The alarm went off at five. I reached for the dresser and hit a lamp that wasn't supposed to be there. Something fell. I found the phone farther back, turned it over, and lay there with the light in my face trying to understand why it said five instead of six-thirty. I had checked it twice before going to sleep. There was a calendar notification underneath the alarm. Management review, seven a.m. I cleared it so I could see the time again. My mouth was dry. I lay there with the alarm still going. The ceiling was wrong. There was a narrow strip of light along the curtains, and the air coming out of the vent smelled like a hotel. I tried to sit up. My stomach folded against itself and I had to put an elbow behind me, then the other hand, and push until my feet reached the floor. I was breathing through my mouth by the time I turned the alarm off. My shirt had ridden up. I pulled it down, looked at my hands on my thighs, then pulled it up again. I had some idea that the sheet was bunched underneath it. I actually checked for that. The skin was warm under my fingers. When I stood, my knees trembled. I kept one hand on the bed until they steadied. The bathroom had two sinks. I put both hands on the counter and looked at myself between them. My face was still there, but the space around it had filled in. I turned sideways and immediately turned back. The shirt was enormous. It fit. That was the part I kept getting stuck on. Somebody had bought clothes for this, washed them, put them in drawers, gone to bed in them. I lifted the shirt and saw pale lines along the sides of my stomach. Then I let it fall and stood there looking at the faucet. "No." The journal was on the dresser beside the bed. I went back for it, holding on to the doorframe while I turned. Then I brought it into the bathroom. I opened the journal on the counter. The hike was still there. The work entry was still there. I read the last paragraph, the part about staying and getting it done, and put my fingers under the edge of the page. I could tear it out. The letter said I could. I had been worried about ending up unemployed, and now I would have accepted unemployed immediately if it came with my own body. I pulled just enough to make the paper tighten near the binding, then stopped. I didn't actually know what would happen when I tore it out. The changes happened while I slept on Sunday. Would undoing one work the same way? Would I have to spend the week here anyway? I read the letter again. It gave me the same sentence it had given me before. Tear out the page to undo a change. I wanted several more sentences. The phone buzzed in the bedroom. I went back for it with the journal open in my hand. Bradley had sent a message. `Can you get in a few minutes before the review? Want to go over your forecast.` Your forecast. I read that several times. Then I looked around the bedroom properly. There was a chair by the window with a dress shirt laid over the back. The closet had its own light. Beyond the bedroom I could see a kitchen counter, and beyond that, more windows. Even with most of the lights off, the place looked expensive. I walked out and found a living room big enough that the couch didn't have to touch a wall. There was a dining table with six chairs. I put my hand on one as I passed it. I don't know why. Checking that it was real, I guess, although I wasn't having any trouble believing the bathroom mirror. On the kitchen counter was a laptop in a dock and a stack of printouts with a pen across them. The first page said Monday Review. Under that was my name. I left the journal beside it and turned on the light. There were notes for six accounts, a forecast, and a list of questions. Some of the questions had answers written beneath them in my handwriting. I knew the names of most of the customers. I knew almost none of the things I apparently intended to say about them. Aries was halfway down the second page. Heat-exchanger package, approved layout, installation coordination. There was a note to confirm service access before the final drawing release. Nolan's name was beside it, followed by a phone number. I sat down and read the whole packet. Then I texted Bradley that I was running behind but would be there for the meeting. It was five-twenty. I had more than an hour and a half. That sounded like plenty until I realized I didn't know where my shoes were, what car I drove, or how to get out of the building. Getting ready took most of the time I thought I had to spare. In the shower I kept knocking my elbow against the glass because I was moving as if I took up less room. Drying off required reaching and shifting and trying again. I sat on the bed to put my socks on and couldn't get one foot where I wanted it without leaning so far back that I lost hold of the sock. Eventually I braced the foot on the chair. I was hot by then. I had showered and was already hot. The shirt on the chair fit. I had expected it to, and still felt cheated when it did. So did the pants beside it. Every shirt in the closet was this size. I looked through them as though somebody might have left my actual clothes at the back. There were suit jackets, good ones, and shoes with wooden things pushed inside them. I took the first