After all, thought Charleston, what’s he going to do? Smoosh me down to the size of an acorn?

  “Why did you say his name was Quincy,” asked Charleston, perplexed.

  Timothy Spall took Charleston by the shoulder and led him back to his desk. Timothy sat Charleston down.

  “Charleston, it is your job to leave that man alone. I have explained this to you already.”

  “Why did you lie to me about his name?”

  “I must inform you that it is your contractually bound responsibility to do as I say.”

  Charleston did not remember this in the contract, but he was sure that it was there.

  “I have already defined your duties,” went on Timothy, “and anything that I did not define should be considered your duty not to do. Is that understood?”

  “I feel,” replied Charleston, “that I could do my job much more effectively, my duties, that is, if I just knew what those cogs did.”

  “I have already explained to you that you don’t need to know this.”

  “But I would do my job better if I did know.”

  “We’re happy with the job that you are doing.”

  “But I can do better.”

  “We don’t want you to do better, Mr. Sutterfeld.”

  “But how can you not want someone to do better?”

  “Because we are happy with you as you are.”

  “Where is the girl?” Charleston asked as though he were simply repeating his question about the purpose of the cogs.

  “What girl?” Timothy queried innocently.

  “The maintenance girl.”

  “There is no maintenance girl, just Merle.”

  “What are you talking about? There was a girl.”

  “I have work to do. Are you done breaking the rules?”

  Timothy Spall was staring at Charleston, once again, with thick, hard disdain. Charleston, under the unmanageable weight of the litany of questions wrestling around in his mind, fell silent. So Timothy Spall headed back to his door. But Charleston suddenly, from the cacophonous static chaos rocketing through his being, got a handle on one and only one of his questions.

  “Why did you hire me to do this job?” he called out.

  The question asked felt as a bullet must feel screaming out of a gun barrel.

  Timothy Spall stopped.

  He turned.

  He looked, to Charleston, somehow and suddenly different. He seemed uncharacteristically frazzled, frustrated. Then Timothy Spall did something that he did not normally do: he asked a question…

  “How much,” he queried in a strained but soft-spoken voice, “do I pay you?”

  Charleston was shocked by the boldness of this seemingly quite loaded question, especially coming from the typically downright regal Timothy Spall. Charleston could think of nothing, really, to say. So he said…

  “Two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year.”

  “Then what,” finished Timothy Spall, “does it matter why?”

  It fell silent, again. Charleston was unsure, but he thought he saw Timothy Spall smile thinly before turning and walking through his door and closing it behind himself.

  The sound of footsteps and a squeaky wheel pushing down the hall towards the elevator brought Charleston’s attention away from Timothy and back to the maintenance man, who had resumed and completed his work during Timothy and Charleston’s exchange.

  The elevator doors opened and the maintenance man stepped inside the red-lit cube. Then the doors closed. And although Charleston wanted to at least say goodbye, and even though saying nothing settled a thick, hollow feeling into Charleston’s heart, he just let the man go in silence. It left the same hopeless feeling he had after breaking his date with Helena Birnbaum. It was dull and warm and almost weightless. It was as if a bit of gravity got lodged in his lungs.

  Charleston looked at the clock. It was 3:20 p.m.

  It was Friday and almost the weekend, but it could just as well have been any day at any time at all—and for a long, long while, it was just that.

  5.

  On the morning of the day that marked Charleston’s one year anniversary as CEO of Thundercom Corporation, Charleston came to work to find a plaque and a cupcake upon his desk. He smiled at the cupcake and at the plaque. These things made him feel special. He had never been given a plaque or a cupcake before becoming CEO.

  Although the items were both anonymous, Charleston knew that the items had to have been placed on his desk by none other than Timothy Spall, if for no other reason than the simple fact that in one year Charleston had never seen anyone else, other than the maintenance man, on the eighty-seventh floor. Actually, there had also been the two occasions upon which he had seen Mr. Twytharp. And then there was the maintenance girl. But she had not come around after those two visits a year ago, and Charleston could barely anymore even make out her face in his memory.

  Somewhere amidst Charleston’s first twelve months as CEO, the days had started growing gradually easier to get through, especially once his ability to focus returned. The morning, if he read slowly, usually took about eighteen newspaper or magazine articles, with breaks to watch the cogs. Then lunch.

  For much of the past year, Charleston had taken to semi-regularly eating with Millet von Straup, a former third floor coworker. He would often see Helena Birnbaum across the cafeteria. He had heard that she had been seeing Curtis Ames off and on. He had also heard that she was not speaking to him, a justifiable stance given Charleston’s never having made good on their date. He had just kept postponing until she stopped calling. And while Charleston had not, indeed, heard Helena speak so much as a single word to him ever since, Charleston did not take this necessarily to mean that Helena had officially sworn off speaking to him forever.

  All of this silence, thought Charleston, might merely be a coincidence.

