Category Archives: Short Story

216. Angry Birds

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Rick, the ranger, taken by the game Angry Birds on his iPad while supposedly charged with watching that the day hikers were aware of, and did not dare try crossing the badly damaged rope bridge, missed the wild boar that had slipped past his truck and walked out over the ravine.

Two days earlier, in a most terrible early spring storm, a flock of carrion were blown down over the ravine and in the confusion of the driving, frozen rain, got tangled up in the rope meshing of the handrail. In their mad attempt of escape, they had also broken a few of the boards. While Rick was playing his game and waiting for the cleanup crew, the wild pig walked out onto the bridge for one of these rotting carcasses.

The ranger looked up from his game to see the boar after it grabbed hold of one of the birds and while trying to pull it free, slipped through the opening of the bridge, through the space between broken boards. At first he couldn’t see the boar from where the truck was parked, but through his open window, he could hear the animal’s loud squealing.

“Oh, for criminey’s sake,” the ranger said after he stumbled out of his vehicle to see the boar hanging from the bridge by the rotting carcass of the bird still tangled up in the ropes. He shouted from the edge of the bridge, “Let it go! Just fall to the river, you stupid pig.”

But the river was a hundred and fifty feet below, and full of rocks, in some places, and though possible to survive if lucky enough to land in a deeper pool, the river this time of year was ice-cold. If the fall did not crush the spirit of any warm-blooded animal, the frozen water most certainly would.

The bridge, though slick in places, was still manageable. Rick told himself not to look down as he stepped over one missing board and then came to the space between boards through which the boar was giving him an angry look, squealing still, and snarling at him through his gritting teeth as he held onto the bird.

The ranger didn’t know what to do. He could cut the  bird loose from the ropes, and send the bird and the pig both crashing onto the rocks below and decided that, yes, before the cleanup crew arrived, that was what he would do. But first, more as a sentimental gesture than anything else, he wanted to touch the wild boar. Though he had come across a couple of dead boars in his lifetime, had scared a few from the brush, and had once even been chased back to his truck by one, he hadn’t ever touched a real live breathing wild boar in its, so to speak, natural habitat.

Rick got on his knees, seeing then that it not a he boar, after all, but a sow, a female. When he reached down through the space between missing boards, the pig in a wild swinging attempt of getting free of the ranger’s hand, threw the ranger himself through the opening of the bridge.

Rick was not a believing man. He did not believe in God. He believed in nature. He believed in cause and effect. He believed in survival of the fittest, even if a somewhat outdated model. He believed, too, in Bigfoot, but only because he had once seen him. 

But that would all change as he held onto the ribcage of the wild pig while hanging over the river through the better part of the next hour. It could not be said that he had the experience of God, per se, in those long minutes before the cleanup crew arrived, late by his calculations by twenty-five minutes, so much as an overwhelming feeling of connectedness as he had never quite experienced before.

He understood that the pig, too, was reconciling herself to this new understanding of the universe. As the ranger whispered and encouraged her to hang onto the bird, he could feel a communal warmth growing between them. It was the closest he had felt to any warm-blooded thing, ever, human or otherwise, in his forty-five years. He would finally understand this feeling, quite simply, as love.

And thus he hung for what felt like days, although it was probably only closer to forty-five minutes. He thought he could hear his game beeping from his iPad through the open window of his ranger truck, but that was impossible. It was too far away. And he could only image, finally, how it must have looked when the clean-up crew arrived.

“Hi, fellas!” he yelled. “I know this looks weird. But I can explain.”

What he could not explain, what he could never, for the rest of his life, explain, or forgive himself for, was that he belonged to a family of primates that would feel the need to kill a wild animal for their own protection, they said, and for his own, after helping Rick back to the bridge.

Rick spent his earlier years after the incident looking for the pig. He thought that she could have survived the fall, even if another part of himself knew how impossible this was. Although he could not bring himself to look, the echoey thudding sound of her body against the rocks below after she was cut loose were testament enough: that pig, the only female that he had ever truly loved, was dead.

173. The Author Going for the Score

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“How do you often embarrass yourself?” she asked him in the fourth quarter of the hard-fought defensive struggle of their first date. 

They had been talking about airline food before that.  She was a stewardess.

“But my boobs are real,” she had said, a non sequitur dropped into the mix as an attempt to draw him off sides, right before she had asked him about how he embarrassed himself.

