COLIN

In the grief-wracked days that followed, Colin Tugdale puttered aimlessly around his home in the city. He thought often about his concluded wife. But it seemed to him that he spent almost as much time thinking about the four numbers on the lock; about two, and three, and eight, and one.

The lock was purely tactile and talismanic. He sat at his kitchen table. He drank his coffee. He held the lock in one hand. He put his coffee cup down to open it, to close it, and then to open it again.

When he thought about his wife it was hard to keep away from the end. When he did think about her conclusion, it was to reflect upon the fact that, as always, she had managed to think of everything.

Colin Tugdale had returned to their house in the city three days after her death. In what was once the cozy clutter of the family room, almost all of his late wife’s books were gone, pulled down from the shelves, boxed and abandoned in a series of waterproof containers outside a local resale shop, along with her tiny cache of newer, fancier clothing. Ruby had insisted on doing this task herself.

He found one remaining cardboard box of her newest books. She had used a blue marker to write an address on the top, and Colin had dutifully driven there.

The city boasted numerous little free libraries—pretty wooden cases, brightly painted, for the housing and trading of books. This particular one was clearly brand new. Colin carefully placed the titles inside. He noticed that some of the books were also brand new. They were unread. Some were children’s books. Some were written by authors he knew Ruby had little time for, and he could only surmise that she had chosen the contents of her little library with others in mind.

Now as he glanced at the mostly empty shelves, he saw that there were a few other books that she had left behind, stories he recalled her telling him about over the years, stories she thought he might like. She had carefully arranged the few volumes that remained, cleaning the shelves, artfully spreading out the knickknacks, trying to make the gaps in the collection as inconspicuous as possible. It had been a noble but unsuccessful endeavor.

Colin told himself he would commence his new reading life very soon.

She had left one item in their bedroom closet, a garment he had long assumed to be her old college sweatshirt. Ruby had been a member of the field hockey team.

Colin had asked her to leave it there when she packed up her things.

He recalled that it had languished there forever, before Colin had accidentally knocked it from a hanger one morning. When he had picked it up, he was surprised at how large it was. He tried it on. It fit perfectly. It was much too large for his wife because, as she finally admitted, it had been purchased as a gift for a college boyfriend, or would-be college boyfriend, a bashful young gentleman who had looked panic stricken when she presented him with this token of an affection he was unwilling to reciprocate.

“So, you got me instead.” He was smiling as he spoke.

She smiled back, “It would seem so.”

“Don’t I get the sweatshirt now?” he asked playfully.

She shook her head. “You don’t ever wear sweatshirts.”

“Was he the sweatshirt type?”

“I thought so.”

Ruby let him keep the sweatshirt.

In the years that followed, Colin wore the sweatshirt on occasion. His wife’s name had been Jarvis, which was silk-screened on the back, along with her number, which was 59. Ruby Jarvis had played all four years of college, mostly in the midfield. She had loved field hockey.

Ruby had placed the rest of her regular clothes, the casual things she wore most days, in a box on the garage floor. He moved it up onto a high shelf when she declared the collection much too threadbare for even the bargain racks at the Goodwill. He hadn’t argued with her.

When he returned to the house, after her conclusion, Colin decided that the box would go out on the very next garbage day. He had told himself that. He had been quite firm. That had been yesterday morning. The box was still in the garage. He had now hoisted it high up in the rafters.

Two days before the trip east, they had argued over a framed poster, one she somehow knew he had long disliked. She told him it should go. But Colin had uncharacteristically dug in his heels. It was still on the dining room wall. And it would stay there. He had won that particular battle. Even if he did hate it.

They had sold her car to a local man with a teenage daughter. It was new, with few miles, and it was well maintained. Ruby told him to put the money toward replacing his car. His car was older, she reasoned, and much too fast, and it slurped gasoline hungrily and lacked most of the latest safety features. But he had refused. The car money had been dropped into their bank account, which was already too swollen for him to ever find the time to spend in the year and a half that remained for him.

