natural experience.” This means that built environment time controls haven’t embedded themselves into the culture or that the build environment and the natural one have found a balance. Glissant has a gorgeous way of talking about the A to B that I was describing above. “Ask a Martinican peasant or native, I suppose, the way: the directions he will provide will have nothing to do with the precise and objective nature of the location that is at stake. He will play with it. You will also find that he will not attempt to impose on you any set notion of time. He will offer a version parallel to your own.” This is a wonderful way to move through the day because it focuses more on the quality of the moment than its drive forward. It can take a while to settle into the mind when you first get here, but it inevitably occurs.

During the colonial period New Orleans was used for raw materials, mainly “tobacco, indigo and lumber.” We were severed from the lands upriver by the “customary three months it took keelboats to pole or pull their way to the Illinois Country.” This, along with climate, gave us more in common with the Caribbean than folks a bit north. And west. And east. Our colonial relationship was with Spain and France who took raw materials and sold us finished goods. Manufacturing, in other words, took place elsewhere.

This continued and was even complained about in a history of the city written in 1900: “But it was not until late in the [eighteen] forties when Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and other Western cities began to enjoy prosperity as manufacturing centers, that the political economists of New Orleans realized that for sound and substantial business their city ought to have factories to supplement its active commerce. An agitation then began, which, however, was productive of few important results.” This is seen today as well. According to a 2013 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, New Orleans’ “employment shares were significantly below their national representation in nine groups, including production.” We are, however, “highly concentrated” in “food preparation and serving” which, as you might know, has the same meter as hunger pangs.

When a city is devoid of major industry, it’s also missing industrial strength time-marking. Georges Gurvitch says, “the groupings involved in economic activity have a tendency to be conscious of the time which they produce. . .[this] is realized in such terms as delivery date, productivity, value, salary-price.”

Time is money, then, and an entire ecosystem of time-based supports for industry crop up that help synchronize our collective clocks.

Trains, trucking, shipping, time management consultants, meetings, market bells, time-cards, fast food, even happy hour. Happy hour at the bar on Magazine Street near my house is from 11 am — 8 pm, a full hour more than a union work day. Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue on a train to Boston, energized by what he called, “its steely rhythms.” Rhapsody in Blue premiered in 1924 as the roaring twenties hit its stride. It’s no wonder those staccato rhythms are still considered symbolic of industriousness. If Gershwin had been on a barstool in New Orleans, we’d have had a completely different tune.

What does synchronize our clocks are festivals and the New Orleans Saints. There are dozens of festivals and holidays throughout the year. There’s even a festival season. This is a city of costume closets, tailgaters and expert party goers. Halloween is for the adults arguably more than the kids. And the festivals that really drive the city are Mardi Gras and Jazzfest.

It is impossible not to participate in Mardi Gras here. Even those folks who choose not to and head for ski vacations during the school break are, in essence, coordinating their rhythms. For the rest of us Mardi Gras parks itself over the city like a massive storm system and rains beads, trinkets, king cakes and excuses to hang out. And it’s not just Tuesday. It stretches long before that, long enough that you have to pace yourself and find just the right balance of participation, attention, inconvenience and, well, drinking so that when Fat Tuesday does roll around you’re alive and kicking. Work, as you define it, doesn’t happen during Mardi Gras and, in fact, tends to be scheduled around. My wife, who arrived in this city to assist in the rebuilding, found this out the hard way. What do you mean you can’t come to work? What do you mean the project will be delayed? And the amazing thing is that she’s from here. Born and raised in southern Louisiana, she knew what she was getting into when she came back. But once outside it’s easy to forget the unusually strong pull.