“Huh?” He was confused. He was still thinking about the reality of her boobs.

“On your dating profile,” she said. “You say that you have a tendency to embarrass yourself in public. What do you mean by that?”

“Oh,” he said. “That.” But he wasn’t sure, suddenly, what to do. He called a timeout and went to the restroom to confer with his coach.

“If you want to get into that end zone,” Coach said, “you got to keep it together.” Coach had the voice of Mickey Goldmill, Sylvester Stalone’s fictional boxing trainer in the Rocky films. “No big mistakes. You hearing me?”

He nodded that he did.

“This is the red zone!” Coach said. “You got to go for the win and punch it in.”

He knew what Coach meant. He could not afford, after the tightly-executed running game tonight, and the smart play-calling, to end as he’d ended the previous four dates, four different women, all from the online dating site.

The first date, after a late and hopeful drive deep into her territory, had ended with him turning over the ball. The second and third stopped him at the goal line, making him settle for a field goal attempt in both cases (the first field goal had been blocked, and the second one he had shanked to the right). His fourth date, a defense attorney, had beat him up so badly over dinner that he limped back to the locker room in tears.

“Now go get ‘em,” Coach said, and patted the Author on the ass as he jogged out to the center of the dining room.

Uncharacteristically, for him, he did not get honest—in his experience, a deal-breaker. He did not tell her, for example, about the “incident” when in grad school. He had come unglued at a reading late spring of his last year, true, but nobody had ever cared to hear his side of the story. They ostracized him, basically, in the writing workshops afterwards, and his thesis advisor refused to return his calls.

This was after the publication and many accolades of his first book of poetry, shortlisted for various awards. But what they didn’t care to know, those that judged him then, was that though he seemed kind of crazy, to be sure, when he came out onto the stage for his reading with what appeared to be some seagull shit on the lapel of his wrinkled tweed jacket—either seagull shit or a little of that bleu cheese dipping sauce served with the buffalo wing appetizers not an hour (and three beers) earlier, the only thing he’d consumed all day beside the Bloody Mary for breakfast—was that his girlfriend had broken up with him not fifteen minutes prior to the reading.

Although it was no excuse, of course, he at least thought that it might help to shed light onto what happened partway through his first poem. A woman in the front row took a call on her cell phone, and though the Author tried to go on, he had been so distracted that he stopped right there and ripped the page out of his book. “What the fuck, what the fuck!” he yelled at the woman. “You’re taking a call right in the middle of my reading? How rude is that!”

He said some other generally awful and douchebaggery type things—really terrible terrible things, actually—until, with tears, the woman said, “My friend was just calling because she loves your work, but she couldn’t make it tonight. Her husband left her last year, and she’s working two jobs to support her family, and all she wanted was to spend her thirty minute lunch hour from her nighttime grocery job to hear you read. I was going to put her on speaker phone.”

But that was not the worst of it. As the Author was walking over to the side of the stage where he had thrown the book, the woman said, while gulping on her tears, “My friend’s youngest son has cancer, and this is all she had hoped for, to get thirty minutes of peace in the back room, sitting on the boxes of bananas or whatever, to hear you read.”

This was one small example of how the Author often embarrassed himself in public. But rather than go there, and because he realized that the scouting team had reported back on this tendency of his, he called an audible and said to the stewardess, “I sometimes hiccup in the elevator.”

“A simple hiccup, really?” she said, and reached across for his hand. “Is that all? We can work with a hiccup or two. In fact, a cute little hiccup out of that cute little mouth”—she reached across for his nose, but missed it slightly, touching him on the cheek, more drunk than he had realized—”and you just might score tonight.”

107. The Unquiet Grave

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Today while returning home from a trip north, I stopped to spend a few hours in a café in the town of X that I will not mention by name so as to protect the integrity of the story that I am about to tell.

In this particular café, they have a bookshelf full of books. The premise of this section, designating as the “Book Share,” is to “take one, leave one.”

As I was leaving the café, one book grabbed my attention. It was the collected poems of a much overlooked, plainspoken American poet from the latter half of the twentieth century. I could hardly believe my good fortune, for I had long wanted to get this volume of poetry but for whatever reason had never done so.

