Harry presses his back to the post of the swing set and watches a light plane pass overhead. The plane trails a banner ad for something. Harry can’t say what. A chill wind makes his eyes tear and that blurs his vision. Maybe it’s an ad for cough syrup, or condoms. Most likely an ad for a wireless service provider.
Harry wouldn’t be in such a bind now if he hadn’t lost his smart phone this morning. It dropped from his hand as he stepped onto the bus. He stood on the top step and watched the smart phone clatter onto the pavement and slip through the grate that covers the catch basin. The bus driver gave a sadistic chortle until Harry glared at him. A plopping sound rose from the catch basin signaling that the smart phone was lost forever.
Helen’s words return to him now: “These evils set upon us in threes.” It calls to mind the image of wild dogs tearing apart a lost child. The first evil—the lost smart phone—would not have happened if Harry had not taken the bus, and he would not have taken the bus but for the second evil—a dead car battery. And the third evil? Harry traces a fingertip through the compact sand beside the swing set post. That came long after Harry got off the bus. He took a tumble down an embankment and into a thicket of barberry shrubs. At first, he thought nothing of it; he stood and brushed himself off and continued to his appointment. But as he walked first down one residential street, then down another, a throb took hold in his right thigh where a thorn had pierced the flesh. Now a pain has seized the whole leg and Harry can barely stand.
Harry came here on a lead from head office. In his mounting delirium, he gazes out from the playground to the rows of houses which front it. What a godforsaken place. And underinsured. Harry had ventured into this suburban desolation to deliver at least one ignorant family into the light of a total insurance package—home, life, auto. But after he turned the first corner, when the main arterial road disappeared from view, the houses began to blur one into another and all the streets appeared the same. Harry wished he had been more careful with his smart phone; it was GPS-equipped and he could have used it to get to his appointment. Without his smart phone, he was lost in a maze of pro-forma, slap-dash, two-story fully-detached brick dwellings.
Harry thought it would be easy to stop a local resident and ask for directions, but he saw no one. He walked for blocks without encountering a single person. Twice, a garage door rose and a car zoomed onto the street, but it wasn’t until the car had passed that Harry thought to wave down the driver. It wouldn’t have made a difference. The drivers stared straight ahead, stony-faced and wearing sunglasses, which made eye contact impossible. On one occasion, Harry thought he saw an elderly woman staring down upon him from a bedroom window, but when he blinked and looked again, the woman was gone. He took the walkway to the front door and clacked on the brass knocker, but no one answered. He pounded his fist on the door, but again no one answered.
Along another road, Harry saw a garden hose between two houses. As he drank, a black dog barked and lunged at the gate. Maybe this was one of the three evils that had set upon him. Further along the same road, Harry felt a need to relieve himself. This is when he fell down the embankment and punctured the flesh of his thigh with a barberry thorn.
The light is low and soon it will be night. A chill has taken hold of Harry and has set his bones to clattering. The swing set is hardly adequate shelter, but there is nothing better. Sodium lights flicker on and cast the whole landscape in an eerie orange, even Harry’s hands, which look other-worldly. All the house lights are on automatic timers and come on at roughly the same instant. In his fever, Harry sees the houses springing to life, windows as eye sockets, glaring at him, judging him, finding him wanting. Harry wishes he could be home with Helen. There are so many things he wishes he could tell her. If he had the chance, now, he would share his dreams with her; he would tell her how he had hoped one day to underwrite whole neighbourhoods just like this, to throw big company barbeques in parks just like this, to light fireworks on holidays and with sparklers in the shape of the company logo. But now Harry worries that he will never have the chance to do these things. He wishes he could have spent more quality time with Helen, maybe chat on Facebook with her or play games on the Xbox. Life could have been so much more.
There is a whirr in the distance, the chop of rotors hashing the air. Maybe they will come and rescue him. Maybe they’ll amputate his infected leg. Maybe they’ll attach a robotic leg to the stump, a limb he can control with Bluetooth technology or Xbox Kinect. The whir fades and in its place there echoes across the land the plaintiff howl of a backyard dog.
They find Harry’s body the next morning. The first to discover him is a seasonal worker for the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. He operates a riding mower and is cutting the lawn when he spots the body propped against the swing set post. It is the body of a man, well-dressed except for a slit in the trousers, arm resting on a leather brief case. A dog has torn away a chunk of the left cheek and is chewing it by the foot of the slide.
When the police arrive, they say it’s a shame the man didn’t have a proper smart phone. How the hell can you expect to get anywhere these days without a GPS-enabled device?
