If Timothy Spall is to later inform me that my reading is objectionable, reasoned Charleston, then I will simply stop my reading.

  Charleston even devised a system by which he would, every third paragraph, glance up to check on the cogs.

  Although the intention and thought put into this plan were ample, Charleston found his success in carrying out the plan to be abysmal. Charleston began reading and the next time he looked up not only had he read twelve paragraphs but he was also saddened by the nation’s abysmal economic forecast and the political stratification of classes brought about by politicians in their ever-important efforts to get elected and reelected.

  Charleston was happy, however, to find that it was already 8:45 a.m. And in light of the fact that nothing had gone wrong with the cogs in thirty-two years, Charleston resumed reading and resolved to himself to pick up a paper every morning before work.

  After all, he reasoned, I’d probably hear something if anything did go wrong with the giant cogs.

  With his new reading regiment underway, lunch came much more quickly than he had feared it might. He had to concede, though, that it was still a struggle to get to 12:30 p.m.

  On his way to lunch, Charleston stopped to wash the newspaper ink off of his hands before heading into the cafeteria. The sight was similar to yesterday’s and Charleston, again, felt like having a salad.

  Today, Charleston was seated by himself at an empty table. He put dressing on his salad and had not even taken a bite when Jane Dubwray set her tray down and took a seat across from him.

  While Charleston typically avoided Jane at all costs, he now felt a certain gratitude towards her. After all, she had sort of been the impetus for his trip to the fourth floor, which had, in turn, been the catalyst for his trip to the eighty-seventh floor, which, at that time, did not even exist. Thusly, she had also contributed to his discovery of the joy of reading the newspaper.

  “Hello, Jane,” Charleston said, for the first time ever unprovoked.

  “Charleston, I can’t believe your sudden success. Do you think something like this could happen to me?” asked Jane excitedly.

  “Well,” pondered Charleston, “I don’t see why not.”

  “That’s what I thought, too: I don’t see why not.”

  It all happened easy as a pretty girl walking down the street, thought Charleston. So why couldn’t it happen again? Why couldn’t an even prettier girl walk even more easily down a different street?

  “Have you been adjusting all right?” asked Jane.

  “Oh…well. It takes some getting used to.”

  “But you always were such a hard worker.”

  “Why thank you,” replied Charleston, truly flattered even if he wasn’t sure how accurate her observation truly was.

  “And I’m not just saying that, either,” Jane followed up.

  “I don’t suppose you would,” countered Charleston.

  And Jane smiled.

  And Jane was truly flattered.

  The two sat then, for a stretch, in silence. Until…

  “Are you going to be looking for a new job?” asked Charleston.

  He had remembered how Jane had been feeling unfulfilled at Thundercom. As an acquaintance and as CEO, he felt it his responsibility to inquire, to show interest in the company’s employees. And while this question struck Charleston as a benevolent act, it sent ice water through Jane’s veins.

  “What?” was all Jane could think to say.

  “A more fulfilling job,” clarified Charleston.

  The ice water in Jane’s veins then turned immediately into ice.

  Why, thought Jane to herself in disbelief, did I have to confide in the man who would only one day later become the CEO?

  All that Jane could say was: “I’m fulfilled.”

  Charleston frowned.

  All that he could think to say was, “Huh?”

  As soon as I get back from lunch, thought Jane, I am going to start looking for another job.

  Charleston and Jane ate the rest of their lunches in silence.

  Charleston did not want lunch to end. He did not want to go back to work, even though he did have more of the newspaper left to read.

