Lost and Not Found

A Novel by
Teel McClanahan III

Modern Evil Press
Phoenix

ISBN: 978-1-934516-52-2

eBook Edition

Copyright © 2003-2004 by Teel McClanahan III

Some Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by Modern Evil Press, Phoenix, AZ

ISBN: 978-1-934516-01-0 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-934516-52-2 (E-Book)

 

– for Sara –

 

“I’m going to write a novel.”

The words slipped out of his mouth and into the empty room as though he had intended to say them, but before that very moment it had never occurred to him that he would write much more that the totals in his checkbook at the end of the month. When he was younger, maybe… He had had foolish dreams of writing fanciful stories when he grew up, but now he had a firmer head on his shoulders, and spent no time or thought on such trifling fancies.

Still, as those words hung in the air of his bedroom they came to feel more and more right. He began repeating it to himself, quietly at first: “i’m going to write a novel… i’m going to write a novel…” The more he heard the words coming out of his mouth, the more he believed them, and he began to grow louder and more confident. “I’m going to write a novel. I’m GOING to write a novel…” He was nearly shouting by the end of this apparent bout of some shunned and bottled part of him asserting itself against even the restraint of sane volume (“I’M GOING TO WRITE A NOVEL!!!”) when suddenly he stopped, stood up and walked out of the room.

He simply had to tell someone. He hurried over to the phone and began to dial Ariadne, but just as the fingers on one hand were pressing the final digit his other hand was placing the receiver back down onto the cradle. He stood slack-jawed like that for several minutes. Nothing happened. Perhaps he was thinking. With him though, you could never really be too certain about where his mind was at any particular moment.

Finally he moved again, this time retiring to his study and sitting down at his computer. He had apparently decided what he needed to do first, and it was not to go shooting his mouth off about writing a novel with no plan, no research, and no story in mind. Not to Ariadne. His analytical mind wanted to be prepared for the conversation the repressed part of him had nearly gotten him into before he regained control over his facilities. He brought up a browser window and began searching the internet for information on the subject of writing novels.

Who writes novels? How long is a novel supposed to be? How long does it take to write a novel? Once he was done, could he get it published? Some of these answers were fairly cut and dry: Everyone, it seems, writes novels. Which is why, No, he probably couldn’t get it published right away. Others were open to some interpretation. Some authors took years to get even the shortest of novels produced. Some of the highest paid authors in the world could turn out thousand-page manuscripts somehow within a matter of a month or two. Length itself was a very fuzzy matter. While he had thought that the average novel he had read was no less than 300 pages, he learned that that was longer than the average novel published by any major American publisher by about forty pages. Isaac Asimov said that if it’s less than 70,000 words it isn’t a novel, but most major publishers in America won’t even consider an author’s first novel if it were longer than 70,000 words. Conflicting information, indeed.

As he was learning about other publishing options available to him such as print on demand services, he stumbled across a group that challenged people to write a short novel in only a month, forsaking classical concerns such as quality and complexity in favor of getting a lot of words written very quickly and generating a feeling of having accomplished something worth being proud of: If you managed to do it the way they suggested, you would be in that small, elite group of authors who have not only completed a novel, but have done so in only a month. To show they were not afraid of making an already challenging goal more lofty, they did this every year in February, leaving only 28 days to write an entire novel. He knew the voice that had burst out of him earlier certainly seemed to have the drive to push a novel out of him in four short weeks, and regardless of whether he had realized it, that now-very-aggressive part of him was already signing him up for it on the site. He considered it a great stroke of luck that it was only about a week until February began, as he wanted to get started right away.

He NEEDED to get started right away.

He found that the website was already quite active with thousands of people he had never heard of all gushing about their hopes and dreams for their upcoming novels and giving each other advice about how to get past blocks and how to keep up the necessary daily word-counts. There were people already planning to get together by city for group writing sessions, and it was then that it occurred to him that he didn’t really know any other real writers. (“How odd,” he thought to himself, “that I already consider myself a ‘real writer’ without having written even the first word.”) While he suddenly found himself possessed with a singular drive to write which he had not felt since high school, the idea of sharing the writing process with friends would make the whole thing even better. He wasn’t sure it would be the same with strangers, so he set himself on the idea of convincing his friends to sign up as well.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The next day at work, he mentioned his plan to his old friend John. At first, John thought he had lost his mind. “Write a novel in twenty-eight days? You’re crazy.”

“I think crazy is a little strong. I’m ambitious. I have high hopes. I may even fail, but none of that makes me crazy. Besides, there are thousands of other people attempting the same thing.”

“That just makes them crazy, too. When are you planning on writing this ‘novel’? After work and on weekends? How can you possibly find the time to get it done?”

“I plan on devoting myself to it. Giving up a few social activities in February if I must. I’ll be done in a month either way, so it’s not like I’m forfeiting the rest of my life. Just a month to see if I can get this thing done.”

“If I didn’t think it was impossible, I might join you, you know. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing.”

“That’s just what I was hoping you’d say. And it simply isn’t impossible. Last year 40% of the people who signed up finished on time. We aren’t trying to write something immense like The Stand, the goal this month-short novel group set for themselves is only a fifty-thousand-word minimum.”

“Fifty thousand words? That’s not really a novel, is it? More a novella.”

“You read too much Asimov.”

“What?”

“Nevermind. It’s a short novel. There are some differences in the content and intent of novels and novellas, not just the length. Plus, fifty thousand words is a good starting point that ensures that your novel is at least about a couple hundred pages. I may end up writing something a lot closer to the length you more commonly associate with novels. It just depends on what serves the story.”

“So you have a story in mind already?”

“Not really. I’m batting a few ideas around and I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with something, even if it doesn’t turn out to be the novel of the century.”

“I think I might try this. I’m not saying I think I’ll finish, but at least I’ll be giving my best shot at it.”

“Cool. It’ll be a lot more fun for both of us to do it with someone else. I think that’s why they all do it in February every year, instead of just whenever anyone feels like starting.”

“Yeah, except… Wait! I’m going to that convention with Marketing the entire first week of February! I can’t write a novel in three weeks.”

“Well, you can try. You can even work on it at the convention. I know you won’t really be paying attention to those dreary speakers most of the time, and it’ll just look like you’re keeping diligent notes.”

“Well maybe… Maybe you’re right. This convention may actually give me a head start on you, since you’ll be working here full time the entire month.”

“Just so long as you still do it. Having a friend doing the same thing has got to make it easier than trying to do it alone.”

“You just want someone to hold you accountable, make sure you don’t quit halfway through.”

“No, I’m more worried I’ll quit after only a few pages.”

“No problem. I’ll be glad to harass you for an entire month about how you’re not spending enough time writing.”

“I wonder if we can talk anyone else into doing it. Maybe Ray or Paul.”

“Paul probably won’t go for it. He has some crazy idea the world is going to end on Leap Day. He won’t shut up about it lately. I doubt he’ll bother writing a novel that he believes will be destroyed as soon as he finishes it.”

“Leap Day? I forgot about that! I guess that means we get twenty-nine days to write the novel in. As far as Paul spouting doomsday predictions, he’s been doing that since we were in high school. I thought he gave it up, though.”

“I guess he’s started up again, then. He said something about some bad calculations or something giving him the wrong date back then… whatever. It’s all rubbish to me.”

“Still, it won’t hurt to ask him. Maybe he’ll want to write a novel about the end of the world.”

John laughed. “He might go for that one. Try to get his crazy ideas down on paper.”

“That reminds me, what about Sally and Ariadne?”

“True, true. Why don’t we bring the whole thing up tonight at Rooster’s?”

“I almost forgot it was Thursday. That’s a good idea.”

“Alright. See you then.”

“Sure.”

Every Thursday for years, he and his friends had been getting together and hanging out at The Rooster’s Rump, their neighborhood pub. Over the years, as each of their group moved farther and farther from The Rooster’s Rump, they had all still attended. It was too much of a tradition to give it up; if they were still in driving distance, they would be there, rain or shine.

They weren’t even sure why they still went to The Rooster’s Rump anymore, except that they always had. The food wasn’t great (though they all knew a few items that weren’t on the menu but which always seemed to come out alright), and most of them had given up drinking (some for dietary reasons, some for financial concerns, and at least one because he thought drinking was a bad idea), but The Rooster’s Rump was home, so that was where they met.

He went straight home after work to check his messages and change clothes before heading right back out again. He slipped into some jeans and a t-shirt and headed down to The Rooster’s Rump. It was still his neighborhood bar, even if some of his friends were coming from thirty or forty miles out. It almost wasn’t worth the drive since the walk would be so short, but he wasn’t like his friend Paul who rode a bicycle everywhere he went. He had allowed himself to become a good, old-fashioned lazy American. He saw Paul locking up his bike and waved as he pulled into the parking lot. He was right on time.

“Did you two come together today? It’s been such a long time!” This was Linda, standing up as he and Paul walked in together and giving them both big hugs. “How’ve you guys been?”

“Pretty good, Linda. Are you in town for some sort of convention, or just to see my smiling face?”

“Oh Paul, you know I could never resist that smile.”

“And for the record, I wouldn’t let Paul ride in my car if he paid me.”

“Like I’d want to ride around in that deathtrap anyway. I get around fine under the power of my own two legs.”

“Now you two keep calm,” soothed Linda, “Let’s all just try to have a good time tonight.”

“We’re just kidding around anyway, right man?”

“That’s right. We’ve really got to get a new schtick though. People have heard this one so many times they stop us before we even get started in on it.” He gave a sidelong glance at Linda, and smiled before he turned back to Paul. “ Surely there must be something else we can disagree about than basic transportation. The old car versus bike routine is getting old.”

“Well, considering there’s only about five weeks left in which we could polish it, how about we just stick to this one for now. If you’re still interested after March 1st, give me a call. Assuming there will still be telephones and service by then, of course.”

He let out a deep sigh. “Not this again, Paul.”

“What are you two talking about now?” asked John as he came in and sat down with them.

“Paul’s started in on his Doomsday theories again.”

“What’d I tell you? He’s been getting really weird about it all again lately.”

“Hello! Earth to you three! Linda here, wondering what the heck you’re talking about.”

Paul brightened up at the thought of being able to explain it all again. Not very many people in the grand scheme of things took him seriously, but he knew he was right, and that everyone had a right to know. “The world as we know it is going to end on February 29th, this year. I’ve been saying it for years and years—“

John interrupted, “He has. Since high school. Of course, back then it was coming on a different day…”

“Yes, yes, I’ve known for over a decade that this day was coming, and have been trying to warn people about it.”

“Then why is this the first time I’ve heard you mention it?”

“Because you’ve been very lucky,”

“Until now,” finished John.”

“Give it a rest, guys.” Paul turned so his back was as much to the two of them as possible while still facing Linda, and continued. “This isn’t some sort of flawed biblical translation or based on a secret code in the Torah or the Cabbala or the Qu’ran. I haven’t joined a doomsday cult that told me to give them all my worldly possessions because we’re all going to die next month. I’ve simply known that the world was going to end on February 29th, this year, definitively for, like these two fools said, just over ten years.”

“Leap day? I thought the loonies were saying it was supposed to be Cinco De Mayo last year or something.”

“That was based on bad math.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. I saw some weirdos on a Jerry Springer followup episode trying to explain why the world hadn’t ended. They said they’d fouled up their ‘celestial navigation’ or something, and it would be this year instead.”

“Weirdos aside, that’s just what I’ve been trying to tell people like these two. I’m not alone. I was alone back in high school, but as soon as I double-checked my own math years ago and placed the date properly on Leap Day I’ve learned of more and more groups and individuals who say that they have discovered one way or another that something big is coming on February 29th, this year. A couple of years back, some scientists projected that the Earth’s magnetic field, which reverses polarity about every ten thousand years, is scheduled to reverse again on February 29th. Who knows what catastrophic effects something like that could have on global climate or electronic systems? The last time it happened, the world descended into an Ice Age.

“A group of monks have recently split off from the Catholic Church, saying that the Church’s position that Jesus’ second coming should be kept secret is blasphemy. They are on a world tour, going from country to country, trying to make known their belief based on secret texts they were charged with copying and keeping secret, that Jesus will return to Earth on February 29th. These are not religious fanatics. Most of them had spent decades in monasteries, copying the old texts by hand in total silence. Something they read there must have given them that date. I’m not saying I necessarily believe we’ll see Jesus walking on Earth on Leap Day, but clearly something big is about to happen.

“You’ve heard of the SETI project that analyses information coming in from radio telescopes around the world?”

“Of course. My computer used to crunch numbers for them while I was away or asleep.”

“Do you know why you said ‘used to’? They found something.”

“I think I remember getting an email about that… but they said they had like, 200 best guesses, right?”

“If you go back and read that email carefully you’ll see there’s a little more subtlety to it than you first noticed. I know the guy who wrote that email, and he was pretty sure he’d get in trouble if he just revealed the whole thing, so he put it all in there so that no one would know the truth if they just glanced quickly at the email before deleting it. But he got it all in there. You see, back at the beginning of the SETI@home project, the whole thing was basically just for a touch of good PR, to make it look like the US was still interested in searching for extra-terrestrial signs of life. The entire thing cost them only a few thousand dollars to set up and a couple thousand a year to maintain by assigning the duties to existing employees, but it did wonders for their public image after decades of spending millions and finding nothing. They never really expected to find anything, since they were basically feeding static from random corners of the universe into everyone’s software.

“They had set up a pretty robust system anyway, despite thorough skepticism by the folks in charge, and every piece of data was sent to at least two computers so the results could automatically be verified by the massive redundancy of the distributed system. Then, not six months ago, duplicated results started appearing from out of the static. They quietly stopped sending out new data to clients about a month after that, instead re-sending all the data that had produced what looked like positive results, and then not long after they had triple and quadruple-checked all theses ‘best-guesses’, you received that email.

“What it actually said was that they had found these things that might be signs of intelligent life, and they were going on hiatus.”

“That’s right… I thought it didn’t make sense that they would stop when they’d finally found what they’d been looking for all along…”

“Exactly. But they had a good excuse. If you’d read further down the email, you’d have seen that the excuse for their hiatus was that they were petitioning for more funding. See, the big Arecibo radio telescope is not cheap to rent time on, and they needed to convince congress to give them the funding to rent time from Arecibo to get new readings from the points in space these ‘best guesses’ seemed to be coming from. And before the year was up.”

“Before Leap Day, I presume?”

“Exactly, plus time and money to crunch the numbers on real supercomputers instead of the slow distributed network. Of course, you can probably see why they want more to prove themselves wrong at this point than to prove themselves right, as you might have expected.”

“Wait, no. I don’t understand. You’re talking me in circles now. Why would they want to prove themselves wrong?”

“I’ll explain… See, if they know they’re counting down to February 29th, they already have all the data they need. More than enough, actually. You see, what they found, what these bits of regularity in a random sea of static represented, was a countdown of sorts. Yes, it happened to be encrypted to look like static, but so is every call from your digital mobile phone – if picked up by a standard radio receiver, any digital mobile phone’s transmission is as much like static as the seemingly empty hiss of deep space has always been. And yes, it was coming from a series of points in space where there are no stars or galaxies evident for the signals to originate from, but hidden there where no one would have seen it but for a silly PR stunt by SETI, was a countdown. If you go to the SETI@home website you can find a star map showing the ‘best guesses’ they want to check; you’ll see they all form a narrow, straight band through space, and not parallel to the milky way, but almost perpendicular to it and to the plane of our solar system.”

“Okay, but why did they bother shutting the system down in the meantime? Why not keep the whole thing secret and just keep feeding us the old data?”

“Remember I said it wasn’t costing them much to maintain SETI@home, right?” She nodded. “The urgency and weight of what they found called for more resources than they were budgeted to have for the next several years, just to put together a ‘solution’ of some kind. They’ve at the very least got to prepare for the possible arrival of a new message, or even a visitor, from another place in the universe. They have to make every person they have access to and every computer under their power focus on being as ready for whatever is coming as possible, and they have to keep it a secret. They’re drafting scripts for the President to follow if two-way communication is called for, scripts for the President to read in the event of as many possible scenarios as they can imagine to come or calculate for.”

“Well, that at least is believable,” interrupted John, “the President definitely needs to have someone else tell him what to say.”

Linda ignored John’s comment, “Why would the SETI scientists be involved with writing scripts? Doesn’t the White House have a staff of writers?”

“I may have misstated; the SETI people are simply doing everything they can to give the writers the information they need to give the President the information he’s going to need. They’re like full-time technical advisors. Most of them only do analyses, few of them actually even interface with non-SETI people anymore. It’s just the original team there that was supposed to be running the distributed network, not any new people; they don’t want this to leak out by having a job fair. From what I’ve heard, the place is running full-tilt, and almost out of steam already.”

John interrupted again, “Well if you’ve heard, they’ve obviously let it leak out somehow, don’t you think?”

“I told you, I know someone on the inside. I’ll get to that in a minute, John.” Paul glared at John, apparently believing that would keep him quiet, and turned back to Linda to begin again. “They’ve been using the access they can reasonably use without raising eyebrows or too much expense to monitor the signals almost 24 hours a day. They’re analyzing and re-analyzing the signals they’ve already got, and the ones coming in live, listening to the countdown, trying to divine something more from the information in the signal, from the methods by which this information may have been originally encoded, about the intelligence that did so.” Paul paused for breath.

“Why are they using this frequency above any others? Why are they encrypting it in just this way, and no others? What makes these methods preferable over anything Man has come up with to date, and what does that tell us about the intelligence that produced them? Is there any natural phenomenon that could possibly explain these signals that has not yet been considered? All of this and more must be addressed, and they must also come up with a decision about how to handle PR if something shows up on February 29th and they’re ready for it but have not let the public know anything about it. Do you think you could trust your government if they knew an intelligence from deep space was on its way to Earth and they knew exactly when it was coming, but told you nothing of it?” He paused again, this time waiting for a response.

“I uhhh… I suppose I’d assume they knew what they were doing in not telling me. Probably wanted to avoid riots in the streets and unanswerable questions from the press.”

“Well, the government can’t trust all the citizens of the world to be as trusting and intelligent as you, so they’re already working on the spin control for an event that they aren’t even sure is going to occur. You see, the answers to all their questions are still more questions. They have been unable to discern anything about the source of this countdown by what they have available to them. They are as in the dark as they were when they first determined that it was a countdown at all. Interestingly, they have been able to locate information dating back to the earliest radio telescopes regarding the particular patch of space that this signal is coming from, and the countdown was always there. It has been counting down to February 29th for decades longer than I have.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about this,” John said with a big interrupting grin on his face, “are you secretly working for the government, intentionally feeding us the very misinformation you’re saying is being created to cover the government’s ass in this?”

“Just because I have the information doesn’t mean I work for the government. As you both know, I have become increasingly vocal about the upcoming event in recent years. I’ve even got a pretty strong following on the web by some of the smartest and most knowledgeable people from around the world, all sharing stories of how they found evidence in their own fields that something is going to happen on February 29th. Archeologists who found ancient prophecies that refer to the date, geologists whose studies have shown them patterns in the Earth’s crust that should be repeating in just over a month, astronomers who have seen signs that something very massive seems to pass through our solar system like clockwork, throwing the orbits and velocities of all the moons and planets a little more out of perfect alignment every time it passes by. More and more evidence is appearing the closer we get to the date.

“These aren’t crackpots. These are experts in their fields, often with colleagues backing them up, but too afraid of publishing anything for fear of being labeled frauds by their peers. They want to tell someone what they’ve found without losing their jobs and their funding and they find my site and share what they’ve found. Some of them have been from SETI, which is how I know what’s going on there – they’ve been very forthright with the information. Working together, the astronomers have even shown that the path described by the source of the SETI message is the same as the path of whatever has been throwing off the orbits of every object in the solar system. You wouldn’t believe how worked up figuring that out got them. Of course, the SETI scientists couldn’t tell their colleagues any more than the astronomers could talk about the SETI message; where the information came to them from would be called immediately into question and they would be dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorists.

“The same way these two,” Paul gestured to him and John, sipping from their sodas and keeping their eyes lowered sheepishly, “dismiss me.”

Linda took a moment to consider all of what Paul had just said. “Well, Paul, considering the weight of evidence you say exists, I don’t know how I could do anything but agree with you. Still, even you admit that no one really knows what is or isn’t going to happen on February 29th. So… I think I’ll keep my eyes open and watch for some interesting news that day. Maybe you’ll surprise us all by being right.”

“That’s more open-minded of you than most people have been. Thank you for not dismissing me outright.”

“Have you ever considered going into sales? I get the feeling that with something people could actually see and feel, you could convince vegans to buy meat grinders.” Paul smiled at this, while he and John laughed out loud, though Linda wasn’t sure if they thought she was being sarcastic or ironic, or if they were just being idiots. She continued, “What are your plans for Leap Day, Paul? Do you have a bunker or something?”

“No, I don’t have a bunker of my own, although if worse comes to worse, there are people who have invited me to join them in theirs. I actually could have access to NORAD, if it really came down to it. That’s how high the knowledge of this goes, and how much everyone is glad I could bring them together on this. Still, it all really depends on what is learned in the next month or so. If the geologists are right, it may pay to be airborne that day, but if some of the other theorists are right, it won’t matter where in the solar system you are, you’re going to be in trouble. I, of course, do not actually believe that this will be an extinction level event, considering the geological record of it goes back through several eras of life including at least the last of the dinosaurs. If it was going to kill everything on Earth, how could plants and animals survive to the present day?

“That is not to say that there are not those who believe that all life is indeed threatened. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that some vast alien force is going to show up and destroy all life not deemed relevant, or judged to be worthy of continued existence. Like there’s some sort of universal traveling judgment system for all life that comes around periodically to eradicate unworthy species. That is the sort of theory that I don’t dismiss outright, but which gives communities like ours the negative stigma of the schizoid conspiracy theorist that we tend to have assigned to us.

“At least there is some evidence of species surviving these periodic world-wide events. Sharks, for instance, appear to have been around for every single one of them. Which has lead some of our group to believe that the only way to survive will be to descend into the oceans. They suggest that Atlantis was actually the only city to survive the last time this happened, and they did so by knowing it was coming and taking their entire population under water. When they ascended, presumably March 1st, they knew they had to populate the world, so they spread out to the far corners of the Earth, abandoning their original home and Atlantis, their underwater refuge, forever. This would explain how human life appeared on every continent around 10,000 years ago at once; the originators were masters of the oceans and had no trouble reaching the Americas or Australia. Some go on to say that the myth of the great flood, which has been found in the ancient histories of every culture, is actually the same myth as Atlantis. That it was not the entire world covered with water and only a boatful of people and creatures survived, but that something else happened and the only ones to survive were the ones who covered themselves with water. That anyone above the surface of the ocean was destroyed.

“Personally, I’m going to wait until the most possible information is available before I make any final plans about where I’ll be when Leap Day rolls around. As it stands now, there is space set aside for me in an underwater refuge, in NORAD as I said before, on the International Space Station, on two flights at supersonic speed, one East and one West, in case we have to race towards or away from the direction of the Earth’s rotation, a few other underground bunkers in various locations around the world, so that no matter what country or province I happen to be in when that day comes, and no matter how difficult it ends up being to get from one part of the world to another … you know, in case word really does get out and mass panic sets in … I’ll have a place to go. There are certain advantages to being able to plan for something like this so far in advance.”

“It sounds like you really have all your ducks in a row there, Paul. You’re sure there’s no advice you could give someone like me about where to be?”

“You mean someone without access to the private sanctuaries of the hundred most paranoid people in the world today?”

“That’s just about it exactly. The average Joe.”

“Probably in front of a TV. And not just when you wake up Sunday morning. February 29th starts well before that. What time zone will you be in on February 28th?”

“Pacific. I’ll be back at the home office in Portland by then.”

“Well, what most people don’t realize about the way world time really works is when the new day starts. Because of the nineteen time zones between Portland and the International Date Line, February 29th starts for the first time in the world when it is only 4AM on February 28th in Portland. Really, if something catastrophic and global is going to happen on Leap Day, it should be on the news by the time you wake up February 28th. Or we could all be dead by then.”

“That seems really weird. Are you sure you have that right?”

“Yes. In fact,” Paul paused as he did a quick calculation in his head, “by the time February 29th rolls around to Portland, it will be 7PM at the International Date Line, where all dates begin. Whatever’s going to happen will almost certainly have begun before you even go to bed Saturday night.”

“That’s almost as wild as the prophecy you’re selling. Makes international time sound pretty messed up.”

