Free Unhappenings by Edward Aubry

room in my parents’ house. It was a genuine source of pride to read the words “Bachelor of Science in Physics.” Every morning before breakfast I would head into the library, and read the entire document, whispering the words softly to myself.
    And every day, in recognition of the fact that—very much against my expectations—it was still there, I would finish by whispering, “At least for now.”



y diploma turned out to be permanent. Unfortunately, it was about the only thing from that part of my life that was.
    During my senior year, I applied to, and was accepted into, a Masters program at Cornell. I wasn’t due to start until the fall semester, so I spent much of the summer relaxing, and planning to relocate. My displacement—physical this time—was a refreshingly simple ordeal, and preparing for it made me feel pleasantly normal for a change. Toward the end of July, my father carefully broached the topic of how long it was going to take me to start looking for a job. To anyone else preparing to move out of state for graduate school in a month, such a suggestion would be confusing. To me, it was all too clear. A search through my correspondence from that year soon turned up the rejection letter from Cornell in my saved e-mails, along with similar letters from several other universities.
    It was surely an act of remarkable restraint that my father’s inquiries about my future plans were as kind as they were. The conversations we must have had about my universal rejections from graduate schools were probably awful for both of us, and I was at least partially grateful not to have actually experienced them. Dad was always deeply invested in my prospects as a physicist. His own field had been computer science, and he had been fortunate enough to be exactly the right age to ride the cascade of developments in artificial intelligence that transpired in the 2060s. Had he graduated two years earlier or later he would have missed what was a very narrow window of unprecedented opportunity in his specialty. While he never wished for me to follow directly in his footsteps, I was his only child, and the possibility that I would follow science of some sort was a point of personal delight for him. I know he often saw me as a younger version of himself. We even looked strikingly similar. Same skinny build, same unmanageable hair (although unlike him I did ultimately get to keep mine), we even had the same taste in eyeglasses, at a time when those had gone nearly extinct. When I finally asked for optic surgery, it nearly broke his heart. I can only imagine how he must have crashed at my apparent washing out of a career in science.
    With grad school suddenly no longer an option, I did indeed begin to look for work. This proved significantly daunting. My intent was always to pursue a PhD and spend the rest of my life steeped in research, exactly as my father had hoped, preferably in time travel applications. I never had a plan B.
    How short-sighted of me.
    Fortunately, my parents were people of means, and there was no real urgency for me to be employed, at least from a survival perspective. Nevertheless, it was unacceptable to them, and to myself, for me to begin a career as a layabout. My first choice was to put my physics degree to work, especially as I was now planning to start the grad school application process all over again, and I wanted to be able to build experience to make myself a more desirable candidate. Partly on the strength of my background, but largely as a result of my father’s connections, I was able to get a job as a research assistant, which he found encouraging. That lasted for nine days. On day ten I woke to discover that I had been working for three weeks as a tech support person for a communications firm. The next few days were an embarrassing sequence of incidents in which I needed to be retrained on very simple matters. Eventually, I settled into the work.
    That job lasted for ten weeks. Then,