Okay, I lied. He’s not in Talos yet, but only because I had a flood of inspiration and felt very satisfied with how things were rolling out. So, he’s almost in Talos – but not yet. Something will happen tomorrow… well, just wait and see what happens with the typewriter. Oh, and don’t mind Lars Othret. He couldn’t possibly have any relation to the supposedly-deceased Danil Othret.

Word Count: 10,010

It was not even three days later that Graham found Adam Curie setting up an open market full of his old knick-knacks and useless junk, clearly hoping to make a small profit that would sustain his family for a few weeks. Several prospective buyers had stopped by to look at Curie’s house, and one of them was quite sure he and his family would buy, but didn’t want to be too hasty. That customer was tying the knot on a long string of visits to various homes across the state, and was happy to have finally “found one that suited his family’s needs so well.”

Only in utter disbelief did Graham visit the Curie garage sale, which was covered in old newspapers to protect it from the early falling snow. The headlines on the newspaper raved about the lack of power, and terrified the public by preaching about the coming of a second Dark Age. Business and e-business firms were closing en-masse, causing even greater financial worry in an already tumultuous economic environment. Panic was widespread – whole districts were losing power inexplicably, and it wasn’t coming back.

How could Graham, then, feel so calm? How could he be so at ease, when even his most cherished neighbor’s family was to be scattered, destitute, to some other part of the planet?

Graham peeled away one of the newspaper layers to look at the frozen items beneath it. Cups, silverware, an old fan – all junk. He couldn’t imagine how Curie planned to sell any of this, especially when half the town went out complaining to the power company and the other half worried so greatly about their financial assets that they, too, might sell their homes and relocate just to ensure that they would have disposable income in the future. Although everywhere around him was silent, Graham could hear the screams of the destitute crying out for financial security, crying out for electricity, crying out for any modern convenience, coveting any combination of the three they could convey

Then he saw it, sitting alone, with a light layer of fresh snow spread across its surface: the typewriter. Snow sunk between its keys, undoubtedly harming the inner structure. Graham wiped the snow off of its surface, revealing several of the keys, and blew the dusty snow out from its innards. The snow exploded into the air, sparkling in the sunlight, and hit Graham’s face – in the areas protected by his rather small beard, he wasn’t cold, but the rest of his face suddenly felt frozen. He spit out the snow that had fallen into his mouth, and from a distance heard Curie laughing.

“I suppose if you want to say, ‘If there’s one thing I can still derive pleasure from, it’s the sight of you covered in snow’?” Graham said, almost shouting. Curie laughed again.

“That sounds about right.” Curie walked over to Graham, and made his face somber. “Since we don’t have power, I probably won’t see you again for a while.”

“When do you leave?”

“Two days.”

“What?!” Graham was in disbelief. There was no way, even with all the resources available in the world, for a man to clear out of his house so quickly. “You must be coming back for certain things.”

“Oh, well, yes, but we won’t be living in this house anymore. Eventually I’ll make a trip back to gather the non-essentials, but without power most of it is effectively useless anyway. I figured if I can sell the house fast and lighten my load, I’ll have the new homeowner take care of the electronics until power returns to America. The other countries must all be laughing at us right now, I swear!”

“Well, what’s the buyer going to do with his stuff?” Graham asked.

“Move it in; there’s plenty of room. I told him he could shove all of my old junk in the closet, and that I’d be holding this garage sale to get rid of the really useless junk. Though I see you’ve found the typewriter.”

Graham didn’t think that the typewriter was useless. In fact, he was sure that it could be used to create the next great novel of the century, and that these chances were magnified by the cross-country rolling blackouts. There was no doubt in his mind that every smart author in America at that moment was using some form of ink on paper to create their stories out of fear that they might lose their drafts to a sudden power outage – and that was if they could get power at all. If not, then they’d be forced to put their pens to the page, literally.

“You’re sure this guy is buying?”

“Well, no. But he seems pretty close to being sure, and looks like a great guy. I’d like him to buy it, if no one else.” The bags under his eyes had deepened, and Curie looked more tired than ever. His child and wife were nowhere to be seen; Graham assumed that they were out having lunch and had left Adam to hold up the garage sale.

Graham ended up staying with Curie the rest of the day to maximize the time he had left with his good friend, and in between interesting conversation he helped Curie run the garage sale. They sold a good deal of merchandise, and made a fair bit of cash – enough to support the Curie family for many weeks to come in their new home. He wondered how Vanessa felt about this whole ordeal, and how his child would cope with growing up in a home that was undoubtedly less lavish than what Curie had just sold. But in the end, Curie advised Graham that it was the best for their financial assets. Pulling money out of their mortgage would have been a death sentence in the current market, and thus they had no choice but to relocate and start saving. Curie continues by stating that if, perhaps, he one day reclaimed his job and made a small fortune off of a new novel, he could move back to this neighborhood.

