It was a simple, innocuous thought. It was nothing, really. It was the realization of a modicum of minutiae. It was a sudden, happenstance mumble of internal monologue. But it nevertheless started Monday ever so gradually onto a downward slope into Tuesday and the many complicated days to follow. As he stood in his 7:12 a.m. Monday morning shower, his mind weaving into and out of random associations and semi-remembrances, one thought came to the foreground of his mind. Either I do not know, Charleston muttered in his own mind, or I have forgotten the color of the maintenance girl’s eyes.

  Charleston closed his eyes and replayed every memory he had of their fleeting cohabitation of the same spot in the universe. But no image culled from his brain held the secret to this mystery, which only made Charleston try harder to remember. As he started his walk to work, Charleston was not sure that he hadn’t begun making up memories in an effort to find the answer to this nagging question. In fact, Charleston grew so preoccupied with this troubling detail that it led directly to problematic aspect number two of Monday morning: Charleston neglected to pick up a newspaper on his way to work. He realized this when he sat down at his desk and had nothing to do.

  “Crap my ass!!” Charleston declared, violently disappointed in himself and bracing for what was sure to be a crushingly plodding Monday.

  The insufferable crawl that Monday did indeed prove to be bled right into Monday evening. And the seemingly immovable Monday evening bled right into Tuesday morning. And this was the third problem with Monday: that it was still essentially happening when Tuesday came. And on Tuesday morning, perhaps because it was really still Monday, Charleston again forgot to stop to get his newspaper. “Shit-fuck-Christ-God!” Charleston declared, absolutely revolted with himself and upon reaching his desk again. “Perhaps, you fucking idiot, you should just get a fucking-fuck subscription,” he accosted himself venomously. His voice echoed through the open room, bouncing off the gray walls before it trailed off and all fell silent again. He wasn’t quite sure anyway how he would have a newspaper delivered to a place that only five people knew to exist, only one of whom held the answer to the nagging question that Charleston would not be able to answer until Friday at 3:00 p.m. But it felt good to attempt to be proactive for a moment.

  Not only, thought Charleston, am I almost four full workdays away from anyone coming to the eighty-seventh floor, but I also don’t even know what awful things are going on in the world.

  Charleston puzzled that the details of a man’s murder in a tenement in the barrio somehow made it easier for him to do his job, but it did. Any digression helped. Anything that would keep him from watching the cogs straight through until lunch, which was precisely what he did. It proved just a hair shy of unendurable, bringing Charleston’s waning mind countless times right up to a tipping point. A point from which he managed to retreat, but a point with which he hated flirting. He could not help but at least indirectly blame the maintenance girl for this near stoppage of time. It was her eyes that led to his folly. Twice. And it was his folly that led to this inescapable moment. This desk, this floor, these giant cogs, the maddening almost impasse of it all. He bristled at life for allowing the same precious memory that brings out the impossibly full aroma of bar soap to simultaneously slow down cruel, cruel time.

  This is, thought Charleston, the most difficult job I have ever had. It is a challenge incommensurable.

  On Wednesday morning, Charleston did manage to remember to get a newspaper. While he worked his reading regimen back into his routine, he still could not help but feel as though some kind of irreparable damage had already been done. Nothing major, but a crack of sorts, a fracture. He still enjoyed the reading, but his immersion into the text previously had lifted him out of his immediate surroundings and into the respective worlds of each news article whereas now he could not fully escape a general awareness of the giant cogs that he was supposed to be watching. At first, it was but a nagging bit of static in his concentration, but by the end of the day it had grown to a persistent and mildly caustic inability to focus. Charleston found himself rereading paragraphs two or three times each. He was even abandoning articles altogether out of a general disinterest. This had never happened before. Each article had seemed like its very own symphony.

  By Thursday morning, however, Charleston could only dream of having back what, by comparison, seemed like laser focus. He could barely even sustain his concentration long enough to digest the individual words any more. He just stared at them as they entered and then dropped from his mind. Even more distressing, however, was the corresponding deliberateness with which time molasses-trudged on.

  Charleston put down the newspaper.

  He reassured himself that a second was the same unit of measurement last week as it was this morning, and that time would indeed pass the same whether or not he had his newspaper stories to distract him. In an effort to demonstrate for himself this fundamental law of human reality, Charleston decided to observe time’s comparable passage while focusing on the cogs for as long as he possibly could without break.

  According to science, he told himself, the time should pass all the same.

  Charleston checked his watch.

  He took a breath.

  Then he locked his eyes directly upon the cogs. And he held.

  Staring. Blinking. Breathing. Observing.

  Blinking. Staring. Breathing. Welling up with frustration and outrage. Railing against the pointlessness of this entire undertaking.

  He pulled his head away and stepped from his desk.

  He checked his watch.

  Fifty-one seconds had passed.

  Charleston decided that science, in this particular instance, was completely full of crap.