A similar thing happens during the football season but on a smaller scale. When the Saints play a weekday night game it’s not uncommon for people to take the afternoon off. On the Friday before a Sunday game one can assume the bank teller, the streetcar driver, the elderly lady walking her dog will be wearing a Saints jersey, even during preseason. Parents will quietly root against their kids in soccer tournaments if the championship game happens to coincide with kickoff. Gametime is the quietest moment in the city and, I’m told, the best time to go to the emergency room. Jazzfest is really no different, though it only lasts for two weeks. A friend’s company gives its employees one Jazzfest Friday off so they don’t have to call in sick.

In the essay Festival: Definition and Morphology, Alessandro Falassi says, “At festival times, people do something they normally do not; they abstain from something they normally do; they carry to the extreme behaviors that are usually regulated by measure; they invert patterns of daily social life.” This is quite clear if you know nothing of Mardi Gras except its reputation from afar, Bourbon Street, breasts, etc.; I cannot exaggerate some of the things my kids and I have seen. That said, Mardi Gras is also a deeply family focused festival where every single participant has some version of a yearly ritual, whether it’s red beans and rice at the house, meeting along the parade route, the hosting of a party on a given night, barbecue under the viaduct, the display of the Mardi Gras Indians, old-money balls or the family table at Galatoire’s.

This has a really specific annual effect. “Among the various functions which the holding of festivals may fulfill,” Sir Edmund Leach notes, “one very important function is the ordering of time.” Festivals act much like the hand of a clock, tick, ticking away. Repetitions tell us another cycle has begun or ended. This is one of the functions of synagogue, Thanksgiving, Diwali, the yearly family picnic. It’s a way of lining a culture up.

And therefore to stray from a culture’s clock is to be a non believer. Church bells, the muezzin’s call, while completely beautiful also serve a serious function for that culture. I’m fairly convinced you would not recognize a New Orleans that doesn’t celebrate Mardi Gras. There is a lot of vested interest in Mardi Gras here. It’s a boon for the city, it’s our identity, it’s even a way of maintaining some of the harsh racial and economic norms. “Without the festivals, such periods would not exist, and all order would go out of social life,” Leach says.

It is impossible to separate the culture from the calendar. One begets the other much like the chicken and the egg. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist who did a lot of thinking around social organization says, “The divisions into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts and public ceremonies. A calendar expresses the rhythm of collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularity.”

And so, then, to be in New Orleans is to be on New Orleans time.

Speaking about Durkheim’s findings, the anthropologist Alfred Gell excitedly put it this way, “collective representations of time do not passively reflect time, but actually create time as a phenomenon apprehended by sentient human beings.” And the thing is Mardi Gras has no set length. It lasts from 12 days after Christmas until the day before Lent. This could be early February. It could be March. It could be somewhere in between. The celebration has no specific meter and so it tumbles us every year leaving no fixed grounding in time.

The first Mardi Gras the kids and I witnessed, we landed on Lundi Gras, the night before Fat Tuesday. My wife had been living in New Orleans for some time before this and picked us up from the airport at about five in the evening. We then drove a backroad route carefully choreographed to avoid parades and parade traffic — no easy feat — to a house within a few blocks walk of the big Uptown parades. There, a very coveted parking spot waited, the product of much planning, generosity and multiple texts.

We ate red beans and rice, I drank a little rum and then we walked to Saint Charles where a big parade was expected at any minute. When we got there it had just started and I was immediately hit by the colors on the floats, beautiful yellow and purple and pink crepe paper flowers with streaming and gleaming centers that seemed to vibrate in the night air. My kids reflexively reached for beads, flashing things and toys tossed from the floats, delighted each and every time they were rewarded. And the night seemed to swirl from then on, people in costume, marching bands, flames, dancing. It was as if nothing else existed.

At some point a friend of ours, another transplant to the city, leaned down to my children and said this: “Just imagine, kids, everywhere else this is just a Monday night.”

