Fragile Read Online Free PDF Page A

emptiness the television has forged within his skull:
You will never make a difference.
    He will never fulfill his childhood ambitions. All those things he dreamed he would do are gone; they have been worn away by years of doing what he was told he should do, by listening to the voices that told him, one by one, over and over, to do the right thing, to tow the line and do what’s expected of him.
    He takes a deep breath of the chilled air and leans his head back, staring at the ceiling. His life floats there above him like a sinuous, gently twisting tape measure, the years ticked off from one to sixty-five across the tapered, faintly glowing surface of this object he has unwittingly fashioned. It seems to have anebb and flow to it, as if it’s being nudged along by a current in a stream, and he realizes that the rightmost end of the tape is narrowing to a blurred tip that must be the future: wavering, dim and indistinct, as opposed to the bright shining surface on the other end of the spectrum, where his hopes and dreams shone like the sun.
    Then, from this image of despair, a vision of an expense account dinner appears, enticing him with the prospect of a beer and a steak at the hotel restaurant. This is what his life has been reduced to now: the momentary pleasures of eating, sleeping, and ingesting pre-packaged mass entertainment. Go ahead, a voice inside him says, you deserve it. You worked hard today, traveled all the way from Spokane to wherever it is you are now. The line at the airport check-in counter was long, the line at the security checkpoint even longer. They made him take out his laptop and take off his shoes. Even subjected him to the indignities of the probing metal wand and the pat-down search after his loose change triggered the x-ray alarm. The customer he met with this morning was unconvinced—no, the model 2006ZX server doesn’t have the capacity we need to manage the entire food processing plant we’re bringing on line in six months, and the new model 2007YZ is at least fifty thousand over the competitor’s comparable. They wouldn’t listen to reason, didn’t try to work with him as he showed them how they could make it work with a simple upgrade to the 2006ZX. He left them the specs, promised a call back tomorrow, checked the box off his to-do list, and dropped the rental car at the airport.
    But some yearning remnant of that glowing bright end of the tape measure, some indistinct notion of his own immortality hidden away in a compartment deep within him makes him open his briefcase and pull out the pad of drawing paper and a mechanical pencil he bought last week at the art supply house near the university campus in the city where he lives. The blank sheet of paper feels rough in his hands as he slowly, carefully tears it from the pad. He places it on the desk and sets the pad aside, the empty white sheet staring up at him, challenging him to make the first move.
    It has been at least ten years since he last attempted to draw. He reads blueprints for his job on occasion, when he’s looking at plans for a plant or office park where a server he has sold is going to be installed, but they are highly technical schematics that show the details of the network cabling for large industrial factories, huge boxes of steel and pre-fab concrete slabs where grape jelly or precision electronic circuit boards or jet aircraft engines will be manufactured. He knows how to read these schematics, but the pinpoint of light that shines within him, a remnant of his earliest ideas about himself, still seeks something beyond this transactional application of his talent. The first mark on the page is the most difficult, the act of prime commitment that will introduce a definite direction to the work. Yet the bulk of the form he imagines has set itself before him, hovers in the near foreground, somewhere between his brow and the lamp on the desk, and takes him, by the pure act of willful