Epilogue

When his probation officer heard that he had found employment in the big city to the south, she was skeptical at first and was on the verge of confining him to the town, especially since his catastrophe at the college. But after discovering that he did indeed find gainful employment, she wrote up the paperwork that would transfer his probation to the city. The probation people would rather have Charlie gainfully employed and out-of-trouble than have him pose as a steady crime risk through his great talent for remaining idle. It took several days for these transfer papers to work their way through the maze of signatures and clearances of the county’s bureaucracy until he was finally free to leave the town and all who inhabited it about a week after seeing Renee for the last time.

He decided to abandon all of his furniture and all of his old belongings too. He fit everything that was necessary into one suitcase that was light enough to haul around. He explained to his new employer that he would need to find a place to live once he got to the city, and this was no problem, as the employer was more than willing to pay for his relocation expenses. He would be working in a corporate office from now on—a high rise of glass and steel. They offered him a salary generous enough to one day raise a family on if he stuck with the company and moved up the ladder like everyone else did. It’s funny, because with all of the countless job applications that he had filled out and all of the resumes that he must have sent out, the only real job ever worth having was the one he landed through knowing another person who recommended him. If a man doesn’t know anyone in this world and thinks himself too special and distant an island, then he is never going to get a job like the one Charlie now had. He learned that it is never wise to do anything alone, no matter how alluring its temptation. It’s better to make contacts instead, lest the temptation of blissful solitude and staunch individualism get in the way of his own progress. He learned this the hard way, and it was all because of his association with Artie and Renee, however painful this association was.

He stood in the light of his living room with his single suitcase packed and waiting. He judged whether or not it would rain that afternoon. The apartment seemed somewhat dusty to him, as though the place was now an old and tired relic ready to be partitioned from his present and parceled off to the junk heap of the past. The fingerprint of all of his struggles would most likely haunt the next unlucky soul who had the misfortune of moving in.

Abandoning the place came with a bit of awkwardness as well, because normally he would have liked to have tied up loose ends before moving on. And yet realizing that the world was an ever- growing ecosystem of loose ends, plans that didn’t work, and mistakes that moved from generation to generation—all of which required the attention, love, and labors of people other than himself—quelled such an awkwardness, but only momentarily. Someone would always be moving into misfortune as the person before him moves out of it.

He could no longer lay claim to any irrational sense of responsibility that had kept him chained to these misfortunes either. There were indeed higher forces at work that worked through other people to see that the many loose ends were tied and that the conflicts he faced came to a peaceful and just resolution, until, of course, there are new conflicts that completely replace the old ones. A constant movement it was—whether up or down, in or out, around and around, he wasn’t sure, but it was constant enough to keep life progressing through time as though nothing would ever stop it. The last thing he needed to do was worry about the processes behind this movement. He no longer wanted to worry about the processes and the methodologies at work behind the swings, the cycles, and the continuous fluxing of time. He got the sense that he should no longer be so concerned with the wizard behind the curtain, so to speak. He should move on as everyone else moved on.