I left a novel that I had finished reading in exchange for this thick volume of poetry. Only when I returned to my hometown after my trip north did I, by chance, turn to the two blank pages—flyleaves, they might be called—past the index of poetry titles in the back of the book. I found a strange, cryptic note written there, as the shaky scrawl suggested, by the pen of an old man. The note was addressed to a certain Katie, to be discovered, perhaps the hope was, by Katie herself. I felt mildly bad then for having grabbed the book.

I recognized in the man’s few brief lines certain themes that have long been a fascination of my own and thus, naturally, I was quite taken by the sad tenor of his writing. The old man was grieving the lost opportunity from the chance encounter he’d had the previous day with Katie in that very café. “I went to the coffee shop today,” his note began, “where I met you yesterday, hoping, hoping, that when I returned today, you would be here.“ It was dated July 26 of the previous year.

I opened my journal to read of that time in my own life. On July 26th, I had not written anything, but on the day before, the 25th of July, I reference a “lengthy conversation” with a woman whose name I hadn’t caught. This conversation, apparently, had taken place in the same café in the town of X. This surprised me, for I did not remember this encounter, nor did I remember visiting the town of X in July of the previous year, although it wasn’t impossible. I go there occasionally on the weekends to walk the beach and think, and I often stop at the café when my travels take me in that direction.

I read how this mysterious woman and I had talked about the same poet whose volume of collected works I now had in my possession. She had been reading this volume in the café. I told her that I, too, had long wanted to read this poet, and although I had picked up and put down his collected poems several times, I had never been able to penetrate it.

All of this is as I recorded it in my journal.

“Timing,” the woman agreed, “is an interesting thing. It took me ten years to read him myself, but then one day I was ready, you know? When I opened the book, I sort of just fell into his words.” She stopped to think about that and giggled.

In my journal, I detailed every nuance of this giggle. I went on for three or four excessive lines on the tremolo of her voice, as if she was nervous or not used to hearing herself speak. Finally, after my description of the giggle, and of her voice, but not much of anything else, I recorded her as saying, “That sounds silly what I just said—doesn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

We talked of other things. That was what I wrote: “We talked of other things.”

I guess I eventually returned to my own writing, and she to her book of poetry. There is no hint as to why I would have been passing through the town of X. There is no mention, most discouragingly, of a walk together along the pier after our cappuccinos. It is a shame that we did not do so (if, in fact, we did not), for the views from the pier are exceptionally beautiful—sublime, really—in this town during July. There is no indication, furthermore, of a sexual attraction or even of a brief, awkward moment of reaching over to take her hand when departing.

Certainly one of us must have lifted a hand to wave at the other when saying goodbye at the door, but I cannot now be sure. Which one of us left first? I do not know. Because I cannot remember this encounter in the slightest, I have to rely on my journal as the sole authority. And my journal is less than helpful.

Even so, from this encounter with the unnamed woman as recorded in my journal, when I returned to the note in the back of the volume of poems, Katie had taken on a more legendary, folklorish quality. Was this woman in my journal the Katie of the old man’s address? Had he met up with her before I got to the café, or after I left? Or am I to believe that I am the old man? Even if dated to July 26 of the previous year, is it possible that this note was penned several decades in the future by my elderly self? I understand that this last hypothesis is quite strange and, of course, at this remove, there is no way to tell. All I really know, finally, and without going into the details of the old man’s grief, is how at the end of his note he quotes several lines from “The Unquiet Grave.”

“The Unquiet Grave” is an English folk ballad about two lovers who loved each other greatly, and lived for each other all their days, until the wife tragically died. I do not know how I know this, or even where I first learned of this song—I am not British, nor am I, usually, much drawn to British-type things. This is not to say that I despise British-type things, but I am simply not drawn to them.

I am only right now remembering, furthermore, how in this folk song the man mourns for his wife “for a twelve month and a day.” She complains that all this grieving is keeping her from her peace and demands that he let her be. He begs her for a kiss, but she explains how that would be fatal. He does not care. He is in that much pain. He wants to die, too, if he can’t be with her. Finally, she says, and I’m paraphrasing, that death does not fit him well. He would only rot down here, with her, in this grave. He should choose, rather, to live.

And that, apparently, is all the encouragement that he needs. Live—”choose to live,” his lifelong love says, from the grave. And he does. And yes, live, he does, for all his remaining days.

