It is better not to think about illusions he decides and goes to the gym. He does pull-ups and push-ups and runs on the treadmill. He exhausts himself, his attention. It is very boring at the gym. He leaves the gym. He walks back. He enjoys walking. He can think, walking, can look at passersby, lots of possibilities. You can go this way or that. And can think. And other reasons. Walking is fine. Here he is at the store already. He buys himself some cereal. Hello, Shakur. Yes, just this. No, thank you. He falls on his way out. He crashes down, his temple slamming against the ice. But he holds on tight to his cereal. And it is happening more quickly now, the deep night moving through him, better not to think, hurrying on, looking into their faces, the time already exhausted, the portion of the day left behind in idle pursuits like staring at walls, eating tasty foods, enjoying entertainments such as travel and sports. The cold of the winter night is his taste of the real world. This is my taste of the real world, he says to himself, taking his cereal with him to the snowy park. The ground of the park is covered in snow and ice, and a portion of the moon is out, and the ice emits enough of the moonlight to see by, enough certainly for him to eat his cereal. Slipping and sliding up the hill in the park, looking for the place to eat, having left it somewhere in here beneath the moon and the stars. Gracious me, he says, as he bowls over into a patch of ice. Somewhere in the night a voice says, Hello? Hello, he says. Hello, the voice repeats. Well, hello there. I am just here to eat my cereal. What? says the voice. I am just here to eat my cereal. Your cereal? Yes, just me. Okay, would you like to sit with me while you do that? Sure, but where are you? I'm over here. Dark shape of a man walking closer. Hello. Gloved hands shaking. You're aware that this is a bad place to eat cereal? No, I think it is great. I see, says the other man. Well, there is a good log over here that I was sitting on. They walk over to the log and sit next to one another. The man opens his cereal and begins to eat it. The other man asks for a bite. The good man with the cereal tilts the box toward the other man, who takes off his glove and sticks his hand in the cereal box and digs around for a bit, before pulling out his hand, carefully, depositing some of the cereal in his mouth. He holds the rest of the cereal in his hand. With his other hand, he takes something out of the cereal and puts that thing in his pocket. They sit and eat cereal for a bit. There is nothing like some cereal in the night. The flavor of it. Yes, well, I'd better be going. Yes. The other man stands and leaves. The man with the cereal sits and eats until the sound of footsteps in snow fades and returns and fades again. Then he also stands and leaves, exits the park, walks down the street. Fire trucks thunder past, their groaning horns, the ground shakes. The man holds onto his cereal. Gets upstairs, puts it away, walks into his closet, curls into a ball and sleeps. He emerges from the cloths gasping the next morning. Climbs out of his closet. Climbs down the staircase. At the door looks out. Sees the people wearing clothes, remembers, goes back upstairs, puts on his clothes, brushes his teeth, spits, runs downstairs, looks out of the glass door at the people walking by, the snow and slush, remembers, goes back upstairs, digs around in the closet, finds a pair of boots, puts them on, falls down the stairs, slamming his head into a wall, breaking his head, stumbles out onto the street, a man says, Oh my god are you okay? Oh yes, he says, I am okay, let me through, pushing through the huddle of people, back to the park, back to the log, walking around it, looking for the tracks, finding them, the third boot-print, following it, head dripping red, following the tracks, the third print, different from the other two, trying to remember what he is doing, very important that he not lose track of the third print.
The prints take him out of the south side of the park, down the street, where he loses them. Try not to lose them. The wish to keep track of the third boot print in the snow. Finds them again. They go left, eastward, down the hill. Loses them in the ice but knows now where they are going. They are not going to A or B, they are going to C, remember, the third print, taking him now to location C, where they don't know about the cereal. Remember not to talk about things of no importance, not to think with too much vantage of these things. There is something coming out of him, dripping out his trail, but he is not going to think about who is behind him, for it is not the sort of thing he would think about, and would that he not be parted from his challenging print!
Arriving at the door, giving it a turn. Entering the cool, dark warehouse. Better not to describe the warehouse. Better to keep moving. The boot-print is here in the dust. It is very important not to think too much about what the boot-print means, because doing so might overshadow the more important aspects of this walk on this fine day, through the park, down the street, and deep into this warehouse, where perhaps they store apples, or oranges, or bananas, or other fruit, or cakes, such as, for example, fruit cake, raspberry cake, chocolate cake, German cake, tasty cake, trying cake, sweet and tasty cake, or trying to remember but not to think cake, trying to remember but not to think what to do at the stage of the warehouse wherein there are two doors cake, one is green cake, the other is blue cake, you can only open one door cake. The suspicion that you are going to have one shot at opening a door cake, he thinks, opens the blue door, because blue is an excellent color, the other good colors are purple, brown, black, red, gray, green, yellow, and sometimes behind the mirrors in bathroom cabinets hide the marinades that end the illusion.