The Tugdales owed next to nothing to anyone. Their small house in the city was paid for long ago. They had considered buying a cottage up north, on a small lake surrounded by other small lakes. But then Tony had up and done that for them, picking the location well, then handing over the keys unexpectedly one sunny afternoon. It was a six-hour drive, even in Colin’s fast car, crossing three state lines, actually re-crossing one line. It was in a stark and beautiful place, alluringly desolate in the short blink of summer, dauntingly desolate and frozen in the extended haul of the winter. They had made their son promise to share it with them.

Tony Tugdale had dutifully smiled and agreed, but he had seldom made it up there.

Colin and Ruby, especially Ruby, had adored the place, as much for itself as for the fact that their clever son had given it to them.

Just prior to her conclusion, Ruby had made a last solo trip north to the cottage, where she had carefully siphoned her existence out. It would be fair to say that Ruby Tugdale had sponged her life away, as much as she was able, and in the immediate aftermath of her conclusion, the government had seen to the few areas she had been forced to leave unwiped.

“Can you please verify the location of your wife’s conclusion, Mr. Tugdale?” The woman had said her name was Eloise at the beginning of the call.

He spoke slowly. His voice wasn’t steady. “We had gone for a walk along the cliffs. On the edge of town.” Then he added pointlessly, “it was beside the water.”

“I see.” Eloise spoke, and Colin could hear her type simultaneously.

Calling the department was just a courtesy. All welded people were monitored. Colin knew that Ruby’s death had already been recorded, had been recorded seconds after it occurred. He had already used his phone, visited the department website, and confirmed Ruby’s conclusion, all in a matter of minutes after she was gone. But for the sake of form, Colin was calling this in, as the Department of Conclusions required. More importantly, Ruby had told him to make the official call.

There was a lengthy pause before Eloise spoke again. “Your wife has already been located and we can confirm her successful conclusion. You have the department’s sympathies at this time, Mr. Tugdale. All our records have been amended. I can also confirm that our staff are on their way. Will it be a ground burial, a cremation, or a more specialized method of disposition?”

The department already knew this, but Colin told Eloise that it would be a cremation. There was more typing. Eloise told him that the government would be able to arrange this for him, if he still so desired. He told Eloise that he did indeed so desire. Ruby had been very clear about her cremation.

Colin’s thoughts on her chosen method of disposal strayed at that point. But Eloise gently reeled him back in. She still needed to know where to send the ashes. “You have two addresses currently on file.” He confirmed that this was so. Ruby had wanted her ashes to be evenly divided. Some would be spread in the garden of their city house, and the rest would be sprinkled along the edge of the lake up north.

After a moment’s thought, Colin Tugdale asked Eloise to ship his wife’s ashes to the city. He would, he decided, drive up to the cottage in a week or so.

“Are there articles that need to be returned?”

Colin assured Eloise that there were not. This was an unnecessary consideration. Ruby had thought to remove her wedding ring before she jumped. There would be nothing else. Nothing, that is, but her blood-soiled pieces of clothing, covering her broken body, shattered on the salty wet rocks. Colin began to fall apart at that point in the conversation. It was fortunate that Eloise had no more questions to ask, because Colin could no longer have supplied her with a sentient response.

At the termination of the call, Eloise thanked Colin for calling and, on behalf of the department, she once again tendered a generic sorrow for his loss. After Colin had numbly thanked her for her kindness, he had quickly hung up.

Now Colin was back home, in his small house in the city, where the ashes, as promised, had arrived that morning. Colin had opened the box and extracted the small urn. He had walked across the wet grass in the back garden. As near as he could judge he had poured out half the contents. It was hard to tell. He cried when he started, and he was crying much harder when he finished.

As promised, the department had taken care of everything. After a succinct and factually accurate—if somewhat impersonal—obituary was posted on various sites, Ruby’s name, and indeed her very existence, had commenced a gentle rendering. Their joint bank accounts became solely his bank accounts. The few feeble pieces of junk mail and plaintive solicitations they received now came addressed solely to Mr. Colin Tugdale. Colin was never billed for any of the conclusion arrangements. That amount had been factored into the Weld Wad. Ruby was no longer insured to drive his car. Her electronic passwords no longer unlocked anything, her ATM card no longer accessed cash withdrawals. Colin would not have been surprised to find that her front-door key no longer worked. But it did. Between the department and Ruby, her vanishing had been both swift and relentless.