91. The Behaviorists Were Right: We Are Our Brains

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At the post hoc retirement party given, literally, around my bed in the hospital suite as I lay there with a very acute case of some quickly multiplying cancerous orb at the base of my skull, one of the partners in my firm asked me what I wished to be known for as saying in my dying breath.

I have lived a long and rich life and, therefore, the question was asked more in a light-hearted way, in jest. We were having fun, eating cake. The bowl of punch had been mixed—out of sight of the nurses—with two bottles of vodka.

I told them that I would give my last words in the form of a story, if that was fine by them. They agreed that it most certainly was. I told them how many years earlier, over half a century, late in the year of two-thousand and thirteen, a case of intellectual property had been brought before me against Facebook. “Facebook was a popular social networking site at that time,” I said to a nearby group of junior partners. They laughed when I said that.

“We know Facebook, Harry!” they said.

Tom, one of these junior partners, said, “Yeah, and we know what compact discs are, too!”

After everyone had a good hearty chuckle over that, I told them of the letter from Mrs. Jansen’s estate that had arrived in an enclosed packet of old lesson plans and transparencies. “I bet you don’t know what transparencies are Tom, do you?” I said.

Again with the laughter. Everyone was clearly having a good time. They were pouring more of the punch.

The letter had been from Mrs. Jansen’s oldest grandchild Sylvia. In the letter, Sylvia explained how when going through her grandmother’s things after her death, she had found these enclosed classroom materials from an activity of her grandmother’s own invention. Calling it the Smiley Book Face, her grandmother had used the activity in her split second and third grade classrooms for a period of four years in the early 1980′s.

As Sylvia understood the activity from a few conversations with her grandmother when she was a girl, and from the materials her grandmother had left behind, each student had what Mrs. Jansen called his or her “profile picture.” These profile pictures had been laminated—Mrs. Jansen had a laminating machine in her classroom—and were felted in back so that they could be stuck to each student’s individual felt board. Mrs. Jansen asked the children when coming in first thing every morning to update their individual statuses by choosing a flannel word and corresponding facial expression from a basket near her desk.

As reward for good behavior or as motivation for completing their various assignments throughout the day, her students could change their profile pictures and status updates as often as they wished. There was a “friending” feature to the game, the details of which were unclear from at least the materials that Ms. Jansen left behind. But only when the students had established themselves as friends, however that happened, could they begin interacting with one another by way of the most popular liking feature.  

In the letter, Sylvia had gone on to describe in great detail this part of the activity. Students could like other students for their handwriting or for their high scores on their arithmetic, artwork and spelling assignments, etc. When liking, students could also write comments to their peers with transparency markers on individual transparencies tacked to their felt boards. Students could unlike their fellow students, as well, especially if these latter students were disrupting the class.

One day when flipping through the documents, I found written at the bottom of one of the lesson plans in Mrs. Jansen’s impeccable handwriting: “The behaviorists were right: we are our brains.”

Perhaps lost on Sylvia, this cryptic note had been most intriguing for me. I had done my undergrad in psychology at Harvard (the Yale graduates in my hospital room playfully booed at the mention of Harvard) and had long been fascinated with that branch of psychology via Watson and Skinner based on the operant conditioning of rats. I gathered from my own research into this case, and my conversations with Sylvia, that the more the students had been liked, the more they had liked to participate in the activity and to find ways to get likes.

In her classroom experiment, Mrs. Jansen had learned or confirmed that children were nothing but rats, in a way, and could be guided toward certain behavioral responses, which had to do, primarily, with fulfilling her various lesson plan objectives. ”Your grandmother was brilliant,” I had said to Sylvia in one of our early phone conversations.

“Maybe, yes,” Sylvia said. “But the problem is that my grandmother herself was not well-liked.”

“But how could this be?”

Sylvia explained to me that her grandmother had terribly red, irritant and flakey eczema for most of her adult life. This eczema, coupled with an abnormally large rear end, had made her an easy target for insults. Students called her Mrs. Waddlebutt, for instance. Eventually this nickname wore at her. She was not a kind or friendly person. She was impossible to like.

Smiley Book Face ended, Sylvia told me, when one of the hold-back third-graders had drawn a picture of her grandmother as a dragon with eczema. I had seen this picture in the file of materials myself. It was well done and had gotten the most likes of anything ever posted to the flannel boards from the three previous years of the activity, according to a rough draft of the letter—also included in the file—from Mrs. Jansen to the boy’s parents.

