Midsummer Dream House

 

Overseer

Here in the bright reception room on the fiftieth floor, the cries and threats rising from the street were a reminder of the dangers Jan had faced and might face again. Soon he was to meet with a figure who would decide whether to extend his sanctuary or cast him back out into the roving crowds, the agents of pure democracy. Down there the mobs were frantic, furious, ravenous, eager to find a pariah and deliver rough justice. They could rip you to pieces in seconds.

This part of the city was never quiet, wary drivers did not idle at corners, but the numbers of marauders swelled as the evening wore on and the fires in the distance surged, casting a sheen on the crowds, the scary faces. Jan could not know how things would go in the next hour. The world had changed so fast that the first half of Jan’s life flickered like a dream in the recesses of his memory.

The overseer had chosen one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world as the site of the administrative center of which this room was an appendage. The choice was one of those odd symbolic gestures. The state’s administrative apparatus had a presence in those areas you might shun, with their homes full of rotting walls and two or three to a bed. We are a ubiquitous presence in the world, the new master class, obey our imperatives, get on board, fall in line. But most of the staff here would never descend to the streets or see any of the residents of this quarter face to face. Workers came and went via an unpiloted jet that utilized a pad on the tower’s roof. Even if a job here was no sinecure, even if the boss was ruthless and might expel underperforming staff on a whim, throw them to the mobs, how nice it must be, Jan thought, to clock out at the end of a shift and go up to that roof where a sleek vessel would whisk you off to where the cries from the streets could not haunt you.

The lords of the new world had let swaths of the city go to seed even as they led charmed lives under this dispensation. At a time of starvation and unrest, the comfort and splendor they basked in were like nothing in history. Somewhere out there beyond the fires, a man named Martin Bishop, whose wealth had been the stuff of legends, dreamed of ending the overseer’s dominance, tearing all this down. No one in the crowds out there dared speak his name.

As Jan waited, sensitive to every blip or squawk from the intercom in this room and those on the other side of the oak portal, he thought of a scene in a bar three months before. Everyone was there who mattered. Every person in the world he cared about or could imagine sharing a future with, laughing and hoisting a drink as jazz flowed from the speakers and more young people flowed into the place and formed clusters of mirth and joy. Tim Walton, Simon Crawford, Mary Johnson, Anthony Hoyt. Tim was a hedge funder who owned a jet and worked where and when he pleased. Simon was a professor of history enjoying a paid lull between semesters. Mary was a poet. Anthony and Jan were peons who toiled in an insurance office, but now they were at leisure and free to think this was real, it was life.

But it seemed Anthony suffered from a barely controlled anxiety. When they sat in bars like this one late into the night, Jan got to hear all about his friend’s fears that the world might change. In his romantic blunderings, Anthony might whip up a community into a frenzy against him, without legal safeguards or recourse of any kind. Jan told him that was silly. Well, hearing about Anthony’s anxieties was better than listening to Mary go on about how time takes everything from us and conventional ideas of beauty are such bunk or hearing Simon drone on about his latest historical theory. To be fair to Mary, she was fun. The young woman spoke cryptically of having met Martin Bishop, the investor who was one of the few to criticize the growing dominance of social media and corporate oversight of human interactions.

As one of the most lyrical passages of Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” flowed from the speakers, Tim raised his glass to propose a toast to the vanguard of the new age. The others hoisted their glasses of beer and had a good laugh, though Tim spoke only half in jest. He really saw potential in every person at their table and believed they would all make out fine even in a world so polarized and unstable. Tim went to some lengths to disparage the architect of the leading social media platform.

Though Jan took a lot of abuse from people for his erratic memory, he would always recall that evening vividly. It was the kind you look back on with fondness, needing the ideas and sentiments to be true, almost believing they were. It fell at a moment in the life of the nation when the tech sector was expanding but the social media platform that everyone, save for a few valiant abstainers, used daily had not yet made itself the gateway through which the peons of this world accessed all public and private sites to organize parties, weddings, funerals, watch films, pay bills, file taxes, list real estate, sue a neighbor, buy a yacht or a plane, vote, send threats to strangers, or undertake a hostile merger.

The new age had dawned and Paul Curtis, who was wretched all through grammar school and high school and could never convince anyone of his gifts in the time before he got money together and joined with a couple of other loners to launch the site, needed the world to know just how unforgiving he was, how little he forgot the humiliations and neglect. He had been a sensitive youth. The encroachments of the site, its growing ubiquity, had been incremental. You might say it crept up on the world until it came to control everything.

