Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt

By Harvey Havel

Charlie Zero has finally arrived to where he doesn’t want to be, as he begins his journey to find the woman of his dreams by starting out at dead last on society’s totem pole. He lives in a town that expects the economy to pick up from wealthy people moving in from the nearby city, but prosperity never comes. Instead, men like Charlie Zero are stuck in low-wage, dead-end jobs that offer no hope of surviving if he ever wants to get married and live the subrurban American dream.

But there’s suddenly new hope for Charlie when he meets a wealthy and successful mobster at a local bar late one night, and with his help, Charlie hopes to get the woman his in love with by associating with him. He finds out, though, that even with the mobster’s help, he is arrested, loses his job, and is generally tortured by his lot in life and the threadbare existence that comes with it. His only real choice, he decides, is to take action and kill the man who is most responsible for it all: the mobster himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvey Havel
• Release date: Jan 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781370961818

Harvey Havel

HARVEY HAVELAuthorHarvey Havel is a short-story writer and novelist. His first novel, Noble McCloud, A Novel, was published in November of 1999. His second novel, The Imam, A Novel, was published in 2000.Over the years of being a professional writer, Havel has published his third novel, Freedom of Association. He worked on several other books and published his eighth novel, Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt, and his ninth, The Orphan of Mecca, Book One, which was released last year. His new novel, Mr. Big, is his latest work about a Black-American football player who deals with injury and institutionalized racism. It’s his fifteenth book He has just released his sixteenth book, a novel titled The Wild Gypsy of Arbor Hill, and his seventeenth will be a non-fiction political essay about America’s current political crisis, written in 2019.Havel is formerly a writing instructor at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. He also taught writing and literature at the College of St. Rose in Albany as well as SUNY Albany.Copies of his books and short stories, both new and used, may be purchased at all online retailers and by special order at other fine bookstores.

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Charlie Zero’s Last Ditch Attempt

By

Harvey Havel

Copyright © 2013 by Harvey Havel

All rights reserved. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

License Notes. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Books by Harvey Havel:

Noble McCloud (1999)

The Imam (2000)

Freedom of Association (2006)

From Poets to Protagonists (2009)

Harvey Havel's Blog, Essays (2011)

Stories from the Fall of the Empire (2011)

Two Tickets to Memphis (2012)

Mother, A Memoir (2013)

Charlie Zero's Last-Ditch Attempt (2014)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book One (2016)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book Two (2016)

The Orphan of Mecca, Book Three (2016)

An Adjunct Down (2016)

The Thruway Killers (2017)

The human heart is told

Of Nothing—

Nothing is the force

That renovates the World—

—Emily Dickinson circa 1883

PART ONE

Chapter One

In his apartment that morning, he knew himself well enough to declare upon waking that he was no longer the same saint he initially was. Actually, it’s not as though he had one day decided in his youth to become a saint. Sainthood was just a concept or an idea that he thought would be considerably useful in a day and age when the world fell to cynicism and sin, and at one point he attempted to become a saint, perhaps because it was easier to do so when the mores of his world seemed to be crumbling. His sickly sin, he believed, was a condition he could never rise above, but even despite this fact, he assumed that moral living was something worth achieving, and it became a condition he could live with—not to be better than anyone else, but because he wanted to define his existence by becoming a saintly figure—to do good deeds, to have a compassion that exceeded the trappings of luxury and easy sex, to save the world—as that was, at one time, his primary aim.

But after lifting himself off of his bed amidst the empty beer bottles and stale rinds of late night pizza that bed skirted his mattress, he went to the kitchen drawer where the silverware would have normally been kept and lit up a joint that cast its thick shadowy gloom over an otherwise sun-lit apartment. He had taken too many steps backwards to even think about returning to his glorious status as a saint. He was far too removed to pontificate to anyone on how they should lead a good, moral life. He moved beyond this into the shady areas of his own innate hypocrisy, as he was now moral about some things but not about others. He permitted certain behaviors but condemned only those that rose too high above the stink of that which was unpardonable. And in such a circumstance it forced him to judge what was considered pardonable and what had passed along in the muck of sins that were questionable and, therefore, permitted.