“I’ve always thought it was a little weird, myself. Still, it’s worked for nearly a hundred years. Why give it up now?”

“Yeah, as long as insanity works for you, why give it up?”

He and John couldn’t help but giggle at this one, but Paul didn’t seem to realize the slight. “That’s the way of the world. Has been for years.”

It was at about this time that Ray and Sally showed up and caught enough of Paul’s ranting to order strong drinks for each other, and offered to buy a round for the whole group if they would stop talking about the end of the world. Paul knew to leave well enough alone and gave Linda his card, with a link to his website so she could find out more if she was interested. Turning back to face the rest of the group directly, he simply said “After about a month, it won’t matter what you do, you won’t be able to stop hearing about it.”

John took this opportunity to step in and prevent another argument or long, paranoid explanation from breaking out by saying “Speaking of next month, my good buddy here has a great idea that I think we’d all like to hear!”

“What is it, man?”

“I’m going to write a novel.”

“That’s it?” chided Paul.

“Come on, John, it’s a great idea. I’ve always wanted to be thinly veiled.”

Sally spoke up, “Ray, we all watched Six Feet Under. You’re not going to get away with stealing their best lines. Anyway, what makes you think that you’re interesting enough to want to base a character on? If I were writing a novel, you’d better believe it would be interesting enough that you had nothing to do with it.”

“My life? Uninteresting? I think you’re overestimating it. I mean, it’s dull enough that I spend every Thursday with you bums, isn’t it? That’s got to be worth something. Some sort of dullest life award, maybe.”

“Dullest life?” John said, “That award would have to go to the great author himself.”

“You may be right, there,” he responded, “but maybe writing a novel will get me in with that oh-so-chic authors crowd.”

“If you think authors are chic, then you really are as dull as John says,” conceded Ray. “I guess I’ll just have to settle for honorable mention.”

Not wanting the conversation to get too far off topic, he continued, “You don’t have to settle for an honorable mention. You can write a novel, too. John said he would. It’ll be more fun than you think.”

“So that’s what we all want to hear? You two are planning on writing novels and don’t want to be alone in your pain?”

“Something like that,” muttered John.

“But more than that, to share the challenge,” he continued, “we’ve taken on the added challenge of trying to write our novels in only a month. We’ve joined a group of people who do it every year, but we don’t have long to prepare ourselves mentally—”

“And to convince you four to join us,” interrupted John.

“Yes, not long to convince you four, and maybe Ariadne, to join us before it all starts. February 1st.”

“Twenty-eight days to write a novel? That sounds a little crazy. How do you expect to finish in time? Have you already got storylines in mind, and just plan on typing them up in February? I can’t imagine you could do it any other way.”

“Personally, I hope to not think about the actual content of my novel until day one. No outline, no notes, nothing. I want to see if I can really go from zero to novel in twenty-eight days.”

John responded immediately, “He is clearly a loon. Of course, this was his idea in the first place, so what am I saying? Of course he’s a loon. Still, there aren’t any rules about not coming up with your idea before February begins, just against actually beginning writing the novel early.”

“There are rules?”

“Sort of. Would you care to explain?” John gestured in his direction as though passing a baton.

He accepted the baton and the conversation as though this were a planned routine. “Certainly, John. When I first had the idea to write a novel, I did a little research on the web to get more information about what exactly it was I was getting myself into. I found a group of people who, every year in February, write an entire novel in one month. So, we know it’s possible. Since I didn’t know anyone in the group but thought it would work out better if I had friends to get together with and compare notes on how our novels are progressing, I recruited John, and now we’re trying to recruit you.”

Paul was the first to respond, saying “I won’t have time in February to write a novel, guys. End of the world and all.”

“You’re the best candidate, Paul! You could use yourself as the central figure; the tragic story of a man who knew Doomsday was coming, but no matter how many people he convinced, the world at large remained ignorant, right up to its dying breath. You could describe everything you’ve been doing to try to let the world in on the coming catastrophe, all the people involved and all the possible ways the world could meet catastrophe and you’d easily fill a book!”

John chimed in, “You could write it while waiting for new news, and then when you’re one of the survivors, your novel could become the new bible of a barren world!”

“Don’t goad him, John. We’re trying to be convincing, not annoying.”

“I must have forgotten. What were we trying to convince them of, again?”

“To write a novel with us in February.”

“Right. You mean we didn’t already do that?”

“You haven’t convinced me yet,” said Sally.

“Or me.” This was Ray.

“I’m pretty sure I could write a novel in twenty-six days. I’ll give it a shot. I’m not writing a new bible, by the way.”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. It’s twenty-nine days, though. Not twenty-six.”

“I’ll need to leave at least a couple of days to get wherever I’m going.”

“Okay then, whatever you need to do, so long as you try. Anyway, the rest of us will have twenty-nine days. And did we mention the book only has to be fifty thousand words long? That’s less than eighteen-hundred words a day, if you were going to divide it up evenly. You guys can all probably type eighteen-hundred words in an hour or two.”

“An hour or two, every day, for a month?” interjected Sally, “And in the end we have a fifty-thousand word novel to show for it? That’s what? One hundred and fifty pages? That’s hardly a novel at all.”

“Fifty thousand words is really only a minimum, and you’re right. It’s just barely a novel. That’s why we call it a minimum. If you want to write a hundred thousand words, go ahead and spend four hours a day writing, you’ll have me beat. The idea is not to try to write fifty thousand and two words, but to write a novel in a month. Fifty thousand words is just a goal we use to make writing a novel something quantifiable.”

Linda finally spoke up, saying “Okay, I see how you can get a novel written in a month now. You’re just focused on word count, not on how much time the creative process takes. Do you realize that what you’ll be coming up with will basically be crap?”

“Yes. I looked at that website myself, and they emphasize that if you want to write the ‘great American novel’ or some new literature classic, this is not the project for you. This project is about getting something written and done. Too many people say they are going to write a novel and they never do. Too many people get started writing novels but never finish them. With a specific time period, a specific word count, and support from a community of like-minded writers, the novel becomes an attainable goal, even for someone with no real writing skill or inspiration. Imagine how good it will feel to get to March first and be able to say ‘I wrote a novel.’ Imagine how much easier it will be to start your second, perhaps higher quality novel, after getting the first one done in only a month. Or just to know that novel writing is not for you, and to have the fifty thousand words of proof always available to you… or burned somewhere, and the memory of that horrible month when you wrote a novel always available to you.”

Linda continued where John had stopped. “I think I’m beginning to see it now. You’re really just writing a first draft anyway. It is a project about self-accomplishment and self-satisfaction, not about somehow becoming a published author. If you really wanted to get published though, this would at least get you started with the writing. Maybe even give you a good enough first draft that a second or third draft would actually be readable.”

“And a final draft might be publishable,” he finished for her. “I’ve even found a couple of print-on-demand services that would allow us to have bound copies of our finished books made, and made available to the public to purchase, for very little or no money upfront. You could see your words in print for less than the cost of all the clubbing you won’t be able to do in February while you’re writing.”

“Oooh. I hadn’t thought of that. If I were really serious about this novel-writing thing, I’d have to give up my social life for an entire month, wouldn’t I?” Ray’s brow became a deep furrow. “You almost had me convinced.”

“We already covered that bit,” corrected John, “you’d only have to write for a couple of hours a day to meet the minimum requirements. You wouldn’t have to give up anything besides a couple hours a day… well, that is if your novel doesn’t take on a life of its own.”

“And if it does that, and you do end up spending a few Friday and Saturday nights at home writing, you won’t even notice it on account of you’ll be so involved in your own book that the rest of the world will disappear.”

“And you’ll have yet another way to pick up ‘chicks’ in March,” added Sally, taking on her impression of Ray’s pick-up-lines voice, “Did I tell you about my novel, ladies?”

Everyone, even Ray, had a good laugh at that one. Sally’s impression of Ray was just that bad. Or perhaps it was just that accurate.

Linda was the first to speak again. “Well, you’ve definitely sold me. Maybe I can use it as an excuse to avoid being handed extra work at the end of the day. You know, ‘Sorry boss, can’t work on the Peterson account, I’ve got to get this novel done by the end of the month.’ I’m sure he’ll believe me…”

“And if he doesn’t, you can bring him the book at the end of the month.”

“Right. Or maybe I can get one of you to email me your book at the end of the month, in case I don’t get mine done in time.”

“Are you already losing faith, Linda? If any of us can do this, it’s you. You’ll probably end up with a publishing contract by the end of March.”

“And Ray will have a whole gaggle of author-groupies by then.”

“This is sounding better and better all the time. I’m in. Of course, the first time it interferes with my nightlife, I’m out again. A man has got to have his priorities straight.”

“Priorities. Right. Good to hear you’re with us on this one.”

“The more, the merrier.” This came from Sally. Everyone turned to face her.

“Does this mean you’ll write a novel in February with us, Sally?”

“I guess it does. It can’t hurt to try. Now, how are we going to celebrate on March 1st? A big no-more-novel party?”

“Well, if Paul is right there won’t be the opportunity for a party, but let’s go ahead and assume at least a couple of us live to see March and plan something big.”

“How big?”

“I don’t know… Uhh…”

“How about Vegas?”

“I’ve never been to Vegas,” said Ray.

“Ray? Never been to Vegas? Am I hearing this right?”

“What of it? I’ve just never been. I have plenty of fun right where I am, thank you very much.”

“That’s it! There aren’t any major holidays around the first of March, so it should be no problem for all of us to get it off and maybe get good rates for a three-day weekend in Vegas. Anyone who hasn’t quite finished their novel by the 27th will just have to spend their time in Vegas writing, I suppose. What do you say, guys?”

“No problem. I haven’t been to Vegas in years. I have an aunt there who is always asking me to come out and stay with her. She has a huge place, so you guys wouldn’t really have to worry about finding a hotel.”

“Wow, a novel and a Vegas trip. February is looking up. I’m there.”

“Count me in.”

“Assuming there’s no better evidence telling me I need to be somewhere else and mass panic and rioting haven’t made Vegas unvisitable, I’ll be glad to join you. I have access to a very secure bunker directly under the strip I can stay in until we really begin to celebrate on Monday.”

“Well like I said, I’ve never been. Really, I’ve always meant to go, secret underground bunker or no. This is the perfect opportunity. If it won’t offend you too much though Linda, I’d like to get my own hotel room in case I uhh… need a little privacy.”

“No offence at all, Ray. I’m sure my aunt wouldn’t want you bringing some drunk floozy home in the middle of the night, anyway.”

“Of course. I’ll make the arrangements for the room, and I’ll book everyone’s flight, okay?”

“You have a ‘friend’ in the business, I suppose.”

“I know a few people, if you know what I mean. Where will you be coming from, Linda?”

“I can book my own flights, thank you very much, Ray.”

“You change your mind, you let me know.” Ray lowered his voice a little and leaned towards Linda so no one else at the table could hear him over the ambient noise of The Rooster’s Rump, “You change your mind about anything I’ve offered you, just say the word.” Linda laughed as Ray put on his best shit-eating grin, and no one else at the table really even cared to know what Ray had said this time.

“So it’s agreed. The end of the world notwithstanding, we’ll all write novels of at least fifty thousand words starting not before February 1st, and finishing not after February 29th, on which date we will all already by in Vegas to celebrate finishing our first novels.” He raised a glass, and everyone drank, “To writing novels!” and then, “To Vegas!”

* * * * * * * * * * *

The next day, Friday, began as any other normal day. He woke up, showered, shaved, dressed and ate. He had time to read the paper. He drove to work carefully, driving the speed limit and taking his time to be a safe and courteous driver. He arrived to work nearly twenty minutes early, which was normal for him. He liked to have time to find a parking space, walk to the building, get to his desk and get settled in before his official workday began. He worked normally that day, getting more quantity of work done than his average coworker while maintaining an average quality level throughout. He was happier than normal, knowing in the back of his mind that he was soon to begin work on writing again.

Then, about an hour before the end of his normal workday, his supervisor Kyle came by his desk. “Hey, are you in the middle of anything?”

“Nope. I just finished with Mrs. Johnson. How can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak with you about something, let’s go to my office.”

“Okay.” They walked down the row of cubicles to the end, where Kyle’s door was closed. Kyle reached out and opened it, holding it open so he could go in. Sitting at the meeting table in Kyle’s office were his team leader Corwin and Samantha from HR. Neither one of them made eye contact with him as he approached the table. He could feel all the joy that had been with him that day draining out through his fingertips and the bottoms of his feet, leaving a trail behind him on the lush carpet, and by the time he sat down across from Corwin and Samantha, he had the distinct impression that he had become an empty shell of a man.

Before Kyle sat down on the same side of the table as Corwin and Samantha, he handed a document to each of them. It was his latest review. He had scored an exactly average ‘3’, across the board except for his grasp of company policy and the information required to do his job, where he had scored a slightly higher ‘4’ out of five. There was nothing in this review to be ashamed or worried about, it had been exactly the review he had looked for and expected. The three of them looked across the table at him. None of them spoke for what seemed like several minutes.

Finally, Kyle began. “The company is making some cutbacks. As you know, we just secured our second round of funding, and are trying to reach profitability as soon as possible. In order to streamline our business, we’ve been cutting back in several departments.” He could feel heat rising through him like steam, warming the inside of the shell he felt he had become. First building up at the top of his head, then slowly filling him, working its way down through his face, and lowering as he listened. “Unfortunately, I’ve been asked to make some reductions in your department.”

He knew they were making cutbacks. One entire department had been laid off a few weeks earlier, and its duties assigned to one already-overworked employee. One of his friends in Development had been cut back to reduced time. Just reduced enough that they didn’t need to provide him with benefits anymore. He knew his own department was almost too small as it was, so probably they were looking to reduce costs by cutting out a few hours a week and all his benefits. He never got sick; that would be a lot better than losing his job entirely.

Samantha pressed a manila folder across the table into his hands. He opened it as Kyle began to speak again. “We’re offering you two weeks severance pay if you agree to sign this document. You can find a check in that folder for your outstanding salary through the end of the day today. You have one week to decide whether or not you want to sign the document, and a check will be issued to you via US Mail the next business day after we receive the signed document. Feel free to consult a lawyer and have it looked over before you sign. You will be eligible to collect unemployment.”

Samantha spoke up as Kyle paused, “Do you have any questions?”

“Why me? Why not Robert? He’s hardly trained. He’s only been here … what, 104 days?”

“One hundred and eight days,” Corwin responded automatically, as though he had been expecting the question.

“Okay, 108 days. I’ve been here over two years. I have more seniority than you or Samantha, here. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Samantha opened her mouth to respond, but no words emerged before Kyle spoke again. “It’s your reviews. They show you’re not working at the quality level we expect.”

“What? We discussed this at my last review, and again when we first went over this latest one a few days ago. A ‘3’ means ‘meets expectations’. You told me yourself that if someone is consistently scoring ‘4’ and above that they should be considered for advancement or at least additional responsibility. I thought I made it clear that I enjoy my job, I consider myself good at it, and I’m not looking to have more responsibilities or a new job entire.”

“You’re right. A ‘3’ means you ‘meet expectations’, but yours is the most important department in the company, and we expect more from you.”

Now the heat that had been creeping down the shell of his being was filling him, as though the heat were becoming a corporeal thing growing within him. He was becoming upset, but he kept his voice calm and even, just as he had been trained to do with difficult customers. “If you gave me a ‘3’, which we can all see you did since you were kind enough to give us all copies of my latest review, it means that even with higher expectations for the department, you believe I met those higher expectations. If I have not met your higher expectations, you ought to have scored me with twos or ones.”

“This is not a negotiable matter,” Kyle responded, trying to take control of the conversation, “it has already been decided.”

“I understand that it has already been decided, I just want to understand it.”

“Well, what don’t you understand?” Samantha was using her most sympathetic voice.

“Why am I being laid off? Why are you letting me go? What could I have done differently to prevent this that wouldn’t have forced me into greater responsibility or another job entirely? I don’t understand.”

“We want employees who want advancement. We want a staff that looks to take on new responsibilities. You’ve said yourself that that doesn’t describe you.”

“So wanting to do my job properly isn’t enough, I have to want to not be doing my job at the same time?”

“That isn’t what I said, I was—“

“That is what you said. You said you wanted employees who weren’t focused on the job they were actually supposed to be doing because they were working on getting a promotion instead. That seems counter-productive to getting each job done effectively, to me.” He felt now as though steam would erupt from his ears and any moment, and he was sure they were bright red by now.

Corwin spoke up again, “This isn’t about your opinion—“ but Kyle cut him off.

“What he means to say is, that’s not what we want. We want employees who put their full focus and attention to the job they’re currently in, AND who are looking for ways they can take on additional responsibility and advance through the company.”

He didn’t understand how they could be this irrational without knowing it. He wanted to shout it into their heads, force them to see what they were saying, but his voice, if it changed at all, dropped down almost below hearing as he continued. “That doesn’t make sense, either. You can’t give full attention to one thing and pay attention to something else. No matter how over-used the phrase is, people can’t actually do 110% of anything. It isn’t logically possible. If someone is paying attention to advancement and to other people’s jobs, they aren’t putting their all into their own work. If not putting their full energy into their own work is what you’re looking for from the other employees, maybe that explains why I put in the same hours as everyone else yet serve more customers; I’m only trying to do my job. I’m not looking for a new one.”

Samantha still looked as though she wished she weren’t visible, like she wanted to just fade away and not have anything to do with any of it. Kyle did not have a good response, and he knew it. So he repeated himself. “This is not up for negotiation, it has already been decided. Today is your last day, and we have given you a check for the time you’ve worked, including through the end of your normal shift today. If you decide not to sign the document and return it to us before the end of the day, next Friday, you will not receive anything else. This is your only opportunity, and we’re offering you two additional weeks worth of pay at your current rate. Do you understand?”

There was that question again. Hearing it, he became more incensed. “Why does Kyle keep asking me if I understand, when the part I don’t understand is why I’m being let go?” he thought to himself in the increasingly tense pause. Finally he broke the silence. “I can see you aren’t going to tell me why you’re letting me go. I can see that you don’t have a rational explanation for it. I can see that Corwin has some sort of personal grudge against me, perhaps because I was offered his position as team leader and turned it down. Perhaps because I trained him for the position he is currently in, though he is officially my superior. I can see that this company does not respect its employees or its customers, and would rather maintain the status quo of corporate-ladder-climbing that has made corporations the enemy of the common man than to see someone actually try to do good by its customers and its greater good. I can see all this and I can see that there is nothing I can say or do to change it, but no. No, I do not understand.”

The three sat across from him, speechless. He looked from one face to the other, Samantha still looking apologetic, Corwin still too dumb to know that he shouldn’t look so self-satisfied, and Kyle looking like he wanted to say something. Like he wanted to say “We don’t have to take this from you,” and “Just get out!” There were a few words he’d like to say as well, but knew that it was not in his best interest to do. What he really wanted to do was to stand up on that meeting table, open his pants, and urinate on Kyle’s face before Kyle could figure out what was going on.

Another voice in him echoed forth from its resting place deep inside. It came from a place darker than the hole his idea for novel writing had sprouted from. It spoke to him, and it said that this was an opportunity he’d been looking for.

He spoke again. “Okay. I’ll take a look at the document. What else can I do? I suppose you want to escort me back to my desk so I can get my things together?”

Corwin, holding back a grin, said “I’ll take you.”

He looked down at his hands, laying flat, face down on the tabletop, but hard. The tension in his hands and arms and the adrenaline in his system made his hands look white and waxy like an impression of a skeleton. He could see an outline of his handprints on the table when he moved them away, as though the heat he could still feel boiling inside him were real. He moved back from the table as to stand up.

Samantha stopped him and Corwin for a moment, “First, I need you to sign this.” She slid another sheet of paper across the table to him. “It just says you know you’re being laid off, and that we had this discussion. We all sign it. It doesn’t hold you to anything, it just proves we had this conversation.” He looked it over. She was telling the truth.

He began to sign it, and as he signed said “I’m going to need a copy of this with all of our signatures before I leave.”

“No problem.” He handed the page back to Samantha, who signed it herself before passing it on. “I’ll get the copy to you before you go.”

He stood up, taking the copy of his review and the manila folder from the table, placing the review in the folder. Corwin quickly jotted his signature on the page and handed it to Kyle, practically jumping out of his seat to escort him to his desk, then off the premises. Just before he slipped behind Corwin and out the door, he heard Samantha say, almost under he breath, “I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to do this.” He turned his head around to see her as the door closed, but her head was down, her face concealed.

He followed Corwin back up the aisle to his desk, trying to plan on how to get his things together the quickest. He had a few emails, a few personal files on his computer that he’d need to email to his home account while he packed up his physical detritus. As he came around the wall of his cubicle he realized that forces outside of his control were still changing his plans. His monitor, his keyboard, his mouse and mousepad were all still there on his desk, but the computer itself was in the hands of Jack from the IT department, who proceeded to set the computer on a trolley and wheel it away, whistling a happy tune. There were two empty boxes already on his desk, waiting for him. They must have been planning this for some time, to make an appointment with IT to send Jack to take his whole computer out at this particular time.

That he would not be allowed to retain his digital personal effects was as great an offense to him as if the company tried to keep him from gathering his physical personal effects. In stunned silence he began slowly going through his desk sorting personal items, trash, and company-owned property. He’d hardly noticed that Corwin was still hovering nearby, but realized he was being closely monitored. They didn’t want him to take or damage any company property. They didn’t trust or respect him at all.

He didn’t want to make a scene, he just wanted to get himself together and get out. He wanted at least to say goodbye to John, and maybe make plans to get together later and discuss it all. But something in him wanted to at least try to act out against the company. Before that though, he thought it best to try to see John.

“Can I go say goodbye to a couple of people?”

The expression on Corwin’s face was one of resentment and malicious power; he was clearly glad to finally be rid of what he must have considered competition. “No. You are to clear out your desk and I am to escort you directly to the exit.” Corwin was looking for some level of defeat on his face, some acknowledgement of his powerlessness, but found nothing.

“Alright.” He continued packing, slower than before because he was now quite keen on wasting Corwin’s time in particular. Just as he was nearly done, he motioned with an oddly shaped ‘executive gift’ as though it simply did not fit, and then began slowly unpacking everything to try again.

“Why don’t you use the other box?” Corwin was definitely beginning to turn red in the face. He had been standing there waiting for the satisfying moment of slamming the door closed on him forever for nearly half an hour. People were now standing up in their cubes, watching him slowly get his things together a second time. He wasn’t ‘making a scene’ in the traditional sense, but he sure was getting people’s attention.

Finally he got the last item into the box and put the lid on. Corwin immediately said “okay, come along,” but before he had walked more than a couple of feet from the cube, he stopped. “What now?” asked Corwin.

“You’re going to want my security badge before I go, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. Hand it over.” Corwin extended his arm to receive the badge, but did not get the results he was looking for.

He had turned around and walked back to his cube, setting the box on the desk and beginning to unpack it. The badge was all the way at the bottom, just above a plain manila folder. He set the badge on the desk and Corwin snatched it up like a hawk descending on unsuspecting prey. He slowly packed his things together in the box for a third time. Finally, when he had finished again, he put the lid on the box, and turned to face Corwin.

“Is that everything?” Corwin’s face was beet red.

“I think so.”

“Okay, then.” Corwin led the way, angrily marching toward the exit. Just as they reached the door, again he stopped.

Corwin’s face flashed with fury. “What is it this time?”

“I don’t have a lawyer.”

“So?”

“I don’t even know a lawyer.”

“So?”

“So, I figure there’s no point in taking that document home with me if I’m just going to sign it anyway.” He turned around again and began moving back towards his desk as he continued speaking, “I’ll just get it out and sign it right now.”

He glanced back over his shoulder at Corwin and saw that the beet red color that his face had been before had now spread across all his visible skin. What was more, his face had turned an even deeper and more vibrant hue of red. As Corwin stomped after him, it became increasingly clear that this choice of staff reduction had been largely Corwin’s choice, and that he was not at all pleased at the way it was turning out. It also appeared that if anyone was going to be making a scene, it was going to be Corwin.

Before this day, it hadn’t occurred to him that a grown man such as Corwin would be so paranoid as to his own undeserved position as to get rid of someone who had clearly stated he had no interest in a promotion. Simply because he was qualified to take Corwin’s job at a moment’s notice and had basically trained him didn’t seem like enough reason to get someone fired. The premise was irrational and unfounded and just the sort of thing that never bothered to cross his mind until it was too late.