Although the liking feature was taken away for a week, as detailed in the letter to this hyperactive boy’s parents, the activity eventually had to be suspended altogether. This happened sometime shortly after this same boy—a certain S. Sund (“don’t ask me how I remember his name,” I said to the partners, “but that was it”) —in lieu of liking, had begun “poking” and “tagging” the other children.

My problem as the attorney for this case was that aside from the ancient-looking quality of the lesson plans and overhead transparencies, there was no evidence, indeed, that they actually had been from the 1980′s. The only way, therefore, to establish the Smiley Book Face as a precursor to Facebook was to contact Mrs. Jansen’s former students. The firm was successful in reaching many of these students and although they were, for the most part, very cooperate and willing to talk, none of them were willing to testify under oath.

At this point in my story, I stopped talking.

“But I don’t get it!” Tom said. “What kind of encouraging last words are those?”

A couple of the others laughed again, but not with any vigor. They were waiting for me to go on. But for a moment, I could not. I glanced out the hospital window at the skyline of the city where I had spent most of my eighty-seven years of life, and yet suddenly it didn’t seem to me like I had lived there for a day.

After another, more awkward and extended period of silence, with only the faint hum from the machinery positioned around my bed, keeping me alive, I whispered, “The problem was just as Sylvia had foreseen. Though probably ahead of her time with Smiley Book Face, her grandmother, Mrs. Jansen, had died without friends, the worst possible thing.”

87. The Day After the End of the World

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My name is Linda, in case it matters. I recognize that it probably does not. I hadn’t thought to ask for time off on the day after the world was supposed to end, according to the Mayan calendar. I hadn’t even remembered when it was, to be honest. Holiday season at the shop is often a blur, and there was nothing so different about the days approaching December 21, 2012, nor really was there was much to note on the morning of the twenty-second as I drove off in a possibly carcinogenic brownish fog to open up the silent shop.

The power was out, but since we live in an area of the country where power outages are not unheard of, I went in back and fired up the generator. When I returned to the shop, I sat behind the counter and looked up from my book only when a couple of pages of a newspaper rustled by out on the sidewalk. The thing was that I was really getting into this book, and I didn’t mind the silence.

The book was a pseudo-scientific account about the beginning of human civilization, starting with how the first fish-like creature had the first recognizable thought. This thought, by nature, was also a future image of itself, what we might describe as longing, or desire. This desire came from a meteoritic storm somewhere not too far away in the newly banged-out space. Because the ties between everything were more fluid back then and not as distinct or as separated and as airy as they are now, this meteoritic storm also strangely stirred in the young fish-like creature’s head.

The author suggested, with a variety of charts and scientific formulas, that this first creature was divided within itself even before it longed to emerge from the primeval soup. Because life was still in a more permeable state—not, in other words, so put together, or as constitutionally sound as we might understand life today, the creature could divide itself simply by thought.

It could and did, in other words, leap onto the beach and stay behind, in the water. Longing, then, was also the first division. I got up and paced the shop, organized the cards on the display rack. When I returned to my book, the story focused primarily on the half of the creature that had made it up onto the sand and through a series of painful growing spurts of environmental adaptation, learned to become its longing.

The problem was that longing breeds longing. It could not stop itself from wanting more. Here my right leg was falling asleep as it sometimes did when I sat for too long. I was hungry, on top of it, and decided to go for lunch. I limped around the shop until the pins and needles in my leg went away, locked up and went to the diner next door.

I found the prophet sitting at the counter in the dark, staring into his empty coffee mug. I sat next to him for a long while, but when nobody came out to serve us, I went in back to find the generator and fired it to life. I made a hamburger for myself and a veggie burger for the prophet, both with fries, and one giant strawberry milkshake to share. I paid for both of us, leaving my money on the counter, and returned to my book for another four hours of my shift.

I read how over millions and millions years of trial and error, the half of the fish-like thing on the land became a humpbacked gargoyle of a slithering protohuman of some sort. This protohuman grew a vagina and penis and balls and inseminated itself to bear the first in a long line of our protruding foreheaded ancestors. It was these ancestors who reportedly didn’t learn to walk upright until about four million years ago, a relatively short time considering how much longer they had spent slithering around on the ground, according to this author.