And who was Charlie Zero to judge anyone or anything, as only his solitary existence defined him as a man who did nothing of true value and nothing that detracted from its current value. Charlie was no longer a man who could sustain his own existence by what some may call ‘heart’ or ‘will’ or ‘intelligence’. He needed women and only women to validate what hid beyond the number of his name, and yet he had to pay for this validation with women by paying them through the money he made from a job he neither liked nor disliked, with women of his choosing who neither attracted him nor repelled him. And if he couldn’t buy a woman on any given night of the week, especially when alone and sitting in his room, then perhaps this validation would somehow fall from the sky, as though he had waited patiently for it all his life, or even waited a minute or two longer during what he considered to be the bitter sting of patience.

Perhaps it was as simple as a number line that stretched to the right to infinity, and perhaps he could hobble along that line, searching for this validation in his ever-nauseous gut, only to find that after zero, zero becomes one, then one becomes two, then two becomes three, and then infinity becomes infinity plus one, infinity plus two, and so on. He never liked numbers much anyway, and he didn’t really care for them now that he faced a predicament where he both existed and didn’t exist at all. And so Charlie disliked his name but decided to live with it, and perhaps he had been so used to being called a ‘Zero’ in the school playgrounds, in the dining room where his once-living mother called him to supper, within the neatly-printed lines of the junk letters that collected on his coffee table, and within the strict, unbendable lines that became the prison of his life. His name was simply a number that had been passed over. So much for the joint he just smoked.

And yes, Charlie Zero paid for his women, simply because he refused to kill for them, as that’s what most women secretly desired. Granted that he thought killing men to have his choice of women was worth every bit of soft skin moving on top of his in the middle of the night, but in no way would Charlie ever kill a man, whether a woman wanted him to or not. It certainly wasn’t the fault of women that he had to kill other men, as women were naturally predisposed to want no other solution, and if he were to kill one man, it would in a sense be like jumping over the numerical line that extended into something valid. Whether a simple number greater than zero represented a body killed or a status to be held, it would merely perpetuate what was already grotesque into a lust for killing that knew no end. So killing men for a shot at luring a legitimate woman in his bed was certainly no match to the logic of trying, at least, to finagle a woman away from another man, as this could be done without having the blood of a complete genocide on his hands.

So somehow Charlie Zero decided that he must avoid killing other men and still have a woman in his bed, which is why he paid for sex in the first place. But then he thought, why pay for it anyway? Why bother? A woman wouldn’t love him anyway, as though love and matters of passion were also characters in his delusional play. But regardless of how horrible he felt about his paying for sex, he had to leave the apartment at some point, only he didn’t know why he should leave, as nothing really waited for him on the other side of the thin wooden door that separated his apartment from the rest of the town outside. Life on the other side of the door seemed as dreary as the day before, yet it was filled with the possibility that he may run into someone who still smiled and, therefore, understood some little bit about him.

When he finally forced himself to leave his apartment, he walked down a sunny street that blinded him to the other pedestrians on it until he rested underneath the awning of a local grocery store that sold wilted flowers and rotting fruit. Walking past him was a woman, although not such a glorious vision of the woman he had so many times imagined, but a woman whose complexion was fair and her disposition haughty and elegant. She wore a beret that was tilted to the side of her slender head. She also wore a coal-colored scarf that caressed her neck as though it were a continuation of her naturally condescending airs. Charlie had nothing to lose by looking in her direction, as perhaps he would have to kill a man after all, even though he had sworn he wouldn’t, and perhaps this man was the same man who loved her, as surely she must have had someone to love her. Her face was indeed plain and ordinary, but it fit the profile of someone who could certainly validate the parts of him that he had left for dead long ago.

She even smiled to him, after all of his hang-ups, and since he found her quite sweet at this point, he might as well have walked right up to her and asked her a question about where she got such a scarf, or where she found the tight little body that walked around with it, her pants just below her waistline and her mind much too smart and chaste for the likes of him. The fact was that he knew nothing about this woman. He only knew that he needed her in his life.

