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his work: the kitchen tightly sealed and taped with care and attention. It was nightnow and despite his fatigue he spent a few moments tidying up the work area and organizing the stack of painting supplies for the next day. It was not until he had completed this task that he realized he had neglected to eat both breakfast and lunch, a situation that had been, at one time, an occurrence so regular that it had become a kind of running joke between him and his wife and which now bit into him with a cruel irony. There had been periods when he would work through meals two or three times per week, his workday eight or ten or twelve hours without stop or rest or break, until he was the last engineer remaining in the office, until only he and the cleaning staff remained and still he would continue to tabulate out his calculations and angles and data. He had never asked Barb to understand because he thought she already did, or rather that if she lacked the understanding it was not something he could justify or explain. He told himself that it was simply who he was and any other choice would have been to deny the very force of his being, each goal clear and achievable because he had worked so hard to achieve those goals and because he had developed the discipline necessary to do so.
    He had learned—even as a child—that there was a difference between assumptions and expectations. He had never assumed anything about his success but indeed he had come to expect it. He would make the best grades in his classes because he put in the most time studying. He would be quickly promoted at his first real job because he worked harder than any of the other new hires and later, when he accepted a commission in the Air Force, his OPRs would show his superiority because he performed his tasks with correctness and exactitude. His teachers and peers had called him a genius and he knew he had a gift but that was not why he succeeded, or rather that was not the only reason. He succeeded because he had learned how to work with that gift as a kind of discipline, putting in the time and effort to see his projects or problems or challenges through from beginning to end. This had been his force and his credo. This had been the engine of his forward motion: not only his ability to see the numbers and to feel, asif intuitively, their relationships, but also the indomitable and inextinguishable power of attention and focus. There had been a time when his wife had been at his side, helping push that engine forward, but it was not so long ago—a year, maybe two—that she had called him “obsessive,” as if the time he was putting in to his own destiny was somehow optional or as if he had changed. But he had not changed over the course of their marriage. At least not in any way he could recognize.
    Even now he remained the same, if all he could think to do was paint this empty house. It was an absurd way to pass the time and he knew that. Of course he did. It was pathetic and it was not even serving its true purpose. Had he been working on a project—a real project—the numbers might have been complex enough to consume him. But there were no such numbers here. And yet there was nothing else to do, so tomorrow he would spread the dropcloth along the base of one wall and would pry open the bucket and pour the paint into a tray. If he worked with the same steady determination he could complete the first coat in the kitchen in just a few hours, a process he reviewed as he carefully unpeeled the tape and pushed back the clear plastic to access the microwave and slid his frozen dinner tray inside, realizing as he did so that he had also sealed off the new coffeepot he had purchased the day before and the cabinets that held the chipped mugs, the two or three bowls he had been using for his breakfast cereal, and the drawer in the island that held the silverware.
    That night he stood and looked out the upstairs window at the bight of dark concrete that was the