pair I could get on without working out the laces. I put the printouts in the work bag on the counter. The journal went in after them. I zipped that compartment closed, opened it to make sure the journal was there, and closed it again. The keys had a Cadillac badge. Down in the garage, I pressed the button and waited for something to flash. An SUV blinked at me from a space with my apartment number on it. It was clean and dark and much larger than anything I had owned. I walked around the front before getting in, giving myself a second to look at it. Then the seat moved when I started the engine and brought the steering wheel toward my stomach, and I spent the next minute figuring out how to make it stop. Traffic was already bad. Of course it was. The car had a screen with a map and cameras and more controls than I needed, and I was still sitting behind the same brake lights. The meeting notes were on the passenger seat. I kept saying the figures I remembered out loud. The first time I said them I sounded like I was practicing for a school presentation. By the fourth time they sounded more like information I might know. I got to Meridian at seven-oh-six. I had never cared much about the distance from the parking lot to the door. That morning I cared about every bit of it. I stopped just inside to look at my phone while I waited for my breathing to settle, then went down the hall with the packet held against my bag. Through the conference-room glass, Bradley saw me and moved a chair out with his foot. "Sorry," I said, coming in. "Traffic." "You all right?" he asked quietly. "Yeah. Just a morning." Calder was at the other end of the table. I looked at him and remembered the office where he had told me I was done. He glanced at the clock and asked if I had the revised numbers. That was all. Nobody seemed surprised to see me. Nobody seemed to have fired me on Friday. I put the packet in front of me and said yes. For the first ten minutes I could follow what people were talking about. Not all of it, but enough. These were still customers ordering equipment. I knew what a delayed approval did to a delivery date. I knew why someone wouldn't want to hold a price indefinitely. The words hadn't become a different language. There were simply a lot more occasions when somebody finished a sentence and looked at me. When it was my turn, I started at the top of the page. I could hear how carefully I was reading and tried to look up more. That worked until Calder asked why one order had moved into the following month. I turned a page too early. There was a little pause while I turned it back. "Customer hasn't signed off on the layout," I said. "We have the equipment selected, but I'm keeping it out of this month until they do." "They told purchasing Friday." I looked at the handwritten note. "Verbal approval. We're still waiting on the drawing." Calder nodded. "Fine. Keep it there." I pressed my feet into the floor under the table. Nobody had noticed anything. Or they had noticed and thought I was tired, which was useful because I was. Aries came up near the end. Bradley asked about the service clearance, and I found the note I had read in the kitchen. Engineering had checked the revised layout. We were waiting for Nolan to confirm one dimension at the site before release. I said I would follow up that morning. "Good," Calder said. "That's how we need these handled. Before we ship it." He said it to the room, but he was looking at me. I had spent years wanting that man to acknowledge that I did anything useful. Apparently he did now. Apparently he had been doing it for a while. Afterward, Bradley walked beside me into the hall. I was trying to let him choose our direction without making that obvious. "You looked wiped out," he said. "Didn't sleep great." "You sent me that revision at eleven last night." I nodded as if I remembered. "I told you this morning was fine." "Wanted to get it done." He gave me a look I couldn't quite read, then stopped beside an office with my name on the door. Sales Manager. I checked the name first because the title didn't help. Derek Ryan. Mine. "Let me know what Nolan says," he said. I went inside and put my bag on the desk. There was a window. There were two chairs on the other side of the desk for people who wanted things from me. On a shelf was a glass award for quarterly sales, with my name engraved under the company logo. I picked it up, tilted it toward the light, and put it back. I shut the door, then opened it again because I wanted to see what the office looked like from the hallway. After that I sat down. For a few minutes I felt pretty good. I pulled up my email signature and looked at the title again. There was a direct line I didn't recognize. I opened an old message from Calder and found him asking for my opinion before he answered a customer. I went back several months and found more of that. People had been waiting for me to weigh in. There were messages thanking me for visits I didn't remember making, for catching things I didn't remember catching. One customer had written, `Glad you made us check. That would have been a mess.