This, perhaps, was his first mistake. You don’t choose any one woman. They instead choose you, hopefully when the time is right, but usually it was his timing that was always off. Charlie had understood that these women had been fed since birth to accept certain kinds of men who were predisposed to do the same sorts of things that these women were used to. Every inclination of their sex was controlled and mapped out beforehand, such that a woman couldn’t imagine a life that went far beyond that which had already been planned and scouted, even if the life were so ordinary that even the heaviest dose of sin couldn’t provide for its palliative of freedom. But women certainly weren’t bad people to Charlie Zero. They were instead caged- in by circumstance. They were trapped within a mindset that meant extinction to the ones who loved them if they took one spontaneous step one way and not the predetermined step along the predetermined route, and it was a shame, because Charlie Zero, too ensconced within his own past saintliness, did not have the conscience to kill any man for this woman. And because of the man this woman probably slept with, some scumbag or some self-involved plutocrat who had an implicit hand in sentencing Charlie to his given name, a man who fed upon the same maggot-feed of the same Godhead that relegated the many to slavery and the rest to lives of nomadic alienation, then perhaps he would have to avoid the painful act of deprogramming such a woman from the robot she was made to become.

Perhaps he loved this woman with the beret and scarf, and very few women would understand this peculiar kind of love, as it was a kind of slavery to him almost, if he chose to look at it that way. But it wasn’t all slavery, as nothing moved him enough to interrupt her walk along the avenue, as she was as satisfied and as content as a well-fed feline. And perhaps it became an obsession with him, because Charlie had always been alone, eyeing someone he could never possess, his nose buried deep within the virtues of chastity while neglecting it all the same, a vow he remembered taking long ago to the Church, a vow that he would remain a good man, as he would never kill anyone over a woman. Perhaps he thought this the dilemma of the Western world, its ridiculousness and its ability to select what thrives and what does not, what passes for cool and what does not—the same old bullshit but on a different day—and yet there was no other system of thought that provided an ounce of his dignity and courage than the females he constantly pursued. Her face in the sunlight was as bright and delusional as a shiny apple, the system of things treating her too well for him to sink his teeth into her. He lusted after the idea of finding her alone and willing in his bed, in the narrow villa he liked to call his apartment where nothing much happened save for his wild and free dreaming of the life he wanted but could never get.

And he never felt so selfish as he did just then. It was a selfishness that was debilitating, as if giving everything he had was its own form of self-sacrifice and abuse, and perhaps it was wrong to take, take, take from the Grand Soul in the sky. Greed and folly had become ingrained in him as he became a willing participant in its proliferation. It was the same drama that his nature demanded, the same nature as defined by the same people, in-bred as they were. Charlie ultimately realized nature loved packages. Anything that could be commoditized and packaged could surely fit within the paradigm of what was deemed natural. A man, after all, had to fit his woman, and if the fit could not be tailored appropriately, then it ultimately led to a man’s unhappiness and a woman’s cruelty.

He hid in the shadows of the grocery store’s awning, evaluating the low probability that he would ever mate with this woman with the beret, saying over and over to himself that nature had been explained in the worst possible way, controlled by scientists who found no other way out but to eye their next climb along the long social ladder that had once sparkled their dissertations and treatises when they were young children learning. Well, thought Charlie Zero, science didn’t have all the answers, and it’s not that a firm belief in God ever did either.

But something had to account for the gravitational pull he felt for this woman, even if this love lasted only for an iota of a second, even if it had no purpose or function amongst the levers and gears that moved the ever-expanding influence of nature. Nature, it seemed, was something that drove his fellow man to get fatter and slower, more polluted and more mechanized, like a quasi-industrial monster that deemed love only available for the chosen few, all due to nature of course, which was explained ridiculously and yet looked upon fondly by empires built on their noticeably rotting foundations. No, he never knew why questions of a man’s survivability always had to trump the possibilities of love in a young man’s heart. He realized quite miraculously just then that a bee could fuck a bird any time it wished, or a Chihuahua could fuck a Great Dane where and when it wanted to, that not everything fit within its own compartmentalized space. Napoleon never fit Josephine either, and neither did Boris ever fit Natasha, and Charlie hoped that the men in the area really hung on tight to their girlfriends and their spouses if only to protect these women from joining him in the same line of nothingness that painted his world in shadow. It was a status he had gotten used to but could no longer bear, no matter how low the currents of his depravity. If this wasn’t a confession of love for the woman that passed by him, then what else was?