He arrived back at his desk and found Jack was back, fiddling with something under it.

“I thought you were gone.”

“I thought you’d be celebrating by now.”

“I am.” Jack lifted a flask to his lips and took a long pull.

“Drinking on the job again, Jack?” He knew Jack frequently stayed buzzed through entire work weeks.

“Only for such a special occasion.” Corwin caught up and Jack quickly disappeared the flask.

He set the box down and began unpacking it once more. Now both Jack and Corwin were waiting on him. He took his time. The manila folder containing the document was quite intentionally the last thing out of the box. When he pulled it out, he sat down, and drawing the two-page document from it he began reading.

“I thought you said you were just going to sign it.”

“I am, I just want to read it first. I never sign anything I haven’t read first.”

Of course, there was nothing Corwin could do but stand there and wait for him to read it. He read it thoroughly and concluded that it was two pages explaining that when he signed they’d pay him two weeks’ severance pay but that he was giving up all rights to pursue any other monies from the company. Since they’d already given him a check with all the money they owed him, he figured it was a no-brainer. When he finally signed it, he’d kept Corwin busy for over an hour and given him no satisfaction. And he was not done yet.

“Okay, Corwin, now all I need is for Kyle and Samantha to sign it, and to get a fully signed copy to take home with me, mmkay?” This was said in his most patronizing voice. Since Corwin really still only knew to do what had been told and taught by him, Corwin found himself at a loss. No matter how superior Corwin wanted to feel, he was still just an errand boy for the people who knew what they were doing. Corwin snatched the paper roughly from his hand and with a grimace stormed off with everyone watching.

* * * * * * * * * * *

“Peter, I’m scared.” She lighted upon his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his neck, trembling.

Peter leapt up, drawing his tiny sword from its sheath and taking a fighting stance. “I’ll protect you! Who’s come to pick a fight with me today? They won’t know what hit ‘em!”

She sighed. “Oh, Peter…” She flitted away as he began slashing at the air in a mock battle with a non-existent enemy. She turned away, knowing he would turn this misunderstanding into some sort of adventure for himself and the boys. “That’s not what I meant, Peter,” she spoke softly as she moved deeper into the caves and out of earshot, “I just had a bad feeling all of a sudden. A chill.”

She reached the out of scale bed where she slept each night and curled herself up in its breathtaking comfort and warmth. As she tried to shut her eyes and her ears from the growing noise of the rallying boys, she concentrated on that feeling, trying to remember what, or who, it reminded her of. The bed began taking its inevitable toll on her, pulling her down into deepest sleep when all she wanted to do was know what was wrong, and to whom.

At the last moment before she passed into unconsciousness and forgetting, a smile crept across her tiny face as she remembered what that feeling of desperation mixed with hope reminded her of. She knew she would likely never set eyes on him again, and she was still worried that something might be going wrong with him, but just remembering him was enough to bring a smile to her face.

* * * * * * * * * * *

“Which was when I took the opportunity to pop around the corner.” John took a deep swallow of his black and tan. “The way this cat played it cool, it got everybody’s attention, so I was just waiting for my chance. By then the whole company knew what was going on, and I just wanted to give him a pat on the back.”

“Is that when the boss, uhh…”

“Kyle or Corwin?”

“Corwin! Right. Is that when Corwin finally blew up?” Linda was really getting into the story.

“Not quite, but yeah. You should have seen it. Corwin was redder than a fire engine and hotter than a fire. He tried to get that document signed, but Samantha was nowhere to be found. The others in her department were no help at all, and he just lost it, screaming at them and shouting obscenities. He really did make quite a scene. Then Kyle literally pulled Corwin by the arm into his office and shut the door.”

He broke in, saying “They were both yelling, then. We couldn’t hear what all they said, but we got the gist of it.”

“And Kyle didn’t close the shades on his window,” continued John smoothly, “ so we could see their arms gesticulating and pointing, and gesturing out towards us.”

“Basically Kyle was upset that Corwin’s behavior in the last ten minutes warranted dismissal more than anything I’d done since I’d been hired, regardless of my disinterest in advancement.”

“That he needed to get his act together if he wanted to keep his place in the company, or he’d be the next to go.”

“And then Samantha showed up from who-knows-where and joined them in Kyle’s office. She tried to calm them both down, and they at least lowered their voices, but it was twenty minutes before they came out again.”

“When they did finally come out, Corwin had his head down and had a document in his hand. We think he got written up for his little outburst.”

“I’m sure you’ll hear about it on Monday. Anyway, Corwin disappeared and Samantha came over to me and apologized for the wait. She handed me the fully-signed copy of the document and let me say goodbye to John before walking me out.”

“I didn’t see Corwin for the rest of the day. You think he was sulking or they sent him home to cool off?”

“I don’t care, so long as I never have to see him again.”

“I wish I could say as much. Alas, I still have a job.”

“So, does this mean you’re not going to be writing a novel? I mean, don’t you have to start looking for work?” Linda seemed genuinely concerned for his well-being.

“Well, since they would normally pay me for my work through today two weeks from now, the check they gave me this afternoon which included all the pay through today actually covers all my expenses for the next four weeks. Plus they paid me my back vacation time, another two weeks’ pay. Plus I’ll be receiving that check for two weeks’ severance pay in a little while, so I figure that that alone has me covered for two months.”

“Which would only give you one month to try to find work if you don’t look at all while writing the novel.”

“It would, but you know how they say to always have three months’ salary saved, in case something like this happens?”

John sputtered, nearly flabbergasted, “You have three month’s salary in savings? How?”

“No, no. I was going to continue by saying I never did that. But I do have about one month’s worth, plus because it was officially a layoff, I can liquidate my 401k with no hit at all… If it comes down to that. And that’s another month’s salary right there.”

“You haven’t been investing much.”

“Well, between the slow rate I’ve been putting in and the awful market, yeah, there’s not much there. But it’s there if I need it. I’m not worried, and I will definitely still be writing a novel.”

“I won’t.”

He and John turned their most shocked-looking faces to point at Linda, and instead of the desired effect, their simultaneous motion just made her break out laughing at them both.

“Why not?”

“I’m just not.” She gazed into her beer as she spoke. “Look, you two are excellent salesmen. You convinced all of us to play along in your little scheme last night, but come on! You didn’t really think any of us were going to write novels, did you?”

“You sound like you’re speaking for the whole group in saying you aren’t even going to try.”

“I basically am. I haven’t heard from everyone, but … well, after you guys left last night we all sorta … Well, we talked about how none of us thought we could do it. No one was going to say anything until you got started, but I guess that’s out the window now.”

“I guess so.”

“So it’s just John and I, then?”

“You and John and the other ten thousand people from that site. I went and looked, and in case you didn’t notice, there are quite a few people right here in town writing novels in February. You could get together with them.”

“I guess I’ll have to. John’s going to be out of town the entire first week of February, and I know I’ll need some positive feedback on the process.”

John threw up his hands. “Hey, don’t blame me! I got conned into attending this convention before I ever knew about the novels thing. I’d be here with you if I could. Heck, I’d gladly stick around and keep on these drop-outs’ asses about the whole thing until they gave in and started writing. But it’s out of my hands.”

“I know, I know. I just … I was looking forward to working with friends.”

“Who says you can’t make friends with the other novel-writers in town?”

* * * * * * * * * * *

Ariadne never showed up at The Rooster’s Rump that night, so she didn’t hear about the month-short novels until that weekend when she and Sally got together to spend a day or two doing some light shopping. At about the sixth hour of going into every over-priced boutique in the upscale part of town, Sally finally mentioned the idea for the first time. At first, Ariadne sounded interested. “So he’s finally decided to start writing again, has he? Good for him.”

“Oh? Had he written a lot before?”

“You didn’t know? When we were in high school he was always writing these powerful short stories and passing them around our little circle of friends. Sometimes, when something was overdue, he’d turn one in to a teacher. They were always so impressed that he has written something to powerful that they would lay off him for a few weeks about all the other homework he never did. It even worked in his history and math classes. He was quite the talented writer.”

“How come I’ve never seen anything he’s written? Or heard anything about it before this week?”

“That’s the thing about him. He never told anyone why he stopped writing, just one day he stopped having new stories to pass around. He even stopped attending the Poetry Club his senior year. It was awful, and no one could get anything out of him about it.”

“He writes poetry, too?”

“Sure. He was a founding member of his high school’s Poetry Club, and he was there for nearly three years, always with something new to share, rain or shine, until all of a sudden he just stopped writing altogether. His poetry, most of it anyway, wasn’t as serious or as structured as his prose… on the surface. There was always some little joke embedded to throw you off the hidden depths of what he was writing about. He managed to create some of the darkest, funniest poetry I have ever read, though he kept most of his best work to himself. Something a little odd about his poems that made them seem lighter than whatever their subject matter, was that he always followed a strict rhyme and meter, usually rhymed couplets a la Dr. Seuss. Now that I think about it, I remember he even did a couple of what he called children’s books in Dr. Seuss’s style. One of them featured children being vaporized by an atomic blast.”

“He sounds pretty disturbed. Or at least that he had a troubled childhood.”

“That’s another thing; he always seemed happy, even when I knew he was depressed. He could always put on a happy face. Anyone who didn’t know him the way I did would have thought that all the death and depression he was writing about so outlandishly was just to get attention, that he was a normal, well-adjusted teenager who just happened to know a thousand ways to take a human life. I knew better. He knew how a human life could be ended so that he knew exactly how he could take his own when the time came. I think he didn’t think of suicide as an option as much as an inevitability. Like somehow he had been put on this irrevocable path, and when the right moment came, he would be forced by fate to end his own life, and he was getting ready for it.

“I always tried to comfort him. You know him these days; he’s a pretty good guy. He’s always been nice and polite and he doesn’t try to pick any fights or cause any trouble. He does well at his job, but he isn’t too competitive and promotion-minded like some corporate drones end up. He knows what his place in this world is, and he does what he can to be the best he can be without being noticed.”

“You’ve just summed him up as an invisible man, Ariadne. Like he’s just going through the motions of life, not really living it. You know, I’ve never really considered it before but now that you mention it… I know you’re right. I guess he always just blended into his surroundings so much that I just took him for granted.”

“That’s just it. And that’s why you’ve never really considered his life before; there was no reason to. There is nothing extraordinary about him. He seems to have gone to great lengths to just disappear. I think it’s that same passively suicidal mindset that he’s had for as long as I’ve known him, working in the background of everything he does. Not suicidal the way most people think about it, where you actually take actions to try to end your own life outright. More subtle, like what I was describing earlier.

“Since he seems to believe his life will inevitably end in suicide, he’s lived his life so that when the time comes for him to take his own life, he won’t be missed any more than a worn-out old chair that gets taken out to the curb. After a while you hardly remember it was there at all. He’s minimalized himself. Not to disappear from our lives today, but so that he will disappear painlessly from our lives when the time comes. Everything he does at work could be done by someone else already working there; he is professionally replaceable. He is not the leader of our social circle; we will still be complete without him.”

Sally interrupts Ariadne’s musings, saying “I’ve had a kind of feeling from him that he was constantly on the verge of moving away, the way he never has or wants to make any plans too far in the future. He almost gives off this aura of something that is about to be in motion.”

“He thinks he hides it so well, but look. With just a few minutes thought you realized that you’d picked up on it on your own. I totally agree with you about how he seems always to be on the verge of no longer being there. But for me, I’ve always imagined that he was just going to fade away one day. Like one minute we’ll be chatting and the next he’ll be some fine vapor being carried away by a passing wind. That I’ll watch him disappear and won’t even give a second thought to it. He’s made it seem like a totally natural thing that the world would or should go on without him.”

“That’s so sad. It never occurred to me that someone could think so lowly of themselves. Or of their own lives. It never occurred to me that I would be able to think of someone that way myself, but he just makes it so easy. Now I feel bad for not noticing sooner. I want to do something about it. I want to show him that he is important, that we do care about him, and that it really would make a difference if he went and just disappeared.”

“That’s probably not such a good idea. Think about it. He may decide that he really should get on with killing himself before he becomes very important to anyone. Actually though, we may not need to do anything. He came up with the idea to write a novel, didn’t he?”

“As far as I can tell. John was sort of in on convincing us, but I think he’d been convinced earlier that day himself.”

“Right. Then he sold the lot of you on doing the same thing, right?”

“Right. Convinced us all to try to write novels in under a month. He seemed pretty excited about the whole thing. We all even decided to go to Vegas together at the end of the month to celebrate.”

“How about that. All of a sudden he’s writing again, for the first time that I know of since we were dating, he’s taken on a leadership role and convinced the whole group to write novels, too. He’s made a plan for himself beyond the next few days, and even planned a trip over a month in advance. He’s really beginning to sound like something’s turned around in him.”

“What do you suppose it is, Ariadne? You sound like you know him a lot better than I do. Perhaps even better than he knows himself.”

“That may very well be true. Still, I guess I haven’t been keeping as close an eye on him as I did back in the good old days. I haven’t the foggiest about what’s gotten into him. Maybe he’s met someone special. Did he mention anyone to you or one of the guys Thursday night? Mention some big date coming up this weekend? Anything like that at all?”

“Not that I recall. I probably would have remembered that, too. I don’t think I’ve ever known him to be interested in or involved with or even just fucking anyone. I was never really attracted to him myself, but I think he just made himself seem unavailable. I thought he was gay for a while, but I haven’t seen him with any men, either.”

“Well, I can set your mind at ease about one thing, he is most definitely attracted to women. I have first-hand experience with just how excited he can get around the right woman.” They shared a knowing smile, and before Sally could ask for any details, Ariadne continued. “I think the reason we haven’t seen him in any relationships is a symptom of the same bad mojo we were talking about earlier. He doesn’t want to leave a grieving widow or a sobbing girlfriend when the time comes.”

“That makes sense in a sick sort of way, I guess. How long has it been since the two of you were an item?”

“We decided to ‘just be friends’ right after we’d both finished high school. I knew something was going wrong with him when he stopped writing, but he wasn’t saying anything to me about it. I wanted to be able to know what was going on inside his head, and he just wouldn’t let me that close. We both decided it was for the best if we didn’t ruin what friendship we had left by drawing things out or going through a lengthy or difficult break-up. Now that I look back on it, I can see he was being pretty mature for someone right out of high school. I guess we both were, because we’re still friends. Though he still won’t let me know what’s going on inside that head of his.”

“Did he ever date anyone after that?”

“Not that I know of. Of course, if it took him this long to work through whatever it was that had stopped him from writing back in high school, perhaps it’s for the best that anyone else didn’t get involved.”

“Maybe. I know I wouldn’t want to be involved with someone who got stuck on some bad feelings back in high school and never let them go. That’s really … well, like a stalker. Like one of those guys who follows his old high school girlfriend all over the country, peeking in her windows and going through her trash. I saw a piece on Dateline about that the other night, and it started to get me scared that it could happen to me. I guess something like one in a hundred guys gets obsessed with ‘the one that got away’ and they never get over it. He’s not stalking you, do you think?”

“Him? Never. Being a crazed stalker would put him too much in our minds. He seems to want to fade away, remember?”

“I guess so. I hope I never have a stalker of my own.”

“I think that goes without saying. All this talking about him is really getting me curious about what brought this on. I wonder what he’s doing right now. Do you think he’s working on ideas for his novel? Maybe he’s warming up for the novel by writing some poetry. Maybe he’s found some mystery lover, and they’re going at it right now, and he’s finding inspiration for a whole slew of great stories.”

“It sounds to me like you’re the one that never got over your high school relationship, Ariadne. Are you sure you’re feeling okay? We’re still talking about the same person, right? Little guy, non-descript? Not your husband Micah, but your high school sweetheart.”

“Leave Micah out of this. You know we’re separated. Anyway, Micah simply doesn’t compare with him. You don’t know. You’ve never really looked soulfully into those eyes of his, Sally. It’s like they just go on forever. And his lips… Oh… I remember how soft they were, even to this day. I have never met a man whose kiss was more soft, more sweet than the kisses I shared with him.”

“I can’t believe what I think I just heard you say. Who talks like that? Ariadne, I think your memories are a little skewed by the intervening years and your trouble with Micah. He is anything but poetry for the eyes. You’re probably just remembering him the way you wish it could have been. An idealized version of what really happened between you two. We’re talking about the awkward teenage years here, right? No sixteen-year-old boy knows how to kiss that well. Any depths you thought you saw in his eyes were probably just from his hoping you wouldn’t realize he didn’t know thing one about how to treat a lady.”

“That’s another place where you’re wrong, Sally. He was always so courteous, to the point where he got mocked by the sort of teenage boys you’re referring to. Holding open doors, offering his coat, treating both genders equally, and not just to get into their pants. Unless he’s been doing something behind my back, he’s still a virgin. We fooled around, but he always said that sex should be saved for the wedding bed. He was that kind of proper, and I’m sure it didn’t even occur to him to cheat.”

“The more you talk about him, the more I’m torn between thinking you must be inventing some perfect man for your own novel and believing you and trying to go snatch him up for myself. If even half of what you’re implying is true, and he’s somehow gotten over whatever he was brooding over for the last what, seven years? Well then you’re telling me that he may very well be the number one groom to grab. If his lips are as soft as all that, imagine what making love to him must be like.”

“Believe me, I have.”

“I’ll bet you have. You definitely still have feelings for him. Deep, unresolved feelings. Feelings you’ve been hiding from yourself, and worse, from me. You simply must do something about this. Confront him, seek therapy, something! Don’t go on like this, dreaming of a relationship that was over years ago – give it up or go after it, one or the other.”

“Sure. Go after it. That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have a cherished friendship on the line.”

“The way you talk about him, I think your little ‘friendship’ sounds more like tolerated stalking with the benefit of conversations. You’ve been waiting for him to ‘come to his senses’ and come back to you for too long, Ariadne.”

“I’m not sure this is the right time, though. Maybe I should wait until March, after he’s finished his novel. Maybe I was the reason he stopped writing in the first place. Or maybe his novel will be about his hidden feelings for me.”

“Okay, now you’re starting to really sound crazy. Is everyone I know this crazy? First Paul with his doomsday prophecies, then this whole ‘write a novel in a month’ routine, and now you with the crazed stalker bit.”

“Don’t forget about womanizing Ray.”

“Yeah, but at least I’m used to that. At least it didn’t come out of left field like this did. I knew about Ray’s affliction from the moment I laid eyes on him. You… I thought I knew you better…”

“I’m sorry I kept this from you. I’m sorry I kept this from myself for so long, really. Maybe it really is for the best, though. Maybe he really will be ready to let me into his life again, let me in to see what he’s really like on the inside. Maybe bottling up these feelings for him for so long has aged them like fine wine. Maybe we’re meant to be together now.”

“There you go again, babbling on and on like Paul about February 29th. Dateline seemed to think that the most dangerous and obsessive stalkers were men, but I’m thinking of giving them a call. If you keep talking like this, you’ll change their minds. You’d change anyone’s mind.”

“You don’t have to be so harsh about it all, do you?”

“Now, you know I’m only kidding, right? Dateline won’t even bother coming out until he’s put a restraining order on you, anyway.”

“Ha. Ha. Very funny.”

“Just promise me you won’t go digging through his trash, no matter what happens, or what crazy ideas start going through your head, okay?”

“Sure, sure. I promise I won’t go digging through his trash. I’ll just talk to him about what’s been going on with him lately. I’m sure I can get something out of him about why all of a sudden he wants to start writing again. There’s got to be some sort of explanation.”

“Just don’t go beating it out of him. Just talking, not hitting, okay Ariadne?”

“Stop patronizing me, or I’ll start the beating right here.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

So that’s what he set out to do. He went back to the website over the weekend. (“Weekend from what?” He thought to himself, musing that for at least the next five weeks every day was part of this unending ‘weekend’.) He found that there were hundreds of people signed up who lived in the state, and dozens in the city where he lived. There was even a message board set up for people in his state to discuss writing their novels and plan get-togethers.

Unfortunately, no one had volunteered to be the official ‘liaison’, or even just tried to get people together yet. Figuring that at least he wouldn’t have to talk these people into writing novels in the first place, it was worth a try to talk them into getting together sometime. There were some people planning on getting together at a coffee shop on Sunday night, February 1st, the first day anyone was supposed to be writing, but they were in a town over 100 miles south of him. He decided he would try to set up the same sort of thing a little closer to home.

He lived right near the heart of downtown, and knew of three coffee shops on the same block downtown that people might want to meet at. One was very popular, but the coffee wasn’t very good and the staff wasn’t very friendly. One was less popular, but had better drinks and free wireless internet access. The third was almost always empty, but had the best coffee, smoothies and boba, plus wireless internet access.

He made a post on the message board, saying that he was trying to set up a meeting at the third location, The Boba Café, for Sunday afternoon February 1st around 4PM. He said that he would be there from 4PM until they closed at 11PM, writing, and that he’d be glad to meet other novel writers in the area. Within just a couple of hours, several people had replied saying they’d be there. He thought maybe it wouldn’t be a problem at all that his friends weren’t playing along.

* * * * * * * * * * *

That week was awful for him. He didn’t want to start working on the novel ahead of time, but it was at the front of his mind constantly. He poked around in the job classifieds and online looking to see what sorts of openings were available, but with no conviction. He updated his résumé to change ‘Present’ to January of this year for the end date of the job he’d just lost. He actually stared at his résumé for hours on end, trying to polish it or improve it one way or another, but he just couldn’t focus on it. His mind was still trying to wrap around the supreme rejection he had just experienced for no rational reason he could grasp.

There were things about the people in this world that he might never be able to understand. Why people couldn’t accept that just because they’d got what they wanted didn’t mean that there were malicious people out there trying to take it away from them, for example. In trying to keep other people from taking what they valued, they were only becoming what they most feared, and setting a terrible precedent for interpersonal harm.

Thoughts like this just kept rolling around the inside of his head as he tried to find anything to make the time pass faster. To his frustration he found that no matter what he did, surfing the internet, watching his 500 channels on television, staring at his résumé, the classifieds, or anything else, he simply couldn’t focus. His mind kept going back to trying to figure out what had happened, trying to figure out the rest of the people in the world, trying to figure out the world, really. And every time he felt he was approaching some level of understanding, some glimpse as to why people were the way they were, why basic human behavior had cost him this bastion of stability in a capitalistic world, every single time he became further and deeper enmeshed in his own confusion. Every plateau of understanding just gave him a better view of the things he still didn’t understand.

All this angst and frustration with nothing capable of creating more than a momentary distraction besides the thought of beginning work on his novel just added to his anticipation for the week to be over and slowed down the apparent passage of time. The week stretched on an on. He tried calling everyone who’d said they would try to write a novel, to invite them to at least show up Sunday to hang out, but they all refused. They refused politely, but they still refused. After that first day’s quick responses there had been no new follow-ups on his invitation for a meeting on the message board. Still, he figured a few people would be better than none.

Finally, Sunday rolled around. The anticipation in the morning was almost as bad as it had been all week, waiting for the meeting that night. He was allowed by the rules to have begun writing at 12:00:01AM the previous night; the first second of February. He found that because he had actually been effective in not thinking about what he would be writing that he had no idea where to begin. So after watching hours of vapid late night television on a Saturday night so he could start writing right at midnight, he found himself with a blank Word document staring at him and nothing to fill it with. He went to bed.

In the morning he opened up his laptop again, and that blank Word document was still sitting there, staring back at him. He put his hands on the keyboard, and tried to think of a great first sentence. Nothing came. It was worse than staring endlessly at his résumé, which at least existed as a starting point. He couldn’t even figure out a first word for his novel, let alone fifty thousand. After sitting there staring at the blank word document and coming up with nothing for a couple of hours, he closed his laptop, stood up, and walked away.

He did anything to fill his time. He paced. He boiled water, staring at it as it slowly rose in temperature, testing the old adage and finding it untrue. He paced some more. He mowed his lawn, figuring that as long as he was walking back and forth and back and forth he may as well push the mower while doing it. He got out a pad of scratch paper and a pencil and a pen and stared at them until he decided that he was having more of a braindryspell than a brainstorm. He paced some more.

Finally the morning was over, it was noon, only four hours to go. He made lunch, taking as much time as he could to spread peanut butter and jelly on bread. He sliced his sandwich diagonally, then in diamond-shaped quarters, then triangles. He stacked them and made little towers out of the tiny peanut butter and jelly sandwich triangles and then decided he wasn’t hungry after all, throwing the whole strange scene away. It was 12:30. He paced.

