Freddy never knew his paternal grandfather — he had died before Freddy’s birth. But he’d heard stories.

His grandfather’s name was Jean Hebert de Longpre. He was born on January 1, 1900, in a small village in the province of West-Vlaanderen, Belgium, the oldest of three sons and two daughters.

Towards the end of World War I, Jean’s father, Alain, was killed not far from his home, murdered by a German soldier in an argument over his bicycle, which Alain refused to surrender to the retreating invader.

Shortly after his father’s meaningless death, Jean went to work on a grain and dairy farm to help support his family: baling hay, milking cows, spreading manure, avoiding the remnants of the war.

By the fall of 1920, he’d become the farmer’s most trusted worker and he’d fallen in love with the farmer’s eldest daughter, Isobel. He asked her father for her hand as New Year’s Eve became 1921 and they were to be married in June, after the first harvest of the season.

Spring came and the farmer had a bounty of grain to deliver to market. He hired some extra hands (including Jean’s two younger brothers) for the weeklong trip and left his son-in-law-to-be in charge of the farm while he was away.

Though Jean kept the farm running smoothly, it was in that particular week that the farmer’s most prized dairy cow decided to go dry, completely dry, milk no more. Whether it was the farmer’s absence or an act of God (it certainly was that), no one could say.

Perhaps the Holstein was feeling suicidal; for a beast that gives no milk is also known as “dinner”. Jean scoffed at the beast’s refusal to give it up and waited for the farmer’s return before preparing a month’s worth of steaks. The farmer wasn’t quite as glib about the cow.

When he returned to find his darling empty and doomed for execution, he blamed Jean. Sad and enraged, he told his future son-in-law, in his native tongue, “If that’s how you run a farm, perhaps I should find a more suitable husband for my daughter!” It sounded far more threatening in angry French.

Poor Jean, in all his hard-headedness, called the farmer’s bluff and retorted, “Well, now you don’t have a choice, you stupid old man!”

And so, at the age of twenty-one, he called off his wedding ten days shy of the ceremony and decided out of the blue to get as far away from the war-torn Flemish countryside as he could.

He wrote a letter to Isobel, which his brother, Frederic, delivered and within a week, Jean had booked passage to Southampton, England. He worked hard labor there for a month, employed by the same company that had several years previous built an infamous vessel called Titanic.

From Southampton, he took a ship across the Atlantic to what he hoped would be a better life.

He arrived in the port of Halifax at the beginning of August 1921, and immediately began looking for work, along with thousands of other immigrants whom had spent their last $250 on Canadian landing fees. To simplify things and make prospective employers believe he was English, he changed his last name to “Long”, a symbol of his metamorphosis — Jean Hebert Long.

Through a bilingual acquaintance, he heard of farms on the Canadian Prairies that were offering jobs to “reliable and strong hands”. With a dwindling pocket of cash, he stowed away on a freighter to Montreal. He found the French-Canadians in Montreal to be ruder than any Parisian he’d ever met and barely able to speak the French language correctly.

He hopped a train to Thunder Bay and another further west, finally arriving in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on August 22, 1921.

Jean quickly found work on a nearby farm. After all he’d been through, the journey he’d taken, it was easy labor for him, not much different than his first days working for Isobel’s father. He was the employee of the month.

He’d never experienced the Canadian prairie winter, however, and a year-and-a-half later, never wanted to again. He moved to the Southern Ontario farmbelt, about an hour from Buffalo, New York.

Jean worked three seasons there before opening up his own one-seater barbershop in the small country village of Guelph, Ontario. He met a lovely young Irish immigrant named Rebecca O’Malley whom he married in 1928. She gave birth in 1930 to Alain Frederic Long, Freddy’s father.

All of that, a future, countless journeys of innumerable descendants, roads and paths and courses of unknown circumstance, free reins upon untamed horses running beyond the horizon, the black stretch of nothingness through which eyes and minds cannot see, forever, a life led, all of that… because… the cow… went dry.

To Freddy, that, in no uncertain terms, is an act of God.

When Freddy was twelve, his mother enrolled him in a summer computer course at the local post-secondary. He had excelled in mathematics + his teacher suggested that he explore the wonderful world of computer programming ÷ Freddy’s parents were in the midst of separating and did not want him clouding the discussions × Freddy didn’t much mind because, to him, a computer translated to computer games = Freddy was twelve and liked games.

