Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,46

had. He’d felt it for a long time, the looping tendrils of dissatisfaction, the sharp pangs of regret. Regret for what? He didn’t know but recognized the longing, the way that, even in the calmest moments, there was an undertone of discontent.

Now, however, he was really in it; now, it was more than dismay. Over the past few months, his life had narrowed to a pinprick, as if he were being pushed through a series of checkpoints, each one stripping away another piece of who he was. If he’d been a philosopher, he might have seen this as some kind of purification ritual, but he wasn’t a philosopher. He was a man.

Or not even a man, not really; not a very good man, anyway. As a kid, he’d sworn that when he grew up, he would pay attention, and here he was living in the fallout of his in attention, a junk bond trader in a collapsing market, laid off and understanding in a whole new way what was meant by out of luck. The day they’d canned him, he had seen the old man in the corridor, but that fucker hadn’t said a word. Instead, he’d disappeared behind the mahogany door of his office—to make lunch plans, to cash out an option, to do God knows what while the HR robots did the dirty work. All morning, people had been summoned, an e-mail or a tap on the shoulder, and then the long walk to the conference room. When his time came, he felt his throat grow dry and a blade of panic slide down his windpipe. He sat for a moment, looking at his computer. There were numbers tracking stock transactions, but as usual they didn’t add up. Briefly, he wondered if he should do something—throw the monitor on the floor, hurl his desk chair through a window. Then he got up and trudged down the hall, reminding himself to keep his head up, reminding himself not to let it show.

That was the idea, not to let anyone know it mattered, not to make a scene. In the conference room, they offered water because you couldn’t cry when you were drinking water—or at least that’s what he’d once heard. It’s not personal, the robots were saying, your position has been eliminated, but it sounded like they were submerged. They handed him a folder with some papers to sign and instructions on how to get his severance, and just like that, he no longer had a job.

He couldn’t say how quickly the plan had started to develop, but the earliest inkling came before he’d finished cleaning out his desk. Standing on the jetty, watching the sky grow pale and silver-pink at sunset, he drifted back to that moment, emptying his drawers into a trash can, realizing that nothing he’d gathered in the last five years, nothing he’d accumulated, meant anything at all. In a weird way, he felt hardened, kilnfired, as if those few minutes in the conference room had heatblasted him into some new shape. Not purified, though, never purified. Not unless purity could be defined in terms of rage. He’d kept going through his papers, not registering their contents, seeing all those columns of numbers, those transactions, break down into abstract lines. His eyes kept drifting to the old man’s office, and he began to imagine what it would be like to walk through that heavy door and slam him through a wall. That little troll—he’d mismanaged the investments, he had overextended, selling short and buying long. Now, all of them had to pay for the mess while the old man went about his business, buying fancy suits and spending weekends on Cape Cod.

But here he was on Cape Cod, having taken the Plymouth & Brockton bus from Boston to Hyannis, and the RTA to Harwichport. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and he’d come down here for his own kind of celebration, a personal reckoning, Thanksgiving with a kick. He knew this town only from that one long-ago summer and the presence of the jetty in his dreams. But the more he’d thought about it—thought about it? Obsessed about it, sitting in his Central Square apartment in the months since he’d been laid off, watching his severance dwindle down to zero—the more he’d had that sense of being whittled, of his life leading toward a single moment. That moment had arrived.

It had been twenty-five years since he’d last been here, and yet, he knew, there was