He thought maybe peanut butter and jelly wasn’t what he was hungry for, that maybe if he prepared something more savory and elaborate he would find his appetite. He fiddled and peeked and poked through his refrigerator, his cupboards, his big freezer. He selected ingredients seemingly at random and lined them up on his counter one by one. He began preparing the meal. He chopped. He pressed. He juiced. He cubed. He tossed. He kneaded. He sautéed. He simmered. He sweated. He baked. He broiled. He set the table. At 1:50, he carefully plated a visually stunning three-course meal, and placing it in front of his seat at the head of the table, found himself still without an appetite. He nibbled until 2, then gave up.

He put away ingredients. He carefully wrapped leftovers. He washed. He dried. He scrubbed and scrubbed. He soaked. He sanitized the entire kitchen. Then he paced some more. He sat down in front of his scratch paper again and this time picked the pencil up. He began to write.

Super!

Astounding!

Great!

Amazing!

Wonderful!

Uncanny!

Fantastic!

Marvelous!

Common.

Ordinary.

Everyday.

Disappointing.

He threw down his pencil in disgust. Nothing. He had come up with nothing. Worse, he had come up with nothing and it had gone downhill from there. He glanced at his watch; it was a little after 3. He decided to be a little early. He grabbed his scratch pad, his pen and pencil and threw them in his satchel with his laptop. He was out the door in under a minute.

He didn’t even drive, he just walked the half-mile over to Boba Café with his satchel slung over his shoulder, whistling a happy tune. He felt good because he thought that if he could just meet someone else who was in the same boat, it would at least get him started. He would know for sure he wasn’t alone. The walk passed like nothing, and suddenly he was there.

He set his satchel down at a table where he was in clear view of the door, then went over to the counter to order a drink. If he was going to sit around a Café for hours, he was going to pay his way.

“Is the special any good?” he asked the young woman behind the counter.

“The coco-banana boba or the turkey-avacado wrap?”

“The coco-banana.”

“I haven’t tried it yet. It’s a coconut and banana smoothie, with boba. Everyone says they’re great. Have you tried boba before?”

“Yeah. Your honeydew smoothie with boba is excellent.”

“Yeah.”

“So…”

“Yeah?”

“So, I guess I’ll have the large coco-banana smoothie with boba.”

“Four twenty-five.”

He gave her exact change. While he was waiting for her to make his over-priced beverage he glanced at his watch; it was still only 3:15. He had walked too fast. After a few moments, she came back to the counter with his drink.

He spoke to her again. “I’m gonna be here writing all night. Some other people might show up later and join me. You don’t mind a bunch of writers hanging out here, do you? I’m thinking of making it a regular get together.”

“Sure, no problem. What are you writing?”

“A novel.”

“What’s it about?”

He racked his mind for an answer. He didn’t want to look like a jerk, saying he was a writer and not having any idea what he was writing about. He was trying to remember if he’d gotten anything worthwhile on his scratch paper, and he mumbled aloud “it’s uhh… super… astounding…”

“It’s about a superhero? Which one? Superman? Spiderman? Daredevil?”

“Uhh.. It’s a new one I’ve made up…” He just went along with her, pretending that this had been his idea all along. “It’s about how a uhh… a common man finds he has … uncanny powers. Yeah.”

“An origin story? Cool. I’m a big comic books fan! Can I read it when you’re done?” She didn’t look like any comic book geek he’d ever seen, but what did he know? He certainly wasn’t a comic book geek himself. She was probably more qualified to write a novel about a superhero than he was. But he was too deep into it to disagree.

“Sure. I’m trying to get the whole thing written by the end of the month, so I guess you can read my first draft in March…”

“Great!” Another customer was waiting at the counter. She glanced over, then back to him. “I uhh… I gotta go, but let me know how it goes!” She smiled at him before she walked over to the waiting customer.

He stumbled over and took his seat, setting his cold drink down and only then realizing that it had numbed his entire hand as he’d stood there talking about a novel he didn’t know if he could write. As he flexed it, it felt as though the cold had punched a hole right through his hand, he felt like he’d just promised that girl he’d be writing a novel about a superhero’s origin story. He figured it was as good a place to start as any. At least if he was writing about a superhero he would be writing. It might not be the great American novel, but that wasn’t the point of this project.

So he took out his laptop, and this time when he opened it up and faced that same blank Word document, he started writing.

* * * * * * * * * * *

“I can tell you’re lonely, kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know how in comic books when the superhero is just starting out, trying to make a name for himself figuratively he always comes up with the worst possible moniker for himself, and then a friend of his or some hot-shot reporter comes up with a much better, much cooler name?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, clearly you don’t have any friends and you’re not getting any publicity or you’d have a much better moniker than that.”

“Come on! It’s not really that bad, is it?”

“Tell me, kid, was I right? You’re lonely?”

“Yeah, but I don’t see -”

“Well, you’re gonna stay lonely with a superhero name like that.”

“You’re a hot-shot reporter. Why don’t you give me a better name?”

“Look kid, I don’t get paid to help no-name kids launch careers as vigilantes, and I can tell by looking at you that that is just what you intend to do, so buzz off and find some other jerk to do your dirty work. Didn’t your mother give you a name? Why don’t you go ask her opinion? And don’t even try to tell me the tragic tale of your mother’s death, kid, ‘cause I already heard it.”

“How did you know my -”

“I told ya, I already heard it kid, now buzz off and don’t come back until you’ve got a good story and are willing to give me an exclusive.”

“I thought I was a good story.”

“Well you thought wrong. You’re not even a lousy story, because there’s just no story to tell here. Just a lonely kid in fancy tights, looking for attention’s all I see. Now, you stop a bank robbery without getting anyone hurt, or you star in a major motion picture, and then we’ll take another look-see, and I think we’ll find a story.”

It was true. He was lonely. As he watched the reporter walk away, he remembered how he’d got to where he was today; he’s still be a normal young man if he’d just been content with being lonely. He had to go and ruin everything in a desperate attempt to find comfort in human companionship. If only he had stayed home that fateful night, Cinco De Mayo, just ten short months ago. It seemed so much longer since the accident, like everything that had happened to him couldn’t possibly fit into a year, let alone ten months. Maybe that was just the time distortion that comic books had put in his mind. So much could happen in those 26 short pages, but so very little could really happen in a year’s worth of comics.

In comic books, the hero’s origin might come clear slowly over the course of decades as small facts turn up, finally revealing a complete story only after hundreds or thousands of separate issues. Then again, it might be covered in just a few panels on a single page. When he looked back on it, his ‘origin story’ seemed more like the former. Job wasn’t even sure when, exactly, he had begun to change into what he now was, but at least he knew when he first started to notice that there was something odd about himself. It was right after the accident, but in order to really understand, you have to start a little further back in time, with Job’s lonliness.

Job hadn’t always been lonely. He had had a big family, a healthy social life, a variety of great relationships over the years with a variety of beautiful young women, and he had always known what to do on a Saturday night. Job always knew where the party was, and whether it was worth attending. He was certainly not the leader of his social circle, or the most popular man on campus, but he was by no means a loner. That is, he wasn’t a loner before. Before what, Job couldn’t really tell you, but he remembered having lots of friends and a big family and no trouble finding or maintaining a healthy, loving relationship. Then, before he had noticed anything was changing, he found out that all his family had died or moved away, his friends had found new social circles or new cities to be a part of, and Job could not, for the life of him, find a woman to be with.

Each individual death or cross-country (and sometimes international) move seemed totally natural at the time, and easy enough for Job to take. As people became physically distant (or buried outright), they tended to communicate less and less with him until one day he looked around himself and it was a Saturday night and he didn’t know what was going on. Not only that, but he didn’t have anyone left to call and ask. Father, mother, brothers, sisters, all dead.

The severity of that hit him pretty hard all of a sudden. He knew there had been fewer tears shed at each successive funeral, but he had thought it had something to do with himself becoming increasingly apathetic about the whole situation. That Saturday night he realized for the first time that the number of people even available to attend each funeral was simply dropping over the years. Thinking back, he realized why he had been the only one present at his oldest brother’s funeral; he was the final member of his immediate family. He was the final member that he could recall of his extended family. Had everyone else been as oblivious to this as he had been? Was he the next to go?

He tried to concentrate on this. Surely if every other member of his family had died within just a few short years, there must be some sort of connection between their deaths. Old and young, generations wiped out. Surely, he thought, some connection. Cancer, heart attack, car accidents, old age, SIDS, AIDS, all unrelated. There was one family, his mother’s cousin and his wife and children who had all died at once in a horrible house fire, but that was on the other side of the country. That was tragic, but it was in no way related to Job’s grandparents’ deaths. His grandfather had lung cancer, and once it got to his blood he was dead in three months. His grandmother had passed away in her sleep a few days later. His father’s parents had died before Job was old enough to even know them. A couple of car accidents, years apart, took the lives of two of his brothers and his mother and sister. Both incidents were because of drunk drivers who also died in the accidents. His youngest sister had walked away from the later accident with hardly a scratch on her, but rented a boat one day and never returned. The boat washed up empty a few days later, a little worse for being left apparently alone at sea.

He rattled off to himself all the seemingly normal ways his family had left this world since he had started undergraduate school, and on that Saturday night he realized that when he graduated with a PhD in a few short months not one member of his family would be alive to see it. Somehow it seemed worse to him that there was no apparent reason or connection between their deaths. How could so many good people be taken from this world so suddenly, an entire line of people wiped from the face of the Earth? How could he not have realized anything sooner?

Thinking along these lines brought him quickly to his now missing friends. Once, he had had so many. Funny, that in the midst of all the death in his own family, not one of his friends had passed away. Yet not one lived within 1000 miles of him. Who had been the last to go? Had it been Carla, flying to Senegal to be a missionary? Obviously, Job had no way to try to get back in contact with Carla. Who was before her? Fred? Melanie? Big John? He tried the numbers each had given him to reach them in New York, Seattle, and Milan, respectively. Every number was disconnected. He found his address book and began calling all of his old friends’ forwarding numbers and found that every single one of them was disconnected, or gave another forwarding number, that one being disconnected. Where had everyone gone? How had he lost touch with everyone he had ever known, and why hadn’t he noticed it along the way?

Job broke down and got out his little black book and began trying to reach ex-girlfriends. They might not be happy to hear from him, but at that moment he was beginning to feel a little crazy. He was beginning to feel like perhaps he had imagined everyone he had ever known, and any old voice would do, so long as he recognized it. After going from A to Z in his little black book he had had only one line connected, but an angry old man had answered, insisting that he didn’t know any Dolores, and wasn’t he aware of what time it was? Job was beginning to become frantic. He pulled out his photo albums. In them he found what he expected to find and it put at least a little peace in his mind. His friends and family must have existed, and all his memories of them weren’t just crazed dreams. He had photographs to prove it. There he was at Weschler’s Wieners with Big John and the guys. There he was curled up on the sofa with Dolores. There was that really great picture of Mel at his High School graduation, all those years ago.

He wasn’t going crazy, but maybe the universe was trying to mess with him. Maybe fate did exist, and it had decided to pick on Job. It occurred to him how ironic that would be, considering his name, but he just couldn’t figure out what it was that made sense about this situation. Somehow he must have become distracted by his studies or something, because his family was dead and his friends had all moved away and disappeared and he had somehow managed to avoid making any new friends or meeting even any potential girlfriends along the way. There he was, home alone on a Saturday night, with literally no one to call. Job had never found himself here before.

Surely it must have been happening every Saturday night since Carla’s plane took off, but this was the first weekend he didn’t have to work late on some paper due before Monday morning. He was finally coming to the end of his thesis paper and wanted to take the night off and have a good time, and he realized that he just didn’t know how to do that anymore. That he simply didn’t know how to have a good time by himself, and he no longer knew where to find fun people. He was at a total loss.

How do people without friends make new friends, he wondered to himself. Every time he had met someone it had been through one of his existing friends. He seriously couldn’t remember anyone he had met outside of the warm introduction of a friend or family member. He thought it must be possible to make new friends without the aid of existing ones, but he sat all that Saturday night just staring off into space with a photo album in his lap, contemplating what he could do to try to make up for lost time and lost friends, and when the sun started to peek through the windows and Job realized that he had not moved from that spot all night and had still not come up with anything, he was more scared than before.

He was not an unintelligent person. He was completing a PhD in Mathematics with specialization in theoretical models for advanced Physics; there must be something going on upstairs. That he could not even come up with a few bad ideas for how to get out of his situation left him feeling somehow inadequate as a human being. He had concluded then and there that there must be something wrong with him as a human being if he couldn’t even think of a way to reintegrate himself back into the social world.

* * * * * * * * * * *

He stopped writing just then, noticing that he had finished his Coco-banana smoothie and the boba at the bottom at the same time. He looked at his watch. It was almost 6. He’d been writing for two and a half hours. He’d been sitting there for two hours after he’d posted he’d be there, and no one had come in looking for him. Only one other customer had come in at all, actually, and they appeared to be friends with the young woman behind the counter. He wondered where all the people who’s said they’d be here were.

He had really been looking forward to doing this as a member of a group he could see. Knowing that there were close to ten thousand people writing novels at the same time was nice, but he wanted it to be physical instead of statistical. He felt a little like the character in his novel, left out in the cold by his friends with no one to turn to.

He wondered if that was why it was coming out that way. When he was writing, it was just like it had felt all those years ago, it just flowed out of him. Sure, he’d had trouble getting started, but once he’d got even part of an idea in his head and a few words down it had all just started gushing out through his hands and into the computer. It felt like he was just tapping into some huge wellspring of story. That he wasn’t making it up at all so much as he was simply interpreting it from the raw creative energy floating just beyond perception into the words that anyone could readily perceive.

He looked back over his work and was pleased to see that it was going as well as he’d felt it was going. He set there a moment, just letting it sink in. He thought about getting another drink. At first he was craving a huge, hot Chai Tea with a shot of espresso, but then his mind automatically chastised him for even thinking of drinking caffeine this late in the day, especially on a Sunday. Then, while he was thinking about various fruit medleys, he remembered that he no longer had a job to get up for in the morning and was under no pressure to even look for a job until his novel was done.

He stood up, found a trashcan for his empty cup, and went back over to the counter. The young woman behind the counter smiled at him as he approached, saying “How’s the novel coming?”

“Pretty good. I seem to be building momentum.”

“That’s good. Can I get you something else?”

“I want your biggest hot Chai tea, with a shot of espresso in it.”

“Staying up late tonight?”

“Working on the novel.”

“Right, sure. Umm.. with the shot of espresso, that comes to…” She rang it up on the register to figure it out, coming to “five twenty three.”

He dug out his wallet and his change and made exact change again. “You guys are making a killing here.”

“Not really. No one comes in. Everyone goes to The Coffee Plant.”

“But you have better coffee. Better everything. And they don’t even have boba!”

“I know. But they don’t come here. Look around.”

He knew she was right; no one bothered stopping in Boba Café. There was one other guy in the place, and it didn’t look like he even had a drink – he was just sitting on one of the couches reading a magazine, enjoying the music.

“I don’t know what it is. I tell all my friends you’re the best. I hope things pick up.”

“Me too. Lemme get that drink for ya’.”

“Sure.”

He stood by as she made his drink, enjoying the sounds of the process. The clanking, the banging, the pouring and bubbling and steaming. The stirring. And then she put a lid on it and handed him a drink worth all five dollars and twenty three cents. Lots of caffeine, lots of spice and flavor, plenty of body and mouth feel. Here was a beverage that, once it cooled down enough that it wouldn’t boil the top of his tongue off, would totally satisfy him. He savoured its aroma as he returned to his seat, then set it down out of his way as he began to write again, ignoring it for nearly twenty minutes while he waited for it to cool. The anticipation and the wild aroma creeping into his senses just added to the experience of the drink for him.

Just as he was re-reading the last couple of paragraphs to begin again, someone walked in the front door. Someone carrying a cup of coffee from The Coffee Plant. Someone he thought he recognized. Someone who walked straight toward him.

“Hi! I haven’t seen you in what… four or five years?”

“I guess not. Did we know each other through the GT’s? My memory of that whole period is a little fuzzy.”

“Mine, too. Yeah. I’m Rich. I think we both dated Tess at the same time, but I don’t think you knew it at the time.”

“I had an idea, but … Well, you dated her, so I assume you got yours, right?”

“Right. Did you know that her ex-boyfriends get together every once in a while, like group therapy? I guess she really does a number on everyone she dates.”

“You can say that again.”

“Anyway, so I saw you on the novel-writing site saying you’d be here, and I thought to myself ‘I wonder if that’s the same guy!’ So I just had to come and see for myself.”

“I guess it is. You’re writing a novel too?”

“Yep. I haven’t started yet, and I can’t stay tonight, but how about we get together next Friday night right here?”

“What, you’ve got a hot date tonight?”

“Yes. Well, my girlfriend is getting a table for us at a restaurant down the road, but I wanted to stop in and say hi.”

“Oh, don’t let me keep you! Go. Enjoy yourself.”

“I will. Anyway, why don’t you post that we’ll meet here next Friday at what? 6?”

“Sure.”

“And you can meet Amanda.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“Right. She’s writing, too.”

“Cool. Well, get back to her. I’ll see you Friday.”

“Yeah. See ya’.”

Rich disappeared out the door. That wasn’t exactly what he’d been hoping for, but it was better than being in this totally alone. And he could at least look forward to sitting with a couple of people and writing come Friday. Not that bad.

He turned his attention back to his laptop, trying to get moving again. He took a sip of his still-too-hot beverage and set it back down, further away. He put his hands to the keys, and without a moment’s hesitation, the words started flowing again.

* * * * * * * * * * *

After a few days he remembered that most people just go to bars when they want to meet new people, but that didn’t change his attitude about his own failure to be a normal human being. By then he was engrossed in his studies again, polishing the final draft of his thesis for review, and he couldn’t really try to reintegrate himself with society anyway. He just focused more intently on getting to the end of his final semester of classes, his final rewrite of his thesis, and it wasn’t until May, just one short week before graduation that he remembered how totally and utterly alone he would be after he walked across that stage. He wouldn’t even have the little human contact that being a graduate student amounted to after that. He would be lost.

He resolved himself to do something about it. He resolved himself to find out where the biggest Cinco De Mayo celebration was taking place and go there and have a good time and try to make some new friends while he was at it. He decided that if fate wanted him to be alone there wasn’t anything he could do about it, but that if he didn’t at least try to do something he would end up alone regardless of fate. He was at least going to try.

Since Job lived near the college, it turned out that he biggest Cinco De Mayo celebration was taking place within walking distance of his home. Even as he walked out his front door, he could see that the party was already in full swing; there were cars parked all up and down his block, half a mile from the official parking lot which must already be totally full. The event was being held at Sabroso’s Cantina, the biggest, most popular Mexican restaurant for miles around, and Job could see that they must have done a good job advertising it because there were streams of people constantly flowing into the event area from every direction, with hundreds or thousands of people already inside. Job paid the fifteen dollar cover charge without flinching and joined the flow of people inside and towards the margarita-dispensing stands. He felt so out of touch with the world that he needed a few stiff drinks to relax a little. Another fifteen dollars’ worth of drinks later and Job noticed that the band onstage was at least one he’d heard of. He headed over to the stage.

As he approached the stage, the already thick crowd just grew thicker and more volatile. This was no quaint Mexican music being played. These were real rock stars. They were putting on a big show, considering the fact that they were playing at a Mexican restaurant instead of an arena. Job felt bodies bumping into him on all sides, and couldn’t quite remember if he was supposed to apologize of just ignore it, or bump back or what. The drinks had helped loosen him up a little bit, which allowed him to squeeze himself into the crowd and almost begin to enjoy himself. Unfortunately, it also seemed to make him more aware that he didn’t quite fit in. Everyone around him seemed to be with their own friends, forming little circles and clusters of people from which Job was excluded. As he noticed this and began to think and over-think the situation, Job began to fall out of beat with the music and stopped moving altogether.

All of a sudden Job found himself separated literally from the throbbing, pulsating masses as they continued to move in time with music that he could barely hear over his own thoughts of separation. He stood still, a stone, steadfast in a sea of motion. So separated from that crowd, Job found it easy to see a path right out of it, much easier than the path into it, and he walked out of the tight crowd around the stage and out of the event altogether, beginning to head home.

If he had waited just one song longer or if he had stood in line for one more drink, he wouldn’t have been in the road at that exact moment, but he didn’t, and he was. And the car came out of nowhere. And neither Job nor the driver was sober enough to avoid the other, and there was a collision and an awful sound of the breaking of bones and the twisting of metal as the swerving car drove Job’s helpless body into a parked car on the side of the road. All Job could remember after seeing the flash of oncoming car was a strange sense of not being in pain, followed by the strange way the world spun around all of a sudden and he couldn’t move. Of course, Job reckoned in his drunken state that he was still standing still because he simply wasn’t part of the crowd. As he lay there, crushed between two cars, waiting for something to happen, all he felt was alone before he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The young woman who had been behind the counter came up on him suddenly. Well, it seemed sudden to him; he had been totally engrossed in reading the story as it had appeared before him on his screen. For all he knew, she may have been standing there for a while, reading over his shoulder before she spoke up.

“I’m gonna go ahead and close up for the night.”

“Oh, uhh… what?”

“I’m going to close up. Sorry. You’ve gotta go. There’s just no business tonight.”

“Oh. Oh! Sorry. Have you been standing there long?”

“No, no. I’m sorry, kicking you out like this. But we’re short-staffed and I’ve got to open the place up again tomorrow morning, early. You could come back then, if you like.”

“Oh, uhh… sure. Maybe I will. Let me uhh…” His mind was still in the story, wondering what happened to Job after the accident. He habitually hit ‘Save’ every paragraph or two anyway, but he hit ‘Save’ again, and closed his laptop. As he put it into his satchel with his scratch pad and things, he continued mumbling. “Get my … okay. Yeah. Be right out of your way… just a…”

She was already walking away, straightening the magazines on the table by the couches, then continuing into the backroom, shouting out “See you again!” before she disappeared.

He finished collecting himself, and threw away his now-empty cup, thinking to himself that he was going to be up all night after that. He walked to the door in a daze, and if he’d turned around he would have seen the young woman wheeling a mop and bucket out of the backroom, but he didn’t turn around. The cloud he felt in his mind hovered there, and without even noticing the walk in between he found himself with his key in the lock of his front door. Then all of a sudden he was sitting in front of his laptop at his desk with a fresh glass of cool water beside him and his continuing novel in front of him.

* * * * * * * * * * *

He was awakened by someone shining a bright light into his eyes. He tried to shut them, but found they were already shut. Still, he could see a bright white light that seemed to be passing across the length of his body. He opened his eyes and the light was still there, but he couldn’t see exactly where it was coming from. It appeared to be emanating somehow from a solid, opaque wall just above him. Then it was gone, and he didn’t wonder about the light too much just then because he was really beginning to feel sore. He could remember the accident, but softly, like something that has been filmed slightly out of focus, and with indirect lighting. He tried to pinpoint what parts of his body hurt specifically, but it seemed to be more of a generalized pain, almost entirely out of body, but still all around him. He tried to move, and found that he couldn’t lift his arms or legs or turn his head to the side.

The surface above him which had been glowing a moment before began to pull away. He realized that perhaps he was being moved and it was setting still, but from where he was that hardly made any difference. A man’s head appeared above him, looking down on him, a little confused. “Oh. You’re awake. Good.” This did nothing to clear up Job’s confusion.

“I’m Doctor Omnerhoff. You’re in the emergency room at Newman Memorial hospital. You were hit by a car, and from what they’ve told me, you were hurt pretty badly. I’ve just had some X-rays taken so we can see where the damage is. You don’t appear to have any open wounds or shattered bones, which is a good thing, and you don’t seem to have suffered a concussion. We’ll have to wait for the X-rays to come back before we know any more, but you may be the luckiest person to come through here tonight.”

“Why can’t I move?” Job’s voice seemed to be faint and far away, as though he couldn’t find the breath to speak. When he heard it come out that way, he panicked and tried to take a deep breath, only to find he could breathe normally and had simply forgotten to do so before he tried speaking.

“We’ve got you in a neck brace and restraints, in case something important is broken. We’ll remove them when we have more information. Now, if you need anything, jut let one of the nurses know.” With that, Dr. Omnerhoff disappeared from view.