` I read that one twice. I could have been doing this. That was what I kept thinking. Same company, same people, same building. I had spent all that time convinced I needed somebody to get out of my way, and here was an entire inbox where they seemed happy to have me around. It was irritating. It was also difficult to stop looking through it. I could give it until Sunday. I didn't have to decide about the page this morning. The rest of Monday happened through that door. People brought questions on laptops and questions on pieces of paper and questions they assured me would take a second. I started writing names beside everything because otherwise I couldn't remember which person was waiting for which answer. Twice I went looking for somebody to ask about one thing and came back responsible for something else. By ten-thirty there were six things on my desk that somebody was waiting for. I still hadn't called Nolan. I opened his account first and read everything I could find. The exchange was almost friendly. He had sent photographs of the equipment area. There were questions from me about a door, measurements from him, a marked-up drawing from engineering. I remembered the call where I had wanted him to stop talking so I could get through my queue. In this version I had asked him to send more photographs. When I called, he answered with, "Tell me you've got good news." I almost apologized. I had the first word ready before I remembered there was a different conversation happening now. "Still need that final measurement," I said. "I know. Maintenance has it. I'll chase them." "We need it before we release the drawing." "Yep. I'll get it to you." He also asked about a valve his maintenance crew wanted to add beside the planned installation. I opened the drawing while he described where it would go. There were measurements on it, but I couldn't honestly tell him how much room they could use there. I asked him to send a photo from that side along with the measurement. He said he would. After we hung up, I sat for a moment looking at his name on the screen. I had been expecting to have to defend myself. The photo arrived before lunch, with the dimension we were waiting for. I called engineering and spent several minutes explaining the wrong part of the drawing before we were looking at the same thing. Eventually they sent back a marked-up version. The valve needed to go farther along the wall, clear of the access space. I called Nolan back and explained it. He said he'd get his maintenance guy on it. "Appreciate you checking," he said. I kept the drawing open after the call. It had taken more than an hour spread across most of the afternoon. There were four other things I was behind on because of it. I also knew where the valve needed to go and why, and Nolan wasn't going to discover the problem with equipment sitting in his way. I sent the confirmed measurement back to engineering for the final drawing, then filed the correspondence. For once I didn't feel an immediate need to reopen it. The day went on until there was hardly anybody left in the building. Every time I thought I had reached the last thing, I remembered another person I had told I would get back to. I couldn't tell which decisions could wait because I didn't know enough about them yet. I kept reading old threads, looking for the place where somebody had already solved the problem. Sometimes I found it. Sometimes I found a message from me promising I would. On the way home I stopped for food. I had meant to see what was in the refrigerator first, but I was hungry now and the restaurant was on the way. The order took longer than they said it would. I stood near the pickup shelf, shifting my weight between my feet, looking at other people's bags every time someone came out of the kitchen. I was paying quite a lot to avoid making dinner, and I was still spending my evening waiting for dinner. At home I ate on the couch with the bag beside me. The city looked good through the windows. I wanted somebody to see it. Then I thought about having somebody over and looked down at my shirt, which had pulled up while I sat. I tugged it back into place and reached for the remote. Tuesday was easier only because I knew where things were. I knew how to get to the garage and which hallway led to my office, and I remembered to bring the charger for the laptop. I could do the familiar parts of the job. There were even moments when I got interested and forgot to be worried. Then someone would refer to a conversation from two weeks ago, and I would have to say, "Remind me where we landed on that," while opening every related file I could find. I started a list on a pad. It grew faster than I could cross things off. People came to me because I apparently answered their questions, and I answered slowly because I was trying to discover what the answers were, which meant I stayed late, which left me tired the next day. I began taking the pad home. The laptop came too. I put both on the dining table and moved them aside when I needed room for my plate. Looking through old messages, I started noticing the times. Ten-forty at night. Eleven-seventeen. A whole exchange on a Saturday afternoon, months before I had arrived here. Apparently knowing what I was doing hadn't gotten me home much earlier. On Wednesday a sales associate brought me