  By 2:58 p.m., Charleston was seriously contemplating resigning his post as CEO of Thundercom Corporation. He had spent his afternoon reading about a space shuttle that had blown up in outer space, a budget cut affecting farmers in the Midwest, and an objectionable tax being considered that would raise the cost of coffee by ten cents per cup if purchased retail and twenty-seven cents per pound if purchased in bulk. He had been intermittently checking the cogs, too, but once he had tired of reading, at 2:52 p.m., Charleston took to simply staring at the cogs, which he did successfully for all of six minutes before his anger returned, now in a more tangible form. From 2:58 p.m. to 2:59 p.m., Charleston noticed an agitating tremor that was shaking in all of his major organs and growing larger. This tremor built uncontrollably. It was on the verge of becoming a scream when, from behind him, Charleston heard the sound of the elevator bell followed by the opening of the elevator doors.

  Charleston was delighted.

  At first he was sure this sound must be announcing the presence of Timothy Spall. And Timothy Spall might finally bring with him the answers to Charleston’s questions. And answers to questions would surely communicate to both Charleston and to Timothy Spall that Charleston had indeed been working hard and doing well at this hard work he had been doing. And for some reason, Charleston felt sure that this would somehow make him feel better, would make his anger subside. Then Charleston panicked…

  He had yet to decide whether or not to ask the sixth question (which had been the second question and which could be considered the eighth question depending on how one looked at it). Soon thereafter, however, both Charleston’s delight and his panic were assuaged by the mere curiosity that he had never before seen Timothy Spall take the elevator—this created serious doubt in Charleston’s mind as to whether the elevator actually contained Timothy Spall at all.

  The sound of a squeaking wheel began echoing down the hallway and into the cog room, followed by the clank of metal. This brought before Charleston’s mind his seventh question:

  (7) During work hours, might I leave my desk?

  …which he told himself to write down later.

  The metal clank and the squeaking wheel grew gradually closer, and Charleston began to notice two sets of footsteps scuffing along with these other sounds.

  Clearly, he thought, it isn’t Mr. Twytharp, for he is always alone, and he makes a mushy sound when he walks.

  Finally, around the corner the culprits of the sounds came. And upon seeing Charleston, the culprits of the sounds stopped. Thus, the sounds stopped, too. And there, before Charleston, wearing identical gray jumpsuits were a man and a girl—he in his fifties, and she in her late teens. They were both smeared and spotted with grease. Before them and steered by the man was a sizeable metal tub on thin, rusted wheels. Sticking up and out of the tub were two wooden sticks. It was with his hand on these wooden sticks that the man maneuvered the metal tub.

  The man and the girl stared, wide-eyed at Charleston.

  Charleston stared, wide-eyed, at the man and the girl.

  “Who are you?” asked Charleston, of neither one of them in particular.

  “We’re the maintenance men,” replied the man, plainly.

  Charleston looked at his watch. Sure enough, it was three o’clock exactly. And although he had not realized it until this very moment, it was Friday—Charleston knew this because yesterday had been Thursday. Charleston looked back at the man and the girl.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Then it was silent.

  Then the man and the girl went to work, pushing their clanking, squeaking metal tub across the floor and up to the giant cogs. Immediately the man removed the two wooden sticks from the metal tub, revealing what seemed to amount to a large swab on the end of each stick. The swabs, moreover, were covered in a slightly opaque and greasy gel. The man and the girl promptly began applying these swabs to the teeth of the different giant cogs. He swabbed the upper halves of the cogs and she the lower, both working counter-clockwise until each arrived where the other one had begun. Then they moved on to the next cog. All in all, each cog seemed to take about twenty-two seconds to maintain.

  As he watched them work, a swell of anxiety began pulling at his chest. At first, Charleston considered this occurrence wholly unprovoked. But upon further introspection he realized that having other people in the cog room introduced a multitude of further complications surrounding his job responsibilities. What, for example, if something broke? How would this impact Thundercom Corporation? And to whom would he report this malfunction? Or what if someone got hurt and needed help? What was Charleston to do then? He was contractually bound to secrecy about the existence of this floor, about Mr. Twytharp, and about the specifics of his job duties. How would he even possibly explain anything should it happen? Let’s say, Charleston speculated, this young girl were to get her hand trapped in between two of the giant cogs, the function of which I do not even know in the first place. Were I to call emergency medical technicians, I would most certainly have to tell them where I am. Otherwise they would never be able to find the injured girl. Furthermore, how would I get said girl, trapped in said cog, some sort of help on a floor that does not exist?