Remembering that evening in the bar, Jan wondered what he would not give to see his friends again, as the vanguard of the new age or a gaggle of kids laughing and getting ripped on beer.

The brightness of the room was painful as over the intercom came a shrill peal, then a strangely mild voice.

“Mr. Jan Heath, the overseer will receive you now.”

It was as if he had come to meet an acupuncturist or a kindly therapist. The panel across from his chair slid to the right, revealing a brightly lit and tastefully furnished white space beyond. Jan rose and walked through the door. He did not nod to the receptionist as he passed between her desk and the Klimt abstraction on the wall.

Soon he came to the chamber. One wall was blank, the other a window offering a view of the city and the fires way off in the distance. Flanked by two tall lamps, Jan’s boyhood chum sat on a bronze throne with armrests that curled into dragon’s claws and a scarlet cushion. A semicircular backrest partly enclosed the throne from behind, so Paul could not see what lay in the chamber’s nether parts without getting up, but Jan guessed the door through he had come was the only point of entry.

The young man regarded Jan with neither coldness nor warmth. Paul’s gaze was a challenge to Jan to speak first. It soon became discomfiting and Jan guessed that was the point.

“It’s been quite a while, Jan. Thanks for all the calls and letters, by the way.”

Say the wrong thing and in seconds Jan could be out there on the street, buffeted by the seething human currents.

“I guess I assumed you’ve had more important things to do than keep up with me. Being, you know, the most powerful man in the world.”

Paul considered this.

“Define coward, Jan.”

“Coward?”

“Okay. Ah, well, it’s someone who hides from danger and hardship, or takes advantage of a situation where—”

“Does the term apply to someone who criticizes others behind their back? To his friends, over a few beers, for instance? Maybe someone who denounces a technical innovation even as he uses it daily.”

Now Jan felt uneasy. He sensed that Paul, who dealt with others brusquely and decided their fate in seconds if they got even this far, had been waiting for this conversation.

“One that is such a feature of daily life that I think we all see ways it could be improved. Even as we recognize its necessity and value and all the work that goes into making it run—”

Paul scoffed.

“All the work to make it run. No, Jan, I don’t think you have any concept of that whatsoever. And, if I’m quoting accurately, you said that ‘a site this contemptuous of our privacy is the Devil’s gift to the race.”

Paul had him. For all the abuse people gave him about his wobbly memory, Jan was not just aware of having made this remark, he recalled the context, the conversation in the bar one evening. Tim, the hotshot funds guy, was in an upbeat mood and had gotten them a round of drinks. Worrying that if his answer got out too soon, it might be one of the last things he said, Jan fumbled for words.

“Well, Paul, you know, as I just stated, one can criticize a brilliant invention without being a Luddite. Don’t you think so? I’ll complain about the sun when it’s horrid outside, that doesn’t mean—”

“That you’d put out the sun. Jan, I think you see the point I’m making here. You’re an ungrateful whelp. You think people give you a hard time for forgetting things. Well, I think you know what I took four years of in high school and four in college. Paul’s a nerd and a geek and dork and a reject. Paul has no social life. And while you were partying and having the time of your life and thinking here were the moments that defined you, in the warm company of cherished friends, I sat alone in my study grasping at algorithms and codes and financial models. And I put this thing together and made it work in defiance of all expectations, financing not just the thing itself but all the data centers and power sources, and it transforms the world and ushers in an age of convenience and collegiality we’ve never known, and my good buddy Jan, the kid I used to walk home from school with and stayed up all night playing Dungeons & Dragons with, until we drifted apart, this former friend of mine whines about the lack of privacy, what with everything so centralized and users able to see and track and monitor one another without knowledge or permission. Setting aside your asinine crack about the Devil, that’s the gist of your complaint. Am I right, Jan?”

Jan did not see where Paul meant to go with this questioning. It seemed Paul almost wanted to offer him an out, an ethical pretext. But to take the bait would admit that Jan’s hatred of the site was sincere, he loathed the means of Paul’s ascent to the top of the world.

“I had real concerns about the effects of the platform on the discreteness of our social, financial, and professional lives, in a word, yes, about privacy, though I could have expressed myself with more tact.”

