Free A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman Page B

go to the nearest war. But the rest: They had an eccentric personage, he had an eccentric personage (the baker). They had a stunt action, he had a stunt action (the evangelicals). And while the Jewish evacuation of Rhode Island was perhaps not as pressing an issue as the epidemic of underage mothers, it was along the same spectrum, that could not be denied. Was Slava required to produce a memoir of Little League times or learning to bake with his mother? Slava cursed his mother for never teaching him how to bake, and the full Gelman clan for keeping him busy translating credit-card offers until it was too late to join Little League.
    No, it couldn’t be the subjects. It had to be the style. Slava returned to the issue and reread every article. Then he went to a bin where he kept old issues and reread the last six issues, this time latitudinally: the opening story across all six; the next story across all six; the closing story. He experienced the Egyptologist’s tremor upon stumbling on Nefertiti’s lunch bowl: He had decoded the pattern. The wipe board full, Slava started taping note cards on the refrigerator, the fridge burping in acknowledgment of this first garlanding since its purchase.
    Article A. Opening part: The Scene. Sentence One: Specific Date. “On January 27, 2005, Avery Coulter went outside to clear his driveway of the heavy snowfall that had blanketed Rochester, New York, the previous night.”
    The prose made the obvious elegant—you could not very well shovel snow anywhere but outside, could you, but one didn’t mind with such a sinuous sentence—and though it stayed well shy of the fences, the tempered, diffident tone was like a mother’s hand on the cheek. Absent a mother, a Beau Reasons.
    Onward. We watch Avery start to shovel the driveway; his neighbor owns a Range Rover; the township recently cleared a nearby creek’s overflow tubes of debris (the randomness of the details only adds to their aristocratic, mysterious elegance); booltykh —Avery feels a strain in his lower back. He knows something’s wrong. Section break.
    Section Two: The Issue. “Tens of thousands of Americans strain their backs shoveling snow every year, leading to millions of lost workdays and tens of millions of dollars in hospital bills. Many Americans have snowblowers, but quality machines are pricey indulgences, at five hundred dollars and more. It was while Coulter, an entrepreneur, was laid up after his unsuccessful driveway clearing—according to Forbes , Coulter has enough money for a million snowblowers, but that morning he wanted some exercise—that he thought: There has got to be a better way.”
    Section 2A: The Quote. “‘I hadn’t shoveled a driveway since I was seventeen,’ Coulter said on a recent afternoon. ‘So I guess it served me right. But it wiped me out for a week. I thought about people who don’t have the luxury of that. And that’s when I thought: SnowGlow.’
    “Coulter, who specializes in domestic use of nuclear energy, imagined a negligibly radioactive field that could melt the snow in your yard [note the smooth intimacy! not a yard but your yard] at the rate of a square foot a second. Don a protective suit, warn the neighbors, flip a switch, and voilà: snow into snowmelt.”
    And we’re off. A biographical section on Coulter, quotes from a current (ingratiating) and a former (passive-aggressive) associate, a skeptical comment about runoff from someone in Energy, a zoom-out about the state of nuclear, and then the semi-autistic peter-out of the end: “The winter has been especially persistent in Rochester this year. On a recent afternoon, Coulter was in his driveway, pulverizing a snowfall with SnowGlow. By his count, it was number sixteen of the season. He had been spending more time at home than ever. In his hazmat suit, he looked a little like an extra from Red Dawn . It was nearly dark when his wife called him to dinner. ‘In a minute!’ he yelled. He sounded like a kid