  The mental image of that girl with her surely gentle hand grinding those massive cogs to a halt suddenly gripped Charleston’s mind. There was, as he imagined the circumstance, little blood involved; rather, most of the damage was beneath the skin where bone was splintered, cracked, chipped, and irreparable. That probably elegant hand would never be like new again, even after countless surgeries and skyrocketing insurance premiums. Knowing in her heart that all of this was ahead of her, she would nevertheless be trapped—her hand malformed and shot through with lightning streaks of razor-sharp pain. Every tremor, every shake, every shift of weight would hurt her only more. Her coworker would flit about in a panic. But she would look to Charleston Sutterfeld, CEO of Thundercom Corporation. And Charleston would have absolutely no idea what the hell to do—other than hope that Timothy Spall or Mr. Twytharp might appear and take control of the situation. This, thought Charleston, is just not right.

  Charleston sat down at his desk and took a good, long look at the maintenance girl. Only now was he truly taking notice of her, beneath the gray grease smears and gray jumpsuit. Apropos of no hard, or even soft, evidence, Charleston observed in her someone far too gentle of heart and of mind for as humid and matter-of-fact a place as the eighty-seventh floor, which did seem to exist but might just as well not as far as the entirety of the rest of the world was concerned. She still had dreams to dream up—and boyfriends with which to make mistakes. She had insecurities to learn to live with. She had the best part of ambition, the young part, the part that didn’t yet know any better. She still had significant aspects of her person that were gorgeously fragile.

  She could not possibly understand a place like this. He didn’t understand a place like this, and he worked here—and in a fairly prominent capacity, not to mention. This was no place for such an innocent.

  She couldn’t possibly know how quickly, silently, and irreversibly the sweet parts of us can go away. Sometimes as we sleep, they just dissolve, leaving little more than a bruise deep down inside. Sometimes we snuff them out through our own awful decisions. Sometimes we almost dare them to leave.

  Or sometimes, and as far as Charleston was concerned this was the most terrifying type of departure, the sweet parts of us go away because of awful things entirely beyond our control. Sometimes we are unwittingly right at the edge of a precipice unknowable, unperceivable, unintuitable. Standing so close but an earthquake, but a lunatic, but a reckless driver in the rain, but a bullet, but a lightning bolt, but a loved one’s death, but an abusive lover, but a lapse in attention, but an accident, but an ugly intention, but a hateful person, but a person who never learned any better, but a self-destructive tendency, but a political issue, but a fundamentalist’s bomb, but a wallet for a mugger, but a sexual predator’s blood made boil, but a disease-ridden cough, but a mistaken elevator ride and a gentle girl’s hand misplaced in a giant cog’s teeth away from being forever no longer the same.

  Somewhere way off in the distance, Charleston swore he heard the crack of a thunderclap. Or maybe he did not hear the clap as much as he felt it, a shift in his blood from warm to warmer. The heat from this room finally penetrating his skin, his blood now perhaps hot enough to facilitate the killing off of some particular bacteria or to propagate the exponential growth of some other bacteria somewhere small and previously unperturbed in his biology. Either way or neither way, this blood brought about a shift so deep down and fundamental in Charleston that it went all but unnoticed but for the single fact that suddenly the maintenance girl’s face became the most delicate, precious, and impossible concomitance of traits, became so exquisitely an expression of a human being who was so perfectly unlike any other human being that ever existed, so singular an occurrence in time, so unlikely to ever have occurred just precisely like this. Suddenly, the maintenance girl became to him some one thing worth protecting in this overwhelmingly indifferent world. Sure, he watched the maintenance girl through a still mildly-blackened eye, and sure, Charleston suspected that his recent intense solitude might be hindering the clarity of his perceptions and thoughts, but he still remained resolute in his belief that the maintenance girl and all that she represented were important to him. Either as symbol or as actual being. What was happening here mattered. No matter how gray the walls, the cogs, her jumpsuit, or the lights in this room were.