Colin sat at his kitchen table in the reformative light of the early morning.

He had slept badly again. For most of the last decade Colin Tugdale woke up every morning of every day at the exact time he had woken every morning of every workday for the previous three decades, several hours before he had to get to work to troubleshoot the school district’s network of computers. On most workdays when the weather was accommodating, he had walked to the administration building from home. Once he was there, he checked the firewalls and filters. He dutifully answered the half-dozen emails he received each morning. One of the teachers would usually wonder why the research sites he or she tried to access for his or her master’s thesis were always blocked. He told him or her that IT policy was handled by the superintendent, Dr. Matt Currie, who Colin disliked, if only because Dr. Matt Currie had seen fit to dislike Colin first. He would usually have to advise at least two teachers who couldn’t access the district website to turn off and reboot their computers before they filled out the requisite technology work order form.

When he had finished with his routine morning e-correspondence, Colin usually had time on his hands. Often, he emailed his son, who would not answer until later in the day. Sometimes he pulled up maps of potential walking trips for his two summer months. These he would stare at longingly.

Now Colin Tugdale sat in his kitchen with half his dead wife’s ashes in a container, an open padlock in his hand, and an empty coffee cup on the table.

After he returned home from his final trip with Ruby, Colin was unable to resist. He played the numbers.

His initial strategy had been to buy several lottery tickets incorporating all four numbers. Which he did. He never once won big. He never once even came close to winning big. One time his ticket yielded a thirty-dollar payout. He was slightly amused when this happened. He wasn’t especially looking to make money.

Next, Colin took to walking the streets of the city alone. If he thought no one was watching, he compulsively twisted bicycle locks as he walked past. There were always commuter bikes chained up beside the nearest transit station, the brickwalled ambiance of the coffee shop, the two competing corner bars offering a strict diet of artisan beverages, and the LGBTQ-friendly church with a grim Gothic exterior and a young congregation. Outside each establishment, he hurriedly turned the assembled locks to the same four numbers. But they never once opened for him.

Inside the vestibule of the train station stood one wall of rental storage lockers. They were all accessed by four-digit combination padlocks. The temptation was almost more than he could endure, but every time Colin entered the station there was a security guard standing close by, and he couldn’t try his magical combination.

Finally, on a rainy morning, Colin asked the attendant if he could rent a locker for the day. He paid the nominal charge and feebly waved his empty backpack convincingly in the man’s face. He was asked which locker he wanted. Colin wasn’t ready for the question. There were four rows of lockers. There were ten lockers in each row. The lockers were numbered one through forty.

Colin stared at the lockers and waited for inspiration. With a shrug, he told the gentleman to give him any locker. He was promptly assigned locker number thirty-one. Two of his four numbers, he silently noted.

Colin was handed a gold lock and a folded piece of paper with a four-digit combination: six-nine-one-one. He silently sifted the numbers around in his head for a moment, but he couldn’t make them mean anything.

He dialed the numbers, pulled the lock free, opened the empty locker, and shamefacedly placed his empty backpack inside. He noted that the attendant and the security guard could barely be bothered to observe him. The whole process left him feeling foolish.

When he returned later that day to retrieve his backpack, the security guard was miraculously gone. The attendant had deserted his tiny cubicle and was outside the station, talking on his phone, his back to Colin.

Here was his chance. Colin had time to try his numbers on four of the padlocks. He randomly picked one on each row. None opened. The ticket collector quickly finished his call and returned to his post as grieving weld widower and crack amateur numerologist Colin Tugdale made himself scarce.

One evening he wrote and ran a rudimentary computer program that scrambled and rearranged the numbers into parts of phone numbers and street addresses, into old-fashioned radio station call numbers, into map coordinates, into pretty much anything. Nothing he found had any particular significance. An occult website promised to study the numbers and unearth their hidden spiritual importance. But his four numbers, despite the site’s insistence on draping the digits in tones of portentous inference, were quickly revealed to be pedestrian.