And that’s right. When you’re in the middle of it all, you really can’t imagine what it’s like somewhere else because you’re so deeply here. Year after year. What this does is separate New Orleans from the rest of the United States. Not only is it an island physically but culturally and metaphorically. Yes, Mardi Gras is celebrated in other places but here it is universally agreed upon. You have no choice. You’re either going to celebrate or you’re going to be caught in the traffic. And so it’s easier, and quite a bit more joyous, to simply surrender.

I was in a store the other day talking to its owner. He’d moved, after twenty something years, from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, chased out by changes he wasn’t super happy about. And he worried aloud about the same thing happening in New Orleans. It’s wild here, wild around edges in ways that are attractive. Impromptu bonfires in backyards, random street parades. You can park on the sidewalk. We lit an incredible array of fireworks on New Years, some exploding overhead so loudly that they’d draw a squadron of police in any other city I’ve lived. One really does get Old Bull Lee’s attraction. Things feel possible. Good and bad. Optimistic and its half-empty other. Not to mention that almost every day is bright, with warm light that settles on all the things in bloom. And there is always something in bloom. The coldest months seem to bring out the best ones, camellias and Japanese magnolias. So it’s a place that very much recommends itself.

The question, then, is whether too many people will come down to New Orleans, like me, and settle here. Enough people that New Orleans ceases to be what it is. Or was. Enough people that the attractive things (again, good and bad) seem to fall away the way they tend to when loads of new people move into the neighborhood — with their own expectations, desires and comforts — and muscle whatever was there before aside. That, essentially, was what chased the store owner from Williamsburg.

My answer to that question is: I doubt it. I think the construction of the city, its address with the land and the environment shapes time. And that’s a potent, almost undetectable force. If you find, after two years here, that you simply cannot think and act the same way you did back in L.A. or Brooklyn or Washington D.C., because something fundamental inside your head has shifted, no amount of will can change that. You’ve been shaped, in other words. Your meter is now adjusted and the streetplan, the moisture, the plantlife, the randomness have made their case.

If you stand at the Mississippi’s edge on the levee right next to the French Quarter and look the direction the river flows, you can see time.

It’s the same time that Louis Armstrong describes in his first few, luscious bars of ‘Do you Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” from the 1947 movie New Orleans. The song itself was written by a guy from Long Island (which explains the cornball rhymes), but Louis Armstrong, because he’s from here, takes the material and pulls it, milking it out, twisting it, making it his own. His meter is the meter you sense as boats float slowly by. Or clouds roll overhead. This is time all right. And you’ll notice, as you watch the Mississippi flow, that the time you’re looking at bends sharply and moves ever so gently out of your grasp.

Photography by Dorka Hegedus

Time and the City was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We make our coffee on the stovetop using an Italian espresso maker. It’s the round and stainless steel version of the octagonal aluminum one you’ve undoubtedly seen. I could tell you that there’s one of those on nearly every stove in Italy. I could tell you that it’s been the subject of news magazine pieces, museum exhibitions, semi-nude photo shoots, tea towels and tattoos.

But instead I want to tell you about my routine. I can envision this routine, the actual making of the coffee, happening in the exact same way when I’m in my eighties. There’s no need for improvement, innovation, deviation. This works and it works perfectly. The liquid result is brown going on black and sits in a cup with regal dignity. When I take the espresso maker off the stove, where it’s been sitting all night, and carry it over toward the sink so that I can begin to make the coffee, I’m filled with the greatest amount of anticipatory satisfaction I’ll find in my entire day. This is one of the only pieces of my life that feels completely figured out. And the way the coffee maker has wedged itself into my being and my memory is the best testament to the object’s iconic status that I can think of.

We lavish so much of our time and attention on things. But this worship tends to ebb once the object has hopped out of the photograph or into our shopping basket. So it’s not always apparent what’s meant by ‘good design’ until an object has been truly sifted into our lives.