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He goes back home with the marinade in his pocket. The lights in his home are off, the way he likes them. The streetlight outside the window is enough. The excitement as he begins to make himself some macaroni and cheese, feels in his pocket for the marinade, opens the marinade and reads it to his macaroni and cheese water, which he is so excited to eat once it turns into macaroni and cheese proper. Try to see without thinking, says the marinade. It makes the dish taste better. Some people do not like flavors. He looks in the refrigerator for flavors, spices, finds hot sauce, lets it rip. Dumps hot sauce in the macaroni and cheese water. Makes a marinade for the dried pasta. Trying not to think. To see only. Around the pot wraps the flame its fingertips orange and thick down the wall the cockroach runs the length of the counter leaps into the flame dissolves its life into air and blackness. This cockroach understands something, no, no it doesn't, no more thinking, he says to himself, pouring salt into his eyes as if he were his father, blinking. Pours salt into the pasta water, pours pasta into the salt and hot sauce water. Shakes the pot around. Hurry, he says, trying to finish the pasta work, trying not to figure anything out. You cannot just say not, he says. That is not enough. You have to focus on what you are doing. Not think about things. It is not enough to say not. Not does nothing. No, no, no. Ow! he says and takes his finger away from the hot pot. Decides it is better to be out doing something while he waits for his pasta to cook. Runs down the stairs, out the door, to the hardware store down the block, goes into the bright store, runs down the aisle. The man asks, Hey, can I help you? I have experience looking for hardware, says the man. You look like a guy who is looking for something that he cannot quite put his finger on or who cannot quite verify that a thing is or is not the thing he is looking for, in short, like a man who could use a hand, this way please. The voice fades as the man runs deeper into the hardware store. The store smells like rubber and is brightly lit. It is too bright. He can see everything. He can see too much detail. The dimensions of the screws, the voltage of the drills, the shape of his hands, the ink on his fingers, the pain in his shoulder, the headache, the shape of the hammer, the crow bar, the heartache, the shape of their future, the lost voice in the other aisle saying, Look, I can help you, if you just give me a chance, I can by discourse win through to an understanding of you, the sort of thing for which I have always hoped, to understand a customer's wants and needs. He is clearly a driven salesman. It is his vocation. He is not above his life.
The smell of the rubber floors, the paint in the cans, the sheet rock, the glue, the faucets, the ink on his fingers, the bags of mulch, the door to the cellar, down to the cellar wherein the resident carpenter cuts the wood by means of the miter blade. He is here now, cutting wood. Hello, says the man to the carpenter. Hello, says the carpenter, chewing a splinter of wood. Trying not to look at him. Hello, my apologies, but I was running away from the damn salesman. Yes, you have to be careful around here, says the carpenter. Goodness, I am tired, says the man to the carpenter, his voice catching. Look at me, says the carpenter. The man looks at the carpenter. Are you good? asks the carpenter. Yeah, says the man. How about you? asks the man. I am grateful for my work as it gives me a good vantage point. Yes, I can see how having no windows would make for good views. Yes. Well, thank you for your carpentry and goodbye. Goodbye. The man runs up the stairs of the cellar, runs out of the hardware store, runs back to his building, runs up the stairs, runs into the kitchen, turns off the pasta, pours out the water, adds the macaroni and cheese dust, pours in some water, stirs it, and eats. Fortified, exhausted, then, he slumps into his closet again.