Jan thought this answer walked a line between cowardice and recalcitrance. Its effect on Paul was not evident right away. The young man regarded his onetime friend with something like contempt, tempered maybe by a sense that Jan was not completely hopeless, not yet.

“Go to the window and take a look outside, Jan. You’ve never seen the city from this vantage point.”

Wondering whether Paul’s review of his case had run its course and some mechanism was about to propel him through the glass, Jan shuffled warily to the window and peered out at the glowing distances and rotated his eyes toward the scene below. The dancing and flickering curtains of orange on the horizon were fires with no other purpose, as far as Jan knew, than to remind everyone that things were a great deal worse for those who ventured outside the city’s bounds.

He looked at the scene fifty floors below. All over the human traffic flowed, bodies cleaved paths and edged around others in a furious dance, waves broke up and their components formed new ones that buffeted and fractured and splintered still others and drove them into fresh patterns and channels as voices merged into a buzz at once angry, solicitous, eager, plaintive. Try to follow the progress of one of the people down there and you would get that individual mixed up with a hundred others. You could watch this passage all day, and how little the mind fathoms numbers that it might ponder as abstractions. A hundred thousand, two hundred, eight million. If you fell down, no one would notice, the soles of boots would land like giant hammerheads. How foolish to imagine that the urge and the need to get to a point somewhere in the grubby quarter could permit an infinitesimal slackening of the pace or a pause to save the fallen stranger from death by trampling. As he indulged in these ruminations, the voice behind him here in this aerie nearly made him jump.

“You rejected what I had to offer because you valued privacy. Look down there, and there’s a world with no privacy, Jan. I offered you a decent existence on a discrete plane, where you would not exist in total isolation, of course, but would be quite cozy.”

Jan turned to face Paul. The gloves were off now and the overseer was going to do as he saw fit.

“I was your friend. Not like those spoiled and vicious kids we went to school with. Now if I dare criticize anything about your brilliant invention, I deserve the worst.”

The other gave a low, mocking laugh.

“Think of it as a fork in the road. As for your being my good, dear friend, that doesn’t exactly find support in the statements I’ve heard quoted these past few days.”

“From people trying to deflect blame and save themselves.”

“Maybe. But the comments have an air of truth about them. They sound just like things you would say when you thought I’d never find out. Or perhaps you thought I might someday, but who cared, I was a nerd who sat in his room toying with the high-techs gifts his software engineer dad brought home for him. I never did like the term ‘nerd’ much or understand what exactly people were trying to say when they used it, but that’s another conversation.”

“Paul, I never said—”

“Oh, I know everything you said, Jan. I know every little curse and epithet and variant of a swear word you called your loyal friend. And I think you did it partly because you needed to feel better than Paul, you wanted hide the fact that you could be so slow sometimes and had trouble remembering things.”

“That’s true, Paul. I’ve never admitted it to anyone before—”

“You know, what people who said ‘nerd’ didn’t ever get was reciprocity, or how life compensates you in ways no one expects. You and your friends thought you were interesting and fun to be around and you had this natural facility in social situations, while I was AWOL when they were passing out those traits. And there was a big hole where a natural characteristic should have been.”

“Paul!”

“I’m not finished, Jan. No, you never thought in terms of me as someone with other gifts, ones you didn’t respect and never tried to understand, you never imagined all the things I could do that you’d never in a million years be able to emulate. Today we are in preparations to launch a shuttle that will bring people to the fourth moon of Jupiter. Callisto, in case you’re not up on your Galilean moons.”
“Callisto. I can’t say I’ve heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t remember if you had, Jan. Anyway, you can sit there in this café on Callisto and listen to Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ as you sip wine and look out at the galaxy.”

Jupiter’s fourth moon. A café there. Jan saw little point in arguing about the scope of Paul’s achievements.

“I never called you a nerd, Paul. I find the term just as objectionable as you do.”

“Look at me, Jan. Look at the boy you betrayed. The kid you thought would never get anywhere. Paul the geek. When Paul turns his back, I’ll flash looks of distaste to my other friends so they’ll know I’m cool and I don’t really want to be talking to this loser.”

“I swear on my grandmother’s grave, Paul. I never called you a loser.”

“Oh, that was one of the gentler terms. But look at me, Jan. Do you see an elf? An ogre? A sprite? An orc? A will-o-wisp? It doesn’t really matter whether I’m good or evil according to your otiose, pre-Nietzschean terms. Let’s adopt D&D nomenclature again, Jan. You look out the window and see what’s down there and you may think I’m wicked, all right, but you know that I’m lawful evil, and the latter part could hardly matter less in this new age.”