Once, to assure himself that madness was not rapidly encroaching, Colin calculated the odds of his having rightly surmised the lock combination in the first place. He was reassured by the sizable number of digits his answer contained.

Because of his job, Colin was more than proficient with computers. Because he was skilled at preventing students from visiting inappropriate websites, he was himself particularly adept at finding appropriate websites. He studied birth dates, death notices, even celestial charts. He placed the four digits in deliberately wide searches and came up with an immense collection of nothing.

Two-three-eight-one. Two-three-eight-one. Two-three-eight-one.

As Colin continued his search, he had a thought. What, he wondered, had occurred on the date two-three-eight-one—as in February third? In 1981? In 1881? In 1781? In 1681?

In no particular order, he received his answers. A fistfight in a rugby stadium becomes the origin of a popular drinking song. A movie actress dies in a car crash minutes after giving birth in the backseat. The baby lives. An obscure act of Parliament all but sanctions child labor. An oil painting signed and dated that very day, month, and year is discovered in a hut halfway across the world and is sold at auction to provide an impoverished village with drinking water. A man born that day out of wedlock in a cave in a cold northern country grows up to become a martyr and a canonized saint, in that order. All prove to be events of interest to someone. But not Colin Tugdale.

After his wife’s pre-conclusion, Colin had sat in the crowded terminal and tried to read the first line of the newspaper article for the third time. The flight west was solidly overbooked. Colin already possessed his ticket. Three young children howled at each other in the row behind him.

He was listening with mounting interest to a series of announcements. There were several seats available in first class. The cost to upgrade was in freefall, currently standing at half the usual cost of an upgrade; a conventionally expensive seat, as opposed to a bracingly exorbitant one.

He hesitated. He considered. He eyed the three urchins reproachfully. Still, he was reluctant.

This expenditure seemed out of character. So, was it plausible that this anomaly could be attributed to his very recent loss?

Colin was perplexed. But then, as he thought his way back through the years, to arrive at the very beginning of his fifty-year marriage, it was clear. He hadn’t always been thrifty. Ruby was the penny pincher.

Oh, for God’s sake, Tugdale, he silently implored. Be honest with yourself. Ruby wasn’t frugal. Ruby was downright cheap. And he had loved her in all her parsimony.

The airline employee at the gate made one more frantic plea. The price of an upgrade to first class now stood at one third of the usual price.

So, well aware of the tidy sum to his name in the bank and the short time left to spend it, Colin Tugdale strode purposefully forward. He asked if the noisy trio of youngsters was traveling economy today, and, with that confirmed, he was more than ready to subject himself to some long-overdue pampering.

Affecting the air of a man accustomed to parting with considerable resources in substantial torrents, the freshly weld widowed Colin Tugdale snapped his credit card onto the counter. A crisp shirt sleeve gestured toward the spongy red carpet.

But as he turned in the designated direction, Colin was discreetly summoned back to the counter. The clerk entered his details into the computer for a second time. And in a moment, she had good news. His very recent bereavement had shown up in the airline records, and he was thus declared eligible for an additional funeral discount. Colin explained that there was not going to be a funeral, but was quickly assured that flights undertaken within an allotted time after the death of a concluding spouse were automatically subject to the discounted rate.

So, not only was Colin Tugdale flying high; he was flying high and saving big.

The flight west was three hours long, and the complimentary red wine was better than the respectable vintage with which he had toasted his wife’s last living moments. His guilt lessened as he accepted each near-overflowing glassful.

As the plane prepared to land, Colin was handed a thin plastic card and a small piece of paper. The card bore the logo of the airline and the words rewards suite embossed on the front. The paper had four numbers written by hand in dark blue ink. Colin glanced down. To his surprise the first two numbers were a two and a three. He held his breath just long enough to register that the third number was another three, while the fourth, as if it even mattered by that point, was a seven.

In his semi-inebriated condition, he almost missed the doorway. There was a slot in the wall beside a keypad. Colin inserted the plastic card into the slot and stubbornly pressed two-three-eight-one. He wasn’t too surprised when the red light stayed red and his card slid back out. He pushed the card back in and entered the assigned numbers. Two-three-three-seven. The light turned green and the door opened.