Job was becoming more and more lucid, like waking up with a hangover more than being in shock after a serious injury. He couldn’t see anything but the lights and ceiling tiles above him, but he could hear a lot going on all around him. He realized that Cinco De Mayo must be a pretty dangerous night to be out and about, what with all the excessive Margarita and Corona drinking going on. He felt foolish for having tried to be a part of that. He felt especially foolish, since his night out hadn’t made him any friends, and may have cost him much more than the thirty dollars for some overpriced drinks and a has-been rock band. He could be crippled or paralyzed, and his insurance premiums were sure to go up after this. If only he’d stayed home he’d still be whole, even if he happened to be separated from humanity.

The idea that fate was making its position blatantly obvious occurred to Job as he lay there, waiting for Dr. Omnerhoff, or a nurse, or somebody, anybody, to come into view and tell him what was going on. Tell him whether he’d be okay. He had tried to go out and change his loneliness, and fate had turned to him and slapped him hard. He learned his lesson quickly; he was clearly meant to be alone right now. When fate decided it was time for him to have human companionship and connection again, it would let him know.

As he lay there, contemplating his fate, he kept seeing out of the corner of his eye that strange glowing. “They must be overcrowded if they’ve left me in the X-raying room,” he thought to himself. Still, he could hear people all around him, some in pain and some just complaining. They couldn’t possibly fit this many people in such a small place, and they wouldn’t dare expose them to all that radiation, would they? Before he could spend much time trying to figure out why the X-ray machine glowed at all and why so many people were squeezed so close to it, he felt hands undoing the straps that had been securing him in place. As the hands worked their way up several sets of straps a woman’s head appeared above him.

“There’s nothing wrong with you. Not one bone broken. No internal bleeding. You’re a very lucky man. The Doctor asked me to release you.”

“That’s it?” Job noticed that his voice was back to normal.

“That’s it. You survived a car accident intact. We’ll just need to have you fill out some forms, sign a few things, and you’ll be free to go.” As she said this, she was removing his neck brace and helping him sit up. She handed him a clipboard with dozens of forms and pointed him to the waiting room to fill them out. Job walked in a daze, now seeing the people who he had heard crying out before. Most of them were still covered in blood or had loved ones nearby. He looked down at himself and saw that while his clothes were pretty torn up, he didn’t appear to have bled at all. He didn’t have any injuries, and he didn’t have anyone to celebrate this fact with. He sat down and filled out form after form in a daze. “How has this happened?” he thought to himself.

Job wasn’t sure if it was the time that had passed or the strange implications of what was going on in his life, but he found himself quite sober when he reached the end of the forms he had been given to fill out. He turned them in at the front desk and carefully walked home. Luckily for him, Colleridge Memorial hospital was not much farther from where he lived than the Cantina had been. He figured it was probably near daylight, considering how empty all the streets seemed. When he arrived home he saw that he was correct, it was just after four in the morning. He decided to try to forget that this had happened for a little while and get some sleep. Job fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.

When he woke up the next morning, the whole incident seemed as much like a dream as his ever having friends and family had on that lonesome Saturday night, weeks ago; the only way he knew it was true was the very visible physical evidence. His shirt and pants had been ruined, and he was still a little sore all over. Again, it was that strange pain he had been feeling the night before at the hospital, a sort of all-over pain, but just outside his body – not in it. He didn’t think it deserved any pain pills, so he didn’t take any, and after a little while either the pain had passed or he just didn’t notice it anymore.

It was a Sunday, and he decided that rather than sit around and contemplate his luck at surviving being struck by a car and his unluck in being surrounded by friends and family he would go over his thesis again. He had read it literally hundreds of times, but it was distracting enough that it occupied him the entire day. The next day he presented it for final review, and it was just a whirlwind from then until graduation. Job had a job lined up with Los Alamos Research Facility in the fall, so once he’d graduated he was free for what would probably be his last summer off. This would probably have been seen as a great opportunity to let loose one last time before embarking on a career in secret mathematical theory for the next forty years, but for Job it just gave him a chance to think.

He thought about the night of the accident a lot. He thought about the strange light he had seen coming from the X-ray machine. He realized, weeks later, that he had definitely not been in the X-raying room while waiting for the doctor’s return. He had simply been in too much of a haze when being told that he was perfectly healthy to have noticed at the time. He called his doctor and set up an appointment to go in for a follow-up. He lied and said he was still sore from the accident and wondered if maybe one of his ribs was fractured after all. They took him at his word and actually happened to have an opening that afternoon. Job’s relief that he would not have to wait long to see whether he saw the same glowing light coming from a different X-ray machine came across to the receptionist as relief that he would not be in pain for long. She didn’t think twice about it.

After that call, the day went by very quickly for Job. He had been thinking himself into a dead end for days when it had occurred to him that perhaps there was something about the X-raying process that had affected him. His mind then refused to go back to the tedious re-examining of the blur of Cinco De Mayo until he had more information. More first-hand information. Information about what he’d seen while being X-rayed. If any time had passed between his setting down the phone and his name being called by the nurse at the doctor’s office, he had simply missed it. All of a sudden, Job was being taken exactly where he had wanted to be taken, placed in front of the machine he had been waiting to see. All of a sudden, the nurse was donning a lead-lined vest, and then he saw it again.

Right where he had expected it to be coming from, he saw the glow again. As the piece of film was exposed by the X-rays, he could see what appeared to be a bright white light emanating from the machine on the other side of him. He closed his eyes and the room disappeared, but that steady white glow was still there. Then it was gone; he heard a click as the light disappeared and opened his eyes. The nurse had turned off the machine. She took the exposed film and left him alone with his thoughts.

Not long later the nurse returned to lead him to a tiny examining room to wait for the doctor. Even as the doctor came in and looked at his chart and his X-ray and poked and prodded him and asked him questions about where it hurt, and was he tender there or here, he was already someplace else in his mind. The doctor prescribed him a mild pain reliever and sent him on his way, ensuring him that it was probably just a bruise on his ribcage that should heal by month’s end. Job did not go home after his doctor’s appointment. Instead he went straight back to the university he had recently graduated from. He went directly to the physics department.

Job knew well that even after a semester ends the professors would continue doing their research. There was one department he was now very interested in visiting. His university was home to a very well known and well-funded professor whose research involved advanced uses for X-ray crystallography. Which meant that Job could get access to more X-ray producing equipment. Graduate students are always excited to meet someone who has even a feigning interest in their research, and the professor in question always had grad students working around the clock and around the calendar for him. Job went straight for the grad student who looked as lonely as Job himself felt, and he was not disappointed.

Job spent the next six hours amazing the grad student with his apparent easy grasp of advanced X-ray crystallography and its applications. Job pulled this off mostly by combining his enthusiasm to learn more about his strange ability to see X-rays with a little trickery. Every time the grad student would turn on some bulky experimental device, Job could see before his own eyes what it was doing. “I see. You’re dispersing a coherent beam of X-rays into proscribed paths,” Job would say when he saw a single beam of pure white light split out into a dozen smaller beams which got bounced off of or passed through a variety of barriers. Or “Are you trying to extend the capacity of fiber-optics by doping them with lead and shooting X-rays down them instead of visible light?” when confronted with a device similar to the X-ray laser he had seen earlier coupled onto a coil of what appeared to be thin fibers of metal, but all of which emanated a pure white light at their tips. Every time he mused like this, the grad student would ask Job again why he hadn’t joined the professor’s studies. He said simply that he merely had a hobbyist’s interest in X-rays, but that his real passion was advanced mathematical theory. The grad student seemed to buy it.

At the end of a long night Job was getting more and more used to the idea that he could now not only detect X-rays visibly, but that he could concentrate and make out the outlines of building structures and bone structures and metal components when he looked closely at the X-rays penetrating these varying substances. He even had the opportunity to let the grad student know about a potentially dangerous ‘leak’ of radiation that went straight upstairs into what appeared to him to be a biology lab. He could see tiny reclining skeletons of what must have been rodents of some kind behind the strange grid of what must have been their cages. The grad student must have been responsible for that particular piece of machinery personally because he was both grateful and embarrassed when he found that Job was correct. Mostly just glad that the professor hadn’t been the one to catch the mistake.

Job was able to step out while the grad student was trying to replace the misaligned shielding and decided to walk home. It was the darkest night Job had seen in a while. It occurred to him that it must be a new moon as he stepped outside into the encompassing darkness. Thinking to himself about his newfound ‘power’, Job began to see that there must be trace amounts of X-Rays passing through everything all the time; he kept catching glimpses of the super-structures of cars and slight glows above closed doors, but coming from the other sides of walls. His mind now had the additional information it had been looking for, but it certainly didn’t know what to do with it. He decided to sleep on it that night.

One thing he did know for certain; Superman’s X-ray vision, this was not.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Looking up from his laptop, he saw that it was getting late. He was tired, but not sleepy. Probably just the caffeine keeping him awake. He decided it wouldn’t hurt to try to get some sleep, to get a fresh start on writing again in the morning, when his fingers were more accurate and his eyelids less heavy. He saved again, redundantly, and closed his laptop, putting it to sleep. Then he followed it, shuffling into his bedroom and finding himself readily able to pass into slumber. He slept without dreaming.

In the morning after breakfast when he sat down at his computer, instead of going right back to writing, he went to the official website for the novel-writing project and updated his ‘live’ word count. Everyone who was registered with the site had a little progress bar showing how close they were to 50,000 words which appeared next to their name everywhere. It was based on the honor system; everyone was trusted to put in accurate numbers. He looked at his word count and updated his number from zero to five thousand, five hundred and three words. His little progress bar updated, now showing him over 11% of the way there after only one day. If he could keep this up, he could be to 50,000 words by the end of next week.

He looked at other people’s numbers so far. A lot of people still showed only zeros, but most everyone seemed to have at least a couple hundred words. One person’s word count was at one hundred and twenty-eight thousand, which he simply did not believe could have physically been written in one day. Obviously, some people weren’t following the rules. For him, the rules weren’t nearly as important as the writing itself, but he still didn’t have any intention of bothering to break them. He checked his email, then got back to writing. He wanted to find out what other sorts of super-powers Job might have, and the only way he knew to find out was to see what he wrote down.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The next day Job felt he had a better idea of his place in the world. He had read superhero comics as a child, he knew there must be more to his special abilities than the ability to detect X-rays. Right now he just needed to figure out what his other powers were and what he was supposed to do with them. He couldn’t help thinking about them as ‘powers’. It had been ingrained into him from an early age that X-ray vision was a super power of superheroes like Superman. Job didn’t feel particularly super, but he could hardly deny that his special sensitivity to X-rays was certainly powerful. Not for stopping crimes directly, or for seeing through disguises, but is certainly set him apart from the rest of his graduating class.

By this time in Job’s thinking, the idea that he had powers that he must come to understand and control had completely wiped his coincidental loneliness from his mind. If only he had known how his extended vision was related to the deaths and disappearances of all his friends and family he might have ended up going a totally different direction. As it was, instead of following a course of dark revenge like he had read in so many of Batman’s comics, he was set on pursuing a quest to do good for its own sake. He still had no idea how being able to detect X-rays could be used to do good for mankind, except that maybe if he took up the suggestion that he go to work on X-ray crystallography for a living he could possibly advance the field further than every other scientist for a generation. Still, somehow Job sensed that there must be more to him than that. He just needed to figure out what it was.

Almost as soon as he began really concentrating on it that morning, Job realized that he had never had an X-ray before the accident. His family couldn’t afford dental care for all the children, and since he’d never had any toothaches or other problems, he had been among those without. He had never fallen out of a tree and broken a limb – he had fallen out of plenty of trees, but until that moment he had always assumed it was his amazing luck that had protected him from serious injury. Now that he was thinking about it, it occurred to him that perhaps it was related to his ability to walk away from that accident unscathed. He remembered signing the police report describing the accident. Job had been wedged between two wrecked cars. The one that had hit him contained no survivors and the other had been parked, but had been totaled on impact. How could the force of the collision have passed from the moving vehicle, through his body, and into the parked car without doing any damage to him? Without even scratching his skin or breaking his bones or even bruising him? He remembered being sore, but he did not find a single mark on his body, and even the nurses had seemed slack-jawed at his total freedom from injury. Maybe they had seen the driver of the car.

Job thought that perhaps he was invulnerable. Then he reconsidered. Wouldn’t he have noticed something like that before? He could remember skinning his knees as a child. He had definitely caught the chicken pox. He was not ‘Unbreakable’. Then again, he couldn’t remember ever having to put a single band-aid on a skinned knee or having to take time off school for the chicken pox; he had gotten better over a single weekend. He was sure they were supposed to last longer. Maybe he could just heal quickly. He was fiddling with a pencil as he was thinking this, and all of a sudden, surprising even himself, he stabbed his pencil down into the back of his own left hand with all his strength.

And he screamed out in pain.

And the blood didn’t look like it was going to stop.

And the pencil seemed to be stuck in the back of his hand for good.

And eventually he was able to wrench the pencil free from his tortured hand and toss it aside as he grasped his hand, torn with pain, covered in blood, and he hopped from one foot to the other in agony, trying to decide what to do. The idea that he was invulnerable was now clearly and finally out of his mind. He certainly hoped that the bit about rapid healing was true, because he realized that he was losing quite a bit of blood. He wondered how hard it would be to clean blood up off a hardwood floor. Finally it occurred to him that perhaps he ought to go clean out the hole he had made through his hand and maybe put one of those band-aids finally to use. Maybe go see the doctor again.

Job trailed drops of blood to the bathroom, still clutching his left hand tightly with his right as he went. When he released the pressure over the bathroom sink, what seemed like too much blood fell down into it, splashing back up and making the sink appear to have been filled to the brim with blood and then drained. This blood must have been between his hands, though, because there didn’t appear to be a river of blood coming from either hand anymore. He turned on the cold water, getting his blood all over the faucet, and put his hands under the clear water.

He screamed again.

The water felt too warm on both of his hands and too cold on the hole in his left hand. He wasn’t sure if one was burning or the other, he just knew that it hurt just as much as when the pencil had still been lodged in his hand. He rinsed off as quickly as he could, but waited until the water ran clear again over his hands and he could rinse most of the blood off the basin of his sink. The pain was subsiding. He corrected his own thought; the pain was just as intense, it now felt as though it was no longer originating from the wound itself, but pressing in from all around his left hand. Like what he imagined phantom pains must feel like to people who have lost limbs, except he was feeling a sensation that could only make sense if his entire left hand was enveloped in some sort of thick, extra layer of flesh, and it was that second, invisible layer of flesh that was now in pain. He examined the wound closely. He could see that it was not nearly as deep or severe as he had first thought it was; he must have imagined that he’d stabbed clear through his hand!

In fact, Job decided that he must have been severely overreacting to the shock of what he had done, because it appeared that only the very tip of the pencil could have gotten into his hand. The hole was far too small to have accommodated the entire diameter of the pencil shaft. It looked like the tip of the pencil had even broken off in his hand. Perhaps that was why it had hurt so badly; there was pencil still lodged in his hand. He found some tweezers in his medicine cabinet and carefully and quite painfully extracted the graphite tip of the pencil from his hand. He rinsed the wound again and went to put a band-aid on it, discovering that he didn’t really own any band-aids. He decided he should probably go pick some up. He walked out of the bathroom and back into the hall and saw something that made him put off going for band-aids right away; the blood on the floor.

He got right to work cleaning up the trail of blood he had left in the carpet on the way from his study to the bathroom. Job never regretted investing in a steam cleaner for his carpets. When used correctly, and right away, it could remove just about anything. With a second pass, he re-Scotch Guarded the affected area. He even found that one of the solutions he had bought to maintain his hardwood floors had instructions specifically for cleaning up blood. Job got so involved with cleaning everything up from his little ‘accident’ that he just kept cleaning. He ended up spending the rest of the afternoon pleasantly cleaning his entire home. Even though he would be leaving it permanently in a few short months, Job still took pride in the place where he lived and was glad to do what it took to keep it looking its best.

As he was putting away the last of his supplies and washing his hands of the latex dust from the gloves that he always wore when cleaning, he saw that there was no trace of the wound left on the back of his left hand. Talk about rapid healing; this must have set some sort of record! Job was happy to have discovered this advantage, even though it had hurt a lot. Actually, there was still a vague sense of pain pressing in from all sides of his hand, just outside his actual skin. He had nearly stained his carpet and ruined his expensive hardwood floors, but he could heal rapidly. Not as good as invulnerability, but good enough. Not Superman, but better than average.

Since Job knew Superman was fictional he realized he wouldn’t have comparable abilities; we give Superman the powers we know man cannot possess. Still, Job had two powers very similar to powers of Superman: Nye invulnerability and X-ray vision. Sort of.

* * * * * * * * * * *

After a couple of hours writing, he decided it was time for a break. He updated his word count to seven thousand, one hundred and thirty, now over 14% of the way there, and closed his laptop. He had already written the minimum number of words recommended by the site for each day, and was way ahead overall. That passage had been fairly intense to begin with, but had then tapered off with the cleaning and the fairly low-key way Job had confirmed his powers, so he found himself losing interest.

He worried that if he was already losing interest on the second day, only 14% of the way through the minimum word count, how he could possibly make it to the end of this. Would he be able to keep going until he finally got together with other writers on Friday? If he didn’t write another word between now and then he would be pretty far behind.

He’d always wanted to be creative. To write, to paint, to take his ideas out of his head and put them onto the page, the canvas, into the real world one way or another, but he’d almost always been told that he couldn’t succeed. And it had gotten to him, and it was reflected in his thoughts now, his doubts that he would be able to even keep this activity up through a second day.

To take his mind off his own growing self-doubt, he decided to get out and do something. It was the middle of the workday though, so everyone would be busy at work. He’d have to do something on his own. He wandered around his house for a while, trying to come up with something, and then decided to drive down to the local dollar theatre and take in a movie. He didn’t know what was playing, but he was sure he’d have at least heard of one of the movies.

When he arrived, he found only about a dozen cars in the parking lot, and took a spot right up front. There were ten movies playing on twenty-four screens, and the pickings were typical for a February; mostly movies that no one wanted to see, all competing for that ‘lesser of the evils’ consumer dollar. Plus, on one screen, they were still running the Matrix Reloaded/Matrix Revolutions double feature. He’d already seen both movies, and from the show times it looked like he’d miss the first half of Reloaded, but it was better than the rest of the trash playing.

The disaffected teenager in the box office let him pay for just Revolutions, saying it was playing to an empty theatre anyway. In the middle of the day on a weekday, it was no wonder. Since he was waiting to buy the three-movie box set coming out in March, he didn’t mind re-watching the movies in the theatre – maybe he would catch something new that would inspire him.

He bought a soda and popcorn from another disaffected teenager working at the concession stand, and ended up walking into the theatre just in time to hear the Merovingian cursing in French. “It’s like wiping your ass with silk. I love it.” He sat down and tried to pay attention to the speech which had been so overlooked when it was first heard, and which became so scrutinized at the end of last year. But he found his mind wandering.

He had seen this scene so many times, had it described and analyzed and recounted to him so many times and with so many different perspectives that it was like the back of his hand; he hardly noticed it anymore. While he waited for the action sequence that was to follow and the much-more-engaging Revolutions, his eyes wandered along with his mind. In the darkened theatre he noticed the glowing ‘EXIT’ sign, and it reminded him of something he’d read. That in turn led to thoughts of his novel, and where he might go with Job later on, and before he knew it he’d missed enough of the movie that it was the final crash of the car chase that caught his attention again. That still-spectacular shot always got him leaning forward in his seat, and from that point through the last half hour of the film, and then right through the two and a half hours of Revolutions, he was focused on the movie.

When it ended finally, with nearly twelve full minutes of credits for the two movies combined at the end, the lights came up and he saw for the first time that he’d actually eaten all of his popcorn and drank all his soda. He stood up, and it was fairly jarring being forced back into reality after so long in a much more compelling place. After taking in such a complex vision of a fictional world, he wasn’t sure he could come up with good ideas of his own for his novel.

When he left the theatre, he resolved not to try to write again that day, to pick up again in the morning.

He managed to get through the rest of the day and the night without worrying about his novel, and when he woke up in the morning, he re-read the last thing he’d written, and started again.

* * * * * * * * * * *

After so much excitement, Job decided to call it a day. No more trying to discover what other strange abilities he might have. He headed down to the local Cineplex to catch a movie. Nothing too exciting presented itself, but Job was simply looking for some sort of distraction from the newly unfolding events that had been occurring in his life lately. He bought a ticket to the movie that had the next showtime and wandered into the theatre to try and relax. Unfortunately, as soon as he walked into the darkened theatre he was right back to thinking about his special abilities again. This time it was because of an incessant glow he found he could not ignore even with his eyes closed, coming from the exit signs.

Job knew he had noticed the exit signs glowing in theatres before, but never to this extent. Or perhaps he had simply accepted it as normal and ignored it. Since he had spent so much time recently in differentiating visible light from X-rays, he knew immediately from the quality of the glow and the fact that he could see it with his eyes closed that what he was seeing was not the normal red glow that told normal people how to locate the exits in the dark. It was also not the white light of the X-rays he had been looking at. Actually, Job could not think of a color to describe what he was seeing, even to his own mind. There was no normal, visible equivalent to it. It was not until he had a chance to read up on the manufacture of exit signs later that evening that he learned that what he was seeing was a weak form of Beta radiation. Apparently all of these emergency exit signs used a slightly radioactive ‘Beta battery’ so that even in the event of a catastrophic power failure they would continue to be able to lead people to safety, day or night, for decades without replacement.

The problem with this discovery for Job was mostly in that it resulted in his totally missing the movie he had paid for. In the controlled, darkened theatre he had a great opportunity to practice focusing on this new form of vision. When he was just looking generally in the direction of the sign he simply detected a secondary glow in an indescribable color. When he really focused, and here he was not sure if he was doing something with his eyes or with his mind to create the focus, he could discern the shape of the ‘Beta battery’ inside of the sign. At the time he didn’t know what he was looking at, but after bringing it in and out of focus for nearly two hours he found he had a very good idea of its shape. He also found that even in the dim off-color light of the ‘Beta battery’ he could make out the shapes of the materials around him that variously absorbed or reflected or remained transparent to the Beta radiation. Mostly it seemed to just pass through everything, but some of the metal in the sign seemed to block it and he could see the shadows created by the metal as well as the outside shell of the sign. It was like nothing he had ever seen in movies or on TV or really even in comics; Superman could always just see through whatever materials he chose to and not through others. Job’s eyes seemed to be giving him information about what was inside and what was outside of things, and he simply needed to learn how to properly grasp their superimposition to be able to see like Superman did.

That, and carry an X-ray flashlight. Possibly sterilizing everyone he tried looking at, or worse giving them cancer. Job realized quickly that even with the ability to focus on and understand the insides of things at the same time as the outsides of things, his extended vision was limited to the available natural emissions of X-rays and other rays. When he was home again and researching the exit signs and then Beta radiation, he realized that he could probably detect a wide variety of different forms of radiation. Beta particles and X-rays were very different in the eyes of scientists, even if both of them were harmful to humans in extended doses and visible to Job even in very small doses.

Job tried to think back in time to determine if he had just not been paying attention in the past, or whether his ability to see ‘more than meets the eye’ was part of a recent change in him. He simply couldn’t remember. He may have seen strange glows coming from things his whole life and simply assumed that everyone could see them; that it was completely normal. He definitely couldn’t remember having to be X-rayed before. His rapid healing had prevented him from ever needing to be treated for a broken bone and presumably had been what kept him from cavities and other dental woes. Perhaps if he had been one of the children to get a dental checkup once in a while, he would have noticed the strange light sooner. Maybe he would have asked about it, and his abilities would have been found out. Would he have been taken away from his parents at an early age and put under observation and subjected to a variety of cruel and unusual tests? Job figured that it was for the best that his now known abilities had worked in concert with fate to keep his secrets safe.

* * * * * * * * * * *

DING!

He was interrupted in his writing by an incoming email. Some company had seen his updated résumé online and wanted him to come in for an interview. It was a job for another big corporation doing almost exactly what he’d been doing before, but they wouldn’t say how much they paid. They gave a phone number to call to set up the appointment.

Thinking it a lark, he gave them a call to see what sort of operation they were running, and whether they paid enough to support him. The woman in Human Relations told him he could come in that afternoon if he was available, but that he would have to ask the interviewing manager about the pay scale. He said that that afternoon would be no problem, and they set an appointment for him to arrive for the appointment at 1PM. He already had directions in the email, so he thanked her and politely got off the line.