“Tell me how I could consider you lawful good, Paul, when your assessment of others is based on what they did and said when they were far too immature to know any better, and you won’t ever forgive them.”

Paul shook his head wearily.

“Why don’t you come with me, Jan.”

The overseer got up and walked to that part of the room Jan had been unable to see when standing directly before the throne or at the window. Following Paul, Jan saw how off his sense of the room had been. As another portion of the wall slid aside, Jan gained a sense of the extent of this floor and the number of its administrative functions. He followed the overseer down the hall until they came to a black panel which promptly rose to reveal a screen. Before the screen came to flickering life, Jan saw that nearly identical panels punctuated the blankness of the wall all the way down to the far end of the corridor.

“So, Jan. You think that I designed my site without any regard for users’ privacy. For all your groveling, I think you still lack any perspective on the matter. If you don’t believe me, maybe your dear friend Tim Walton can help you unlearn your delusions.”

On the screen Tim appeared in a different mood from the one on display during that time at the bar months before. He sat by himself at a barren blue table, facing Jan and Paul wearily with a hungover look. A few inches from his hairy forearm sat a glass of gin.

“Can he see us?” Jan said.

“No. We don’t respect the rules of privacy here, remember?”

Now Jan heard the banging. Dozens of people slapped and pounded the walls on either side of the forlorn figure at the little table. All around cries rose. Most of these were semi-coherent at best, but Jan gathered that people who had lost money and been unable to recoup it through litigation were going to have an audience with Tim. Pursuing redress in the courts had been a costly, exhausting, infuriating fool’s errand, but now the bill had come due.

“Tim! Get out of there, man. Hurry!”

Paul laughed out loud.

“Come on, Jan. Even if he could hear you, where would he go?”

The screen flickered off and Jan followed Paul a few feet down the hall to the next one. In seconds a dank and muddy field appeared, with a sodden sky above and a narrow ditch wending its way from a point out of the frame to a culvert in a modest incline. Looking more closely, Jan noticed something odd. A terrified face peered out from the culvert. Jan recognized the clipped dark hair and the olive complexion. It was Anthony Hoyt, his drinking buddy and confidant, looking as if the world wanted to kill him.

“Here is one definition of privacy, Jan. Your friend has staked a claim to some premium real estate.”

“He would have been infinitely safer as a name and a tiny picture in an online platform.”

“What makes you say that?”

They moved to the next screen. Again it took Jan a moment to recognize the figure before him. It did not help that her back was to the screen. The woman with wispy dirty blond hair and cracking skin sat at the counter of a grimy diner with faded red walls and a nearly opaque window. From behind, she looked like wrecks Jan had seen in rehab clinics and homeless shelters. She was having or trying to have a conversation with a beefy man in his fifties wearing a brown leather jacket and soiled jeans. He sat three stools down and mostly ignored her. Though Jan could not see her mouth move, he gathered from what he could hear that she was telling an anecdote about her father and expected the other to find it funny.

“Recognize Mary Johnson? I made sure no one would hire her for any respectable job.”

“No, Paul. That can’t be Mary.”

“It’s your dear friend Mary, pestering that guy for change. She’s already done it to three others in the joint. If the guy keeps ignoring her, maybe she’ll flash him—”

“Why do I need to see this, Paul?”

“We were talking about perspective, Jan. About what privacy does and doesn’t mean and where you and your friends fit into the whole picture.”

“And Simon? What have you done with my other friend, Paul?”

Paul laughed again.

“What have I done with him? You haven’t listened to a word I’ve told you.”

They moved to the next screen. Here they witnessed Simon Crawford in a role that maybe was not part of most professors’ job description. Jan knew the images were not exactly contemporaneous because the mob carried a frightened man through the streets at the height of a day where no fires could have been more wrathful than the sun. The man riding on the shoulders of a member of the furious crowd wept and murmured and trembled and waved his arms wildly for balance. Here was the elemental force Simon always said Charles Dickens was writing about in those passages of A Tale of Two Cities where images of human and natural storms blur. They had stormed the Bastille and were happy to escort a member of the parasitic class to the guillotine.

When Paul and Jan returned to the throne room, the overseer’s tone was calm, even gentle.