a quote she had been sending back and forth with a customer. The quantities in the email didn't match the attached schedule. I noticed because the same customer had used two different names for one item, and I had spent enough of my ordinary life making quotes to recognize what had happened. "Ask him if those are the same thing before you change the total," I told her. She stood there typing it into her phone. I almost said I could just do it, then remembered my own list. The next morning she came back with the corrected order. It had gone through. She held up the printout like she thought I'd want to see it, and I did. I asked what he'd said. We talked about it for a minute. After she left I caught myself sitting a little higher in the chair, which was embarrassing, but I stayed that way until my back started bothering me. I could have got used to that part. It was all the other questions that ruined it. Bradley found me eating at the desk again Thursday. He was holding his keys. "You know you can go home." "I've got to clear this first." "All of it?" I gestured at the screen. "Enough of it." He pulled a chair out and sat down. I wished he wouldn't. Now there was going to be a conversation, and at the end of the conversation the work would still be there. "This is what we talked about last month," he said. "If you keep taking things back, nobody learns what they can finish without you." "I'm letting people do things." "Some things. Then you're answering their customers at ten at night." I wanted to tell him that I was trying to learn several years of my own job in four days. There was no ordinary way into that sentence. "It's been a weird week." "It's been longer than a week." He named two people who could take pieces of what I was doing. I knew them both. I had asked them questions that day. I said yeah, that made sense, and he waited instead of getting up. "What are you giving them?" "I said I would." "You said it made sense." I forwarded a delivery question to the associate who handled the account and asked her to confirm the date with shipping. Bradley watched me send it, then got up. He told me he'd see me tomorrow and went to pick up his kids. I went back to the other emails. That night I finally checked my pay. The apartment and car and office were evidence, but I wanted the number. The deposits were much bigger than they used to be. For a moment I did the calculation I always did, multiplying by all the months ahead, imagining the money accumulating without anything inconvenient happening to it. Then I opened the rest of the account. The rent made me sit up. There was a car payment, insurance, parking, credit-card payments. I opened the card statement and found restaurants I didn't recognize and several I did. Delivery charges. Drinks. Clothes. The apartment building charged me separately for things I had assumed were included, because if rent was that much surely they could let you park a car. Apparently they could not. Some of the charges had to be work expenses. I found a hotel, then a reimbursement, which helped until I realized I had already counted that money as part of how well I was doing. There was more money left than I was used to having. I should have found that reassuring. Instead I kept imagining losing the job and trying to keep all these payments going. I checked the journal in my bag, then went back to the account and looked at the pay deposits again. I had found where I kept the weed. I smoked after dinner and for a little while stopped reviewing all the things I might have missed. I had a beer too. I knew neither was likely to improve the next morning, but I opened it anyway and put it on a coaster. I watched something I had already seen because following a new story sounded like another request for my attention. When I checked the time, it was already late. I didn't want to go to bed. I had been waiting all day to have some time to myself. Friday I went down the wrong hallway after using the bathroom and almost reached my old desk. Somebody else's mug was there. I turned before anyone could ask what I needed. My mother called around lunch to make sure I was coming Saturday. Her birthday. I could remember that without checking anything. I said I would come. She asked if I could get there before dinner this time. I told her probably. Then somebody appeared at the door and I held up a finger at him while she told me what time, and by the time she finished I needed her to say it again. Saturday, I put the journal in my bag before leaving for my parents' house. I wasn't going to need it there. I knew that. Still, I pictured a pipe breaking in the apartment, somebody coming in for maintenance, the bag being mistaken for something else. I took it. At a red light I reached over and felt the square edge of it through the fabric. I stopped to buy a card and flowers. I wrote in the card in the parked car, using the cover of the journal as a flat surface. I wrote Happy Birthday, Mom, and that I loved her, then sat there trying to think of something else that didn't sound like an apology. Eventually I sealed the envelope. I had spent enough of the week around people who accepted this body as mine that I thought seeing my family might be easier. It