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The father sat still in his small stall. The building’s lights had been flickering for hours, a flat night club. Each direction seemed to go several directions. The more he worked the more there was.

I AM GOING TO LEAVE THIS ROOM NOW, the father typed into the machine.

THERE ARE OTHER THINGS I HAVE TO DO BESIDES TYPE INTO THE LIGHT.

I DON’T FEEL WELL AND THERE’S TROUBLE AND THESE DAYS AREN’T REALLY DAYS.

PLEASE LET ME BE            MORE OFTEN.

The cursor went on, silent beeping.

The father stood up, turned off the computer screen. He hesitated, glued. The way he was standing, the blank box looked straight on at his belly, an enormous glassy eye. It had such good warmth coming off it. The father rubbed his typing hands. At home, he knew, his wife and son were waiting, stuffed full of days that had just passed—days that as they accrued with those incoming would form wrinkles, pustules, new hair on their skin. These imperfections did not yet appear there in the older image of their faces hung on the wall above the father’s desk—mother and son side by side there, smiling, in a room the father did not recognize. The father had not taken the picture, nor had he hung it there.

Beside the picture, sized just like it, a small square window in the building looked onto the outside. The window looked upon no other shore or building, but more light—the same color, grain, and sound of light as the machine’s. Above the window, a small placard: There is no year.

The father grunted, made his hands fists. He swallowed on his spit, frothing suds between his cheeks in makeshift milkshake. He drank.

The father, feeling fatter, fuller, sat back down on his cube chair.

Into the black machine, with the screen off, the father typed as if he were at an organ, performing some small song.