Free 14 Degrees Below Zero by Quinton Skinner

stiff, and in some automatic mode in which he killed off part of himself. He seemed happier selling shirts. Well, not
happier
—how to use that word, with a man like Lewis—but at least more
authentic.
    So what was she going to do? When she tried to talk to Stephen, he told her to read Marx. She’d
already
read Marx, back in high school. Sure, we were all alienated from our work—point granted. Capitalism sucks? Sure, why not. It was all well and good for a dead bearded guy. But what about her?
    She wished her mother were alive.
    At least Anna died at home, which was all she had asked for in her final days. Lewis had called in the morning while Jay was making Ramona her toast and juice, and told her that Anna had died an hour before in the first light of dawn. He waited until Jay came over before calling the paramedics to take the body away.
    The way it worked was, you said good-bye to someone, and then you thought about them all the time. You knew they weren’t coming back, yet still you held each new event and possibility for them to examine, to comment upon. But they never did. Dead people were stupid, with their stubborn inability to keep up with current events.
    Jay had an armload of dishes as she wove through the nearly full dining room. The Cogito was going through its growth phase, too innocent yet to look ahead to its decline. Everyone who came in was rubbing their hands together, blowing their noses, their eyes full of the unexpected cold. The street through the window had that browned-out colorless hue of winter before the snow.
    She laid out the plates for a trio next to the window—a woman in black, and two bearded men wearing the earnest earth tones of Unitarians. Jay had pegged them as local theater types, or maybe small-time real-estate entrepreneurs. She knew they had her pegged as a waitress.
    “Miss?” said one of the men, kindly eyed through glasses. “Excuse me?”
    Jay was halfway gone, and had to stop and turn. “Did I forget something?”
    “No, it’s just that we didn’t order this.” His companions looked down at their plates as though they had arrived from another galaxy.
    “We haven’t ordered anything,” said the woman in black. “Can we see some menus?”
    Wrong table.
Jay picked up the plates again. She sensed everyone in the place looking at her. She wavered for a moment and then decided to brazen it out. The rightful owners of the three dishes looked at them warily, glancing over at the other table as though gauging how much they had contaminated the food during their brief ownership of it. Jay smiled as though nothing had happened.
    Only a few more hours to go.

7. THE POINT OF FEAR, BEYOND ITS UTILITY AS A WARNING.
    T here comes a point at which the sweating man begins to feel a chill rather than the heat of his exertion. It’s a nauseating feeling, accompanied by a threat of loosening from the bowels and a general blurring of vision. The whole thing was downright ominous. It made a man think of how he might feel in the final moments before a catastrophic physical breakdown.
    Stephen stood panting and dripping, watching a man almost ten years his junior line up for a free throw and, inevitably, miss it. These were, after all, graduate students in the humanities. They could toss around a little Kant and Hegel, but they were hopeless with a basketball in their hands.
    The game resumed. Stephen had long since stopped caring about the score, his main ambition now being to keep moving without passing out, or dying, or suffering an involuntary explosion from his innards that would embarrassingly soil the court at the university gym. He jogged across half-court, his knees aching, one arm held up for the ball.
    Of course he shouldn’t have done
that.
He was the sole faculty member on the court, and the students kept one eye on him at all times—in part to divine whether he favored any of them, also in sheer curiosity over whether he could keep his feet. As soon as he indicated an