Our espresso maker has an elegant, round bottom that’s taken on a reddish, golden-brown patina over the years. This part screws into a straight upper portion which rises to a lip that juts out for coffee pouring, less pout than proud servitude. The lid looks like a beanie topped by a tiny, plastic pom-pom. Normally the espresso maker would have a plastic handle but ours is gone. My wife, Desiree, used it to pry something a few years back and the thing won. What’s left is a small, upside down, wide angled metal L that’s been spot-welded to the shiny upper portion of the coffee maker. To pour hot coffee in the morning I pinch this little L with towel-protected fingers. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

At the sink I unscrew the bottom. Inside is a little brown circle of yesterday’s used coffee grounds pressed into a crusted hockey puck, the sensual violence of stovetop steam tickling and squeezing out every last bit of flavor. My goal each morning is to keep this delicate puck intact while pulling out and emptying the little metal basket it sits in. It’s no easy task. The basket hovers in the rounded base of the espresso maker with half a fingernail’s tolerance on any given curved edge. A fat finger or an improper pluck will cause the caked grounds to collapse into shards.

Done right, though, it’s the feeling of sticking a perfect landing. It’s the notion of something falling your way. After I pull the basket up I open the compost bucket, hold the thin portion of the funnel that’s attached to the basket between thumb and two fingers, and thwack it on the side of the bucket using a quick sideways flick of the wrist. Out falls the puck and this little moment gives me complete satisfaction. Nothing for the rest of the day will compete with the feeling of seeing a perfect disk of grounds—squeezed, compressed and used to its fullest potential— beginning the journey back toward soil.

The espresso maker consists of five parts: Top, bottom, funnel-basket thing, a rubber gasket and an upper screen. The upper screen is loose and held in place by the gasket. Both are replaceable and are the only two pieces that require semi-regular maintenance. The gasket is supposed to be swapped out for a fresh one perhaps every four or so months. In our case, this stretches to six or seven or twenty. The screen, well, we’ve had two in more than a decade. This means the espresso maker, more than any other device in my life, is nearly infallible. It has an engineered stability that one only sees on things meant to be sent into orbit.

Compare this to the coffee grinder. I want to say this is our second grinder and I want to say it was a gift but maybe I’m confusing this with the first grinder, which may have been the same kind of grinder. I don’t know. These details escape me because I feel so little for the grinder’s place in my future. The grinder is an ergonomic hourglass design, complete with grippy rubber at its center in exactly the places I put my hand. To open it, I twist the top counter clockwise, giving access to the rounded cylinder where the blade does its work. At the bottom are gentle dunes of extremely fine coffee powder that must be held in place by static, or luck, or happenstance. I have no idea if yesterday’s powder is today’s or if it is one batch of extremely resilient dust from months ago. But I like the presence of the little drift because it is delicate and ephemeral and vulnerable, because it is there on the edges despite the hourglass design, as if saying that not everything can be perfectly plotted, planned and considered.

I pour two scoops of beans into the blade cylinder. The first beans fall in with wondrous, individual rattles. The top is then set back on with an audible click — the indication that it’s in a safe operating position. And on it goes. My hand is in the ergonomic sweet spot, my thumb holding down the large, soft button. There are three lights just under the lid that indicate the level of grindedness but I cannot tell you what their labels say because I do not observe this moment of action carefully. Nor can I tell you what the dial at the bottom of the grinder is generally set on or even what it means. What I’m waiting for is that third light to turn on and then I’ll grind for a few seconds longer, counting slowly to the number four. Perhaps this is when the dust is generated, who knows?

I turn the grinder upside down, tap it on the counter with a quick pop-pop and rev the blade a quarter second to drop as much of the ground coffee as possible into the lid. When I tap the lid on the counter I notice how solidly the plastic meets the hard counter but I still recognize there will come a day when I do this and the lid cracks. That is the grinder’s inevitable beginning of its inevitable end. That or the blade mysteriously not working. And while we’ve had this grinder for quite some time, long enough for me to have forgotten its origin, I still relate to it as something that will necessarily fail in a fixable way and end up leaving my house in useless pieces.