He figured there wasn’t anything wrong with going to an interview. That if the process of finding new employment was this easy he couldn’t understand why everyone was so worried about him. He knew they’d already seen his full résumé online, but he printed out a fresh copy to take with him to the interview. He also showered and shaved and ironed a shirt and pants to give the best possible first impression. He was nothing if not professional at heart these days.

By the time he got himself in order, it was time to get on his way. He knew where the place was; he’d practically driven past it every day on his way to work. He timed it to arrive twelve minutes early, giving him time to park, find the right entrance, and get in contact with the Human Relations department before his scheduled interview time. Everything was going according to plan and he did turn out to be a couple of minutes too early for whoever in HR was supposed to be meeting him. This also suited him fine, because his having to wait would make his interviewer feel an artificial sense of power over him, hopefully giving him an edge over other interviewees who appeared too eager to take their bosses jobs. He was still in the mindset that being productive and happy in one’s job was better than always trying to get ahead into someone else’s job.

After several extra minutes, a young lady came downstairs and escorted him up to a cubicle, asking him to wait there; they weren’t ready for him yet. Nearly ten minutes passed before someone else spoke to him, asking him if he was being handled, and by whom. He honestly replied that she had not given her name, but the young woman who had walked him upstairs and told him to wait here was sitting across the row. Another few minutes passed, and eventually someone told him to use the computer he had been sitting at for nearly twenty minutes to begin taking the technical proficiency part of the interview.

It was self-paced. It covered basic customer service issues and chain of command handling first, then tested English comprehension and retention of complex data followed by an increasingly difficult timed math section. He found that he hadn’t done some of this percentage of a percentage of a quantity that decreases over time math without a calculator since high school, and thought he was doing quite poorly and taking too much time. He only answered just over half of the math questions at all; he simply ran out of time.

Then he was waiting again, this time for the right person to look over his scores. He had been there for just over an hour after his ‘scheduled’ appointment. Fifteen minutes later an older woman came to him and told him that he had the highest scores she’d seen, and would he please fill out this application, they would be glad to consider him. The application was 16 pages long, and his résumé already covered 90% of it in one form or another. He carefully went through it answering each redundant question in tedious, printed longhand, most of the time copying the answers directly across from the copy of his résumé he’d brought with him.

When he finally finished it and found someone to alert to this fact without causing a security problem, he was directed to sit down again and wait until the appropriate HR person could interview him. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly 3PM, two full hours after his ‘scheduled’ appointment. Soon he would be able to actually interview. He prepared himself mentally, which basically amounted to sitting up straighter and thinking of how to describe his ability to deal with a tough situation. He’d never had a problem with an interview, and had never failed to be offered a job he had interviewed for.

Shortly, the older woman came back and said that the woman who would be interviewing him was in an interview with someone else, and that a second and third person were already waiting, but that she would see if she could find him a private room to wait and then to be interviewed in. They walked up and down the length of a row of offices and she seemed genuinely surprised that each one was occupied. They went downstairs to where there were rows and rows of cubes that remained totally unoccupied, and again she appeared surprised as each and every office was in use in one way or another.

Finally, apologizing profusely, she escorted him to the break room on that floor. She said it wasn’t in use yet, and that he could expect to see someone from HR to interview him soon. He set and continued waiting patiently. In order to remain patient, he didn’t allow himself to look at his watch. He looked at the break room supplies, the coffee machine, the typical corporate art. He counted the tiles in the ceiling. He drummed his fingers. Finally, another young woman showed up to interview him.

He followed along at first, but it became quickly clear that she had little information about the job or what it required, and had less experience interviewing people. He helped her through it in the most friendly way possible, having interviewed people for similar positions dozens of times in the past. She took notes and seemed to be thankful for the help. When they got through the questions she was required to ask, she asked if he had any other questions.

“Do you know what the pay rate is?”

“They didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“I think it’s 9 or 10 dollars an hour, but don’t quote me on that. I’ve got to get the man who would be your direct supervisor to interview you now anyway – he should know.”

“Okay.”

With that, she was gone again.

He continued to not look at the time. He didn’t want to know. Watching seconds pass while waiting just made them pass slower. He stopped thinking about the time, and before it seemed like too long had passed, a big, hairy man poked his head around the corner, peering into the break room curiously. “There you are. Sorry about the room, we’re interviewing to fill this entire floor, so we’re a little … well, sorry.” The man sat down across from him.

The interview with the supervisor went faster than anything else that had happened there that day. He simply confirmed his experience and answered the man’s questions thoroughly. The supervisor informed him that it looked like they’d offer him the job, but he’d have to pass a drug test first, and handed him information about where to go pee in a cup for them. The man also went over their benefits briefly, handing him another packet of information. He didn’t mention pay at all.

“Do you have any further questions for me?”

“What’s the salary?”

“They didn’t tell you?”

“No. She said she didn’t know.”

“It’s nine twenty-five an hour.”

“Is that flexible at all?”

“Uhh… “

“Well, if it isn’t at least eleven, I’ll need to get a second job.”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask HR. Do you want to wait while I find someone?” The man was standing to go find an answer.

“No, no. Here. I’ve got to go do the drug test anyway, and it looks like,” He finally looked at his watch; it was five minutes to five, “Yeah, it looks like they’re already closed, I’ll have to go tomorrow.”

“I could talk to them about it, and when we get your drug test back, if we decide to offer you the job, which I believe we will, we’ll call. I’ll be sure they have the information.”

“Perfect. Thanks.”

“No problem. Thanks for coming in. I’ll walk you out.”

He was escorted across the building to the door he’d come in, and let out politely. He went home. The interview process had taken over four hours, and he didn’t see the interviewing supervisor until the last five minutes he was there. He was beginning to grow weary of the way the corporate world operated. If he’d thought more about it, it would likely have occurred to him that they were hiring him for less than he was worth because they expected him to quickly seek out and find advancement within the company. Of course, if he’d come to that conclusion he almost certainly wouldn’t have bothered with the drug test the next day.

But he did.

The interview, the time it had taken and the redundancy of it all, had put him off his writing that night. He’d fussed about with what he’d already written, changing a few words here and there, fixing spelling and grammar errors, but the length did not increase before he went to bed.

When he woke up in the morning he went straight in to the specified doctor’s office and urinated into a tiny cup to prove that he still didn’t bother taking illegal drugs. Thus, he was from then on simply waiting to hear back about the salary. If he could do this job easily and perhaps earn the rest of what he needed with a part time job on the side, he should be fine. He kept his résumé online in hopes that he might get a better offer.

He went home, sat down, and this time found he had something to add to the story.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Something Job didn’t find out about his childhood was that his darkest fears of being known, of being put under observation and subjected to a variety of cruel and unusual tests, were true at one point. When Job was born he had been the result of a government program that had combined fragments of human DNA with the infinitely more complex equivalent to DNA that had been found in the cells of the deceased alien bodies in the Roswell crash. They had originally tried simply cloning the alien genetic materials, but every time they did the result would die quickly when exposed to the living womb of any Earth-borne creature, Man or animal. The technology simply did not exist yet to try to incubate a fetus to term artificially, and the best minds in the world could not work out what was going wrong with their attempts.

Scientists began grafting bits and pieces of human DNA onto the alien genes and tried again and again until eventually they stumbled upon a seemingly random strain (actually an apparently mutant strain) of the alien genetic code, which when spliced with a healthy dose of human DNA managed to survive the initial implantation into the living womb of a surrogate human mother.

The living expression of that strange mix of genetic material was born into the world in no time at all compared to the decades of research, trial and error which had gone into creating it. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of the best minds in medicine, biology, chemistry, and more far-flung fields such as xenobiology (a newly validated field to be in), theoretical physics and mathematics, and agriculture had worked in one way or another on the various parts of the puzzle that eventually culminated in Job’s birth. Only a few dozen ever knew that it was more than pure theory, and only a few of those ever had first-hand experience with the baby that resulted.

Those that did have first-hand access to the baby wanted to poke and prod at it to no end. They subjected it to tests to try to determine how it differed from a normal human baby, partially because it looked so much like one - the fully-grown bodies of the recovered life forms from the Roswell crash had looked nothing like humans. They were in fact not classifiable by any existing standards, which all related to life on Earth and were simply inadequate when faced with this new biology. What was it that made this life form so similar in appearance to humans? They had ended up using less than 3% of human DNA in the process, and compared to the length of the alien genetic code, humanity ended up being less than a thousandth of a percent of its total code. Where had that other 99.999% of his genetic code expressed itself?

The baby was exposed to every toxic substance known to harm man, and seemed fine. The baby was exposed to every form of radiation known to man, and in every intensity that could be generated at the time, and all it did was try to shield its eyes from a light that the researchers could not see. They subjected it to physical stress tests usually reserved for high-endurance industrial products undergoing critical trials, and it was during these trials that a Ms. Elaine Hardin was driven over the edge watching these cruel men do such horrible things to an innocent infant. Ms. Elaine Hardin was barren, and could never have her own children. This is what had created the drive in her to study human genetics; she wanted to try to find a way to cure her own genetic imperfections and prevent future generations of women from having to suffer as she did.

Not being able to have her own children was one thing, but standing by while these heartless bastards tortured an innocent baby, regardless of its genetic origins, she simply could not do. One morning she walked into the compound where the baby was being held and, using some of the toxins that the baby had not even flinched at having poured across his skin and down his throat, she quickly and permanently dispatched every scientist on the staff that day.

They were in the midst of testing the baby’s ability to withstand a sustained crushing force. When Elaine got to the baby he was pressed between two large metal plates. According to the readout, this eight-week-old infant was currently under over twelve thousand pounds of pressure per square inch. She pressed a few buttons and as the pressure began to dial down instead of continuing upward, the baby giggled. Or at least she thought she heard it giggle. It might have been a final gurgle from the melted face of one of her ex-colleagues. Still, it sounded like a giggle to her.

Eventually, the infant was freed from ‘that horrible contraption’ as Elaine referred to the device the baby seemed perfectly content to have been squeezed into before she arrived. Had anyone been left alive, they might have thought Elaine a bit crazy for talking to herself. Of course, when the next shift came in later that day they would not doubt that Elaine had been crazy. It would not take long for them to track her down. Reviewing the security tapes, they could see it all; she had killed everyone in a sort of mad rage, then wrapped the baby in blankets, put the blankets into a lead-lined duffel, and simply walked out the front door with him undetected. They were able to track the secret transmitter in her car all the way to the Nevada border, where she was caught with a car-seat but no baby.

It took a few days of intense “interviews” with Elaine, but they eventually located the doorstep that she had left the baby on. The family there had no difficulty at all giving up a baby they had only known for a few days, especially in exchange for the sum of money they were being offered. They had a mortgage to pay, after all. By the time it was discovered that the baby they had recovered was not the baby they had created, Elaine had hung herself in her isolation room from her own hair. They had no way of knowing when she had made the initial switch of the baby they wanted and the baby they ended up with.

Elaine had simply stopped at a hospital wearing her sister’s badge and uniform (Elaine’s sister was an OB/GYN who was known to work at a variety of regional hospitals, depending upon where her patients ended up), and switched the babies without once being questioned. The baby that the government ended up with was supposed to be named Job. It never would be.

The boy who grew up being called Job would never learn of his true origins, either. Had he gone just a few short months longer without discovering how different he was on his own, the government would have had him in its clutches again. When Job had applied to do research for the government at the Los Alamos Research Center, he had had to go through a much more comprehensive interview and review process than one would go through to get a job at the local Starbucks. He had been submitted to a series of psychological examinations, including the entire MMPI series. He had been interviewed personally by every member publicly known to be working in the division he was applying for, and four levels of management above them. He had had blood samples taken and was tested not just for any traces of drug use of any kind, but also tested for all known communicable and genetic diseases.

When his genetic material was submitted for testing, it was taken to be a joke of some kind. This was not DNA. There were small traces of DNA in it, but mostly it was what appeared to be an infinitely more complex construction of thirty-seven bases they recognized and several proteins they could not identify at all. The people at the lab assumed it had been cooked up by the researchers at Los Alamos as some sort of prank. That was all they ever thought of it, because when they revealed that they knew it was a joke, it was never mentioned again to them.

Instead, the genetic material from Job’s blood sample was taken into custody by a government research branch long-thought retired due to budgetary constraints and something about ‘lost research data’. It was confirmed to be the genetic material of the lost baby immediately. Job was advised that his position had been secured almost immediately, and the plan was to simply take him into custody when he walked into their hands of his own free will. By this time, they had neither the funding nor the manpower to try to apprehend him otherwise.

Unfortunately for the scientists then being assembled again after decades apart in the hope of being able to once again study a trace of an alien biology firsthand, Job was in a car accident on Cinco De Mayo and became aware that he was more than just human. He began to explore his differences in a much less invasive way than the government had planned, and immediately was trying to decide how he could be using his differences for the good of all mankind. Unlike so many people working for the government today, Job believed that it was the responsibility of every man to do what is right, and the responsibility of those more gifted than the average man to go above and beyond just doing right in their everyday lives, but to live extraordinary lives and to do extraordinary good in the lives of those around them.

Job believed all this, and if he had known about his origins, or even just about his impending capture, he might have begun to characterize the American government as an enemy he must challenge. As it was, he considered himself proud to be an American, and dreamed of being able to use his X-ray vision and rapid healing and whatever other abilities he discovered he had to protect the American way. To protect American soil from terror attacks. To make America a better, safer place to live in. The more Job contemplated his increasingly interesting and complicated extra abilities, the more of an idealist he became. When Job discovered he could levitate a few inches above the ground, he was at a loss for how it would help him defend the American way, but he knew there must be something American that could be protected better from a few inches above the ground.

* * * * * * * * * * *

He found himself nearing ten thousand words, and it was still early on Wednesday. Nearly 20% done in three and a half days. He was sure he could make it to the end. He thought it would be nice to take a more serious break. Since he’d only submitted his urine a couple hours earlier, he probably wouldn’t be getting a call until the next day at the earliest. He was still ahead, even if he didn’t write another word all day. He decided to go daytripping.

He lived in a big, sprawling city, but there were dozens of relaxing, rural locations he could visit within just a couple of hours’ driving time. He didn’t even bother to look at a map; he didn’t have any schedules to keep besides his novel, and he was taking his laptop with him in case inspiration stuck while he was away, so that was a non-issue. He packed a brown-bag lunch, tossed his satchel into the passenger seat, and drove north.

North happened also to take him up, up, up into the hills and mountains, into higher elevations. His ears popped and popped again as he drove the winding road through the changing landscape. He took in the scenery, driving with his windows down, enjoying the clean country air as soon as he was out of sight of civilization.

Occasionally he would pass a group of two or three houses with a town name, but nothing drew his attention to stop. He passed through a town that looked like it might be ten thousand people strong, and just around the bend he found himself driving along what felt like a cliff’s edge down a narrow two-way road. Every time he looked to his left he simultaneously felt a sense of vertiginous fear and a sense of awe at the beauty of the forest and life and natural beauty he felt he was about to plunge into. Either the fear of a fiery death or the appreciation for the lush green beauty that surrounded him drove him to take the next turn off the road that he came upon.

It turned out to be a small dirt parking area for a trailhead. He parked, put his brown bag lunch in his satchel and his satchel over his shoulder, got out, locked up, and started up the trailhead. By this time the sun was almost directly overhead, but the grand, tall trees provided ample shade as he made his way up along the trail, deeper and deeper into the forest and further and further up the side of the hill. There was something sweet about the air that for some reason reminded him of the moment he had finally walked out the door on his last day of work, but he couldn’t figure out why. He could hear his feet crackling the underbrush as he walked, birds chirping and singing all around him overhead, leaves and branches swaying in the light breeze. There were no mechanical sounds, and the difference struck him as though he was hearing something new instead of missing something he was used to.

After nearly two miles of patiently wandering along the trail, he found himself approaching a summit of some kind. The ground was rising up to meet him, but then it was dropping away, and finally he was standing on a ridge gently curving away ahead of and behind him. The view was breathtaking. He could see across an entire valley, densely green throughout and apparently miles wide and at least a mile across. The floor of the valley was totally obscured by the tall trees growing along a ribbon of reflecting light he assumed was a stream or creek of some kind, but appeared to be as far down as the opposite edge of the valley was across from him. The scale of the huge bowl of the valley fooled his eyes in a way he found quite pleasing; its shape and proportions made it seem like something he could hold in his hand, photographed with a macro lens and blown up to billboard size before him. He sat down on a nearby boulder and munched his lunch as he took in the exquisite beauty of nature, the silence around him.

After he completed the thorough enjoyment of the lunch he’d packed, he pulled out his laptop and began to write, inspired by the natural beauty around him.

* * * * * * * * * * *

This had been the most straightforward of his powers to become evident up to that time. He had been thinking again of his parallels to the character of Superman, and had wondered if he had the ability to fly. He couldn’t remember ever flying, but he also couldn’t remember ever being able to see X-rays, either. He figured that maybe that was how he had been saved from excruciating pain when falling out of trees; he had subconsciously floated softly to earth. Probably someone else would have noticed that though, even if Job hadn’t. So, as Job concentrated on the idea that he might in fact be capable of flight, he stood up to go get a glass of water. Except that when he stood up he found he couldn’t walk. His feet had nothing to push against. They were a few inches above the carpet. Job was flying.

Well, no, flying really wasn’t the right word for it. Flying seemed to imply some sort of forward motion and some level of control over that motion. Job was simply levitating a few inches off the floor, kicking his legs a bit, trying to get some forward momentum but failing as his feet did not quite reach purchase. Then Job leaned forward a bit and found himself moving slowly in that direction. Straight into a wall. He reached out to stop himself and found that he didn’t bounce off the wall as he had seen astronauts do in zero gravity. He simply stopped moving as he pushed against the wall and his body shifted back into an upright pose.

He tried leaning backwards and found himself moving back away from the wall and into things he couldn’t see. Before he ran into anything else, Job leaned forward into an upright position and came to a stop in the middle of the room. He tried leaning left and found himself not just moving to the left, but also turning in the air to face that direction. He leaned to the right, and by leaning hard enough to the right found he could spin in place. As he continued to lean to the right he spun faster and faster, and when he stopped making an effort to lean he returned fully upright and suddenly stopped. The room still appeared to be spinning though and perhaps his stomach as well. Job realized that although he could spin faster than a top because he was just off the ground and didn’t have to worry about friction much, he really shouldn’t.

He also realized that he couldn’t do much practicing with this newfound ability in public. Unlike X-ray vision, this strange form of flight/levitation would be noticed if he used it where anyone could see him. Job really did not want to be found out. So he practiced floating around his house, getting the hang of moving without moving his legs. He realized soon that this must be what the Segway Human Transporters must be like to ride; he simply leaned in the direction he wanted to go and he was going. He had a turning radius of zero, and he was just a few inches above the ground. He wasn’t sure how fast he could go, but buzzing down the longest, straightest hallway he had, it seemed pretty fast to him. Smooth, too. Job noticed that everything looked as though he were looking at it through a steady-cam. A Segway would give you a bump as it went over a bump, and when walking there was always that slight bobbing of the whole of one’s perspective up and down with one’s footfalls, but Job was flying. His motion was totally smooth. That was really hard for him to get used to, and made everything seem to go by much faster than he knew it really was.

Still, over time he began to get the hang of it. After the first couple of hours he realized that he had not the first idea of how to get back down again. He was upright, floating still, trying to figure out how he was supposed to get down from just a couple of inches above the ground, imagining pushing off a low ceiling or having to find some weights or simply remaining just above the ground for the remainder of his life, and then he looked down to see if maybe his feet had some sort of answer. They did. He realized that his feet were already on the ground. He nearly fell over.

Except that instead of falling over, he found he was off the ground again, moving in the direction he was about to have fallen. He stopped. He thought about taking a step instead of floating forward, and found that his feet were on the ground again and that he was taking a step. He went to take another step and in mid-stride thought that he ought to just glide forward instead, and his foot never came down. Job saw that he must have some sort of subconscious control over his ability to lift off the ground. Like breathing or walking, he didn’t really know what steps he was taking to do it exactly, but he did it anyway. He hoped it was like riding a bike; he would hate to be going fast down the road and find himself suddenly grinding to a halt as he tumbled across the ground, losing momentum as he lost a layer of skin.

Job, by this point, was easily able to dismiss not having noticed this ability before; he had probably just never seriously tried to fly before this very day. Who would? Humans can’t fly. Job thought briefly that perhaps humans could fly, and that they just weren’t trying hard enough, not believing in it strongly enough, but he could remember hours of footage of early attempts at flight and knew that if anyone had believed that they could fly it was these strange people who strapped tiny wings or other contraptions to their backs and jumped off cliffs, often to their own demise or serious injury. If man had been able to fly, one of these men would certainly have done it first.

Then it occurred to him: A cliff! As he floated around his house, he didn’t go up and down as he went over small obstacles; he remained at a steady height as he moved about. Job thought that he might be able to experience something more akin to what he considered flight if he floated forward off the edge of a cliff. He would either stay at the same altitude and have a chance to try to figure out how to move up and down instead of just forward, backward, left and right, or he would plummet down to the bottom of the cliff where he would be able to stop just inches from impact. He got in his car and started driving north.

There was, a couple of hours to the north of the city, a large area of protected land with high cliffs and few people to see him trying this out. It was now the middle of a workweek, so even the hundreds or thousands of people who wanted to leave the city for the weekend would be thoroughly out of the way, as well. Being early summer there might be some young people out looking for adventure, out for a nature hike, but they should be easy enough to avoid. Or at least high enough that they wouldn’t believe their eyes when he tried to fly off a cliff.

A couple of hours is a long time to sit alone in a car in anticipation of possibly being ably to fly of one’s own power, and Job did everything he could to distract himself. Mostly he just thought about what other strange abilities he would be able to explore. He didn’t want to keep comparing himself to Superman; there were hundreds of other superheroes he had read about for years with powers at least as good as Superman’s. If he had even as little success as he was having so far with his X-ray vision and flight with the powers of Spiderman, Aquaman or any of the Fantastic Four, he would have quite an array of powers to choose from. Even if they were a little weak individually, they might be pretty useful together.

Job eventually arrived at his destination, though he did have to stop and ask for directions to a good trail a couple of times. He parked his car at the base of the trail and after noting that there was no sign that anyone else was using this trail, began to float forward along it, faster and faster as he went. The path was straight in some place, and Job found himself flying along through the forest as he had seen Luke and Leia do on speeders in Return of the Jedi. The path he followed wove between trees in some places, giving him an opportunity to practice making small changes to his direction of travel without losing speed, overshooting, or getting dizzy.

He soon found himself approaching the peak of the mountain he had been moving up, and a short distance from the top he slowed down and continued on foot. From the top of this place he would be able to see the entire valley below, and other peaks and ridges and cliffs for miles around. Job also knew that anyone looking in this direction would be able to see him at the top, which was why he decided to walk the last few yards to the top. He looked down on all the lush green growth of the forest below him and across to the different locations he might want to attempt to fly from, and as he focused on points far away he realized that he could make out very small details even miles away.

It was not like binoculars, which magnified something far away to that it filled your whole vision. Instead, he still had full perspective from the top of the mountain, but could also count the branches on a tree at the other side of the valley. He really concentrated and found that he could count the needles on one branch of a pine tree on that same tree. He closed his eyes and shook his head, not believing what he was seeing, and when he opened his eyes again, everything looked normal. He could see the whole valley in one sweep of his vision. Except that it didn’t get blurrier as he looked further into the distance – it stayed just as clear as if it were right next to him. Everything in his line of sight, whether the tree next to him or a tree on a ridge miles away, or the tiny cabin he had just spotted on the side of a hill at what must be four or five miles away, he could see with equal clarity.

He could count the shingles on the cabin if he wanted to. He could see that there was a newspaper on the porch, and he could read the articles on the cover. He wondered if he could focus as closely on something he was standing next to and make out cellular structures or something equally ridiculous, but when he looked at a leaf on a tree near him, it just looked like a leaf. He concentrated and he could see the unique venations and marks on the leaf. The subtle changes in hue from where one side had gotten more sun than the other. A tiny insect crawling along its surface. All of this, Job could see, but nothing closer. He even went so far as to grab the leaf, insect and all, and hold it mere inches from his face, but he could still only see the same level of detail as he could see on leaves yards or miles away.

