| OCR Text |
Show 425 your lines and hit the traffic patterns right and got to work on time, had your clearings run and your checks filed in time to drink coffee upstairs before the bank opened. Those few precious stolen minutes-provided no one came over to talk to you-allowed you to assimilate what you had learned from the lines you had done this morning and to project what things they had made you capable of that you weren't capable of yesterday. Routine was a virtue. You could measure progress against routine-this day six months ago I was here, eight months ago there. That he disliked his job was irrelevant; he had always disliked his job. What was important was that no one paid attention to him and that he got a small raise every few months-his missionary suits were beginning to wear out-and that painting by artificial light sometimes created striking color combinations because you always overcorrected for yellow and didn't know by how much until you saw it in the morning. By the time he heard the rap on the door he was drying his chest and the bathroom was filled with sunlight from the window over the tub. He looked at his ghostly image in the steamed-over mirror and saw the nimbus where his eyes should be. Before the end of the day his bones would feel alive too. He wrapped his towel around his waist and picked up his spoon and bowl and razor from the wash basin and walked out past a small huddled creature in a bathrobe, with a face like cottage cheese, and heard the bathroom door slam before he had gotten his own door open. Inside his room he rummaged in another box and found clean underwear-he had not worn temple garments for a couple of years, and still felt incomplete without them-and two socks that looked alike and put them on. He selected a pale blue shirt from a hanger on the steam pipe, and while buttoning it watched the girl on the balcony of the adjacent house pinch back dead leaves. He |