He let the woman in the beret pass along the street just like a thousand women before. Her smile lingered in his memory, as though it were just another part of his imagination. Incremental gains along the number line, really. Things like how she smiled to him briefly or how her arms swayed with a tinge of affectation often boosted some part of his ego, but these were nothing compared to a woman who was real. There was too much money in the contemporary woman already, their sex some kind of awkward trade mastered by an economist. Even he had to make a living, and perhaps her smile was the only item he didn’t have to pay for that week. It remained far apart from the glut of costs and debts he could never repay, bills that piled high and offered little remorse other than extended payment plans and reprimands by those who were already born with it. Her smile became the only commodity that actually lightened his mood. It was manna from heaven that he could eat until his stomach burst open—crumbs, though, as they were.

And then he thought that these people were sadistic, as his number was controlled by forces greater than himself, and as much as he objected to such a force, he couldn’t deny that the pedestrians and the gangly window-shoppers were slaves to it as well. He could no longer live with people who followed this force. He wanted to live with a woman who was immune to it, as her status and beauty gave the woman a free ticket far away from the forces that controlled most common people. Perhaps he coveted that which he couldn’t rightfully have, and he had no way of achieving her love except through dastardly means. And when this condition meets a man who has tried to remain moral, that’s exactly when one becomes a slave to the same power structure that rules everyone else, a slave to this same force that rules most of us in order to stay moral. If he could live within her blood, he would, but there were systems in place that rejected his type of infection. He understood that he could not build her cathedrals. He could not provide the sunlight that radiates through stained-glass windows. He could not steer the awkward and sublime light that bathes their dance in cool, soft haloes. He’d rather not interact with the forces that pushed him to imagine such beauty time and time again. He’d rather subvert these forces and suffer the consequences of early imprisonment for the homicide he imagined committing. These would be murders well worth it for obstructing his capacity to breed and procreate, because as a loser and a creep he must have her, shackled and chained by greater forces as he was.

He imagined dancing with her in her most elegant silk dress, her eyes blue and her soul feeling totally at ease with being alone with him. His fantasy in no way touched any sort of reality, as there was no way he could provide for her dreams. He considered dancing with such a woman impossible, and perhaps this was the foundation of the Western world—an existence reduced to the dreams he couldn’t deliver, not by a long shot, and yet he banked on this possibility: from building her cathedrals brick by brick and furnishing sunlight so that she could dance with him, to providing the marble that carried her feet and supported her gentle steps, as he whisks her away in his navy-blue emperor’s uniform, moving towards an eternity where such a woman is actually possible.

But there were no princes or princesses in the town. No royalty here except to occupy every aspect of the common people. People here do not bow before they dance. They stare into each other’s eyes, no matter if they blared Hip-Hop along the avenue or divined the whitest of dreams along some of the tree-lined suburban sections. Charlie’s brand of love was terribly common, a shit-stain on a carpet just as the next man’s was.

In the pit of what was a silent and lonely place, he suddenly realized that he had to tear the whole thing down—to destroy her cathedrals and castles that her many suitors must have built for her, to rub bitter salt into all of the fertile fields they had plowed for her, and to burn her cities where her empty-headed children ran amok in padded playgrounds.

He plunged his hands into his pockets to warm them against the bitter wind and walked in the opposite direction like every other crucified sucker on his side of the street that day.

Chapter Two

The thought of killing someone due to his own frustrations did follow him down the sidewalk that morning, as a woman’s stare was merely a fleeting announcement that he was at least handsome in some imperceptible way, but by no means a thoroughbred who could ensure her survival. As much as he wanted this pipe dream out of life—the ability to support someone like the girl he had seen, and perhaps a child who would have been the result of their union, just weren’t possible anymore. He had been through it too many times before— the scheming, the strategies, the endless opportunity-seeking. And to think that there was some way out of his own financial hardships to arrive at such an enviable position in life!

His financial ruin had started slowly, and at one point, just a few years after graduating from the town’s high school, he had a good job that paid a decent entry-level wage. It was office work, and his boss, an ex-Marine who used to know his father when he was alive, gave him the job making copies and answering telephones, all under the banner of a small real estate business that capitalized on the great push up from the overcrowded cities into the lands of sagging telephone wires, cell phone towers, strip malls, and trafficky roads that intersected wide highways and networks of dented metal and chipping concrete. We have a lot of rich people coming in from New York, his boss used to say to him. Stick around, kid, and you may be able to afford a house one day.