It was time for my one afternoon cigarette. I stepped out for a smoke and noticed the prophet sitting on the curb across the silent street with his head in his hands. I whistled at him and waved when he looked over at me.

He stood up then and began to proclaim: “Woe is unto you. Woe! Woe!”

“Whoa,” I yelled back at him, matching him whoa for woe. “Whoa,” I said. “Whoa!”

He went on.

Kingdoms will fall and even the earth will melt away. Mountains will sink into the heart of the sea. Desolation will be your bride and despair and pain your offspring, but there is hope, brothers and sisters. Hope, I tell you! Turn to God, your refuge and your strength, and he will come to your aid!

That was more like it. I nodded and gave him a thumbs-up, stamped out my cigarette and returned to my spot behind the counter. While finishing the book, I wondered if that first human, by whatever its name, remembered where it came from, and if he or she or it felt like its primordial desire had been so worth it, after all. Also, too, I wondered about loneliness, and how the first human might speak to that. The scientist, the author of the book, did not say.

The author’s point probably if he had one was that the half of the fish-like creature that stayed behind in the water to eventually become a bona fide marine animal probably hadn’t needed to struggle as much as we land creatures and had ended up, therefore, living a better life. He conjectured that we as a human race would all evolve to return to water. In the future, we would swim as before, as if one, with the dolphins and the whales.

It ends as it begins. But I didn’t know. That seemed really pushing it. I shut down the generator, closed up the shop, picked up the prophet and took him home. I made myself a steak and the prophet a vegetable stir-fry with tofu, and together we shared a bottle of wine as I told him about the book. When I was finished, and sufficiently drunk, I said, “Look, I’m a female and you presumably a man. Am I correct?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s my plan.”

68. Should I Die, Bury Me in the Windsor Bronze

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You showed up at your own funeral and took a seat in back. It was a closed casket, thank God, but still troublesome to see it there and to see, furthermore, that it was not the Windsor Bronze “with the beautifully brushed natural finish” and “the half couch Eterna-rest adjustable height bedding system.” Not the one, in other words, that you had twice circled in your casket catalog and bookmarked not a mere forty-eight hours before your demise with a pink Post-it on which you had written, “Should I die, bury me in the Windsor Bronze.” Followed by a smiley face and three exclamation points.

It wasn’t particleboard or particleboard’s second cousin by marriage—that is, pine, thank God—but it wasn’t walnut. That was a fact. Maybe it was cherry with a protective gloss finish and highlighted trim, but then again, maybe not. The flowers, as if recycled from the previous memorial service three days earlier, were rather limp, lackluster. Even the few unconvincing tears seemed selfishly fabricated, the people more than likely grieving, preemptively, for their own fatal ends and not for your poor self laid out most uncomfortably in what was now, on closer examination, you had to admit, very much cedar. And then it hit you.

It was a cremation box.

As a most discouraging finale to a most discouraging B-rated independent drama that had been your life—although if you’re getting completely technical here, it had actually been a tragedy (a thriller, too, but mostly and actually a tragedy)—your wife Janet, without apparent fanfare or qualm, was going to burn you to indecipherable ash.

Not that you didn’t deserve it, of course. Fifteen years earlier, in those rather antiquated days, it now seemed to you, before text messaging, you had sent Janet a long and honest email that stated roughly:

I understand my sweet Janet if you never want to see me again STOP But I slept with the temp STOP The receptionist STOP The one you Janet had laughed at during the Christmas party for vomiting in the middle of the dance floor STOP And I’m getting fired STOP Human Resources is right now in fact approaching the plate-glass walls of my office with a pink slip in hand STOP And I am sorry STOP Very very sorry STOP But I also want to remind you that we still have some dreams left unfinished STOP Including the kitchen remodel STOP Something I will personally see to completion STOP Even if it kills me STOP

Not realizing how prophetic, of course, those last words would turn out to be, you thought Janet had been rather remiss in her reply to call you two fricking Neanderthals, yelling it at you in all caps. The thing in the copy room—you pounding the girl from behind as she leaned over the copier while holding out in front of her a framed picture of the CEO—was Neanderthal-esque, to be sure. But you would like now to know if a full-fledged or full-blooded Neanderthal would really, for instance, be thinking of his wife while fornicating with a girl nearly half her age.