The course began in late June, two hours per day, three days a week. It was called, “Introduction to Basic”. A redundant title, Freddy thought.

Though Freddy regarded the computer as a novelty, there had at that time been recent developments in the American Northwest of a personal computer operating system called DOS. It had been bought, repackaged and resold by a young bull named Bill Gates, who would eventually become the richest man in the Western hemisphere, despite (or perhaps because of) his SNAFU mentality.

The campus computer was a Cyber supercomputer; at the time, the third largest in the world (this was back when bigger, not smaller, meant better). The mainframe was contained in three large rooms in the center of the main campus building. Cables ran along corridor ceilings connecting terminals all over the campus to the mainframe. A floppy disk was 5″ square and actually was floppy. There were even card-punching terminals, as if anyone should be required to communicate via holes in a piece of cardstock. Could you imagine what that would do to the science of electioneering?

It was ancient to today’s technology; but in 1982, it was top of the line. Or so they were told.

Freddy’s class only lasted one month but, in that time, Freddy made the acquaintance of a computer hacker named Ogilvie. Ogilvie was maybe nineteen, but his unshaven face, messy hair, unstylish clothes and inferiority complex made him seem twenty-five. He never revealed his real age.

About a week before Freddy’s course was to end, he was at a vending machine in a low-traffic hallway, trying to buy a pastry that had been waiting to be bought for almost two weeks. He inserted two quarters, made his selection, nothing happened. Another two quarters, another selection, more nothing.

Ogilvie happened to be passing by and noticed the kid’s dilemma – hunger v. poverty.

“Why do you even bother?” he asked Freddy.

“Cause I’m hungry,” Freddy snapped back in frustration. Ogilvie stopped and approached.

“Listen, kid, you don’t need to put any money in it. Lemme see your arm.”

“What?”

“Lemme see your arm,” the hacker repeated, grabbing Freddy’s wrist and pulling at it to view his forearm. “Yeah, see,” he explained, “your arm is thin enough to reach up the slot and pull out whatever you want.”

Ogilvie glanced around to see no one else glancing around. “Try it.”

Freddy shrugged, “Okay.”

Freddy knelt down in front of the machine, slid his forearm into the slot where his two pastries should have been. “Now reach up,” Ogilvie instructed him. Freddy guided his hand up into the vending womb. “Can you feel the packaging?”

“Yeah.”

“Grab it and pull it down.”

Freddy followed the instructions and a Ho-Ho treat slid down into the slot at the bottom. Free. Newborn.

“It worked, it worked,” Freddy exclaimed.

“Shhh, keep it down,” Ogilvie told him, looking around suspiciously.

“I’m gonna get another one.” And he did. Two Ho-Ho’s, twins, sitting in the receptacle. “Do you want anything?” Freddy asked his new best friend.

“Yeah sure, grab me a Snickers.” And there it was… Snickers, à la carte.

This was only the beginning.

Mentor that he was, Ogilvie taught Freddy how to break into other students’ user accounts within the college computer system.

“Y’see, every student has an account on the mainframe where they store all their files. You can’t access the mainframe with an account and you can’t have an account without being enrolled as a student. Now, to access an account, you need the student’s user name and password.”

“Yeah, I know, so how do we get someone’s user name and password?”

“Easy, kid, totally easy. You go to the main terminal room, y’know the one by the atrium?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You dig through the garbage for hardcopies of a student’s terminal session. There’re ten terminals there that don’t have monitor screens; they can only display sessions in hardcopy, like typewriters. And some students are stupid. They enter their user name and password and it gets printed right on the paper and, when they’re done, they throw the paper they don’t need in the garbage, with their user name and password still printed on it for all the janitors to see. My dad was a janitor.”

Ogilvie took him to the main terminal room, dug through a large waste paper basket teeming with computer output and managed to find three such examples of user names and their corresponding passwords.

“See, I told ya.”

“What if someone finds out?”

“You don’t get found out if you know what you’re doing. The best place to hide is in Room L238 in the North Wing; there’re only eight terminals in that room and there’s hardly ever anyone in there… Trust me, kid, I haven’t been a student here for a year-and-a-half.”

And that’s how Freddy managed to continue using the computer after his summer student account had been deleted (purged was the word they used back then). July came and went, Freddy played computer games and ate free pastries while his parents worked out their separate ways, August, September. Then came October.

Freddy was on his fourth stolen student account; user name: Philip66. Philip66 had detected the presence of a hacker in his account and had notified the system administrator. His account was promptly shut down (purged) and he was given a new one. Freddy was locked out.