  That night, despite being thoroughly exhausted and in desperate need of reprieve, Charleston could barely sleep. He woke what seemed like every twenty minutes. At around 4:00 a.m., he simply resigned himself to being unable to sleep contiguously, got up, and turned on his TV. The news was all that was on. But Charleston feared that knowing the news now would ruin the admittedly waning but nevertheless still marginally helpful effect that the day’s newspaper would later have upon him. The mere thought of losing this small asset was unbearable. So Charleston turned the TV off.

  Then there was nothing to do, especially since he was far too tired to read. So, for lack of any better use of his time, Charleston went back to bed. He slept sporadically, waking perhaps every twenty minutes.

  Friday morning, Charleston remembered, for a third day in a row, to stop for the newspaper. He made perfect time on his way to work, too, arriving at the building at 8:28 a.m. Not too late and not too early.

  Right as the clock struck 8:30 a.m., Charleston was seated at his desk.

  It takes, he thought to himself, exactly two minutes to get from the door to my desk.

  Charleston unfolded his paper and began reading about one foreign nation that was attacking another foreign nation because the latter nation had previously attacked the former nation.

  “This initial attack,” according to the former nation, “was unprovoked and barbarous.”

  But so were all of the consequent attacks, argued the latter nation.

  It is sad, thought Charleston. It is all so sad.

  From there, Charleston lost all interest in the story. He tried five, six, seven times to keep going only to reread the same paragraph over and over without retaining any of the information. Charleston checked his watch to find that only seven minutes had passed.

  He tried a different story, but couldn’t even focus long enough to decipher the first paragraph. He checked his watch again. It was still 8:37a.m.

  By lunchtime, Charleston was not in a good place. He apparently did not appear to be in a good place, either.

  “You look so tired,” said Curtis Ames as he sat down across the lunch table from Charleston and upon noticing dark patches developing under his confidante’s eyes.

  Charleston had no lucid memory of coming to the cafeteria or getting the salad that sat, uneaten, in front of him. His entire morning had turned into a bit of a blur somewhere after the tenth failed article, which was around 9:00 a.m.

  “This is without a doubt the hardest job I’ve ever had,” replied Charleston.

  Curtis appreciated Charleston’s honesty.

  The CEO, Curtis reasoned to himself, isn’t so open and honest with just anyone. Nevertheless, all he could think to say in response was…

  “Don’t let 'em work you too hard.”

  …and then he chuckled.

  As the words left Curtis’ mouth, he knew how stupid they were—pointless filler, really. Charleston was so deeply distracted that he missed these words altogether, engrossed instead in staring blithely into the space behind Curtis’ left shoulder. In that space was a glass bottle half full of apple juice. And in that apple juice was an upside down, inverted, miniaturized image of the space around the bottle. In this image, Charleston watched people come and go.

  Curtis figured that Charleston had a lot on his mind, so Curtis did not mention that he had gotten a new position at a smaller company (but what company was not smaller than Thundercom?) that paid better, gave better benefits, and had better hours.

  Upon returning to his desk after lunch, Charleston refused to return to business as usual. Instead, he stepped onto his chair and climbed atop his desk. He stood what looked like still, but in truth he was turning. He was turning himself at the exact same speed that the cogs were themselves turning. He had not an instrument with which to measure or to quantitatively prove the identicality of their speeds, but Charleston knew, knew somewhere and with soul that the speeds were the same. He knew those cogs. Better than they knew him. He knew how they moved; not merely how their moving looked, but how they moved, wherefrom their impulse originated. It was somewhere deep and low and that hums.

  I, thought Charleston, could be a cog.

  “I,” said Charleston, “could be a cog. I might as well have a metal alloy in my bile.”

  Charleston stood turning on his desk for as long as he could stand. It was his feet that got tired first, not his mind and most certainly not his will. So he sat down. But in his chair he continued swiveling around just as the cogs did.

  Eventually, Charleston’s rotations were interrupted by the sound of the elevator door opening and the squeaking wheel approaching.

  She was finally here.

  The maintenance man was, too.

  But he fell away.

  In truth it was really just her.

  When she first rounded the corner, Charleston acted as casually as a delirious and exhausted person could. Thus he did not get to see her eyes right away. But he could see peripherally that her hair was the same as before. And from what he could see of her face at this angle and distance, her skin appeared to be entirely unblemished.

  They did not stop to exchange greetings with him, instead continuing on, uninterrupted, to the cogs.

  After but a moment, which was absolutely as long as he could wait, Charleston stood up from his desk and stepped across the room to her.

  “Hello,” he said, “I am Charleston. You are doing a great job.”

  Then there was silence.

  The maintenance girl said nothing in response.

  But she did look at Charleston blankly.

  Enabling him to see that her eyes were green.

  He decided that he had never seen their color before now, thus his lack of memory was not a lack of memory at all. Up close, Charleston also confirmed that she did, indeed, have no blemishes at all. Up close, Charleston also noticed that the maintenance girl looked much younger than she had from a distance. Not the sexy kind of young but the child kind of young. Her green eyes looked narrow, clouded with youth. Her mouth looked like it said child things and giggled at things unfunny. She was not perfect. In fact, Charleston realized that many of the details the girl had taken on in his week-long memory of her had actually been just covering over what he had not been able to observe of the girl in the brief time he had spent in her presence.