The real estate office itself didn’t allow for too much luxury. The desks were made of brown aluminum, scratched and dented, and the phones still had their chords on them. A small Japanese copying machine became his partner in duplicating the deals made between his boss and the few local customers who wandered into the place. Charlie wanted to learn more about the business, but his boss only needed him for computer work and other such gopher-like, run-around tasks. Such was the young person’s labor market, but at least it earned him enough to cover the rent. Every once in a while, though, a young smart woman from the nearby college entered the place looking for a studio just to get away from her parents. The rental business bustled in the town, and there were other agencies as well that competed for the same business. Charlie was responsible for printing out the leases and maintaining the classified ads for the landlords his boss served.

Start out small, said the boss to him on a number of occasions. The most successful creatures on the planet are the ants, roaches, and rats that feed on the jeweled carcass.

His boss liked to use hunting imagery a lot, but ever since he took the job, his boss had never invited him out to any of his beer-soaked hunting expeditions that he so fondly spoke of. Charlie could tell that his boss made a lot—all of this in spite of his Wal-Mart clothes and populist humor. There was something about being in the trenches of life that excited him, as though the real estate world were a battle that demanded a thick skin and a tolerance for pain and failure. The desks in the office, purchased second-hand, were a testament to this. Even the brown carpeting had old coffee stains on it. There were no windows in the office save for the natural light that came in through the front door and the small opaque glass bricks that surrounded it. The place might as well have been a warehouse or an outhouse on a cargo dock. The plastic light shades hovering above were speckled with dust and dead insects, the computer equipment yellowing with obsolescence. Yet the work was something he could do, and for that Charlie Zero remembered to be grateful for a job that supported him, albeit meagerly.

Every so often, while his boss was out of the office, he would peruse the real estate sites on the Internet and scroll down the list of the homes in the town he would have liked to have lived in. He figured that after five years of doing the grunt work of the agency, he would soon be able to afford a mortgage and perhaps a car to go with it. He never finished college and was quite young to be working, as many young men his age had filled their hearts and minds with the stuff of higher knowledge and intellect. Not so for Charlie, because his path was different. There was no father or mother to rely on and very few family members to help him share the load. They had all been drifters and gypsies who had once been in the military but had now become so overwhelmed by their society’s changes that they really had little choice but to fade away as the old soldier’s dictum had demanded of them. Charlie spared himself military service, but his relatives had always been drafted or served voluntarily.

Back in the 1980s, there was a peace-time draft, so he had the option of either staying or leaving. He stayed put, and with his orphaned status he made what he could and tried to keep on the bright and sunny side as a young man. He still had a few friends from the local high school, but like many of suburbia’s young, they packed up and left the town behind, leaving the likes of him to fill homegrown jobs that were mostly doled out by small business owners who could barely afford their commercial leases. And the local economy didn’t do so well in the early Eighties. But things changed, as Charlie could smell the fumes of some of the old, corrupt castles burning and a new influx of young, hip city-folk infusing the town with their own brand of chic and culture. The people from the city who fled from the crime in their streets had started to crawl in, and the town’s working class had bright ideas of moving out farther into the country, which hoped to bring in the flood of new money that his boss so enthusiastically spoke of. The new money wouldn’t change Charlie’s salary any, but he knew he should stick with the agency, because one day it would go places.

And lately, the thought did occur to him that he should have some sort of competitive advantage over the people who came in. But Charlie was not so concerned about this now. There was something about the need to have what other people had that kept him working. And perhaps he should stay by his boss’ side and follow him until his boss too wore out, as a private in the trenches does. He considered these ideas, and he went to and fro amongst the piles of leases and office papers that were stacked upon his desk in an effort to resume where he was going. An old cup of coffee sat cold and lifeless between his computer printer and the heavy, clunky contraption of a monitor. A job, after all, was merely a stop along the journey, and sure, he would have liked to have stayed and could have grown to become a pillar of the town to whom the young women at the nearby college would often run—yes, the visions he had for himself and the might of those visions—he a more erudite real estate broker catering to the exodus of the city’s dispossessed as they vacated their old turf in droves, because the city is no place to raise a family really. He must stay in the town where he worked, if only to benefit his progeny. The rents would climb through the roof, and he would be a player in all of that. Perhaps he would feel the comfort of a suit on his back and a gold clip holding a silk Chinese tie to his chest. An office boy one minute, and a businessman the next. His fantasy wasn’t too farfetched. From what he understood, most people did it all the time, the social mobility of it all, and the wife who would marry him would be a gem—a jewel fit for his crown.

