Cheered by the quality of beer at the party, Paul took a sip of a nice IPA and decided to take his chances mingling.

A pod of people had gathered around a clean-cut, Rob Lowe-looking guy, standing in front of an empty fireplace, telling a story through copious references to technology.

“I didn’t have my BlackBerry, so I had to login to my mail using my iPhone. Have you ever tried that? Not using the mail app, but actually logging into a client you haven’t actually set up? It’s so slow if you don’t have the 3G enabled! I have to upgrade this summer when they release the iPhone OS4, because it’s just hellish using my first generation iPhone these days. It’s like I’m living in the Stone Age, although I did just finally order an iPad. I can’t wait to get it. I got a Kindle for Christmas, but I never use it. Our IT girl has an iPad, and she swears by it. I really think it’s the future.”

Wow, Paul thought. They’ve replaced that guy’s brain with advertisements.

He found an attractive girl who looked about twenty-five, laughing at something an old gentleman beside her had said while the two of them perused the table of expensive snacks. There were slices of peppercorn-encrusted salami, a wheel of brie, assorted crackers, a fruit plate, and an assortment of dips. Paul thought the salami looked good and took a few slices.

“I love this stuff,” he said.

The young brunette’s eyes immediately went to his gut. “And what do you do?”

He loved getting asked that before being asked his name. It was how he knew he was in New York City. “I’m a lumberjack,” he said. “What about you?”

“I work for a hedge fund.”

“Oh,” he said, and he smiled and walked off, realizing that he was judging everyone there even more harshly than they were judging him.

He took another long pull from the IPA. It really tasted delicious on top of all that peppercorn salami.

It wasn’t so bad, being in a cage with a monkey. The monkey was curious, but as far as roommates went he was very considerate. There was very little feces-flinging, and he was as decent a listener as Meredith had found.

Outside, it was raining, and their only visitor was a lone, ugly child with blond hair and a sour face, who wore a blue raincoat and sucked a red lollipop, sucking it right at them, staring, waiting, and yet unimpressed.

Eventually, the little girl’s mother called out her name, and the girl vanished, running to join the rest of the crowd eating sausages beneath the protective shield of a nearby bridge.

“I certainly never thought this would happen,” Meredith said. The monkey was picking at his fur in the corner away from where he’d shat a moment ago. “I don’t suppose you did, either,” she said.

The monkey looked up.

“No, I thought not,” she said. “No one expects this. Not in a million years, but life is strange.”

The monkey bared his teeth at her. She took this as him trying to smile, trying to cheer her up.

“I know, but you never expect this when you’re just going along, doing what the boss tells you to do, you know? They definitely don’t prepare you for this in college.”

The money laughed.

“Right?” she said. “I mean … I thought this was going to be a good job. Now look at me: in a cage, smelling monkey shit all day.”

He turned away, and she thought perhaps she’d gone too far. She didn’t want to insult him. He really wasn’t all that bad.

So she added: “Well, I suppose it could always be worse, right? I could’ve been a corporate lawyer.”

Faht came in, and everyone was laughing.

Ok, so maybe the purple pimp hat was a bad idea, he thought. The trouble with John Faht was that not only was he intensely serious about silly things, but he had the ability to see himself behaving this way and know just how much he looked like an ass. One might wonder: If he could see all this, couldn’t he change? But no. No matter how much time went by, Faht stayed the same.

Oh, poor Faht. He was a truly miserable and lost soul.

But he walked into that conference room bravely, and took off the purple pimp hat and set it on the table with a smile for everyone who was there making fun of him. Yes, this was the life of John Faht. This was how it went, day in, day out.

Sometimes it seemed that everything was just one big Faht.

The storm came across the water, a wall of rain pushing toward shore and obscuring everything beyond it. Soon, it swept across the yard and hammered the large, glass windows.

Will took another sip of his tonic water and orange juice cocktail and welcomed the sound of the precipitation. Yesterday had been sunny, and that hadn’t seemed right. Not for a day when so much had gone wrong. This was better. At least now, the weather was matching his mood.

He sat down in his green armchair and looked at the stuff of his life: the handmade Turkish rug, the coffee table they’d made together out of an old door and a pane of glass, the series of monoliths comprising the home entertainment center, all of them quiet now, powered off.

Why wasn’t he drinking yet? He’d always imagined that if Mary died, he’d start drinking again, yet here he was, sitting alone with a non-alcoholic drink in his hand. Was it hope–some idiotic idea that she might come walking back in the door?

She’s gone, pal, he thought to himself. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.

But he’d done nothing. He’d prepared food, he’d eaten, he’d slept. But he hadn’t turned on the television, opened a book, or played any music since yesterday morning. He sat and stared. A day had passed. He continued to sit and stare, numb and frozen as the storm intensified, shaking his house, and his house withstood it,

staying right where it was.