Still upside down, I unscrew the top of the grinder and gently lower it, revealing the ground coffee. The lid is just slightly bigger than the espresso maker’s basket and so I cup my left hand over the bottom of the espresso maker and lightly tap in the grounds. It’s an easing process that leaves tiny dustings on the edges like chocolate milk on a child’s cheeks. I’ll wipe those grounds into the basket, an act that’s half not wanting to waste and half needing the seal on the coffee maker to be as perfect as possible.

From there the top portion of the coffee maker is screwed to the bottom, a clockwise turn until I can feel it snug up to the rubber. I then tug it just a little more, assuring the seal is as good as I can get it.

When I was in graduate school in Tucson, Arizona and more interested in professional cooking than my studies, I picked up the octagonal version of this coffee maker at a garage sale. This was before the search algorithm, and exact replacement of the missing rubber gasket in that Tucson at that time was a difficult task. What I did instead was take a larger gasket from a glass canning jar and cut it down, hoping that pressure from a tightened bottom and top might overcome the very tiny gap created by joining the sides where I’d sliced the gasket to make it fit the smaller diameter. It didn’t work and no matter how I engineered it, the espresso maker would envelop itself with errant steam, disappearing in a cloud on my stove and producing a paltry amount of coffee.

So I am, in a way, scarred by this and will, for the rest of my life, attempt to get the best seal possible on the espresso maker. It’s funny the way these little moments change us in small ways. Behavioral tics that are less relegated to logic than a lifetime’s worth of learning the hard way.

I set the coffee maker on the stove and adjust the flame so that it curls just under the bulbous underside. The water in the bottom begins to boil, and the pressure rises, forcing itself up that funnel bottom and into the basket of coffee grounds. From there it steams through the grounds and up another center tube where it condenses and then falls out little slits at the top into the waiting upper chamber. I know the coffee’s done by the pitch and tempo of the gurgling.

It’s difficult to fake excitement when someone tells me about their new pod coffee maker. Inevitably they’ll talk about convenience, how darn easy it is, you just pop the pod in there, put your cup right here, press this little button and blammo. It just doesn’t feel right to me. Part of this is the plastic pod that moves ever so quickly from pantry to trash with only the smallest of meaningful transactions between. Tremendous waste is a phrase that comes to mind. But above that I think about what is missing when one surrenders to this. We are, after all, somewhat defined by our rituals.

After the gurgling has called me to the stove, I’ll snap off the flame, noticing steam rising gently from the steel lip. The smell at this moment is rich, filling the air in front of me. The espresso maker gurgles a few seconds more and then settles into quiet waiting. I set out two cups on the counter, grab a towel and fold it in thirds the long way. Pinching my fingers about two inches from the top of the towel, I grip the smaller portion of the hot stub of the handle and lift the pot from the stove, using the rest of the towel and my other hand to support the operation. I’m not bothered by this slight inconvenience, by the way; the coffee maker has reduced itself to its essential parts and I’m okay adapting.

This is a 6-cup espresso maker, which translates in my house to two wonderful cups of coffee. The cups I’ve set out are actually ten-sided jelly jars that seem like jewels to me and tinkle when I stir the sugar. Desiree likes her coffee ten shades lighter than I like mine, so I pour the requisite amount of milk into each jar. Hers flops from deep brown to silky cloud almost immediately as the milk muscles the coffee aside. In mine, the milk is a quick on-off of a pour, dropping tentatively into the brown pool below.

My morning after this will unfold as I sit down to work on whatever is before me. The empty coffee maker will be back on the stove where it gradually cools and watches and waits for tomorrow, the day after that and every day that follows.

You can follow Craig Damrauer on Twitter at @misterdamrauer. Subscribe to re:form’s RSS feed, sign up to receive our stories by email, and follow the main page here.

Photography by Dorka Hegedus

How the Coffee is Made was originally published in re:form on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.