  Charleston nodded and retreated back to his desk. As he retreated, though, he decided instead to stop, turn back, and elaborate.

  “Oh, I’m the CEO, is why I’m saying all that.”

  But she had already returned to work and did not stop again.

  Charleston half-smiled and chuckled a small chuckle under his breath before turning around again and this time returning all the way to his desk.

  As he sat, the walls became more wall and the floor became more gray and time became somehow even slower and today grew longer. Everything the opposite of all he had hoped would come with this Friday afternoon. Suddenly, Charleston felt that during the span of his entire life he might well not escape a single unpleasant thing that the world had to offer.

  The maintenance man and the maintenance girl finished their work quickly, put their massive swabs into their squeaky metal bin, and rolled off down the hall. Neither of them looked up at Charleston as they went, even as he had watched them cross the room.

  Charleston sat in silence as the elevator bell sounded and the maintenance team stepped inside. The elevator doors closed and Charleston was alone again.

  Until a door opened.

  Charleston heard it.

  Footsteps approached, hard-bottomed shoes against the gray pavement of the eighty-seventh floor, a place that was now a grim, dull reality to Charleston.

  Around the corner, then, from the right side of Charleston’s desk, wherefrom Charleston had never seen anyone come or go, came Timothy Spall. Charleston felt relieved and eager to see Timothy, excited to have his questions answered.

  Timothy Spall halted in front of Charleston’s desk. Immediately, Timothy began explaining...

  “Charleston,” said Timothy Spall, “it was brought to my attention that last week you spoke to the maintenance team.”

  Charleston thought for a moment, attempting to seem professional.

  “I think I might have said, ‘Hello,’” replied Charleston after great discernment.

  “Please do not speak to the maintenance team. They’re here to do a job and we don’t want to get in the way of that.”

  Charleston was surprised by Timothy Spall’s frankness. Were not the two men, after all, colleagues?

  “Oh, no,” replied Charleston politely. “I did not mean to be in the way.”

  “So…if you could…please.”

  “Sure,” replied Charleston.

  And Timothy turned to leave.

  Has he no interest, thought Charleston, in my questions?

  So before Timothy made it five steps, Charleston blurted out a question. It was not, however, a question from his list.

  “Who is she?” Charleston asked.

  Timothy Spall stopped, turned back.

  “What?” he asked, mildly perturbed it seemed.

  “Who is she? Who are they?” pushed Charleston. After all, it was his contractually bound right to ask questions.

  “They are the maintenance team,” explained Timothy.

  “Do you know her name?”

  Timothy was flabbergasted by the irrelevance of such a question. It made Charleston momentarily a bit hesitant to ask any questions in the future.

  “Maureen, I think. And he is Quincy.”

  “Really,” uttered Charleston, so invigorated by having a question answered that he went right ahead and asked another. “And their ages?”

  Timothy Spall’s flabbergast quickly turned to annoyance.

  “I don’t know, he is…”

  “Just her, actually,” Charleston cut in. “How old is she?”

  “I’m not sure,” explained Timothy Spall.

  “But if you had to guess?” pressed Charleston.

  “I don’t know,” reiterated Timothy Spall.

  Charleston leaned back in his chair, crinkled his brow, and cast off his glare.

  “Guessing, though. I would guess fourteen. Originally I thought nineteen, maybe twenty. Then I saw her up close.” offered Charleston.

  “Charleston, I need for you to leave these people alone. Don’t talk to them, don’t think about them. Just do your job. Let them do their job and leave them alone.”

  Timothy Spall then turned and left, this time going all the way back through the door out of which he had come. As Charleston heard the door shut, he could not help but feel perturbed that Timothy Spall hadn’t made any effort at all to listen to the eight (or ten, depending on how you saw it) questions that he had come up with and recorded, as well as the one that he had not yet decided whether or not to record.

  The rest of the afternoon dragged.

  On his way home, Charleston realized that he really had nothing that weekend to which to look forward. Other than the fact that he would not have to work.

  Life is strange, thought Charleston crossing Kingsbridge Road, two blocks from home.

  Life is a mystical puzzle, thought Charleston crossing Murray Street and stepping onto his block.

  Then, coming up to his building, it occurred to Charleston that he did not want to go home. It was a slight feeling, an ease newly attained somewhere inside of him that he did not want to lose.

  So he stopped walking.

  And he stood there on the pavement and could think of no place to go. Nevertheless, Charleston set off into the city, still carrying his briefcase.

  Charleston got some coffee and a muffin.

  Charleston sat in the park and watched the people go by. But this felt too much like his time at work.

  Charleston sat in a movie. But this, too, felt an awful lot like his time at work.

  Charleston went by a bookstore, but the thought of reading felt like his time at work.