was worse on the way there. My mother would know. She would open the door and do the small startled pause people do before trying to be kind. I knew she wouldn't mean anything by it, and I was already preparing to be annoyed with her. At the house I took the bag in with me. One of my brothers saw it and asked if I had brought homework. "Work stuff." "On a Saturday?" "I'm not doing it." "Then why bring it?" I went through to the kitchen before he could get interested in an answer. Mom took the flowers, kissed my cheek, and handed them back while she reached for a vase on top of the fridge. I got it down for her. There were already dishes in the sink and something cooking that smelled like dinner at home, which was a stupid description but the only one I had. She wanted to know about traffic. Dad wanted to know whether the Cadillac was mine or a company car. My brothers were arguing in the other room about whether they had time to watch the rest of something before we ate. Mom asked me to find the scissors. I knew which drawer. Dad wanted to see the Cadillac's cargo space. We went outside, and I opened the back, and he nodded like he was evaluating whether it could take a load of something. One of my brothers came out too and asked how much the payment was. I told him enough. He laughed and sat in the passenger seat anyway. It was a ridiculous thing to enjoy, standing in the driveway showing my dad a car, but I enjoyed it. I found the button that shut the tailgate and let it close itself. When we went back in, Mom asked who had left the front door open. At dinner I tugged the shirt loose over my stomach before sitting down. I thought about where to put the napkin. Then Dad asked about work, and I gave him a version that contained the promotion and left out almost everything else. Mom asked whether I liked it. I started telling her how much responsibility I had, and she waited for me to finish. "But do you like it?" "Parts of it," I said. I told them about Aries. Partway through, I realized I was explaining the valve. I got as far as using the salt shaker before one of my brothers said he hoped there wouldn't be a test. I told him there would, and he asked if I could send him the brochure. I laughed hard enough that they looked at me. There was no point explaining that one. My phone buzzed while we were having cake. I checked it under the table and found a message about a Monday shipment. It didn't require an answer tonight. I could see that. I started typing anyway because I knew the answer, and Mom asked whether I wanted coffee. I hadn't heard her the first time. I put the phone in my pocket and said yes. Later, while my brothers were talking over each other, I forgot to take it back out. I ended up in the kitchen helping Mom put food away. She had three containers on the counter and was filling the largest with what was left in the baking dish. I stood beside her holding the lids. I was getting tired of standing, but sitting down would mean going back into the other room, and I wanted to stay there a little longer. "You're quiet," she said. "Just tired." "Work?" "Yeah. It's good. It's actually going really well." She scraped at a corner of the dish. "You said." "There's just a lot. I get home and I don't want to do anything. I eat, I sit there. Then I've got to go back." "What time are you getting home?" "Depends." She looked at me. "Late." "How late?" I told her. I reached to put a lid on the big container, but she pulled it closer to the baking dish. "Hang on. I've hardly left your brothers any." She moved some food into the other two. I held the lids and watched her try to make them roughly even, then add a little more to mine because it was a bigger container. "You do that with work," she said. "Put it in Tupperware?" "Give it everything and then see if there's any left." I leaned against the counter. "I can't just leave people hanging." "I didn't say that." "There's stuff that has to get done." "I know. You have stuff too." "I play pickleball Tuesday mornings," she said. "Your dad knows. The people who need things know. Sometimes something comes up and I can't go. Mostly I go." "I have customers." "I know, honey." I wanted to explain about customers in other time zones. She reached past me for a towel, and I remembered Bradley leaving to pick up his kids. I couldn't think how to explain him. She pushed the container meant for me a little closer. "Dinner. Sleep. Getting outside sometimes." I looked at the food. "Well, I'm clearly managing dinner." She turned toward me. I wished I hadn't said it. I wished she would agree with me, and I also knew I would feel worse if she did. "Derek." "What? Look at me." "I am looking at you." She said it in her ordinary voice, which made it hard to continue. "I want you to take care of yourself." "I know." "And I'd like to see you more. You don't have to wait until you have something good to tell me." I looked into the living room. Dad had found the thing they had been watching earlier. One of my brothers was telling him he had gone too far back. "You'd be saying this if I got fired." "I'd still want you to come over." I nodded and picked up a lid. It was the wrong one. She took it, found the one that fit, and pressed it down