The sun began to set, and Graham had work to do – his other clients wanted to see how his drawings had progressed, and Graham knew that they hadn’t progressed very much. He spent the night tirelessly working on all of his peripheral projects that he had ignored when focusing on Curie’s lock, which was still scattered in millions of pieces across his carpet. He wouldn’t bother to clean them up; he kept the parts scattered that way as a motivator, as a symbol for the uselessness of work done quickly. If it were any other piece of equipment he’d engineered, it wouldn’t have fallen apart from being thrown. That it broke meant there was a serious structural flaw, and he wouldn’t let that happen to any of his other projects. He saw the breakage as giving meaning to his anger at Curie for bailing out when times got tough, and plowed through his other projects by morning.

He had never checked yesterday’s mail. Tired from the long night’s work, he decided to take a two-minute break and sift through the mail. The paper and ink reminded him of how Curie’s draft novel looked, simple and primitive, not at all like modern words on a flickering screen. Once again proving that a good part of him was born in the wrong age, he expressed his enjoyment of traditional mail to himself. It was tangible, it was personal, it was intimate and did not come often. Whenever he received a letter – one that wasn’t junk, anyway – it was a painstakingly created, personal message. E-mail could be easily rectified, changed, and sent en-masse. But traditional mail, once it was written and sent, was set in stone. Which was why Graham had reason to be surprised that he found a letter from his boss in yesterday’s mail.

The letter was marked as urgent notice and was sent via first-class overnight delivery. It read,

Mr. James Graham,

You may know that we have all been experiencing tumultuous times in America. It is during times like these that we exercise caution, or lose our own blood. We must protect ourselves with all the power we can muster, and it is with a heavy heart that I say our Tesla Engineering is no exception to this rule. With the rampant economy, and the recent power shortages, Tesla Engineering has informed me that I must downsize my staff by the thousands. I cannot tell you how hard this is for me to do, even more so because I know many of you personally and have followed your careers through since their inceptions. But when times are tough, we’re called upon to make tough decisions.

Do not finish your current projects, Mr. Graham. While I wish you could still provide your services to us, it is Tesla Engineering who can no longer afford you.

I chose you, Mr. Graham, because I feel that you are one of the most independent workers I’ve ever seen. If there is any Tesla faculty member that can survive on his or her own, it is you. Your commissioned projects have been canceled, but I think you may find success in freelance engineering until the economy picks up and the power crisis ends. Do not give up hope that there will be an end to these crises. Find recluse knowing that few are as innovative and resourceful as you, and that you will undoubtedly become very successful if America should suffer without electricity for longer than we’d all like it to.

Keep your friends close, and your designs closer. God speed,
Lars Othret
Tesla Engineering
Head of Management

P.S. Let me know when you find yourself someone special; she’ll be a lucky one, that girl. I know you’ve been searching for a while, and one day your patience will pay off – I’m sure sooner rather than later! Trust fate, and trust your ingenuity.

Graham, sitting at his drafting desk, put the letter down and cried. Tears fell over his current projects – not only for his lost job, but also his lost time. And yet he remained resolute, knowing that there would be future opportunities. If he could gain more opportunities like Curie’s lock, there would be hope for him to become a freelance engineer. He could remain in his home and continue business as normal, work three projects at a time, and make profit enough to keep himself going through the crisis. And for the first time, it truly resounded in his mind that America was in a crisis, a crisis greater than any nation has experienced in decades, perhaps centuries.

But now that he, like Curie, was out of a job, he found that he worried about it less than when he had let it pass him by idly. Now that he was a freelance engineer, he made his own schedule and deadlines. He did everything on his own. And like Lars Othret had said in his letter, Graham could handle it. So he remained calm and collected after the tears had dried up; after his projects were ruined. He sighed after the long bout with his emotions, This wouldn’t have happened to digital copies.

At the same time, he also no longer blamed Curie for bailing out in a panic. Now that he understood the pain and terror caused by losing your only job – with absolutely nothing to fall back on – he sympathized with Curie. And then he knew what he had to do to cheer Curie up; he ran upstairs to his bedroom and fetched Curie’s check, which he hadn’t cashed yet and hadn’t planned to cash until he finished the lock, which clearly wasn’t going to happen, put on a coat and dashed across the street. The old newspapers covered the lot of junk, which meant that Curie was still asleep.

He rang their doorbell several times before their child opened the door. “Is your daddy home?” Graham asked the innocent child, who wiped his eyes of sleepiness and nodded. “Think you could go wake him up for me?” At this, the child woke up and procured a wide-mouthed grin, then ran up a nearby flight of stairs. Moments later, Graham heard a surprised screech and then a disgruntled moan, and smiled as the child had.

