He was drowning in A15 forms. At work he typed on the new laptop, which was as bright and featureless as a discount store.
“Working hard?” Ralph Mathieson peeked around his cubicle. “Or hardly working?”
William mustered a thin smile. Then he closed his laptop and drove to the neighborhood he was not supposed to visit. He parked by the mailbox with its two new names. The trees here were small. He could break them, he thought, certainly if he tried, but possibly also by accident, without meaning to.
As William watched from the car, a man with a shiny head opened the door. He was muscular and squat, like a dwarf in a fantasy movie—rough-and-tumble, but trustworthy, reliable. He rose up on the balls of his feet and bounced a little.
“Hello, William,” he called from the porch. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”
William considered Tobias as he got out of the car and crossed the perfectly-flat flagstones. He didn’t look strict. He looked like the type to plan a heist and pull it off.
“Thanks,” Tobias said. “I mean, I think.”
He pulled the door open, and William saw his old coffee table, his old couch, the recliner that had once been a twin to his own recliner.
Tobias pulled out beer because he was a guy who would do such a thing. He was honorable and welcoming, a real dwarf, through and through. “If you’re here for a fistfight, we’ll have to go outside,” he said. “I just vacuumed.”
William tried to decide if he’d come for a fistfight. He tried to see inside himself, to feel if there was anger there, but his chest felt expansive, empty. A wind howled through it. Tobias served the beer in a stein William had purchased in Bavaria one September. There’d been tents, and carnival rides, and singing in a language he barely understood. Someone played a polka on an accordion, and they’d danced together, drunken and fumbling. Had things been broken, even all the way back then?
“Huh,” Tobias said, “It never occurred to me that these were authentic steins.” He looked concerned. “Do you want them back?”
William did, but there’d been lists and agreements. Looking around at the strange constellation of objects that had once been his living room, he wished suddenly for his computer, the old one. He wanted to pan the webcam around the room, to show it how there was still an issue of National Geographic he hadn’t read on the coffee table, how the painted trunk had moved next to the bookshelf. How everything behaved as if this was perfectly fine.
Look, he would say, and someone would be listening. Do you see what I’m going through? And someone would see. He had an uglier thought that maybe he wanted vines to twist around the umbrella stand, an angry tree to hunker in the shadows of the dining room. These weren’t the kinds of thoughts a person shared.
“Sara can’t keep ferrying the kids,” he said instead.
Tobias nodded. “Your sister is great, a real sweetheart.”
William wished he’d taken the fistfight when it was offered, but he finished his beer, left the mug unbroken and rinsed clean.