So he paid another visit to Ogilvie’s prized trash can. He hadn’t seen his hacking mentor in a few weeks but there he was, digging for more passwords. Freddy explained how he’d been shut down again by yet another purged account.

Ogilvie handed him a new user name and password from the bin and gave him some advice – inform the student user of your presence with a threat.

Freddy took it to heart and created a file called “readme” in his fifth stolen account. The “readme” file outlined how the student now had a hacker using his account for “peaceful purposes” and if he reported it to anybody, the hacker would “wipe out any existence of you at this shit-ass college.” Terrorism, for lack of a better word.

A few days later, in Room L238 in the North Wing of the campus, Ogilvie showed Freddy something he’d recently discovered. “Look at this,” he said, typing rapidly at a terminal, “I figured out how to break into the mainframe’s access control protocol. See this list?”

A list of numbers appeared on the screen – 02, 03, 07, 12, 13, 21, 29, 50, 52. “These are the terminals that are currently in use all over the campus. See, I’m 52; you’re 50.”

Freddy didn’t really understand what Ogilvie was talking about but whatever, “Yeah sure, I see.”

“Now watch this.” Ogilvie typed in “ENDSESSION/50” and hit the return key.

Suddenly, Freddy’s terminal shut down. Off, dead, powerless.

“Cool, huh?”

“Yeah, cool,” Freddy responded, turning his terminal back on and restarting the computer game he’d been playing.

About two hours later, around 8:30PM, Freddy was alone in L238. And he was curious. He tried to recall how Ogilvie had broken into the access control protocol (whatever that meant!). After several botched attempts, he was successful.

A list of number appeared on the screen – 02, 03, 07, 09, 13, 24, 50.

“Now how did he do it again?” Freddy asked himself. The dark green cursor blinked at him, as if to say, “The coast is clear.” BLINK – GO! BLINK – GO! BLINK – GO!

He typed in “ENDSESSION/02,03,07,09,13,24”. And without giving it a second thought, he lightly tapped the return key. The only number that remained on the screen was “50”. Him. 50.

“Cool,” he thought, unaware that with great power comes great responsibility. He returned to playing some game, bored, alone, and stupid for remaining at the scene of the cyber-crime. He was twelve, his only excuse.

Ten minutes later, a security guard entered the room, said, “Excuse me,” and typed something on Freddy’s terminal. A list of activities appeared on the screen – everything Freddy had done since Ogilvie had shut him down earlier in the day.

Freddy sat blank-faced as it dawned on him that he’d been caught. The guard escorted him to the Administrator’s office.

“This is him?” the Administrator asked the guard. “Are you sure?” He wore round glasses and tweed.

Outside the office were four professors pacing in anguish, sweating in frustration, cursing to themselves. The Administrator informed Freddy, “These professors outside my office were working on very important reports and when you shut them down, they lost all their work.”

“Maybe they should have saved their work at regular intervals,” Freddy retorted, thereby beginning the word on the street that one must save one’s work at regular intervals.

The Administrator had Freddy banned from the campus. “If we ever see you here again, you’ll be charged with trespassing. Good night.” He was the most polite Administrator ever.

The guard escorted Freddy to the nearest exit, across a campus lawn and down the path to the bus stop.

He never saw Ogilvie again.

“It amazes me,” Freddy thought to himself as he stood on his front porch, the December sun trying hard to keep Southern California mild and prosperous. He had opened his mailbox, removed the two pieces of correspondence there and, upon seeing the identities of the senders, voraciously ripped both their respective ends off and pulled out the papers inside each.

“It amazes me, life,” he thought as he read the letters. “Because life is a maze. You wander down this corridor, reach an intersection, where do you go? Which way? Go left, go right, go straight, go back. Can you go back? Whichever way upon which you decide, does it matter? You end up back at that intersection again, in the same space, with but a few more corridors to your name and character.”

These were no ordinary letters. They were shock blasts. Pure silent laughter.

The whole sequence of events began in 1966 before Freddy was even born. Freddy’s father had quit his upward-bound career as an insurance salesman to join the team at the only type of company worse than an insurance company – a pharmaceutical company.

Freddy didn’t like any company. He’d once read in the Oxford dictionary the following three definitions of the word “company”: group of actors etc.; subdivision of infantry battalion; body of persons combined for common (especially commercial) object. Liars, murderers and thieves. Companies.