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What is the worst that can happen. Walks into the lobby. Tells the security guard he has an interview here (he does), walks into the elevator, up, out, to the desk. I have an interview here, he says to the woman at the desk. She points to the chairs. He sits in the chair, waits, opens and closes magazines, spills out of his chair. I need to pee, he explains. He goes to the bathroom. He jumps up and down in the bathroom, flushes the water in the toilet, tears paper towels in half, steps out, sweating. He smiles and nods to her as if to say, Everything went smoothly. He goes back to his chair. He waits. He opens a magazine and closes it. The sun coming in through the window is hot. Trying not to think. Waiting his turn. A woman opens the glass door, greets him, says, We're ready for you if you're ready for us. He finds he cannot speak so just nods, stands up, follows her. She asks him some questions that he doesn't know the answers to (how's your day going, where are you coming from, how was your flight, have you ever been to SF). They enter a room. She sits in a chair as he explains how it could be possible that he does not know answers to such basic questions. She says, Oh, that's okay, I don't know either, you can sit if you'd like, and gestures at the chair opposite her. He nods, sits. She asks him other questions, asks him to write his answers on the whiteboard. He jumps up and begins to write his answers on the whiteboard. She asks him to clarify his answers and he does. He asks her to clarify her questions and she does. She asks more questions, faster and faster (what arrangement of n vertices maximizes the nullity of its adjacency matrix, explain, how does the spectral entropy of a random NxN matrix scale with respect to N, explain). He answers. She says, Great, that's all. She says, Now, do you have any questions for me? He says, No. They shake hands. He walks out. He leaves.
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He gets the job. They take him on a tour of the rooms of the building. They say, Here is this room, here is how the rooms work. They say, Here is the best room. They give him a computer. He opens it and clicks into applications. He opens his email and checks his email. He does not know how to do his job yet. He asks how to do his job. They say, Yes, I'm not sure, let me ask Steve. Steve comes over and explains how it all works, but his explanation doesn't make any sense. He asks him questions and Steve says, You'll have to ask Angela about that. He asks Angela, but her answer doesn't make any sense. He decides that no one has any idea how it works. He decides he is going to have to find out how it works by breaking it in specific ways and observing what happens. Over the next couple of weekends, he learns how it works. (During the week he has no time for learning because he is so busy checking his email and trying to help people.) The weekends are his favorite. The office gets very quiet. He has a plan, he is implementing a plan. The third weekend he feels he has managed to fit the whole system in his head. The parts of it to which he has access, in any case. He believes there are parts of it to which he has no access, but he doesn't know how to think about those parts. The next week he asks Angela about the inaccessible parts. She says, Excuse me? Of the system, I mean, he says. She says, Oh, yes, I mean, yeah, I don't know either. You have to be promoted to know which parts you did not formerly know about, probably. He says, How do you become promoted? She says she doesn't know and refers him to Carly, who was promoted once. He asks Carly how she got promoted, and she says she did it by being both charming and effective at certain key junctures. He goes back to Angela and asks whether anyone else has been promoted. Angela says, Yes, of course. Lots of people. For example, Emma. She refers him to Emma. He asks Emma how she got promoted. She says, I have a photographic memory. He says, Oh, nice. She nods and says, Yeah, it's pretty sweet. He nods and then heads out.
He goes to bed. He wakes up. He runs in the park. While he runs, he counts down the amount that he still has left to run. He arrives home and checks his phone. A new email he has to answer. Five new Slack messages he has to answer. All very time sensitive. He sits at the kitchen table and answers them. Then he showers. Then he puts his computer in his backpack and goes to the office. On the subway he stands between the cars. There he reads new emails and Slack messages. Once he reads and responds to those, he reads documentation and marinades. When he is done with the marinades he disposes of them by throwing them into the rushing black air of the tunnel.
He is on the stairs. He is in the lobby. He is at his desk. He is trying to understand a foreign data model. He is asking questions. He is trying to understand. It is nighttime. He is at his desk in the quiet office. There are some people at some desks but mostly the desks are empty. He likes it when it is quiet like this and the windows are dark. He has all night to do his work. He doesn't have to read any messages. He can do everything he wants to do. He has all the time in the night. There is no one left except him. He is not rushing. He is taking his time. He is learning. He is in the night. He is in the morning. The sun is coming up. There is no one there. They are home for the weekend. He is pacing around. He has all weekend. He has all weekend to do his work. He thinks and thinks about his work. It becomes large. It was already large, but he made it small during the week to blend in. On the weekends he can remember how large and daring his project is. Vast. It is everything in the room. The swivel chairs, the seltzer cans, the stand-up desk, the couches, and the carpet. All of them have a role to play. Each is a piece in the puzzle. He lies down on a couch and falls asleep. It is evening when he wakes. The sounds of the cars on the street. He stands up and walks to the window. He looks out the window at the orange clouds. He decides this is what he likes. He wonders why it is ever anything other than this. He is alone behind enemy lines. He is doing his work. There is no one else in the room. They are not doing their work.