“James? What the hell? It’s six in the morning – are you insane?” Curie rubbed his eyes, his fists caught in their deep sockets. Sleep would not leave him, but had clearly left Graham.

“I want to buy it,” Graham said with a hint of urgency.

“Buy what?”

“Your typewriter.”

“You woke me up to ask me if you could borrow my typewriter? James–” Just as Curie began closing the front door, Graham stopped him.

“Not borrow, buy. I’m interested in your stories. I’d like to write my own. Really, I would. And without power, your typewriter is the only way I could possibly write anything with any speed. Please let me buy it from you. I have a lot of ideas, and a lot of thoughts I want to get off my chest.”

“A-alright. Come on, I’ll show you to it.” Curie led the way from the front door to the driveway via a stone pathway, and removed the newspaper tarp from one shelf of junk. “Here she is, all yours.” The snow had melted; it was slightly warmer that morning. And even if the snow hadn’t melted, it would have been blown away by the wind, making the typewriter look as though it had only just been manufactured.

“Great! And you cleaned it, too,” Graham said, reaching into his pocket. He yanked out the check and forced it into Curie’s left hand. “There’s your payment. I hope it’s enough.” Graham watched Curie unfold the check, hoping that the man would become wide-eyes and thankful, but that’s not what happened.

“Is this a joke?” Curie said, blinking furiously.

“What? No, I— I wanted to give that back to you, since you need it more than I do. Not that you’re needy, of course, but because I never finished your project.”

“You had to cover costs. Please don’t give me back my own check, James. I’m destitute, yeah, but you’re not exactly king of the castle yourself. And I’m not letting you take me over.” A pause, and then a change of heart. “I can see you really want me to have this, so stop looking at me like that – I’ll keep the goddamned check. You’re going to need a new ribbon, though. I’ve got one lying around here somewhere…” He sifted through piles of junk, until he uncovered a box containing a new typewriter ink ribbon in a far off Rubbermaid container. “Ah-hah! There we go. Take this. And listen, when I leave today, I’ll send you some mail. When you respond to it, you’d better be sending it in a thick manila envelope with your first story.”

“You got it,” Graham said while clamping the box containing the ink ribbon between his jaws and grasping tightly the typewriter with both hands. “Hay hare!” he said with a full mouth, and walked away from Curie one last time, satisfied with the transpired events. Curie, however, was now reluctant to leave. Graham purposefully left out that he’d lost his job when talking to Curie, because he knew that would cause Curie to cancel the sale of his home and try to make ends meet with a steep mortgage, and he didn’t want to be the cause of Curie’s bankruptcy. No – curie would have to forge out his own path, away from Graham, and sometime in the future the two would meet and share their experiences, for better or worse, knowing they made the right decisions at the time.

Of course, Graham had no way of knowing that his decisions were right, or that selling out was the best decision for Curie, but he did know that Curie needed to learn to get along without the help of others. And Graham, well, he just needed to learn to get along.

“Take care yourself, neighbor!” Curie called back, in a strangely unfamiliar voice. Unsure of what he had heard, Graham doubled back – was that really Curie I just heard? It was as though, in the mere moments in between Curie’s previous sentence and his goodbye, his voice had changed completely. It was clearer, more resolute, deeper and confident – nothing like what Graham had ever heard before. He was completely bemused.

The voice bothered him through the rest of the day, as he destroyed his old projects by burning them in a fire. Unfortunately, drafting vellum wasn’t quick to burn, so he used a starter log and some firewood to jump-start the process. He took immense pleasure in watching these old projects burn, and thought about his prospective job at CERN. He hadn’t lied to Curie when he’d said that he was comfortable living where he was – in fact, he was ore than comfortable, but there would always be second thoughts. In the end, he took those second thoughts and burned them in the fire with his old drawings.

To hell with CERN, he said to himself. I’ll keep at what I’ve been doing, like Lars told me to, and never regret my work.

With that, Graham took a broom an swept the pieces of Curie’s lock into a pile, and shoved them in front of the couch, then looked outside to see the moving van carrying the majority of the Curies’ materials. When the van moved clear of the driveway, he noticed how successful the garage sale had been – the lot was nearly empty. How had he not noticed people coming and going throughout the day? Once again, he heard the strange, impossibly confident voice of Adam Curie; something had changed in him then that enabled Curie to attract more customers and sell all of his old junk. Still in bemusement, Graham supposed that some strange, otherworldly force induced by large amounts of stress, given Curie’s situation, possessed the man.

But that was behind him now. Curie was gone, and someone new would be living in that house tomorrow, someone that Graham wouldn’t need to bother with. It was only Graham, his potential clients, and his hand-me-down typewriter to get him through this difficult time. Graham braced himself for tougher times, and let the fire die down. The vellum was long since destroyed, and he felt so very tired after watching it burn.