Early

Early Berleson had long since grown accustomed to the static routine of his middle years. He would sleepwalk through the day at work, make his way home in a sort of empirical blackout, and then, eventually, the night would just fall out from under him and leave him floating in murky space, listening to the strains of Mahler from someplace far off. It sounded almost like a transmission from a ghost satellite.

The planet felt frozen in his skull like a starfish paralyzed in amber. He could sometimes convince himself that his bones were locked up in his skin, and he supposed he would never again shimmy to an ecstatic piece of music.

As a younger man, life had rolled through his veins like a carnival ride, and he had found great and simple pleasure in those moments alone in his bachelor apartment, lunging around –often enough naked– to his old records. It frequently depressed him to recognize that he would in all likelihood die from shame if he were ever subjected to a videotape of himself in the midst of his happiest moments.

Now, outside his windows in the night there was a humid scrim crouched on the neighborhood and he could hear the dense rattle of bugs and the sound of idling air conditioners and sprinklers shaking their sand maracas up and down the block. Beyond that, the city, a wash of white noise interupted by the occasional burst of something sleepless.

It would likely be fair to say that people who wrote about concrete for a living couldn’t write for squat, and Early had made his peace with the fact that it wouldn’t do him any good to try to sprinkle a little fairy dust on the copy. Who really gave a rat’s ass?

Even after editing the damn magazine for almost ten years he still didn’t have the foggiest idea who read the thing, but assumed increasingly that no one did or could. It was clearly just one of those things that people in the trade received and threw on the coffee table at the office.

The journal had a peer review process that essentially made Berleson’s job unnecessary; he was supposed to edit the thing for grammar and style. If he was feeling particularly bored or ambitious he might go through the copy and clean up obvious messes, but lately it took more gumption than he could muster to read through most of the stuff even once.

Every once in a great while he’d receive a letter from someone complaining about the virtually unreadable nature of the journal, and these letters gave him immense pleasure. Berleson relished one letter in particular, so much so that it was hanging in a frame above his desk. “I realize it’s only a concrete magazine,” this person had written, “but, Jesus Christ, I’d think you could at least find some better writers.”