He runs in this manner through the weeks of his heroic life. Gradually, at first, and then very quickly, the people around him discover that he understands how the system works. That he has the whole system in his head. It happens like this: first person A idly wonders aloud how something works. He explains it. Later on, person B asks person A how something works. Person A says she doesn't know, but that he could try asking this new guy. Person B tries asking him and he answers. Persons A and B talk to one another about how this new guy knows all these things. Person C is listening and asks them about him. Then they start coming out of the woodwork with all the questions they long ago gave up trying to understand. Black boxes, race conditions, Heisenbugs, tests failing only at 8pm on the second Thursday of every third month. People are coming to him from high and low, asking him how things work. It is in time generally understood that he is the only one who knows how anything works. So he gets promoted. Time passes and he gets promoted again. This is of course a crucial part of his plan, a crucial part of any good plan. You have to get promoted.
One day he is sitting in the excellent room doing excellent work. Someone comes in and says, Look, we're giving you access. He gets access. He spends the whole weekend investigating the part of the system to which he now has access. Moreover, in this new part of the system there is an exhaustive, system-level index of the parts of the system. It is conceivable that there is another part of the system not listed there, but it is vanishingly implausible; it would be prohibitively difficult and expensive to maintain a partitioning that would keep any second system off of this list. He has met the sort of people who work here and not a single person, of those he has met, would even know how to conceive of such a program. He has therefore satisfied himself that he has access to everything to which the company has access. He works for a few more days, then he quits. They say, You can't just quit! And he says, Sorry. He is honestly pretty confused and frustrated, but of course he doesn't try to explain any of this to them. How the hell would he explain it all? They don't read marinades, most of them, and those who do read poorly, and even if they were the best marinaders in the world, it would not make any difference, because he knows he would not be able to write it. So he just quits.
He returns to his apartment and within a few weeks his life returns. Then one night he writes the following story.
Once upon a time there was a man who began to understand that there was something outside of himself that had privileged access to him. He came to believe that this other entity's interests were not wholly in concord with his own. From the vantage point of a park bench with a coffee in his hand he watched people shout at their dogs: Parma, Parma come, Parma get back here. Thus there existed an entity with a privileged relationship to every other. What do you do with privileged access? You try to place a listening device in the important rooms. What was the important room in this case? The brain. How could the entity listen to the thoughts? It had only to gain access to babies, implant chips in their brains, and poof, there you have it. That was his realization. He saw everything differently, after that realization. He saw that the people who were most easily controlled were those who had an explicit, coherent logic discordant with the logic of the baby-brain-chip entity. That is, people who actively stood up to this troubling state got run over. You could see this by the fact that the people who were brave and articulate in their discordance gradually failed at everything whereas the people who had either already given up or those who were content with trying hard and living happy lives stayed the same. This was to him clear evidence. People were being made to conform. He decided that the only levers by which the entity could control him were those levers of cognition which were intelligible to it, namely, his reason, his more forthright chains of thought. So he trained himself to think in a manner that was neither clear nor explicit. This plan almost worked, but, as often happens when plans work, he eventually got bored. So he ran an experiment (generally the right move if you're bored). He tried thinking horrible, seditious, revolutionary, criminal thoughts. He started speaking ill of the entity, first in his mind, then in his journal, then on pieces of paper he would hand to his accomplices, then on his blog, and then in train stations to whoever would listen. He tried identifying the entity with various specific entities: specific companies, states, families, and so forth. It was an experiment bold to the point of recklessness given what he knew at the time or what he thought he knew. Of course, nothing happened.
So he did some reading and some talking and found that paranoid conceptions of the world, trumpeted into the caverns of the internet, alluded to in each turn of dinner-table irony, were not so much the exception as the rule. He had always assumed that paranoias analogous to his own would hide themselves (he forgot that his had stopped hiding in the end). Didn't these people see that detailed elucidations of the ways their fears could materialize (might already have materialized) amounted to some cross between a blueprint and an advertisement for precisely the scenario they feared? He supposed they were loud because they were trying to coordinate opposition to the downside in question, but then why wouldn't they at least try to encode their thinking? The position in which you are structurally dependent on surrendering the entirety of your scheme, and all the various information edges embodied in it, each time you want to add someone to your team is a bad position to be in. He supposed that there could be selection effects at play, here; maybe there was a vast, silent majority of people encoding and guarding their paranoias successfully; maybe these loud proselytizers would be anomalies, again, if you weighted the sample by headcount rather than by airwaves occupied. But that supposition brought him no closer to an explanation for why a controlling entity would allow this particular genre of airwave to be so easy to find.