  Further, she had initially cringed and tensed whenever he came near her. But she presently seemed not to harbor any perceptibly flagrant hard feelings toward Charleston whenever their paths would cross. Now, in passing, she would even sometimes nod.

  Charleston had not a clue that this modicum of civility was indeed the work of Curtis Ames. Likely out of gratitude for the man who forewarned of the demise of his employment, Curtis Ames persuaded Helena to give Charleston another chance. Helena was not willing to give this chance, but compromised instead with the aforementioned modicum of civility.

  Curtis Ames still worked for Mayogone Corporation, a financial investment group. He still made more money than he would ever have made at Thundercom.

  Within the last few weeks, Charleston had begun eating lunch alone, in a nearby park. He decided that the fresh air would do him good, as would the time away from the office. It also prepared him for the afternoon, which typically took another sixteen articles and a cumulative forty minutes of cog watching. After only a month or two, it had all become downright comfortable, a job in which Charleston took pride.

  Not just anyone, he would often remind himself, could do what it is that I do.

  Charleston placed his plaque beside the phone on his otherwise-barren desk. He noted there would be plenty of room for future plaques as they came. He felt a glint of pride in this thought. A glint of pride that covered over a tremor of unease.

  Charleston sat down and read about gasoline prices, how high they were. Such a story no longer made Charleston sad, for he had heard this story and others like it far too many times for mere sorrow. Charleston had grown so tired of being sad that he had now taken instead to rationalizing solutions to such stories.

  After all, he would think, I am the CEO of a huge multinational corporation. I am one of this nation’s leaders. If I can’t come up with solutions, then who can?

  Charleston even took to writing letters hopefully depicting his solutions to these problems. He would sign them: Charleston Sutterfeld, CEO. He mailed these letters off to newspapers, journals, magazines, congressmen, senators, presidents, prime ministers, etcetera…

  Nevertheless, these problems never did seem to go away. They were always right there in the newspapers and the magazines. And never would anyone respond to his musings.

  If no one needs my help, Charleston would wonder, then why are all these horrible stories still showing up in the newspaper?

  Charleston often heard, though, that such big problems took time to solve. So he made a practice of being patient and holding out hope.

  Lunch came easy on the day of Charleston’s first year as CEO. The morning had been a breeze, making Charleston feel most accomplished at his profession. He ate in the park where he partook of the finest weather: a mild day with just a pinch of gray in the sky (Charleston’s favorite). On his way back to work, Charleston dropped three letters in the mail and picked up a new magazine at a newsstand.

  Everything, thought Charleston as he rode up in the red-lit elevator, seems to have really come together for me.

  Back at work, Charleston noticed a faint, distant musty tinge to the air, which was decidedly atypical. While he figured it was of no real immediate concern, he made a mental note to pay attention to any further alterations in aroma that might come about.

  Charleston leaned back and opened the newspaper to the business page, which was almost always his postprandial read. He read but a few sentences into his first article of the afternoon when, even more faint but certainly more alarming than the unusual aroma, Charleston, for the first time in an entire year on the job, noticed what he thought might have been an unusual noise emanating from the vicinity of the cogs.

  It was a noise in a key and with a texture that Charleston simply had not before noticed, a high-register ringing. As Charleston approached the cogs, the sound grew neither louder nor softer. Furthermore, Charleston could pinpoint no spatial genesis for the sound. He held his ear to each cog’s hub, then to each circumference. He held his ear to the cool, smooth concrete floor. He stood back. He stood closer. Then he stood even closer still.

  The sound is just there, Charleston finally concluded with a somewhat contradictory selection of words for a sound whose source could not be found.

  Charleston realized that he had never before gotten quite this close to the cogs. From this perspective, they seemed large and heavy and, in their own way, quite grand. They moved less than slowly. Charleston would scream if he were forced to move so slowly.

  What, thought Charleston, would be worth always moving so slowly?

  It was this thought, then, that led Charleston to thinking his next thought, a thought he had not thought since his earliest weeks as CEO, a thought without which his life had grown so pleasant, a thought Charleston was more than disheartened to find still tugging at his curiosities, a thought about which he might well have written a letter to Thundercom Corporation if he had not himself been the CEO personally in charge of supervising the cogs’ functioning, a thought which was a question, a question which, when thought, sounded like this rattling around Charleston’s head…

  What do these cogs do?

  At the center of each cog, there was a large metal rod. These metal rods headed from the cogs directly into a thick, gray concrete wall with a rough, textured surface. In the wall, receiving each metal rod was a piece of well-oiled metal pipe that enabled the metal rod to spin, ever so slowly, and turn the cog.

  Or, thought Charleston, might not the cog turn the metal rod?