Job had studied physics and optics, and the properties of his sight he was just noticing simply did not make sense. If his eyes were able to focus on something miles away and make out details that due to distance couldn’t be more than a hundredth of a percent of his total field of vision, then why couldn’t the same lenses in his eyes be used to focus on and make out details as small as the relative percentage of his field of vision, which in this case would mean sub-cellular structures of the insect crawling on the leaf? This extended vision must not be based on focusing light on receptor cells in his retina as it is understood by modern optics; it couldn’t be. There must be something else to it. Perhaps a form of clairvoyance, or somehow using additional surface cells from his body to get more data about things at great distances. Job was not certain that he wanted anyone doing the research necessary to really know how his different abilities really worked, no matter how curious he became about them. If it meant dissecting his eyeball, he wanted no part of it.

“So I have super sight as well, huh?” Job mused to himself, “I wonder what other powers I’ll discover on this little field trip.” He looked around carefully and after deciding that there was literally no one that could see him at all, began walking backwards down the trail.

He wanted to have enough room to really launch himself off the top of the hill. He got as far back as he could while maintaining a direct line of sight with the peak and then practically threw himself forward. He was nearly horizontal, he was trying so hard to get up some speed. It wasn’t until he was just about to pass over the highest point for miles around that it occurred to him that the idea that he would maintain his altitude when he passed over the lip of the precipice made almost no sense, considering he had had to add hundreds of feet to his altitude just to get to the top and had not run aground on his trip up. By then it was too late, he was committed to either fly off into the air or continue down the other side of the hill at his current breakneck pace.

At the last moment before he reached the very end of the upwards leading of the path, he intuitively kicked off the ground. Later on when he tried to remember how he had done this, it would seem odd to him that his foot had been able to touch the ground at all considering how far off the ground his body, nearly parallel with the ground below him, had been as he approached the peak. At the time some part of him had somehow just known that that is what he needed to do and had instructed his leg to do it. Lucky thing, too, considering he would otherwise have been aimed down the other side of the peak towards a very large boulder he might not have been able to get around in time. As it was, he kicked off the very peak of the mountain and found himself rocketing forward at the same breakneck pace as before, but now with the ground dropping precipitously away beneath him instead of staying steadily underfoot.

It occurred to Job as he moved higher and higher into the sky that he had not actually been horizontal just before; he had simply been parallel with the ground below him at the time, making him feel horizontal. He had actually been at about a thirty degree angle from ‘flat’, which was the angle he now found himself continuing away from the ground at.

The feeling of the air rushing by him was similar to what he had felt as he had sped through the forest on his way to the summit, but this experience was totally different; there were no obstacles here, just empty space that made him feel like he was hardly moving at all. Visible clouds were too far away to give perspective (and just how big is a cloud, anyway?), and the earth was now becoming far enough away that he couldn’t get a good feel for how quickly he would be traveling across his surface, were he nearer to it. he realized that his increased height may make him more visible and leaned back up into an upright position. Thereupon he discovered that he was now standing still, hundreds of feet above the ground.

The air moved across his body, but he was not moved by it. Job found that he could even see his own shadow upon the ground with his newly noticed super-vision. He practiced moving around, and found that he already knew how to change his altitude; it was simply a matter of thinking of going in a particular direction, and he would be going in that direction. To move up or down in addition to left and right, front and back, he simply had to imagine a composite of the three directions he wanted to travel in. Actually, it was much more natural than this, but Job had been trained as a mathematician, so he was used to breaking problems down into component vectors and viewing the new perspective as equal to the original thought.

Moving didn’t seem to take any energy, but changing directions seemed to take a little. If Job had been running along the ground, he would have collapsed long before covering the amount of distance he did, just to get up the hill, let alone the distance he covered flying around this way and that in the air. The amount of energy it took to change directions wasn’t a lot, either. It seemed to be about as much as it would have taken to lean in that direction from wherever he had been. Consequently, Job was able to fly around without growing tired or much noticing the passage of time until he noticed the sun disappearing over the horizon. By this time, he had traveled all over and around the forest, over hill and dale, down into valleys, along streams of water, and was not sure how far he was from his car when the sun started to set. He knew he wouldn’t be able to locate it in the dark, so as soon as he noticed the sun playing along the horizon, threatening to disappear, he shot straight up into the sky like a bullet, scanning the ground as he spun rapidly around in circles. He was getting better at focusing his vision, and faster, and found the original peak he had leapt from with no trouble, then was able to follow the trail down its side with his eyes as he began moving rapidly in its direction. He arrived at the trailhead just as the sun finished setting, and touched down next to his car as though he had been walking the entire time; he did not miss a beat. Somehow, flight had become just as natural for him as walking, and within the space of an afternoon.

Job could hardly bear to drive home that night, knowing he could just as easily have flown, perhaps faster than his car could carry him. He knew though that if he was caught flying effortlessly past traffic he would very rapidly make headline news he was not ready to face. Job hardly knew how to control the powers he had, and was increasingly sure that there must be more in store for him. What face he wanted to present to the world was something far beyond his current thinking on the subject. All he knew right now was that until he had had a chance to do some serious thinking on the subject, it was best to keep all of this a secret. He drove home quietly listening to what radio stations he could get so far from the city, walked into his home when he got there, and went straight to sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The sun was rapidly approaching the distant horizon. He had written literally to sunset, and had rushed the last page or so of the document to get it done before he could no longer safely follow the trail back down the hill. He saved, slammed his laptop shut, and tossed it into his satchel. He began running back down the path as fast as he could without losing his footing. The light was vanishing more quickly than he expected and he didn’t want to find himself out in the middle of the woods, miles from civilization, with no moonlight to light his way. He wondered how long he would have to wait for the moonrise to provide him enough light to get out if he couldn’t get to the end of the trail before he completely lost his light.

And then the sun was gone. His eyes had been adjusting as the light vanished in the shadow of the mountains around him, and while he had to slow down to nearly a snail’s pace, he could just make out the trail, or what he thought was the trail, in the darkness. Time seemed to pass slower here, and he felt himself becoming scared or wary of what might be around him in the dark that he couldn’t see. He remembered a time when he hadn’t been afraid of spending nights out in the forest, having adventures and never once worrying about the unknown, but it seemed more like a dream or some imagined history of his childhood fantasies.

He mused for a while about a part of his life that seemed as real as, perhaps more real than, this walk through the darkened woods. Surely some of it must be imagined, if not the entire thing. Flying through the air between the trees, his playmates all around him in the air, like the character he was inventing… he remembered somehow experiencing the freedom of unaided flight. And there was something else, a light… Something important about a light…

He saw a light break through the trees ahead, and disappear again. It looked like headlights, and it gave him hope that he was approaching the highway. He kept an eye up and an eye on the path, and after a few more perilous steps he saw another pair of headlights shine their path through the woods as they went by. He saw a glint of light off what he thought was his car ahead, and if it was, he was only about 50 yards from his destination. He hurried his pace, and suddenly he was out in the open and could just make out the outline of his car in the encompassing darkness. He had made it.

He got in and pulled out onto the road and began his way back to the city. The drop off on the right was invisible in the dark; all he could see was the white and yellow lines in the glow of his headlights. Any fears he’d had earlier about an impending fall were gone because he could not see whether there was a fall to be had at all. He was relaxed from his day in the midst of great natural beauty and further hypnotized by the video-game-like continuity of the lines on the road. Instead of being slowed down as it had felt in the dark and dangerous woods, time seemed to forget him entirely as he drove home. All of a sudden he saw the glow of the city crawling over the horizon, and then he found he had navigated the traffic in the city and was pulling into his own driveway after what seemed like mere seconds later. He stumbled inside and passed out on his bed, falling instantly into a deep sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * *

That night he dreamed of flying. He dreamed of saving lives. He dreamed he was a superhero. He woke up frantic to try to write something down, get a drawing, a sketch, a doodle, something in place to recall what he had seen of his superhero costume before it faded from his memory. It had been perfect somehow. He knew it must have been right. Not a ridiculous rubber bodysuit like in the Batman movies. Not a lot of Spandex; Job knew that his body was not something that should be shown off in that way. Bright colors though, and it looked fast. He remembered from the dream how the colors had looked as he blurred past, flying at hundreds of miles an hour, how they worked together to make him look like a green blur above a blue blur. He was not exactly the flash, but he knew he could move pretty fast while in flight, and he knew that his costume had been blue below green as he moved by at an angle, but when standing still it was more of a solid blue from the front with a bright green mask. From the side, you could see that the green from the mask followed diagonally down and back, and from the back a green triangle sped down his back with its point just above the base of his spine. Job’s head would be covered from the back, all in green – part of the same green field that extended down his back. He wrote as much of this down as he could and made some quick sketches, but Job was no artist so he did what he could to really just fix it in his mind. He wanted to be able to describe it to someone later so it could be properly made.

As the memory of the dream began to fade from his memory he was still trying to fix some of the details of the costume onto paper and he became upset. He was upset with his hands for not being able to draw what he was picturing in his mind accurately and he was upset with his mind for losing the image before he was able to get it down on paper. He slammed his fist down on the desk in anger as the last shred of his vivid memory of the costume leaked finally from his mind, leaving him only with his words and images on paper. Words and images on paper, plus a huge hole through his desk. His antique, hardwood desk.

His first reaction was to pull his hand free of the desk and see if it had been hurt. There was no sign on his hand that anything had happened at all. Not even a splinter of wood from the desk. His second reaction was to marvel at the damage he had done to his own desk. It had never occurred to him that he was strong enough to punch through hardwood furniture. Yet there was the hole, right in front of him. He decided to test this further and drove his other hand through the other side of the desk. It broke through the wood, but did not penetrate as deeply into the drawers on that side. Perhaps he was not trying hard enough. Perhaps he was not angry enough. Job concentrated on putting his whole strength behind his fist and aimed for the center of the now badly damaged desk. His fist went far past the desk, yet somehow did no damage to the floor beneath it when it reached it. Like somehow as he was in the midst of literally turning the rest of the desk into hundreds of pieces of scrap wood with his bare hands, his strength had known his intended target and destroyed only that. The level of destruction his final blow had caused was fantastic and astounding. The desk had not simply had a hole punched through it. It had not simply split evenly down the middle, as wood appeared to do when trained karate masters split boards with their hands, feet and heads. It had literally shattered into hundreds of fragments of shrapnel as the two sides of the desk that had contained papers and other documents were blown left and right as if by a powerful explosive, and tiny pieces of the desk flew in every other direction away from the initial point of impact.

Job examined his hand, and then the destruction settling around him. Still no apparent damage to his hand. Not merely rapidly healing, he appeared to be impervious to harm when focusing on the destruction of something else. Like the force of his blow had been controlled, which made sense considering the floor had been unaffected. Since his hand had not been the intended recipient of the force, it had been equally unaffected. Job picked up a sharp-looking fragment of wood from the floor to test this theory. He walked into the bathroom to avoid the splatter-fest he had experienced last time he had stabbed himself, and then proceeded to repeat what he had done just days before. He stabbed himself in the hand.

The force of the blow was able to penetrate the flesh of his hand, and Job found himself in pain again. The wood was visibly passing in one side of his hand and out the other. He was bleeding, but right over the sink this time. He had to twist the wood back and forth to get it out from between the bones in his hand, but as soon as he extracted it he could see his hand beginning to heal. He watched as his bones slid back into alignment, as blood stopped pouring from the hole that was rapidly closing in his hand as in some sort of movie special effect. Within what seemed like mere seconds, but which may have been as long as a couple of minutes, his hand appeared to have never been harmed.

Job began to wonder why he had taken so long to heal the earlier wound. If he could heal this apparently more damaging wound so fast, why hadn’t the other wound closed up as fast? Then he remembered having to pick the fragment of the pencil’s graphite core out of the back of his hand, and it closing up rapidly after that. Perhaps his body waited until ‘the coast was clear’ before it began to heal itself in earnest. He had something else to try.

Job ran to the kitchen and grabbed a sharp knife. He ran straight back to the bathroom where he proceeded to dig the point of the blade into the inside of his wrist. It would not penetrate. He grabbed a hand towel and cut it in two as though it had been nothing at all. He returned the sharp edge of the blade to the inside of his arm and pulled it along his flesh as though he were really trying to open up his veins. Like any suicidal with any know-how would. Nothing. No blood, no scratch, just that quickly fading white trace of where the blade had passed as blood was pushed away from and rushed back next to the surface of his skin. The same effect as running your fingernail down your skin. He was pressing as hard as he could, straining both arms one against the other, trying to break his own skin.

Then he pulled the blade back and tried to plunge it into the thick flesh of the middle of his forearm. It burned and screamed as it dove into his arm and the blood he had been teasing was more than happy to gush forth from the new opening into the world. It hurt like hell, but Job left the knife in his arm to watch what happened. For a while it continued to bleed like there was no end to his blood. He was worried that he might begin to experience light-headed wooziness from blood loss, but he retained all of his senses as he watched the blood slow and then stop flowing from the wound. He ran water over the area, which was not as easy as he’d hoped. He was still in quite a bit of pain, and there was the matter of trying to get his arm under the tap without running the handle of the knife into the edge of the sink, but he managed to rinse it off. When he did, he saw that it looked like the wound had closed up around the knife, as close as it could get to closed, and had then stopped as though it were patiently waiting for him to remove the offending object. Which he did, post-haste. The tiny sliver of a wound bled a little, but by the time he had run water over it, it had closed up again with no visible trace remaining.

Job went over in his head what he had discovered so far that day as he rinsed his own blood down the drain and then began the slow process of cleaning up his decimated desk. He had found that he had super strength, but that it would only effect what he intended to effect directly. He had found that that included himself; he wouldn’t break all his fingers if he decided to punch his way through the hull of a ship or the vault walls in a bank. He could not be cut by a sharp object slicing through his skin, but something pointed could be forced through his skin when he tried hard enough. He healed much faster than he had imagined previously, and his healing seemed to heal around whatever had injured him if it remained within him. Job realized that his meant that if he was shot he was better off having the bullet go straight through him than to stop somewhere in his body. If a bullet could penetrate his skin at all. It had taken quite a bit of force to get that knife into his arm, or the piece of desk. How much force does a bullet really have? Job simply didn’t know, but it seemed he would be able to survive anyway. Most people who die from gunshot wounds die from blood loss before anything else, and Job now knew he could lose literally pints of blood within a few days without apparent ill effect. He had learned that there were different degrees to which he could apply his super strengh, at least including the ability to nearly vaporize something as large as his desk. Job was beginning to wonder how all his abilities would end up coming together in the end. There seemed to be no end of them.

* * * * * * * * * * *

He had slept in that morning. All the hiking and late night driving had sapped the energy from him, and he’d slept almost until noon. When he did awake, it was from a vague dream of Job flying about, but in plain clothes. Something had seemed off about that. He felt as though a super hero truly would not be a superhero without a costume of some kind, so after musing over breakfast about the costume, he had written it into the story. He wrote the minimum average words for a day again, learning about another new power instead of getting Job as much into a costume as he’d have liked.

Discovering Job’s powers was entertaining for him, he really enjoyed seeing what new expressions and twists on old-standard super powers Job would end up with. A strange form of super strength, near invulnerability, rapid healing, flight, and that realistic but not-quite-useful X-ray vision. What would be next? Telepathy? He simply didn’t know. Actually, he was growing concerned. He had to get Job from where he was up to current time and that conversation with the reporter from the first page. And then … what?

He didn’t want to have Job be in a world stuffed with super heroes and super villains. He didn’t want Job to be a dark vigilante or to have some arch nemesis he battled for the rest of the story. He didn’t know what sort of story Job should find himself in. Really, he hadn’t read comic books in so long he wasn’t sure what he considered to be a good story arc for a super hero to follow. He thought that perhaps he ought to get some comic books and study the subject.

He decided to head down to his local comic book store to see what he could find out. He had to look one up in the phone book; he hadn’t bought comic books since he was in high school. When he got there and walked inside, he was shocked to see the sheer size of the place. The comic book shop he’d frequented as a youth had been a tiny hole-in-the-wall, just two tight rows of boxes packed with comics and collectible issues all over the walls, with a display of the new comics for the week at the counter in the back. This comic store was huge, thousands of square feet of prime retail space devoted to comics.

There were upright displays wrapping around the circumference of the store, hundreds of feet of shelves all full seven feet high with new and recent comics he’d never heard of lining up, all covers in complete view. There were rows and rows of back issues alphabetized in boxes. There were aisles of displays featuring graphic novels, manga, how-to-draw-comics books, and role-playing books. There was a large section behind the counter devoted to models and action figures. There was even a little coffee bar in the corner. He was surrounded by a cornucopia of comics to choose from, and while the bulk of them did appear to be superhero comics, he recognized only a few of the titles from his youth.

He browsed casually. The staff seemed friendly enough, letting him flip through as many comics as he liked, reading whole sections of graphic novels, spending hours without really picking anything up with intent to buy. He kept an eye on the prices of the titles and collections, made a mental list of all the things he had heard of as being great, all the characters that seemed to fit the profile he wanted to build for Job in a few important ways, and as closing time for the comic shop was approaching, he realized that to do the research he wanted to do about how to structure the story and character arcs of the character he was creating he would have to spend almost $500 on comics and collections. He set down the comic in his hand and mumbled quietly “Don’t get it right, get it written.”

He decided that carefully crafting a complex and involving story and character arc, doing the research into what works and what doesn’t work for the super-human experience, and getting it all together to tell Job’s story would take too much time and money and would violate the spirit of the challenge he was facing, if not just the deadline. He decided to just leave all this sophistication for the rewrite later, and that he would just keep writing and hope Job’s story became evident. He would try again with the costume. He went home, set down, and began writing again.

* * * * * * * * * * *

By the time he finished collecting the fragments of his desk into trash bags and setting them outside, stacking the papers and documents from inside his desk drawers as neatly as he could, and cleaning up the layer of dust he had created by exploding his desk, it was the middle of the afternoon. Job wanted to keep investigating what abilities he had, but wasn’t sure how to go about that. Job wanted to keep practicing the use of his known powers, but wasn’t sure if that was either safe or cost effective, considering the damage he might end up doing. Job decided that his best bet for the rest of the day was to try to locate a costumer to begin work on his costume. Before his dream he hadn’t considered wearing a costume, but now he had trouble imagining how he would go on without one. He wasn’t just an anonymous do-gooder like Bruce Willis had turned out to be in Unbreakable; Job had some serious powers at his disposal and knew his public image would be important. He scanned the yellow pages for costumers who did custom work and for experienced seamstresses.

He called around until he found a local seamstress who sounded more than happy to work with him to create an original costume. She had designed and put together costumes for all the neighborhood children for years, but Halloween was months away and she would be glad to get behind a sewing machine for the summer. He suggested that he might want her to use some unusual or heavy-duty fabrics, and she seemed more familiar with them than he was, so she was his choice. And she was free that very afternoon to look at his sketches. He went straight over to her place and spent a while showing her what he had got down and describing it to her. He discussed it as though it were for a comic book convention, so she wouldn’t question it, but she seemed less concerned with why he would want to dress up like a superhero than the specifics of his design. He was pleased, and she seemed to get the idea right away. She even had a much better looking full-color sketch or two before he left that captured the spirit of what he had dreamed of in the first place. He was confident that she would get it right. It was like she could read his mind.

Over the course of the next month or two Job worked with her to get the design right and the costume properly fitted. He also spent a lot of time as far from human contact as he could arrange, practicing the use of his powers. He didn’t find any new abilities in this time, but he knew that he had simply stumbled upon the ones he did know about, so there was no telling when or if he would discover new ones. He also spent a lot of time thinking about how to handle PR. He knew he wanted to do good for mankind however he could. He also wanted to maintain the secrecy of his identity, which wouldn’t be too hard – the only person who really knew who he was in the world was the little old lady working on his costume. He scoured the newspapers trying to find a reporter who would be interested in breaking his story to the public, but who would put a positive spin on it. He didn’t want to be considered a freak or a menace to society; he wanted to be seen as the man he hoped he could be. A hero. He knew he should contact someone in the press before they started to try contacting him. He also knew he needed a name. Something original, something that invoked fear in the heart of criminals and trust in the citizens of the world. Something that adequately reflected his powers. This one was going to be tough.

* * * * * * * * * * *

This one was definitely going to be tough. He needed to come up with a name that Job would be able to consider everything he had just described, but which was a truly awful name for the reporter to make fun of. Worse, he could feel himself running out of steam for writing. This time he’d only written about five hundred words instead of the thousands he had begun writing in each session. He decided to take a break. To think about what awful name Job would take on. To try to think of something to happen in the story after he caught up with the beginning, meeting the reporter.

He stayed on this break, thinking of everything but answers for his present questions, until it was time to go back to Boba Café the following night. He was so distracted that it didn’t even occur to him to meet his friends at The Rooster’s Rump, he just puzzled on through that night and the next day. It didn’t feel like five days, it felt like forever had passed since he’d been there last. So much had happened, in reality as well as in his story, and time had taken on all sorts of strange properties since he’d lost his job. Days used to be very specific units of time broken up into regular blocks of working and sleeping and now … now his time was some strange beast, twisting and deforming from day to day and hour to hour with no rhyme or reason or pattern.

Still, when his clock told him it was 5:45 on Friday night, he knew that that was real and he proceeded to get his satchel together and walked down to Boba Café. Except that when he got there, they were closed. He peeked in the window; everything looked normal. He looked for a sign explaining the closure, and there was a big one that said ‘COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR LEASE’, but no note about a move or apology or explanation of any kind for him. As though the operators of the Café hadn’t even been present when the commercial owners had locked it up and put the space back on the market. He almost didn’t know what to do. He was supposed to meet Rich here, but clearly they wouldn’t stay. He sat down on a bench in front of the Café, pulled out his laptop and tried to find something to write.

Nothing came to him. He started at the beginning and began re-reading what he had so far. He had slightly over fifteen thousand and seven hundred words written, so he was about a third of the way to fifty thousand. And he liked most of it. He thought other people would enjoy reading it, they would be entertained by what was there, but he didn’t know where to go from there. Sure, to the reporter who had made fun of Job at the beginning, but … then what? Luckily his musing was interrupted at five to seven when Rich finally walked up.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“I don’t know. Looks like they went out of business. They’ve been pretty dead lately.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Where’s uhh…”

“Amanda? She’s parking the car. She said she’d find a parking spot if I carried the computers.” He indicated the laptop in his hand and the laptop cases over both his other shoulders by shrugging. “We saw it was closed when we drove by, though somehow we didn’t see you. They’re meeting us at The Coffee Plant.”

“Okay. Gimme a sec.”

He shut his laptop and put it back in his satchel, then followed Rich down the road to The Coffee Plant. It was people’s strange attraction to The Coffee Plant despite better alternatives that had probably driven Boba Café out of business. He didn’t want to add to that by becoming a regular patron of the place, but he figured that in this case he would allow majority to rule.

He and Rich first found a place where they would all be able to sit, and where there was AC for their laptops to be plugged into, which was not altogether easy in the strangely crowded Coffee Plant.

Well, he thought it was strange anyway. The staff was unfriendly, the tables seemed perpetually in need of bussing, and the drinks were substandard in quality for the same cost as the drinks everywhere else around. He waited for Rich to get his drink and get back, watching their seats and their computers. Then he went and ordered a simple drink, a mocha, and after paying four and a quarter for it, found that it didn’t taste so much like ass that he couldn’t stand to drink it. When he returned to where they’d set up, Rich was there with two attractive young women at his side.

“Hey there. This is Amanda, and that’s her friend Betty.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Hi. You’re both working on novels?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I don’t know if mine will be any good, but Amanda talked me into it.” Betty gave Amanda a look that he couldn’t decipher. “What I want to write is screenplays.”

“Me too,” he said. “Well, novels, screenplays, everything. Plus I like painting and drawing. I’m really just getting back into it. I used to do all this stuff back in high school, but … well, I stopped.”

“Neat. What’s your novel about?”

“Well, I’ve been doing a superhero origin story, but … I’m not sure I can get it all the way to fifty thousand words. What about you two?”

Amanda spoke up first. “Mine is about a female Korean ninja assassin who takes over the world.”

“I’m going to write about vampires in a post-apocalyptic world.”

“How far are any of you?” He was plugging in his laptop and getting back to the end of his story.

Rich said he was about a thousand words in, Amanda was over three thousand, and Betty hadn’t really started. She had a title. He almost didn’t tell them that he was fifteen thousand words in and well on track to finish in time. They all started writing, but Amanda and Betty seemed to be chatting more than writing. Still, just being around other writers seemed to give him the push he needed to start writing again, even if it was coming slower and seemed less interesting to him.