He realized that, to resolve his confusions, he had to get privileged access to the group with privileged access to him. He went to Sovereign Technology Incorporated (STI) and applied for a job. If anyone had privileged access, they did. His job interview went well. They offered him the job. He accepted it. He was eager to start his work at the job. He was softly raised until he occupied a degree sufficient to assure him that he saw everything STI did. And that is when he came to understand there was no secret mind-control entity. There were people trying to get to work on time, people frustrated that they never had time to think about anything other than work, people who regretted any deviation from work, saw it as procrastination, waste. There were people trying to help the world (sometimes by bombing starving children waiting in food lines but always with the best intentions). People trying to bring excitement, pride, admiration into the lives of those close to them, expectation into the hearts of the young, or revolutionary technology to the masses. People trying to steam their shirts before the meeting because they did not want to look like they just rolled out of bed. People clawing desperately toward their own peculiar conceptions of the promised land of being forgotten more slowly than their companions. And so forth. So his experiment had yielded evidence to the effect that his theory was incorrect; these data suggested to him that there was, after all, no dominant, clandestine, nefarious faction. If STI wasn't doing it, no one was. Cleared of all charges. So he quit his job (he didn't need a job, as his great-great grandfather had set up for him a trust-adjacent legal vehicle one hundred and fifty years ago, and compound interest had taken care of the rest), and he enjoyed his new freedom for some weeks. He wandered around, drank coffee, sang songs in his head, thought about the properties of the cosmos, the future of the human world, the history of life. He met a girl at a bar and they went back to her apartment and had sex. He tried not to think about her too much and succeeded. He got a volunteer job at a hospital. They assigned him annoying tasks like taking inventory, putting things in their proper places, editing documents, emailing people, directing confused emergency room patients to the appropriate channels, etc.
Then something strange started to happen. He began again to lose control of his mind, but this time the loss was not to a hypothetical entity outside of himself, like himself only indefinitely more powerful, rather the loss was to a thought, a pattern of thinking, a kernel thought, located in his own mind. It was a thought like one he might have had, but it was not his. Having seen it as distinct, he began to trace other thoughts and feelings back to their origins in it. He was infuriated to find that, of those descended from the kernel, some were seemingly inseparable from who he was, some had to him an ambiguous or neutral valence, and some he actively did not want to think and feel. But the real kicker came when he realized that most every thought descended from the kernel was more articulate and compelling than any of his own. And that was, after all, the sense in which they controlled him: he believed them. These thoughts, feelings, and dispositions were beyond him. The efficiency of their reduction overwhelmed him, for they all stemmed from the same stupid sentence: you contain within you a potential that you cannot measure by any means other than its exhaustion. That was the kernel. There was something within him (possibly something very dull and uninteresting but, in any case, the upper limit of what he could offer) and the only way he could give the world access to it was by using it completely: using it up.
He tried everything. He tried painting. He bought oil paints, painted his walls. He tried biology. He bought petri dishes and studied gut flora. He tried piano, cooking, running, gardening, medicine, directing films, writing emails to strangers, helping old women walk down icy streets and old men wipe their asses and city planners organize their databases. He even tried emailing an old friend, a sort of hero of the previous circuit. None of this shit worked, obviously. People for the most part ignored him (he didn't blame them, they were busy doing important work and probably were making informed bets that they could midwife more potential into the world by spending their time on something other than him); occasionally, someone bit and the two of them gave it a shot, but none of that came to much, in anyone else's estimation, and he, for his part, felt, at the end of each such venture, further from his ideal exhaustion than he had been at the outset. He became miserable. He determined that there was almost nothing he could take pride in. He asked himself why he was unhappy, and he answered that it was because he believed he was not using up his potential. He asked himself whether he would believe this if no one was looking. He began to notice that he was often doing fine until he encountered someone who knew him, someone whose behavior, words, glances manifested certain assumptions about what counts as existing, what counts as achievement, what counts as a story, what counts as a memory. He saw that, in fact, their behaviors were triggering this latent tendency, of his, to fixate on the picture wherein humans were repositories of potential. He did not think anyone was to blame for the structure of this situation (he was too well educated, especially after his foray into STI). Or, in any case, the blame is diffuse, he corrected himself, sensibly; the causes are many; the spectral gap, small. The kernel contains ingredients from me, my cohort, my education, my environment, my context in society and history, etc. The causes are many and the triggers are more numerous still. I happen upon an ordinary phenomenon and, before I know it, I am falling back into the picture of myself as a thing failing to exhaust the portion of its potential located in each precious second of its day in the sun. That was how he phrased it to himself at the time.