around the edges. Before she handed me the container she leaned against me for a second, and I put my arm around her shoulders. I had been avoiding letting anyone press against me all week. She stayed there until she wanted the dish towel behind my hand. I left later than I meant to. On the drive home I remembered three things I wished I'd said at dinner, all ordinary things, mostly better replies to my brothers. Usually I did that after work and the replies were arguments. I had a container of food on the passenger seat, the journal in the bag beside it, and the smell of the flowers still in the car. At a red light I checked the message about the shipment. It could wait until Monday. I put the phone down before the light changed. Sunday morning I went to the gym in the building. I had found it on the way to the garage and spent most of the week avoiding looking through the glass. There were only two people in there. I chose a treadmill at the far end and got it moving slowly enough that I could work out the controls without having to keep up with it. After a few minutes I raised the speed, then lowered it when my breathing got louder than I wanted. Nobody turned around. I walked for twelve minutes. The last two were mostly because ten seemed too easy to dismiss. When I stopped, my calves felt tight and there was sweat under the back of my shirt. I stood on the stationary belt looking at the little summary of what I had done. I could do that again. I could probably do it tomorrow. Then I looked at myself in the dark edge of the screen and started calculating how many tomorrows it would take before I could put on a sock without arranging furniture. Upstairs I showered, then heated the leftovers and ate them while reading the work entry. The food was good. It took about three minutes to make it hot. I had known food could work that way before, obviously. I just hadn't done it much this week. The sentence about staying until the job was done bothered me. At Meridian there was always another job. I had discovered that much in five days. I kept putting my finger under the sentence as if there were some punctuation I had missed that would make it a less stupid instruction. Still, I didn't tear it out. I thought about the office. I thought about Nolan saying thanks and the associate coming in to tell me she had finished the quote. I wanted to keep those things. I also wanted to keep the car, which was less impressive to admit, so I spent more time thinking about the customer. I took a sheet of ordinary paper and wrote, Work during work. Leave it there. Move every day. It looked almost insulting. I had gone through all of this to end up writing something that could fit on a cheap sign in a break room. I added a paragraph about being healthy and successful, then crossed most of it out. That was just asking again. I needed something I could have done. There were afternoons I remembered when I'd had a gym bag in the car. From before all this, before I learned how to stay at work properly. I would look at the bag on the passenger seat, think about turning toward the gym, and keep driving home. I had already paid for the membership. Sometimes the clothes in the bag were clean because I had never taken them out. That seemed like somewhere I could start. I was the one who had packed the bag. I worked on the wording through the afternoon. There were sentences about never working late that I crossed out because sometimes something did need finishing. At some point I got up and washed Mom's container instead of leaving it in the sink. I would have to get it back to her. When it was dark, I left the original work page alone and opened to the next clean one. > When I'm at Meridian and deciding whether to go to the gym on the way home or skip it, go. Start with something I can finish and still want to do again. On the other days, take a walk. Move every day, even when work is busy. Don't go home first to change when the bag is already in the car. I stopped there and looked at the earlier work entry again. I wasn't sure how the two instructions would fit together. Neither had a place for me to tick a box marked keep the salary. I had to put the pen down for a minute. > Keep asking questions and checking the work while I'm there. When someone brings me something they can handle, help them work it out instead of taking it from them. Before I leave, write down what needs doing tomorrow. Leave the laptop at work on ordinary evenings. If there is a real problem, handle it, but don't make being available every night the usual arrangement. Leave work at work. Go home in time to make dinner and get some sleep. Keep doing this as the job gets bigger, instead of dropping it the first week things get busy. I read both entries, back and forth. I liked the second one better. It seemed reasonable. I could imagine explaining it to someone and having them agree. I could also imagine how annoyed I would have been if somebody had told me to do all of it last Thursday. My work laptop was still on the dining table. I closed it and put it in the bag, then took the journal into the bedroom. The alarm was set for five. I left it that way. Whatever else happened, I didn't want to be late for the meeting again.