Years later, looking back on his life as he lay upon his deathbed, Freddy’s father expressed remorse over having left the insurance trade. His time with the medicine peddlers hadn’t been all it was cracked up to be and, as many men do when mortality approaches, he sought absolution. He’d once had the Grail, he feared, and lost it.

After his father’s passing, his insurance policy began its long and winding road of adjustment, what with all the variables involved in DEATH.

A month or so before Freddy received those two letters and stood flabbergasted on his porch, he’d needed a new pair of shoes. His old Vans were worn and tattered and nobody wore skate-boarder sneakers anymore. In store after store along Melrose Avenue, he searched for the right pair of rubber souls. Every shoe looked the same – Adidas, Nike, Brooks. Freddy didn’t care for any of them; they all looked too new and without personality (or wrinkles).

Around the same time, Freddy’s new roommate, James, was rooting through the boxes of clothing with which he’d recently moved in. He found an old pair of shoes he hadn’t worn in a few years and showed them to Freddy.

“Do you want these?” he asked Freddy, holding up a pair of dull blue Puma sneakers.

Freddy looked at them and they became the lonely puppy hiding at the back of the cage in your local dog pound. He slipped them on; they were tight, a little too tight. But they looked perfect, sleek, cool. Like Mercury’s heels.

It would later occur to Freddy that though a certain shoe might be appealing, there are more important functions than aesthetics. In other words, sometimes that lonely puppy hiding at the back of the cage in your local dog pound will shit all over your rug.

A short while later, as Freddy was leaving his digs, as he was slipping down the three low steps to the sidewalk, his right foot landed rather askew. Without the preventative qualities of proper footwear, it twisted inward and Freddy’s own weight and gravitational momentum pulled him down, his ankle ligaments tightening and his ears hearing a noise that no ear enjoys hearing… Crackle.

As Freddy crumpled to the ground, the sky grew larger. It was that moment in a car accident that lasts longer than it should – in film, a freeze frame; in literature, a religious text. It was a stretched second that he was down; then he was back up in pain and immediacy, hopping back into the house, yelping to himself, “Ouch, ouch, oh man, bad pain, ouch. What have I done?!”

Freddy hopped to a chair as James emerged from the kitchen with a tuna salad sandwich, asking, “What’s going on?”

“Aw man, I think I broke my ankle,” Freddy replied, quickly and carefully removing the disagreeable shoe from his injured limb. Upon inspection of the ankle, neither Freddy nor James could see any break in the skin. There was a great deal of swelling, however.

“At least it’s not a compound,” James comforted.

“Y’know, in thirty years, I’ve never broken a bone in my body. This sucks.”

Freddy iced his ankle and kept it elevated. James left for fast food and a tensor bandage. After a burger, fries and much phone consultation with friends who had no medical qualifications whatsoever, Freddy decided to keep off his foot and wait a few days to see how things turned out.

In the meantime, he took James to see the L.A. Kings sleep through the first two periods of a game against the Detroit Red Wings. Freddy had scored some wicked seventh row seats in the corner and wasn’t going to let a little thing like an inability to walk prevent him from seeing some ice-bound roughhousing. He borrowed a pair of crutches from James, whose entire family consisted of surgeons and patients. They had plenty of crutches to go around. The hockey game finished 2-2 at the end of overtime.

Three days later, Freddy’s foot was bloated to nearly twice its size and was throbbing out of its tensor. It was tighter than the damn sneaker that facilitated the injury in the first place. And he was in pain.

“Jimmy, would you mind taking me to the hospital?”

“Yeah, sure, let’s go,” James replied like he was going to the beach.

It was a ten minute drive to the hospital, despite the horribly planned San Vicente Boulevard, one of the world’s most confusing streets.

Freddy checked in and filled out the necessary forms while James parked the car. The nurse behind the ER desk asked Freddy a few pertinent questions and shook her head when he told her that the accident had occurred three days previous.

“Are you shaking your head at me?”

She nodded.

“Because I took so long to come in?”

She nodded again and a volunteer in a smock with a British accent escorted Freddy through a set of automatic doors and down a hallway into another waiting room where he sat for fifteen minutes with an overweight middle-aged Mexican woman in spandex leggings whose eyes never darted away from a re-run of “Cheers” playing on the television braced to a corner of the ceiling.