The room was dimly lit and, as far as he could tell, mostly empty. He sat down in the nearest comfortable chair, and he waited. There was the suggestion of acoustic jazz music under a wisp of muted conversation. A waitress wearing a small Celtic cross necklace slid into position, and Colin ordered coffee, which arrived immediately and was truly excellent.

On the plane, he had been told that his rewards benefits, including access to the rewards suite and shuttle service to anywhere in the city, would expire at midnight. There were a great many other services, the steward insinuated. But Colin could sense that the man was reluctant to impart everything. Perhaps he was saving Colin from an overload of intoxicating privilege. He was, after all, only going to be a king for a few hours.

He sat back and sipped his coffee. It came with a thin slice of shortbread that melted on his tongue. The leather seat beneath his rear was rich and soft. In a few minutes, his luggage appeared at his feet, the deliverer retreating too rapidly for Colin to pretend to wrestle with the dilemma of whether or not to tip.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Colin saw a man sitting at a nearby table. He wore a dark blue business suit and a white dress shirt with too many buttons undone. Colin observed a large cigar placed between his fingers, an almost-empty cut glass tumbler on the table, then the flash of a lighter, which lingered for a moment, as the cigar was carefully primed, before the first enveloping mushroom of smoke. Perhaps the smoker prolonged the beloved ritual a shade too long. But just before the smoke cloud arrived, his features were illuminated in profile. The contours of the face were shrouded in more beard and stubble than Colin remembered. And while the remnants of hair on the top of the head were presumably freshly shaved close up against the scalp, Colin was certain that he was getting a glimpse of Mr. Elliot Devine, a prolific acquirer of tech companies who had ventured high and lost gracelessly in a buyout attempt for ownership of Trench Warfare.

Colin remembered the bitterly fought campaign that pitted Mr. Devine against maverick gaming maven Anthony Tugdale, only son of Colin Tugdale, recently weld widowed, and more recently the temporary recipient of international jet-set status.

Seeing Devine was a surprise for Colin. He kept staring into the reconfiguring darkness. Although Colin was usually very good with names and faces, in this instance, there was good reason to be uncertain: Elliot Devine had recently concluded, at the unsurprising age of seventy-five.

Just to be sure, Colin pulled out his phone and searched for his obituary. It didn’t take long. Devine was indeed just as dead as Colin had remembered. Colin remembered having read the obituary, which didn’t directly mention that Devine had concluded, but had lived to be the exact age of conclusion, and the accompanying photograph, dated close to the time of his death, showed a gentleman in love with the great outdoors and looking to be at most in his mid fifties.

Colin put his phone away and sipped his still-warm drink. He felt it safe to assume that Devine was indeed dead, that he had concluded.

So why then was he firing up a stogie in a chair less than twenty feet from Colin?

The attempted buyout had been a secret deal, involving camouflaged leverage, an enticing promise/mirage of copious stock options, and cursory amounts of cash. Mr. Devine had been haughty in the beginning negotiations, growing increasingly astounded, and then angry, as his offers came up short, and young Mr. Tugdale, heeding the advice of his father and a great many others, opted to keep control of his prize asset.

Tony had met with Devine several times in person. Colin hadn’t had the privilege, but he was well aware of what he looked like.

When Colin next looked up, the deceased dealmaker and his cigar were both gone, and his empty glass was no longer sitting on the table.

The rebirth of Elliot Devine was another mystery for Colin Tugdale to consider, as he sat in his kitchen, his morning coffee now mostly cold, and the better part of the day in danger of sneaking away from him.

His day was destined to get stranger.

His phone rang. He glanced at the number on the screen. It was an unfamiliar number; private and local. He answered on the fourth ring.

“Is your wife dead?” It was a woman’s voice.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Is she dead?”

“Who is this?”

“Just tell me if she’s dead or not.”

“Yes. She’s dead. Who the hell is this?”

“You have my condolences.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry she’s dead.”

“Who are you?”

“You’ll soon find out. I’ll be right over.”

The call ended.