  The concrete wall made no sound when pounded with a fist. It stretched mammoth from one end of the room to the other. It was a good ten feet taller than Charleston. No doors, no windows, no idiosyncrasies. The wall was more or less perfect. And it betrayed nothing of the cogs to Charleston as he walked its length in either direction. Upon returning to the middle of the wall, Charleston noticed that Timothy Spall stood quietly and several feet in front of Charleston’s desk. Timothy’s face was plain, nonexpressive. He was wearing a yellow tie, which only now made Charleston realize that Timothy Spall normally wore a chalky, gray-blue tie. Charleston wondered if maybe the tie had been a gift, but could not imagine who would give a gift to a man who seemed as singularly self-sufficient as Timothy Spall. Moreover, the tie’s color did not at all agree with Timothy Spall’s complexion. It made him look sort of…well…awkward.

  “What are you looking for?” asked the consistently officious Timothy Spall. “Is there something with which I might help you?”

  Something about Timothy Spall’s tie and its awkwardness, coupled with the clarity of the man’s persona, made Charleston wonder exactly how long Timothy Spall had been at this company, which claimed to have existed for thirty-two years now. But it also claimed to be located in an eighty-six-story building.

  I wonder has he been here, Charleston somewhat arbitrarily asked himself, longer than these cogs have been in this wall?

  “I was admiring this wall,” Charleston replied, cagily. It was only half a lie because Charleston had come to only half trust Timothy Spall.

  “Admiring?” repeated Timothy, a curious lilt in his tone.

  “The craftsmanship,” Charleston explained, astonished by his own irreverence but feeling somewhat justified nevertheless.

  After a moment, Timothy Spall conceded, “I suppose I’ve never really looked at the wall.”

  Perhaps it was his one year of experience talking—or perhaps it was merely the tie—but it seemed strange to Charleston that Timothy Spall knew all there was to know about the cogs but would never have taken notice of this big, beautiful gray wall responsible for holding upright and in place these big, beautiful gray cogs.

  “Don’t you hear a noise?” asked Charleston, testing Timothy, for what he did not know.

  “I hear a lot of them,” Timothy Spall replied, ably.

  “But a high-pitched one?” Charleston clarified. “One not normally here.”

  Timothy listened.

  And then he said, “Nope. I hear nothing unusual.”

  This, too, seemed strange to Charleston. How would Timothy Spall know a normal sound from an abnormal sound in this environment? The man had barely spent but passing moments in this space over at least the past year and presumably for quite some time before that. Even if it was only the last year, this would be time enough, Charleston reasoned, to become unfamiliar with what is normal.

  And then Charleston did something that he knew Timothy Spall would consider absolutely and downright rude. He asked for information relevant, albeit indirectly, to the cogs and their function.

  “What’s on the other side of this wall?” he asked plainly, dancing gently around the central topic

  As he had predicted, this question incited in Timothy Spall a bitter, simmering ire.

  “Charleston,” he seethed through clenched teeth, “we have been over this.”

  “I’m not asking about the cogs. I’m asking about this wall,” Charleston persisted in his strategy.

  Timothy did not take the bait. Instead, he said nothing at all.

  “Because this noise that I’m hearing,” Charleston pressed on, now in a more direct manner, “might be problematic.”

  “I do not hear any such noise,” Timothy stated as harsh fact.

  “And it is my job to maintain the proper functioning of these cogs.”

  “I’m sure everything is fine.”

  “I suspect a sound, though.”

  “And you have made me aware of this. So you have done your job.”

  “But shouldn’t we investigate the noise?”

  “I will. And I will tell maintenance about it.”

  “But today is Monday.”

  “It is.”

  “The maintenance man does not come until Friday.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What if there are problems before then?”

  “There won’t be.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It is my job to know,” Timothy snapped at Charleston, long since fed up with this conversation.

  “Do these cogs do anything at all?” Charleston insisted one more time.

  Timothy Spall did not reply. He simply turned and headed back toward the door out of which Charleston had seen him come on the occasion of the stir over the maintenance team.

  “Charleston, you’re doing a great job. Keep it up,” he called over his shoulder.

  “A man,” called Charleston, unaware of how he was planning to finish this sentence, “has a right to know the significance of his doings.”

  Timothy Spall did not so much as flinch, cough, twitch, or sputter.

  It was not, Charleston recognized, necessarily the case that the noise had not been there before. It was possible that he might only now be noticing something that had always been there. He did not know how to be sure. So he could not heighten his casual mention into an official claim filed with Timothy Spall, especially since Timothy Spall himself purported not to hear the selfsame sound. But none of this, and Charleston was emphatic on this point, necessarily proved that the sound was not there.

  Just because, thought Charleston, one man believes he does not perceive something, that does not necessarily mean that said something is not there.

  He himself had not, at one point in time, seen the color of the maintenance girl’s eyes. Did this mean that her eyes were thereupon colorless?

  Charleston looked again at the giant, daresay graceful, cogs.

  What, he asked himself again, could be worth moving so slowly?

  Only this time he added also another query:

  How much does Timothy Spall even know about these cogs anyway?

  And then something so large it was sizeless just plaintively occurred to Charleston: There is a very good chance that I might actually know more about these cogs than any other human being on this planet.

  And with this thought came a sense of tremendous responsibility.