He began at last to entertain that the only way to beat back the illusion was to disclaim his potential. This thought, as it came to him then, was indirect, its formulation lazy or metaphorical. The educated part of him moved immediately to straighten it out, but, for once, a countervailing instinct intervened. Like a chess player who can discern good position without explicit calculation and who, embroiled in a game of bullet, identifies calculation itself as more threatening than an inaccuracy would be, he recognized that, if he were to clarify to himself the mode and motives for this action of disclaiming his potential, he would thereby render it a new technique, a new potential. Instead, he merely stopped thinking, again, for the second time in his life, but this time for a slightly different reason.
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But the operation was difficult to perform. The adversary was no longer outside of him. The discord was understood as being at least in part within him. It was insufficient to pretend to the world that he was incapable; he had also to pretend to himself. He questioned, at first, whether it was even possible to pretend to oneself. He went to the shop and threw a potted plant at the wall. This was to show himself how stupid he was or something. But of course that didn't work. You can't make yourself believe something; he stopped trying. He learned to wake up in the morning, roll out of his bed, slam onto the hard floor. Behave yourself, he told himself, by which he meant: behave. You can think about the journey by which a former child comes to see humans as instances of an overwhelming, invisible, inhuman force, but you don't have to think about that. You can also just clean your dishes, hold the hands of the dying, and in solitude squirm. He watched spiders and owls. He bought a pair of binoculars and a magnifying glass.
But it was very lonely, very difficult to find company that saw in his behavior anything other than an erasure, and so, as happens in both isolation and erasure, his own incomprehensible death and its clearer reflection in grief pressed closer. There were a few people who seemed to understand some things about the situations that might give rise to someone's attempting to live in a wasteful manner, which is to say, in a manner that didn't make sense to him. His father, who had blinded himself and who spent most of his time these days dictating to his computer solutions to competitive programming problems, seemed to understand waste. "The sense of freedom (the sense of superseding one's education) expands as the dimensionality of the model originating one's behaviors grows relative to that of the model originating the feedback one receives in response to those behaviors. Thus one technique for minimizing the likelihood of one's accidentally submitting one's soul to an explicit, externalizable model of it would be to make one's behaviors conform to a stupid and in that sense diversionary logic or model" was something he had once read in his father's diary. So plenty of overlap. There was also the man who worked at the deli, the homeless man, the cashier at the grocery store, the carpenter, and the professor who did not respond anymore. Those were the people with whom he felt less lonely, in any case, the people with whom he passed notes. They were, of course, extremely busy (as happens in adulthood), with the exception of his father (another trust fund baby), but his father would die soon, and then there would be no one.
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He wakes up calm the next day. He is going to see his father. He puts on his clothes, brushes his teeth. Goes to see his father.
His father lives two blocks away. His father lives in an apartment, too. He walks to his father's apartment, placing one foot first, leaning forward, lifting the other foot, swinging it in front, putting it down on the ground, leaning forward onto it, lifting the back foot, swinging it in front, and so forth, as any ordinary person would. He arrives at his father's building, buzzes up, walks up the stairs, knocks on the door. Door's open, says his father's voice from behind the door. The son opens the door. Draft of cold air, cold as outside. The father is sitting in a wooden chair in the corner of the kitchen. He is wearing sunglasses and a battered fedora. He is sitting in a chair in the corner of the kitchen, next to the oven. The oven is on. This is how the old man stays warm. He runs the oven constantly. The oven is an old oven, poorly insulated, so the whole thing heats up. The windows are open, which is why the apartment is cold. The son walks over to the father. The father stands up. They shake hands then the son steps back. In the kitchen is a table large enough for one person. At the table is another wooden chair. The son sits in it. They say some things. The usual. Talked to the carpenter. How did he seem? Good. Good. Would you like for me to make you some pancakes? That sounds good. Okay, let me first assemble the ingredients. The son assembles the ingredients, turns on the burner, singeing his father's hair accidentally. The smell of burnt hair quickly dissipates in the wind. He beats the eggs, mixes the flour, pours the milk, puts the bananas in there, the blueberries, the mango, the peanut butter, the baking soda, butter, chocolate, honey, bitters, sand, jam. What else do you think we can put in here, pop? Nothing. Okay, let's cook these suckers.