“I can see the struggle you’re going through, and the sincerity of your groveling, for what that’s worth. I’m going to need a little time to make my decision.”

As a courtesy, the overseer arranged a ride for the guest. Jan would not have to brave the streets tonight. While waiting in the bright reception room, he flipped through a brochure that set forth in detail the colonization of Jupiter’s moon and the building and furnishing of a stylish café where patrons could listen to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and gaze at the stars.

The escort brought Jan to a one-bedroom flat in a crowded part of the city. Though the mobs were not ubiquitous at this hour, good luck trying to rest amid the cries and catcalls and alarms and gunshots.

Jan guessed that Paul’s people knew the address here and kept an eye on him, but the risk of flight was so low it barely mattered. There were few places in the world where Paul Curtis could not find you, and most people would not dare go near any of them.

When you move into a new place, even for a brief time, it becomes part of who you are, Jan had always thought. The house comes to occupy a place in your soul, and no grasp of its history and identity could be complete without an acknowledgment that you walked and breathed there. This squalid little place seemed determined to keep Jan at a distance, or so he thought as he lay down on the mattress in one of the narrow rooms and heard the noises on the streets.

An insult to one party triggered a more vehement slur directed at the mother of whoever had spoken first and a threat incurred a retaliatory one against an entire family. The screams and gunshots suggested not all the threats were idle. At points the clamor receded and Jan grew fairly certain he heard strangers out there on the street menace him by name, as if aware of his vulnerability in this tiny house.

“Pussy boy!”

“Come out, come out! We know you’re in there.”

“It’s going to be a long night, Jan! We could break in any time and kill you!”

But even in the midst of pandemonium, terror is not always the equal of exhaustion, as soldiers who fought on the distant frontiers of the new order could attest. He drifted off thinking of that moon of a distant planet, and how people seated in a café there might feel so far from home and so isolated that they could begin to feel anxious and to imagine that they had only a few yards of dust and dirt under them rather than the mass that Callisto encompassed. They would recline in their comfortable chairs and sip their Zinfandel and Malbec and feel the chemicals of the exquisite liquids transmit signals to their brains. Even as the wine blunted neural transmission, it would render them more vulnerable to the siren song of that famous sonata of Beethoven’s, and their view of the planets and the nebulae would make them prone to all kinds of vivid imaginings as the wine settled in them and the lights dimmed. For some the sonata conveyed pure emotional sensitivity, its opening notes expressed pain and trepidation in the midst of a vast hostile cosmos, and the second movement introduced highly specific, plaintive feelings as the alien settings and the unfathomed infinitudes, the vastness of space and time through which meteors and dust storms passed at intervals of seconds or zillions of years, grew ever more vivid around the listener.

The composition inspired thoughts of domains on the far edges of all existing maps, and a good deal many beyond, the unexplored red and ochre and orange orbs that soared through galaxies and were remote and sedate yet not entirely beyond the reach of the apparatus of the new state on Earth. You could never escape it. For Jan, Beethoven’s piece evoked images of light creeping into far-flung caves and canyons at what most people would take to be unfathomable distances from the planet where dwelt, yet might still see in person as technological advances proceeded at breakneck speed.

Hearing the notes of the second piano movement, he thought of dust and rock and dirt growing more vivid, of light creeping, encroaching, insinuating itself into the remotest crevices and the darkest caves as a moon progressed its orbit around a star, or, to speak more precisely, came ever more directly under the sway of the new master of space and time.

He sat bolt upright in his bed. Paul Curtis must not conquer the universe. That he owned so much already was a crime. He recalled lines from Orwell’s 1984 about how any hope lay in the proles, who could blow the party to hell tomorrow if they felt so motivated.

Jan got up and hurried to the phone in the next room. He could not, would not believe that Mary was a homeless whore who sat around propositioning fat men in greasy diners.

People mocked him for his poor memory. That, as Paul might say, was rich. He dialed a number and waited. After three rings, a raspy voice answered.

“Hello?”

“Mary. It’s Jan.”

“Why, hi there, old chum, I heard you turned on all your friends and enjoyed seeing our torments. It’s good to know what your friendship is worth.”

“Mary, I love you very much and I loathe how Paul destroyed your prospects, but I need to keep this brief. Do you happen to remember that time you said you talked to Martin Bishop?”

It was as if Jan had spoken the devil’s name. Mary’s tone changed immediately.

“Who is this? Is this some kind of prank? Want to sick the police on me? Grow up!”