Freddy sat there and addressed the fact that he’d given his real name and address in the forms he’d filled out. James had advised him to give a false name and address because, wouldn’t you know it, Freddy did not have insurance. Liars, murderers and thieves, he reminded himself. Freddy had given his real name and address because he thought it was the responsible thing to do.

A doctor came in on the late shift on a Sunday night. He examined Freddy’s foot and found it’s most sensitive point on the outside beneath his ankle. He sent for some X-ray’s and Freddy was escorted to a room where his genitals had to be protected with a large heavy mat filled with lead.

Freddy laid there wondering two things: “Who was the first guy to discover he needed to cover his balls when he did this?” and “Does this actually prevent premature prostate cancer?”

Back in the waiting room, he sat for another forty-five minutes and watched people in multicolor pastel smocks mill about, go get this, go do that, runners and production assistants all. Freddy watched a male nurse wrap a tensor around the Mexican lady’s ankle and she left tenuously skipping along on a set of crutches she did not know how to properly use.

Freddy shifted to another chair across from the TV and watched ten minutes of a “Wayans Bros” episode before the doctor returned to inform him that he had a chipped tibia, a little speck of white on one of the X-ray’s. Freddy was relieved to know that it was something – even nothing would have been something, would have answered the question,
“What’s wrong with my increasingly swollen foot?”

“You’ll need a walking cast for three of four weeks. I’ll give you the number of an orthopedist,” the doctor said, writing out his referral. “You should stay off your foot until you see him,” the doctor told him. “It was nice to meet you,” he added and departed to return a page.

The male nurse was back a moment later with another tensor which he wrapped around Freddy’s foot as he had the Mexican lady’s foot. Freddy left the ER with a chipped tibia, his X-ray’s and a referral to a specialist. He would be billed later.

Freddy crutched himself back out to James, in the waiting room, and followed him to where he’d parked the car.

The next day, Freddy called the orthopedist to which he’d been referred. This was the guy that was going to put his foot in a cast; this was the guy who was going to do him in, clear out his bank account. Though there was a bone chip floating around in the ether of his ankle, Freddy was hesitant.

He dialed the number he’d been given – Dr. Feldman.

“Hi, I was referred to Dr. Feldman. I have a chipped tibia and I’d like to come in and get a walking cast put on –”

“Okay, sir,” the receptionist cut him off, “who is your insurance provider?”

“I’ll be paying cash or credit card.”

“Okay, sir, I should tell you that there’s a three week waiting list for Dr. Feldman.”

“Three weeks?”

“Uh-huh, the soonest I could schedule you is –”

“No that’s alright. I think I need this done sooner than that.” Freddy quickly hung up and perused his limited options.

There was a free clinic in Hollywood about which James had spoken; but when Freddy called, all he got was an answering machine message outlining when the clinic was open and what injuries they repaired at which times. The message must’ve been five minutes long!

“Patients with psychiatric problems are to come to the clinic every second Tuesday between three and five.” Freddy wondered how many psychiatrically-disabled people had a sufficient grasp of the concept of time to figure out when every second Tuesday was. That road seemed problematic at best.

Freddy needed a guy. A doctor guy. A foot doctor guy. Someone who could wrap a pillow of love around his ankle that would hold together for the next month. He really needed to walk again. Immobility was not on his to-do list.

James proved to be helpful yet again. He referred Freddy to his family doctor – perhaps he would know the best course of action. Freddy hadn’t had a family doctor since he’d had a family. He called Dr. Kaplan immediately.

“Well I’m not really talented enough to give you the proper treatment,” Kaplan jokingly admitted. “But let me see who… Ah yes, Phil Emery. Give him a call; he’s an orthopedist.” He gave Dr. Emery’s phone number to Freddy.

“Dr. Emery’s office,” the receptionist answered. Freddy explained the whole sordid story to her and made an appointment for two days later.

At 3:30pm on a Friday, Freddy and James found themselves in Beverly Hills at the orthopedic clinic. The building was a large six-floor glass structure that looked like every other building off of Wilshire Boulevard. Freddy walked on the crutches; James carried his X-ray’s.

In the lobby, the floor was black marble; there was no security guard, merely an office directory on the mirrored wall, two elevator doors and another door that led to the stairway. Emery’s office was on the fourth floor. Freddy thought it odd to have an orthopedist’s office on any floor other than the first. James pressed the button for the lift.

