Published in American Writers Review, 2025.
It was July in the Finger Lakes and an hour drive to Syracuse, which normally wasn’t a problem, but Greg’s ‘94 van had no AC, and the driver’s window refused to open. He arrived in Syracuse, exhausted from the heat, and texted Lorraine, his partner, asking her to look for the white sheet of paper with his computer pin number which he needed to open his computer. He remembered his antibiotics – he was infected with Babesia from a tick bite – but not his computer pin. On his desktop were the vital conversations with the City of Syracuse’s Tax Department, the entity that threatened to seize his student rental.
Call me, Lorraine texted back. White sheet of paper? I have no idea where to start. You are not the most organized person in the world. The judgement in her response suggested that if he did call, he could be on the phone for an hour, and because parasites were eating his red blood cells, he lacked the capacity to tackle any issues outside of saving his rental.
Greg was on a schedule – this was new, and good – but he still did not have that four-digit number. There were other things that he, unlike Clarence T, did not have: a luxury motor home, a net worth of twenty-four million, friends that counted, and a seat on the Supreme Court.
What had he been doing all his life?
Yet to move forward, he needed those four numbers. How many combinations could there be? He couldn’t look it up (no computer without a pin), but he imagined the number of combinations was more than he could do.
(It was. Ten thousand.)
He had created the pin on August 1, 2019. It had been a cool morning in Syracuse – 56 degrees – and although global warming had been a concern, the magnitude of concern hadn’t exploded until 2023 when temperatures in Phoenix reached 110 degrees for thirty-one consecutive days. Concrete sidewalks burnt the paws of pets. Air conditioners couldn’t keep up with the heat and over 500 people died. That year was something out of a sci-fi novel. Although Greg read sci-fi, and he had never been to Phoenix, he was a person who cared. If he found a litter of abandoned kittens, he fed and housed the kittens until he established permanent housing, even if that meant delaying changing the oil in Lorraine’s Honda until the very last moment. (Disclosure: Greg and Lorraine were parents to three cats.)
When he created the pin he was ordered to store it in a safe place, as if this would be his last chance, like boating on the Niagara River: here come the Falls, head for the shore. Now! People have survived plummets over the Falls. In 1901, on her 63rd birthday, Annie Edison Taylor curled up in a barrel outfitted with a mattress and a plug. It was twenty minutes of pure hell, she reported. (Greg read this in the Guinness Book of World Records). Annie expected to become rich and famous, but instead she went blind from twenty minutes of being mercilessly knocked about in a barrel. She was not an astute money manager, just like Greg was not an astute time manager.
Closing his eyes, Greg brought himself back to August 1, 2019. The pin managers ordered him not to use a significant date, like his birthdate, or the year he graduated from a community college with a degree in electronic engineering. Or the day in 1988 that he sauntered into GE Microwave to announce his retirement. (Management refused to advance him because he had only an associate’s degree.) He wore a white tux and top hat and walked with a cane and a swagger. Greg told the company president – who took him out to lunch at Dinosaur Barbecue (so he did have one friend in high places) – that he quit, because as the hands-on engineer, he did the work of two or three engineers with Master’s degrees. Not one of them could successfully troubleshoot a failed electronic board.
So Greg bought a decrepit house near Syracuse University, rented the two upper floors to students, and started his own electronic fixit business on the bottom floor. That floor quickly filled with faulty electronic and sound equipment, and anything else Greg thought was cool. Greg was so focused on his fixing things and remodeling projects (two upper floors) that he neglected to carefully read the missives from the city’s tax department, but if he could recreate the computer pin, he could find those conversations and prove to the City of Syracuse that he had not been given the notices they claimed to have sent him.
Too bad he wasn’t a famous supreme court justice.
Greg closed his eyes and visualized his handwriting. The first number was an eight. August phone bill for 2019? No. Favorite band rendered into numbers? The number of microorganisms in a bucket of compost divided by 267,000? If he could only clear the chatter in his mind. Using his flip cell phone, Greg texted his good friend, Frank, a yoga instructor who had just published, Yoga for Distractable and Disorganized People. Frank had no useful advice other than to try yoga.
Despite his photographic memory, Greg could not bring up those last three numbers. He did remember all his grade school classmates and teachers, and where he sat in each classroom. But those three numbers? This was the first time he sensed that his mind wasn’t as sharp as it used to be.
This humbled Greg.
He decided to call Lorraine.
“Oh that stupid pin!” she said, and she laughed and laughed and laughed, and just kept laughing. Greg imagined the tears of relief rolling down her face, and her hands, a little rough from washing pots at Loaves and Fishes where she volunteered, and he felt good, damn good because he had not made her this happy in a long time. Greg laughed along with her.
Then he went outside to his van. He gazed back longingly at his century-old, decrepit house that he was sure to lose, because he lacked an evasive and deceitful character. He did not have the right kind of friends, but he had brains and brawn, so he grabbed the driver’s window and physically pushed the window down so he would not be asphyxiated while driving home.
On route 81, the van drove as smoothly as any 267,000-dollar luxury vehicle. Greg did not need a luxury vehicle – like a Prevost Marathon – because he had his own personal vehicle, paid for by his own personal money. And as he passed countless groves of sumac, and farmland bursting with sweetcorn-on-the-cob, he imagined how much fun he would have tonight dancing with Lorraine, a plebian activity, and certainly not something a supreme court justice would ever be caught doing.
Patricia Dutt 