Interference & Other Stories by Richard Hoffman

Author:Richard Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780898232974
Publisher: New River Press

As I left, the broken white-haired woman was still in her wheelchair by the door, her useless hand above her head. “Hello dear,” she said.

“Hello.” I smiled at her, and then I bent down close to her and whispered in her ear. “Colonel Mustard,” I said, “with the pillow. In the library.”

GUY LOOKS FOR WORK

Guy scanned the want ads. He was supposed to be looking for a job, of course, but as his eyes moved down the columns, the question of how to make some money quickly swelled into the panicked demand for the missing explanation for his life. Where did he fit? What was he supposed to do with a PhD in ethics?

He continued to scan the page. What the hell was an Assembler? What did an Assembler assemble? What did an Auditor listen to? An Estimator estimate? An Expediter expedite? And what in the name of God was an Oracle Developer?

Guy felt misunderstood. Well, not misunderstood, exactly, so much as not understood at all. As he went about his day, busy with first this and then that, so he went about his trackless life. On a good day he felt the equanimity of the disinterested spectator, bemused by the looks on peoples’ faces, the intensity of their exertions, the occasional grace and justice of their actions. On bad days it was as if he were trapped in a meandering joke.

“Quit staring!” said Guys wife.

Gazing into the middle distance, Guy was out of it again, as ifhed passed through a cognitive one-way door and couldn’t get back in. His wife, Wanda, was at the table making a list on a special pad of paper with “TO DO” across the top and a vertical row of boxes inviting emphatic checkmarks. Guy understood that her list-making was a kind of prayer, an alignment of her intentions with her energy. One day he spent about half an hour looking at one of her checkmarks: it was, up close, a gorgeous bit of thoughtless grace. In the way it began, downward, hard, and then changed direction, gaining lift and velocity until it vanished, implying itself into the invisible, it was as perfect as any Zen masters brushwork O. Guy’s heart swelled with love and appreciation.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Wanda when he tried to tell her, but he could see she was pleased. Wanda had half a dozen items on her list. She paused the slightest moment, never looking up from her paper, then wrote down half a dozen more to fill the sheet. “I’ll be gone at least three hours,” she said to Guy as she paused in the doorway. “You have any interviews today?”

Guy looked at her.

“Any prospects?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

Prospects, prospects. Anything was possible. Maybe a new species, the next evolutionary tsunami, was swelling in his consciousness even then; maybe there, in the middle distance, the utterly transforming notion of the next, the new, the unforeseen (though perfectly foreseeable in retrospect) Homo contemplatus would come to birth among the dust

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