One of the elevator doors opened and off got a bleach-blonde woman with really high heels which gave her an Amazonian stature, a really short skirt which was hardly there and really fake breasts which were a gift from her plastic surgeon boyfriend on the sixth floor. She was exactly the type of girl so many people believe Los Angeles is teaming with – Marilyn Monrobots.

Freddy and James raised their eyebrows simultaneously then got on the elevator she had vacated. Up they went to the fourth floor.

Freddy checked in with the receptionist and waited but a few minutes before his name was called and he was escorted into a small examination room that overlooked a park and parking lot. As instructed, he removed both shoes and socks.

Dr. Phil Emery entered a moment later. He was a fossil of a man, in his sixties or maybe even his seventies, with hair as thin as thread and a face of meandering wrinkles that reminded Freddy of the Badlands of South Dakota. He was friendly and handled Freddy’s ankle like Ferdinand Magellan toying with a compass. He inspected the X-ray’s for a moment then gave Freddy the most wonderful news.

“Ah, it’s just a sprain.”

Dumbfounded, Freddy said, “What?”

“Well it’ll hurt but you’ve just gotta walk it off.”

“So I shouldn’t stay off it?”

“No, that’s the worst thing you can do. The more you use it, the sooner it’ll heal. Should take a few months.”

“So I don’t have a chipped tibia?”

“No. You’ve got a bad sprain. I’d say just take it easy; don’t go playing soccer.”

“I don’t play soccer.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“What about the X-ray? What about that little speck under my ankle?”

“Ahh it’s nothing. Just a little speck on the X-ray.”

Freddy tried walking. A jolt of stiff pain shot through the tender foot which had been left unused for a week.

“I know it feels like you shouldn’t walk on it,” Dr. Emery said. “But that’s just your nerves telling your brain that they’re shot. Don’t believe your nerves and you’ll be fine.”

Freddy took a few steps, despite the odd sensations below his knee. He had it back. He had the old movement. He could walk, slowly for now.

“When I walk out of here,” he said to Emery, “I’m gonna be yelling, “I’m healed! I’m healed!””

“Emery,” Emery said, “Don’t forget to say Dr. Emery.”

Freddy limped out of the examination room and back into the waiting room. James was surprised to see him so mobile. Freddy paid Dr. Emery with a check – a measly $140, highly reasonable for sweet peace of mind.

Over the following weeks, the full capacity of Freddy’s foot returned. His right ankle would never again be symmetrical with his left ankle, but his balance had been restored. Or so he thought.

In truth, his balance would not be restored until he stood on his front porch holding two pieces of correspondence.

His father’s insurance benefits finally came through, after so many years bouncing around databases and filing cabinets. Freddy’s brother mailed him a check for his share of the final amount – $2610.17.

Freddy received that check the same day that he received his bill from the hospital. The hospital bill was an incredulous $2468.05. Almost twenty-five hundred dollars for a misdiagnosis, an improper treatment and a bad referral.

He held both letters in his hand. A check for $2610.17 and a bill for $2468.05. He did the math in his head, adding Dr. Emery’s $140, and realized that the difference was $2.12.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, the lord giveth and the lord taketh away, blah blah blah,” he told himself.

Freddy was sick to death of ironic perception and butterflies.

“Gracias, padre,” he said to the clouds and went back in his house, wondering on what he would spend $2.12.

The silver Beemer wound its way through the mid-week evening traffic of Sunset Boulevard, past the theme bars and shaded rubberneckers, past the tattoo shops and peeler joints, past the superstores and boutiques, past the parking lots, their attendants, their cars. Past the wafer-thin girls crossing the street.

Resting his fingers on the top of the steering wheel, Max drove the borrowed vehicle with insouciant ease. Seemingly impenetrable black shades rested calmly across the bridge of his nose as he scanned into the traffic and descending sun. He was thinking about someone.

Slouched in the passenger seat, Freddy squinted from the brilliant shine. He silently recounted to himself the events of the day. Not that anything uncommon had happened. He merely had the occasional bout of short-term memory loss. He glanced at his wrist to see that he had forgotten to accessorize himself with a timepiece.

“What time is it?” Freddy asked.

Max glanced at his watch and said glumly, “7:30.”

Freddy detected his friend’s pathetic tone. “What’s wrong?”

“Aww there’s this girl,” replied Max, as if such a curt explanation were enough. With Max, there was never just one girl. Not that anyone kept a count. Everytime their conversation found itself on the subject, Max would introduce several new names that Freddy had never before heard. There were always new names – Mia, Marcia, Alicia, Felicia, Laetitia.