* * * * * * * * * * *

For the time being he decided that he should at least come up with a temporary moniker so that when he was sighted for the first time by someone he would at least be able to tell them what they were seeing. After reading through the archives of newspapers at the local library for what seemed like forever, he finally found what he was looking for, and it meant that he really needed something to refer to himself as for his first contact with the press. The reporter he found was based out of New York city, but was syndicated in papers around the country. He was taken seriously by much of the country because he took a hard stance on issues where others in the media were prone to be soft. Still, he seemed to let his lighter side come through from time to time, and when it was a slow news week he would sometimes write about lighter subjects.

Job had read more than one of his columns written about the comic book industry. Apparently he had been a big fan of comics when he was younger, and though he didn’t follow any present-day comics, he still managed to keep up with what was going on in the industry. Surely someone who had been a fan of superheroes in his youth would be honest and willing to write about an actual superhero. Job knew that he had not yet done anything heroic, but that didn’t deter him from believing that he would certainly someday use his powers to become a champion of the people. He simply wanted the reporter’s help in establishing a good relationship with the people he would be protecting. Without a strong positive public image, even with visible evidence of his powers in full effect and his good intentions, it was likely that he would be seen as some sort of quack in a costume, perhaps even as crazy when he first started getting out there in the public eye. Being called crazy was not what he was going for. So he did what he thought he had to do. He called up Jack Pressman, columnist for The Observer, and introduced himself as Fantastician.

Jack had almost no response. Job repeated himself. “My name is Fantastician, and I have recently discovered that I have super powers. I am looking to see if you’d be interested in hearing my story.” Jack hung up on him. Job decided that the only reasonable thing to do was to head out to New York and show Mr. Pressman exactly what he could do. He walked over to the seamstress’s home and picked up the finished costume, paying her nearly double what he had originally agreed upon. She nearly wouldn’t accept it, but he eventually convinced her that she had given him so much more than he could have asked for by making his vision a reality. He thanked her a final time asking only that she allow him to change and wear the costume as he left. She was just glad to see that it fit him so well. He said goodbye to her for the last time he would ever have the chance, and left.

He took a moment to place the old clothes he had been wearing on the way over in her garbage bin, and then Job was no longer standing with both feet on the ground. He rose straight up into the air, high enough that he was above any obstructions near the ground but well out of range of overhead airplanes and helicopters, pointed himself northeast and flew out of sight so quickly that it seemed as if he had simply disappeared.

When Job had first theorized that he could have gotten home faster flying than driving on that first attempt at flight, he had been right, but also wrong by a matter of degree. In his practicing, Job found that with much less effort than he had expended to get off the ground for the first time he could accelerate to enormous speeds that he first thought would blister or burn his skin because of the friction with the air he was literally tearing through. Instead he found that his nye invulnerability also prevented any harm from coming to him in this way. The same could not be said of his clothing. He had lost a couple of garments by flying too fast, and had gone home and researched materials that would be able to withstand high speeds by having low friction with the air. He eventually was able to procure the fabric that was used by Nike to outfit Olympic speed skaters and assist the seamstress in using it to fashion his costume. As a result, when Job bolted into the sky and out of his home town at nearly twice the speed of sound, his costume remained intact on his body. By some unknown property of the exact shape of his body, Job also had a negligible sonic impact. That is, he did not create a sonic boom that affected people and things on the ground when he traveled at multiples of the speed of sound.

When he first accelerated and when he slowed down from super-sonic speeds he heard a building or descending roar, respectively, but when he was moving faster than sound he found himself in a strange, silent oasis. He had borrowed some equipment from the university to measure the sound levels he produced on the ground as he passed by and had at first assumed there was something set wrong on the equipment because it had barely registered him as he went by overhead, again and again. Yet when he spoke from nearby it gave exact measurements. Job, being a mathematician, did some math to try to work out how he had had no sonic effects at ground level when traveling faster than his own sound, but the only conclusion he could come up with was that perhaps something about his exact shape, position, angle, and low mass was allowing the sound of his travel to be dispersed in such a way that it never made it to the ground. As long as he couldn’t rationally and logically explain any of his other powers, he decided that this must just be another unexplainable feature of his inexplicable ability to fly, apparently unaided.

* * * * * * * * * * *

“You guys making good progress?” He leaned over to see how Rich’s novel was coming along.

Rich did a quick word count. “I’m at seventeen hundred ninety three words. How about you?”

“I’ve got about another thousand. How about you two?”

“Five thousand.” This was Amanda, who apparently could type twice as fast as he could while carrying on a conversation with Betty.

Betty had to get some help on how to do a word count, but said she had “two hundred and forty-eight words, but I’m off to a good start.”

“Well, just keep at it and I’m sure we’ll all make the deadline.”

“Of course. But I’m getting hungry. What say we go get something to eat?”

“Yeah, that sounds good. How about pizza?”

“Okay.”

He did not speak up. He wanted to keep writing. He had hoped that getting together with them would mean serious writing sessions.

Rich turned to him, asking “Whad’ya say? Pizza?”

“Sure.”

They all saved their documents and shut down their laptops and packed up to leave. Their less-than-dedicated attitude seemed easy-going and frustrated him at the same time. He went with them to pizza, and found that they didn’t seem to want to go back to writing, so after they ate he went his separate way. He went home, and with their attitude slowly infecting his desire to succeed, he tried writing for another couple of hours before sleeping.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Traveling at nearly twice the speed of sound in the general direction of New York, it still took Job more than an hour and a half to get there. It turned out that he had been at least a few degrees off in his initial choice of flight path, and he first reached the Atlantic seaboard in the vicinity of Boston, which he confirmed by a quick drop to ground level to see what local paper was to be found at a local newsstand. The jaw of the cashier dropped when he saw Job drop out of the sky right in front of him, pick up a paper for a moment, set it down again, and alight into the air without a word. He didn’t dare tell anyone what he had seen. Job didn’t mind being seen flying cross-country in broad daylight, because he was fully costumed, but also because he was trying to prove to himself that he had the courage to follow through on months of training and planning. He adjusted the direction of his travel and was so preoccupied by thoughts of his rapidly approaching meeting with Jack Pressman that he missed most of the beauty of the eastern seaboard as he passed over it from a couple of hundred feet up.

He saw New York’s skyline from a long way off, and he had a sort of general idea of where he was headed relative to the tallest remaining buildings in Manhattan. There was a lot to be said for the practical uses of the internet; he had been able to get an idea of what the aerial perspective of his eventual destination would be with the help of a couple of well designed websites. Of course, he had also bothered to look at traditional maps of the area around the offices of The Observer so that he could find his way on foot if he had to. As it turned out, the direction Job was coming from couldn’t have been better. The Observer’s sign could be seen from far enough away that he was able to set down right in front of their building as though he had been there before.

He landed surrounded by pedestrians and traffic, all with their own private destinations, and nary an eye gave him a second look. A costumed freak dropping out of the sky? Must be some sort of movie or movie promotion. Just keep walking. Job had hoped for a little more reaction, but he too had a purpose and a destination, and he stepped right up into the building. There was no one at reception. He waited a moment, but after no one appeared to even be stationed at the reception desk, he decided to simply let himself in. It suddenly occurred to Job that The Observer was not as big-time an organization as he had led himself to believe. If there was some sort of order to what he was seeing, he could not find it. It was not the clean, modern office that you saw in places like The New York Times’ offices or the antiquated, romanticized view of rows of men and women at typewriters and typesetters working furiously to meet some imagined deadline. If there was some logical pattern to the layout of desks, it was not rows or any other pattern that Job was familiar with, even from his nine years of studying advanced mathematics. It simply made no sense. The surfaces of the desks were a disarray; how they were able to come up with even a weekly newspaper baffled Job. There were some half-dozen people apparent in the office, but none of them seemed to be aware of each other or Job in the slightest. Job had seen Jack’s photo above his column a few times and knew that none of these people were him.

There were a few closed doors along the perimeter of the visible space, so Job headed around the perimeter, reading the names on each door as he passed by it. He knew before he got there that of course, the last one was the office of Jack Pressman. How could it be any other way? This experience was not turning out to be the best so far, and as he walked into the office of Mr. Jack Pressman whose door had been slightly ajar, he knocked tentatively and the full weight of what he was doing finally occurred to him. He must look ridiculous in his bright blue and green costume and green Zorro-style mask. He had been flatly hung up on just hours earlier. What hade him think this would be any different? Jack looked up at the strange figure that had just entered his office.

“Fantastico, I presume.” Jack looked down again at something he was writing.

“Fantastician, actually.”

“Right, right. To what do I own this pleasure, Fantastician?” He put a mocking emphasis on the name as it poured spitefully out of his mouth.

“I’ve been reading your column. You used to be a fan of super-hero comics, and I’m just starting out as a superhero. I don’t want to get any bad press before I can show what I’m made of, and I thought you could maybe write something about me to get the word out.

“A superhero, eh? Named ‘The Fantastician’? I don’t buy it. You some kind of nut job?”

“I am totally sane, I assure you, and there’s no ‘The’. It’s just ‘Fantastician’.”

Which brings us up to date, with Jack walking out of his own office after telling Job that there simply isn’t a story, beside which, his name is awful. Job had known that the name wasn’t very good, but in several months he simply hadn’t been able to think of something more appropriate that hadn’t already been assigned to a comic book or movie character. Job followed Jack out of his office, realizing that Jack wasn’t walking away from Job; he was walking to a photocopier. Job lifted a few inches off the ground and floated along behind Jack, then did a quick lap around the ceiling of the room while Jack waited for the machine to duplicate whatever he had been writing. Jack seemed nonplused. Job knew how amazing he still thought flying was; how could Jack be so desensitized to it? Were there other superheroes in New York that Job had never heard of? That had arisen recently and he had simply been too wrapped up in his own affairs to notice on the news?

He landed next to Jack, who was picking up the output from the photocopier, and said “Is there something I don’t know about going on here? I just flew around the room unaided and you hardly batted an eye. I realize I don’t have the best superhero name, but that doesn’t make flight any less amazing.”

“Sure, kid. Amazing. Do you know where the FedEx place is on Fifth Street?”

“I’m sure I could find it. Why?”

Jack placed the copies and the original document in the FedEx envelope that he had been addressing when Job had come in, then handed them to Job. “Why don’t you fly this down there for me? Be sure it makes it there before they close.” Jack turned and walked back towards his office. Job was now slack-jawed himself. Jack kept walking away. “Bring me a receipt and I’ll give you ten minutes of my time when you get back.” Job didn’t know what was going on, but he didn’t see the harm of trying to get on Mr. Pressman’s good side. He walked out of the office and then ascended up for a bird’s eye view. He was able to pick out a FedEx truck in traffic pulling into the parking lot of a big, squat building, and he focused his super-vision to verify that it was, in fact, on Fifth Street. He descended to see where the customers’ entrance was, and actually had a harder time finding his way around on foot after so much time in the air. He did eventually find his way into the front door, and only had to spend a few minutes in line before dropping off the envelope.

“You could have just dropped this in the box outside.” The clerk seemed somewhat upset that Job had bothered him with a pre-addressed, pre-paid envelope with no special instructions.

“I was told to get a receipt.”

This seemed to trouble the clerk to no end, as he had to enter the package’s information into the system manually to generate a receipt. For taking a total of only ninety seconds, Job simply could not understand what was so upsetting. “Here you go. A receipt showing that we received it. You already have the tracking number, but it’s also right here.” He pointed to the receipt. “Your package will be in Portugal by tomorrow. Good day.” Suddenly, it was as though Job had disappeared to the clerk. It wasn’t until he was lifting off the sidewalk outside that it really kicked in that the clerk probably hadn’t wanted to deal with him because of his strange outfit. Then again, the clerk hadn’t looked up, even when pointing out the drop box or handing him the receipt. His eyes had stayed on his terminal as though there were something infinitely more interesting going on there than anything that Job or any other customer could possibly represent.

Job wasn’t sure what exactly he was going to say for ten minutes to Jack. He wanted to be able to evidence his powers firsthand, but what could he show in ten minutes? His nye invulnerability, maybe. Jack certainly would have a letter opener. He had already displayed his ability to fly. There was really no way to show off his X-ray vision though. Jack was perplexed. He flew straight back to The Observer, but slowly, looking down on the citizens of New York city for the first time. They still didn’t bother looking up to acknowledge him. Perhaps his fears of being harassed by the public were totally off base. Whatever the case, he simply knew that he couldn’t leave his attempt to communicate with Mr. Pressman as it was. Job knew he had a story. He just had to figure out what it was.

* * * * * * * * * * *

That night he dreamed. His dreaming that night was more real to him than any life he’d lived for over a decade. It was the story of his youth, but it couldn’t have been real, and even as he watched events roll by as through his own childhood eyes, he still doubted what he was experiencing. This must have been what he dreamed his life could be like when his imagination still took hold of him. Little boys couldn’t fly. They didn’t fight pirates. And there was no such thing as mermaids or faeries. It just couldn’t be true. But somehow it still felt more true than the ‘reality’ he faced every day. And there was that light again… He felt there was something important about that light… If only he could remember…

He woke up Saturday morning and the attitude of his fellow writers had taken its toll on him. Well, that and the attitude of Jack Pressman, saying over and over again to him that Job just didn’t have a story. Somehow he had believed them, and he had decided to just scrap the superhero story. It would take too much effort and too much research to figure out how to build a satisfying story for Job. Telling his origin was one thing, but that wasn’t reality, that wasn’t something people could identify with. He wanted to write something that readers wouldn’t just dismiss out of hand because it had no connection to reality. He went into his laptop, saved the story so far in a safe place, and created a new, blank document.

He was going to write something that people could identify with. Something that people could have an emotional reaction to. Not a total loner without friends or family who one day realizes that he’s better than everyone else anyway. Someone who makes real human connections, who experiences interpersonal relationships, trials, tribulations, and who shows that he isn’t invulnerable. Someone like himself.

And that was when he came up with the idea to write the story of all the relationships he’d been in, and why it had all come to a stop, so long ago. There was an emotional story to be told. One that he knew people were interested in. His friends had always wanted to know what had happened, why he never dated anyone, and here was the way. He would write it all out from his first kiss to his last, and then if they wanted to know they could just read the book.

No research necessary. Nothing he didn’t already know, anyway. He’d just have to change a few names. He could call himself “David,” a generic enough name. He could surely come up with a new name for everyone he’d had a relationship with, to separate the version he was writing from the reality. But otherwise, he would try to be honest, to see whether his past would make a good story to read. He went online and reset his word count back to zero, and then began writing from scratch.

* * * * * * * * * * *

David could never understand women. He had been trying for a long time, but hadn’t come up with anything solid yet. Worse, he didn’t understand why he kept falling in love, or why love felt so big inside him. For someone who screwed up every last detail of every relationship he had ever been in with a woman, it didn’t make any sense that he kept falling in love with them.

David could remember a time in his life when he had rejected love and emotions outright. He had felt the same basic physical attractions that every other teenage boy felt, and had even worked up the nerve to ask a girl or two out. He simply chose to convince himself that love wasn’t real, that he didn’t have or need emotions, and that he could get by without them. It was one of the reasons that everyone he ever tried to be with ended up leaving him; he was too emotionally distant. Another reason seemed to be that he was saving himself for marriage. Sort of.

David had always been a bright young man, so it was no surprise that he knew about the birds and the bees by the time he was nine. He was also a very logical, analytical young man, even at age nine, and had deduced that it would be irresponsible to risk getting someone pregnant before he was financially and emotionally prepared to raise a child. Which meant that at age nine he decided very matter-of-factly that he simply wouldn’t risk it. He wouldn’t have sexual intercourse with women until he was married. He figured he would also be smart enough not to get married before he was financially and emotionally ready to start a family, so that was as good a cutoff as any.

Even though he was aware enough of sexuality by age nine to start making rules about his sex life, he was also too young to need to be. Little David didn’t even approach the subject of dating or sexuality again until he was fourteen and a sophomore in high school. Right away, he had trouble with women. He was charismatic enough that when he got over his overwhelming shyness to approach a young woman in the first place, it was no problem for him to charm her. He was intelligent enough to carry on real conversations and he was very open with his decision not to have sex, so young women knew he wasn’t just trying to get into their pants; he was trying to have a relationship.

His first relationship lasted exactly three days. It was with a young woman named Beth. She was a good Christian girl from a good family. They had friends in common in the Drama department at the high school, and spent time together after school most evenings. She was pretty, and also a sophomore. On Monday afternoon he asked her to the winter dance, and she said yes. By Wednesday night he had worked up the courage to ask her to be his girlfriend; she said yes again. Thursday night she invited him to dinner with the family, and even June, her mother, liked David. Everything was going great. Then came Saturday night and the winter dance.

It started off okay. They both had friends there, and even though he had never danced before and felt like he might make a fool of himself, while a slow song was playing David asked Beth to dance. She consented, they stepped onto the dance floor (actually, it was the school cafeteria, but it served the purpose) and before they had taken two steps, she pulled away hard. He didn’t recognize it at the time, but she was having a mild anxiety attack. She told him she needed to talk to him. The two of them went outside, their friends pretending not to watch them walk away together. Within just a few short minutes, Beth broke up with David. She insisted that it wasn’t anything to do with him, but her own internal conflict that caused the problem. She said her last boyfriend had raped her and she couldn’t deal with being touched, which was why she couldn’t dance with him. She said she just wasn’t ready to be in a relationship at the time. Then she lead him back inside and pretended nothing had happened. They even got photos taken later. (David didn’t get to see the photos until senior year when Beth finally got up the nerve to apologize to him.)

That’s just the thing about the women in David’s life. He can do everything he knows to do, he can be open and communicate clearly and honestly, he can call every night and spend as much time and money as he has to offer, he can even write love poems from time to time. Everything will seem to be going great, everyone will seem to be happy, and there will be no indication that there are any problems, and then suddenly everything will change. One way or another, each woman comes up with some twist, some reason or excuse or explanation, and David is left alone, wondering what happened.

That first time it hit him like a punch in the gut. The wind was knocked out of him and he was in a daze for days. It didn’t occur to him until the next week how awful it was for Beth to ask him to stand by her in photos after dumping him moments before. He had simply followed her blindly, not knowing what to do or how to act. He had stood up straight and smiled on cue and then sat back down at a table and stared at a big plastic snowflake until Beth disappeared home. The he had dismantled the snowflake with his bare hands, breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces until there was nothing left but a pile of white plastic crumbs. It wasn’t exactly like being angry, but he was too even-tempered to take anything out on Beth directly. David had a way of almost always believing women’s explanations and excuses and putting all the blame on himself.

After a time, David was back to normal. He didn’t spend as much time with Beth after school, even though they were both there. She ended up playing his love interest in a school play they were working on, but neither role was very big and they both managed to remain professional throughout. Until he started dating Lynn, one of the tech crew, that is. That was when Beth decided David must be angry with her, and she started avoiding him whenever possible. Beth’s unwarranted behavior continued for years. She avoided David because she thought he was angry with her for dumping him, and he just thought she was angry with him for dating Lynn in the first place. When they finally worked out during their senior year that she had been ridiculous and irrational at the time, it was too late to do anything about it. She was about to ship off with the Air Force.

David’s relationship with Lynn didn’t last very long, either. He had tried to do better than with Beth, but wasn’t sure how. He felt that somehow their breaking up had been his fault, and he didn’t want to fail at being a good boyfriend again. Lynn showed no signs of being afraid of his touch, and she was soon the first person outside of his dreams he French kissed. Being the responsible, intelligent young man that he was, David was afforded quite a bit of freedom from his parents, and he and Lynn often ended up at her place, unsupervised. David didn’t want anything about him to get in the way of their relationship, and since they were both horny teenagers, Lynn was the young woman he first started taking his personal rule of “no sex” in a strictly literal way with.

Since he had ruled that he wouldn’t have sex, he figured that didn’t mean he couldn’t make out, or try some light petting. He also learned that it didn’t stop him from looking at, fondling, or kissing Lynn’s naked breasts. As long as his “no sex” rule had allowed him to see his first topless young woman, he wasn’t surprised when it led to dry humping and heavy, heavy petting. Lynn certainly seemed happy enough about it, and not inexperienced either. Their relationship wasn’t entirely physical; they ate lunch together, met in the hallways between classes when they could, hung out while working on the play, and despite their limited budgets even went to dinner or the movies once in a while. As far as David could tell, everything was going well, and at a few weeks he was doing far better than the three days he had been with Beth. David started to feel happy and fulfilled.

Then came Valentine’s Day. David had never been in a relationship on Valentine’s Day before, and wasn’t sure what was expected of him. He tried asking Lynn, and she insisted that the holiday held no special significance for her and he didn’t need to do anything at all. So he didn’t make any elaborate plans or surprise her with roses or poetry. He planned on spending the day with her, and had made sure that he had money available so they could go out if she wanted. Before the school day was over, she broke up with him. Before they even got to the part of the day where he could have spent time with her or done something special for her, she dumped him.

David didn’t understand. Lynn had told him specifically not to do anything special for Valentine’s Day. She had said that it held no special meaning for her, that he was wasting his time and money celebrating it. Then she broke up with him for not surprising her with something. David was logical and analytical and simply could not comprehend how he could be expected to have figured out that no meant yes and “don’t do anything” meant “surprise me with something special and heartfelt.” David was shocked and upset and didn’t know how to proceed. He determined that whatever he did, Lynn didn’t make enough sense to be with, so when she tried to get back together with him late that afternoon he refused.

Shortly thereafter, David disengaged himself from the entire Drama scene. He didn’t want to be involved with people like that. People whose desires shift with the wind, who say one thing and mean something else. Little did he know that it was not that they were in Drama, but that they were women that had made them that way. He wouldn’t figure that out for years. In the meantime, he was still a teenager, and still interested in trying to have some sort of contact with the opposite sex, so he continued to pursue relationships.

His next girlfriend was Jessica. They were together from the end of David’s sophomore year until the beginning of his junior year. They spent most of the summer in each other’s arms. Jessica was more interested in (and experienced in) everything sexual than Lynn had been, and David was eager to make her happy. Being a hormonally charged teenage boy certainly didn’t hurt matters. They had met through friends of friends in common, so they didn’t share any extra-curricular activities, but in light of his experience with the Drama crowd, David considered that a good thing. With school getting out just after they got together, their entire relationship was extra-curricular anyway.

Dinners, movies, walks in the park and the like were not part of their relationship. When they weren’t together, they talked on the phone, but they spent most weekdays together. David’s parents assumed there was an adult present at Jessica’s house all day, since he knew he was not allowed to go unsupervised, and Jessica’s parents assumed that she spent her days alone. David still held firmly to his “no sex” rule, but the line it seemed to be telling him not to cross kept inching away as he and Jessica got more and more adventurous.

At first it wasn’t more than he had done with Lynn, kissing and groping and heavy petting. David had grown quite a bit, as teenage boys do, and had found himself armed with a pair of extra-large hands. He spent as much time as he could learning how to use them to massage Jessica up and down, how to hold her and how to handle her to obtain the most positive reactions. He was still the same logical, analytical person he had always been, and how to pleasure a woman with his hands was just another problem to work out. Jessica certainly didn’t seem to mind, as it meant hour after hour of back rubs, leg rubs, and increasingly skilled manipulations of her more tender parts.

Before long they began to explore more than just the basic, straightforward, necking and heavy petting. Jessica knew David wanted to not have sex with her, and seemed happy to take other routes to carnal pleasure. Jessica was the first woman David would lick whipped cream from, and the first young woman he saw entirely naked. Sometimes they would just hang out during the day, but other times they would slowly strip each other down, barely breaking hours-long kisses to get clothing by one head or the other or to briefly stop for air.

That summer, David first got access to the online world through Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs. BBSs were the precursor to the modern internet, and offered most of the services that people still use today: You could post messages in forums, chat live with other “BBSers”, download programs, pictures, and stories, play games, and otherwise keep yourself busy for hours and hours without ever leaving the welcoming glow of the computer screen. The fastest modems were 2400 baud when David started, a far cry from the 56,600 baud modems and million bit-per-second cable modems of today, but that just meant you had to be patient to get what you wanted.

One of the things David was interested in was erotic literature. To some degree this was to get himself off, but to a greater degree it was because he was so curious and interested in how to please people sexually. He was very interested in making Jessica happy, and to a great extent that meant pleasing her sexually. He felt from her that she would really like to be able to just have sex with him, and since he had convinced himself not to do that, he felt obligated to find other ways to satisfy her. Even at this early stage, the online world offered nearly boundless amounts of erotic literature, and David even managed to find several detailed guides that explained in excruciating detail how to please (and how not to try to please) people sexually. His parents k