  The sound of the squeaky wheel brought Charleston back to the present. Just as quickly as they had begun, the older man and the young girl had put their wooden sticks back in the metal tub and were wheeling off down the hall. They left as they had arrived, void of salutation.

  “Good-bye,” said Charleston after the two, who were already half way down the hall.

  The man turned back and nodded. The girl did nothing other than stop walking as the man stopped walking and resume walking as the man resumed walking.

  As the two boarded the elevator, Charleston tried to conjure something else to say, but could think of nothing before the elevator doors closed and the maintenance man and girl were suddenly gone, nothing but the hum of restored silence left in their absence.

  Charleston was alone again with the giant cogs and time. Gravity had gone back to seeming heavy, again. The slow, oozing crawl that was the reality of the eighty-seventh floor was once again unadulterated.

  Charleston retrieved his notebook from a desk drawer and his pencil from another desk drawer. Leaving a space for the sixth question, which used to be the second question and which he had yet to decide whether or not to ask, he wrote down his seventh question, which he had earlier instructed himself to remember to write down. Then he conjured and recorded his eighth question (or tenth, if you want to count the corollaries) as well…

  (8) What ought I do in case of emergency—i.e. maintenance girl people are injured?

  Charleston was surprised to find himself feeling a sudden sense of pride in his title and role here at Thundercom. Do you suppose, he wondered, even though he had always thought of himself as a man unimpressed by status, she knows that I am the CEO of this corporation?

  Charleston then tore a fresh, clean piece of paper from his pad. Upon it he wrote one more question. This one he left unnumbered, though, since he was unsure as to the pertinence of this question to his duties as CEO. That question was this…

  What must her name be?

  The traffic, car and foot, was unusually light for a Friday, which served to relax Charleston more than he might usually relax on his evening walk home. Also, there was the wind, blowing alternately hot then cold, hot then cold, a beautiful novelty on a perfectly necessary day.

  Once home, he could not help but hear in the music coming out of his radio the same delicate quality he had observed in the maintenance girl.

  He ordered dinner from a local restaurant that delivers.

  He put on fresh, clean bedclothes.

  He did not have to go to work for two whole days. And he felt not completely but at least slightly rejuvenated in some small ways.

  He lay still under the cool sheets and in the quiet air of his bedroom. No one anywhere the whole city over was saying anything, as far as he was concerned. Or if they were, they were whispering and penitent.

  He slept soundly.

  Although in his sleep one more question did cross his mind… Who watches the cogs over the weekend?

  4.

  The following week was more than any man could bear, and Charleston was, indeed, one of many who were any man. The weekend had been clear, had been sunny, had been relaxed. But on Monday morning problems began, problems that, from there, quite frankly, culminated.

  Charleston woke up relaxed on Monday morning and at his new normal time (new since he had become CEO, that is). He pulled off his bedclothes and turned on his shower. As the water warmed, Charleston avoided the coldish tile of the floor against his feet by standing entirely upon the bathroom carpet. He took a long, deep breath and really felt appreciation for the nicety that was the bathroom carpet. As he took this breath, Charleston noticed the soft, sweet, entirely pleasant smell of the bar soap emanating from his shower.

  That smell, he thought to himself, is downright delicate.

  In fact, all weekend long, he had been noticing similarly delicate things: the way a dog lies on the sidewalk, the snippets of song one catches from passing cars (although this, depending upon the song, could easily be a small vulgarity—the state of contemporary popular music and all), people silhouetted in windows, children and the unsmooth but effective way in which they walk. As he stood under the warm water of the shower upon his shoulders thinking of all the delicate things he could, the week’s first wrinkle creased its way into Charleston’s consciousness.