No. You thought not.

But even while doing the deed to the blinking red light, indication paper jam, you were thinking of Janet, you really were, your best thing. Janet was your best thing. She was your steadfast, your permanent structure, your pillar, your colonnade, your flying buttress and all that. (Sometimes she was your Great Wall, too, but your Great Wall with a gift for making the most delectable melt in your mouth Christmas fudge and honest-to-god better than Cinnabon cinnamon rolls.)

After the couple mumbling, unprepared ramblings into the open mike, Amazing Grace, and a sermon delivered with the impact and authority of a down by three touchdown comeback attempt by the hobbling backup to the backup quarterback, the guests retired to the funeral buffet in the reception area. While mingling there among them, these mourners—each of their black paper plates overflowing with catered greens and one of three cold pasta dishes and quartered sandwiches on Focaccia bread and chocolate covered strawberries—you tried to catch the details of how you went.

There were differing reports.

Some said, while dragging broccoli florets through some sort of flavored hummus spread, that you took your life. Others, while cupping a small napkin beneath their chins so as not to spill any of the bruschetta lifted to their mouths on perfectly toasted slices of baguette, thought that Janet had stabbed you in the larynx while you lay beside her one night choking through your sleep apnea. Still others whispered—while sliding a folded roll of deli meat or a small square of specialty cheese off of a fancy toothpick with black cellophane frill—that it had been a hunting accident, a car crash, a train wreck, another heart attack. What they could all agree upon, however, was that you had gone quickly, without much pain, which was more than you deserved.

You knew what they meant.

But was it too much to ask to be remembered for something besides bringing home to Janet—capable, industrious, master-of-her-new-kitchen Janet—a venereal disease? Was it too much to ask to be remembered for being kind (or tolerant, in the very least) to the elderly and the retarded, and for how you liked to open doors for people and smile, wishing them a nice day? Was it too much to be memorialized, in other words, for all the small, daily, life-changing ways of yours rather than for the unmitigated two-week happy hour donkey-bucking with the temp, the receptionist, the copy girl, beneath the security cameras?

The loss of your job sent you to Office Depot, albeit as a manager, but only until something better came along, a ten-year wait (a ten-year prison sentence, as it turned out), resulting in the four-year postponement of Janet’s retirement as a superintendent of public instruction. But even if she had to pop half a Vicodin to make it through the school board meetings near the end of her tenure there, Janet had liked many things about her job in the first place. And compared to the AIDS—the girl had contacted that afterwards, thank God—what was pushing papers for a few extra years, an occasional headache, or even a quite treatable (albeit messy and somewhat painful) venereal disease?

Of course you hadn’t meant to get the girl pregnant. What kind of respectable person ever means to do that? You hadn’t meant to invite another snot-nosed (now) teenager into your house for Janet to slave over. The troubling thing was that aside from the constant reminder of your infidelity, the kid didn’t really seem like a kid you would sire. But you never thought to ask the copy girl for proof until it was too late.

When you realized, finally, that you had been duped—a white collar, two-million-dollar-a-year salesmen sold a bill of sale by a white trash temp for the second-rate, partially retarded, indolent and needy, greasy runt of the litter—the kid was nine. And the mother, the temp, for a period of three or four years there, stage four oxycotton turned heroin addict, was unreachable—dead, you thought, and secretly even hoped, half-frozen to death in an alley with a needle sticking out of her vein.

The kid aside, and the venereal disease, the added stress with the AIDS scare and Janet’s delayed retirement, you had also committed yourself to finishing the kitchen remodel, a project, you would now like to underscore, that nearly pushed you into the grave. And doesn’t that count for something?

You were asking the devil or perhaps even God. “Doesn’t that count for something, that I was a man of my word, albeit with a minor breach there in the marriage contract (like an iceberg on an otherwise perfect stretch of wide open sea), but virtually a man of my word, and to the very end?”

“Doesn’t that not count for something?”

“DOES THAT NOT COUNT!!”

But before you could click Send, the screen flickered and went black. Human Resources, dressed as Cerberus, the three-headed hound, had powered down your computer. Go ahead and grab your few personal items, they said, their voices out of phase and robotic.

Here’s your box.

Collect your things.

And security will usher you out.