Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

by Paul Hawkins

  Chapter 4 - The Breakdown, Part 2

  From Rosalind’s Journal

  “Maria might come back.”

  “No Blaise,” Janet had told him. “She won’t come back.”

  But he hadn’t believed her and so he hung around the sub-suburbs while his friends left and the money disappeared and the once-dynamic community shrank to nothing and his own life with it.

  There are adventures to tell of the interim. I may tell them, but not now. Things stopped slowly - should I describe the skid marks or the skid? In the end the thing to know is that his life eventually stopped, like a car in a ditch.

  Maria left. Blaise quit Tippins. Janet left. His father killed himself and then Blaise quit - period.

  For a period of years or months (none of us can quite agree) he was alone alone. He almost literally did not move. What things he did (wake, watch, eat, shave, feed Bess), he did almost mechanically.

  But then something remarkable occurred. A book fell open and taught him its secrets.