So Freddy had to ask, “What girl?”

“Siobhan. She’s a model.” The only reason Max qualified her with an occupation – and he always did this – was to give her a personal context. Max only dated models.

“What’s the problem?” asked his friend, anticipating the variation on a theme. Still squinting.

“Well I met her three months ago at some party,” Max began, shifting gears. “I got her number and I put it on my desk with all my other little pieces of paper and I never got around to calling her. You know, it was just one of those slips of paper on my desk. I finally found it again a couple days ago.”

Freddy opened the glovebox and dug through the pink papers, AA batteries, fresh fuses, pens and pennies for a cheap pair of spare sunglasses, to no avail. “So did you call her?” he asked, repeatedly slamming the box closed until the latch caught.

“Of course I called her,” Max retorted quickly. “I called her last night.”

“And?”

“She was pissed off it took me three months to call… So I said, ‘Lemme make it up to you. I’ll take you out for drinks.’ She said, ‘Great, call me tomorrow, late afternoon.’ I said, ‘Great.'”

A smile grew across Freddy’s face – he knew Max had made an error somewhere in the process. It would take some delving. As always, he first assumed the most obvious, “You didn’t call her, did you?”

“Yeah I called her! Of course I called her!” Max deflected the notion that he would be so insensitive as to neglect Siobhan a second time. But he could not leave it at that. His innocence was paramount; he could not be wrong. Someone else had to take the fall. “I called her half-an-hour ago. She wasn’t home!”

What did he say? thought Freddy. Could that be it? “You called her half-an-hour ago?” Freddy asked him.

“Yeah!”

“At 7PM?”

“Yes!”

And there it was, the monkeywrench in the works. Freddy spoke. He spoke with care and hush, barely audible, in a voice that carried with it the knowledge that there are some mistakes that all men make, little faults that crack wide our plans for fulfillment. Freddy spoke these words: “2 hours late.”

Max did not respond immediately. He mulled over the sudden snap in the atmosphere; had the barometric pressure changed inside the car. What was Freddy talking about? he thought. “What are you talking about?” Max asked.

“Late afternoon is 3 to 5,” replied Freddy with certitude.

Max glanced curiously at Freddy before entering a deep curve in the winding road that always made Max feel like Richard Petty or Charlie Sheen. This time, he felt like plain old Max.

Freddy explained, “Late afternoon is 3 to 5. Then you got evening, 5 to 7. Then late evening – 7 to 9. 9 to 12 is night. Then you got late night, 12 to 4. Then early morning – 4 to 6. 6 to 9 is morning. 9 to 12 – late morning. 12 to 1 is noon. 1 to 3 is early afternoon. Then 3 to 5 again – late afternoon. You were two hours late.”

Max was silent for a moment; the only sound was the increasing whir of the engine as the car came out of one curve, into a quick gulley and back up over to the left. Across the recently repaved tar, through a corridor of wealthy taxpayers, their walls of trees and property values, they sped. Past bastards in better cars and suckers in worse.

Max had it. He had the rationalization. It had only taken him 2 seconds but this was it. “It’s alright,” he lied. “I’m just testing her.”

Freddy didn’t get it. “You’re testing her?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you testing?”

Max thought for a moment and had an answer for that too, “The relationship.”

“The relationship?!”

“Yeah.

“What relationship?” demanded Freddy firmly. “You met her once, got her number, finally talked to her three months later and now you have a relationship?!”

“I don’t want any negative emotions going on,” Max ruled. “I want to get rid of that stuff right off the top.”

“What emotions?!” yelled Freddy in utter frustration with Max’s delusion. “You can barely say you know her!”

“No, the way she looked at me at that party. She wants me.” Everybody wanted Max; he was the life of the party.

“Is that why she didn’t call you for three months either?”

“No, see, she was testing me too.”

“What?!”

“But I showed her.”

Freddy could not speak. Even if he could have, he would not have known what to say. The words would not have made sense. All he could do was make a few strange hand movements to express the overloaded circuits in his brain. He shook his hands slowly in front of him, tapped himself on the forehead, slapped his thigh a few times.

Having convinced himself of his own lie, Max shook his head, and scoffed, “Women.”

“No!” screamed Freddy. “You!”

And that’s all he could say. That was the end of that. There would be a new name a few weeks later. She would be a model. And Freddy would live vicariously again. Until then, he squinted in the sunshine.