She nearly screamed the last words as she slammed the phone down. With a feeling of despair, Jan resigned himself to a miserable night amid the cries and gunshots and threats.

But, not an hour after his return to the mattress, the phone on the wall rang. He ran to it.

“Yes?”

He heard a man speak in a cold, mirthless tone.

“We can’t talk this way. Five blocks up and one over.”

Jan heard a click. He did not know who had called, until he did know. The phone was barely back on its hook when he raced outside and bolted up the street. Fires burned on three corners and bundled forms turned to plead for change and mouth threats. He ran, panting, thinking there was no way Mary could really have known a figure of such notoriety. That implied that the top-down security, outside the online realm, was nothing like what existed inside it. Nothing at all.

He reached the corner five blocks from his house and turned left. Even as he did so, the pay phone at the end of this block began to ring. He pushed himself even harder, sweating, desperate, terrified of not making it.

“Hello?”

“Okay. Three up and two over.”

“It’s not safe out here! They’ll kill me.”

“Then go back to your placid existence.”

With a curse Jan hung up and charged up the street, ignoring the forms in the dimness who called out and suggested his pitiful office peon’s body needed a makeover only they could provide.

Panting harder, cursing, fighting back the urge to cry, he reached the third street up from that last phone and began to run. Even as he did so, he heard from an impossible distance the ring from the next pay phone. That booth was miles off. When he got there, he could barely speak.

“Hello?”

“Two up and one over.”

“This is a sick joke! I’m going to die before—”

He heard a click. A form out there in the dark called to him, offering a service. Another warned that Jan’s neck looked pasty and soft and inviting. He charged up the street, thinking he must pass out any second. Most frightening and infuriating of all, the next phone rang before it had any right to do so, before he had even closed one block.

But he reached the second street up, and, summoning the last of his strength, closed the distance to the phone. As he got there, he heard a gunshot not one block away.

“Hello?”

“Jan. Martin Bishop. I’ve heard so much. They always said you could never remember a thing, but I did wonder how you stayed employed in an insurance office if the details of collisions and deaths from eight or ten months past kept making claims on you. Anyway, we still don’t have time here. You know that I’ve always loathed Paul Curtis and everything he stands for, and, in the days when traditional markets still prevailed, even his wealth in no way surpassed mine.”

Jan panted, trying to compose himself, and listened harder.

“In my exile I have not been idle. I have enlisted the most talented hackers in the world in my cause and have put them to work on Paul’s systems, which for all his flamboyance are remarkably vulnerable. Though it would be useful to have a bit more information.”

Jan looked nervously in all directions, to detect any approach. The cries and the gunshots continued but did not get closer.

“Okay.”

“So, you with the pitiful memory. We need answers to a few security questions. What was the name of Paul’s cat?”

Jan answered without a moment’s pause.

“Penelope.”

“His third-grade teacher?”

“Denise Richardson. Except on those days when Nancy Fillmore stood in.”

“His first love?”

“Amy Salter. I should tell you it was not mutual.”

“His first car?”

Jan laughed.

“Trick question. Paul couldn’t pass a driving test, not with his eyesight.”

“That’s okay, I think we might have just enough to proceed. Safe home, my boy.”

Jan not only made it home, he was able to get to the office on the fiftieth floor two months after Martin Bishop and his hackers punched into Paul Curtis’s IT systems, relying partly on information Jan had provided, and proceeded to tear down the house of cards, to dismantle the apparatus on which the most powerful empire in human history rested. The world had changed beyond recognition and now, more or less overnight, everything had changed again.

He stood with Martin, and with his two surviving friends, in the hall just off the throne room.

“They said your memory was poor,” Mary said.

“You said so, Mary. More than once. When you weren’t whining about life.”

“Come on, children,” said Tim.

Now on the screen before them Paul Curtis appeared, a forlorn figure hobbling up a street in clothes too ragged to hide his diseased flesh, with the look in his eyes that Jan had seen in junkies’ features. The gaze of others all around, the looks of hate and disgust, were as clear an expression of pure democracy as Paul would ever know, and he rued the power that deprived him of the thing for which he had shown boundless contempt over and over in his young life.

Fiction by Michael Washburn

Michael Washburn is a Brooklyn-based writer and journalist. He is the author of five short story collections. His story Confessions of a Spook won Causeway Lit’s 2018 fiction contest.