But these were all considerations that confused him more than they helped him. Dreams often get in the way, and to pursue them recklessly without the lack of the Almighty dollar as a counterweight would be like committing a sin against the self, a form of suicide almost, as it would be the same old sin of dreaming too much, and these dreams often became tiring and confusing. It was a sin that mind-boggled even the purest of us.

Charlie Zero wasn’t so desperate yet, however. Sure he had dreams, but they were totally in line with what his paycheck warranted, which was to work hard and follow what his richer sponsor in the office had told him to do, and maybe he just might make it to older age with a quaint suburban house, a wife, and a couple of well-adjusted kids. He never ventured beyond these limits as he continued to scroll down the list of area properties on the screen, thinking that he could afford a couple of them. But the homes he really wanted were way out of his price range.

His boss returned from lunch not long after he had begun filing away the newly-drawn leases. As usual, his boss was cheerful upon walking into the place.

Any phone calls, Charlie? he asked. No. It’s been pretty quiet.

Good. It means that we’ll be pretty busy carving up the entrails by later this afternoon.

And he was right. As soon as lunch ended, several would-be tenants stumbled into the place looking for cheap efficiency apartments and studios in the neighborhood. The ones looking for studios usually came in alone, and they seemed quite tired and depressed to him. If they were on the older side, it probably meant that they had some falling out with a significant other or had just moved into town from further upstate searching for work of any sort. The younger prospects usually came in directly from the college, as they hoped to avoid that new and irritating roommate the college housing office had stuck them with. Charlie had a hard time making these college-types feel comfortable. He had always envied them from a careful distance, and sometimes his coldness towards them showed in the aloof manner in which he asked them to wait for his boss to finish up with a previous client. He wore his non-collegiate status as armor sometimes, as he tried to find anything to discredit them.

Sons and daughters of rich kids, he would sometimes find himself muttering.

It’s not as though he never wanted to finish up college. It was just that the distance that separated his future opportunities and theirs became quite a palpable barrier to wanting to have anything to do with these people. They seemed happier too. They had friends to rely on and all of those parties every weekend, and ultimately they would always land better jobs, even if Charlie outworked them to the ground. He could sense how they were from another class entirely, and this otherness pained the pit of his stomach like an ulcer, and while he was wise enough not to compare his life to the lives of others, he couldn’t help but fuel the flames of his resentments that whispered like the devil in his ears, these ideas that said they would always do much better than he did without really trying very hard at it. It was one of those cruel, sad realities that never lets go of a man, and the fact the Charlie Zero noticed this at his age and not later in life, when one finally gets to figuring out his net worth and calculating all of the money he’s blown on ridiculous things, pointed to some degree of sophistication, but a sophistication that was a direct result of a terrible coldness and cynicism towards these people. That coldness gripped him whenever they walked through the entrance. He also hated how his boss sucked up to them, and even though his boss never treated Charlie as a peon or an underling of any kind, he did notice how his cheap smile warmed to these students when they came in to meet him. It was a worldwide predicament he couldn’t escape—the nature of sucking up to people.

But just when he thought that his resentments and poor attitude had burrowed too deeply into him, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a young woman approaching. He saw her through the window blocks that surrounded the entrance door, as though she were a mirage, and it was hard not to stand above his computer monitor and remain staring in her direction. And to his surprise, she actually entered the office with a bubbly air that warmed Charlie’s insides. He could tell that she was from the college, and he immediately began to think how wrong he had been about resenting these people. She actually smiled and uplifted the room from its usual shroud of dull beige despair, and at the sight of her he could do nothing but stare as though paralyzed at his desk, wondering what on earth he would say to her. She wore a long black coat, and her skin seemed soft and supple, if only he could touch her flushed cheeks. Her dirty blonde hair fell in line with what most gentlemen of his ilk wanted but could never rightfully claim. And if wanting to possess such a creature was wrong, then perhaps Charlie had erred in some imperceptible way, but certainly she was the type of woman whom most men wanted to possess, neither as a plaything nor a trophy, but simply a woman whom he wanted all to himself. He wanted her all wrapped up in his arms on cold nights. If such a closeness were to exist, she would ultimately leave him begging for more of it.

As was usually the case, it was she who possessed him