The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [102]
They went to the kitchen, where Martin boiled water for his morning tea and gave Dante breakfast. Eating, Martin noted, was one of the few activities in which the cat appeared most like an animal—really, almost rodentlike—his head bent down to the plate, gulping up and chomping the pieces of turkey breast Martin set out for him. “Don’t worry—there’s plenty of food,” Martin said, and felt pleased when a few seconds later Dante stepped back from the plate—which was not empty—and stretched before sauntering out of the kitchen.
His tea ready, Martin carried it into his study on a tray along with half of a Zabar’s cheesecake. He turned on the computer and once again considered quitting his job—or “retiring,” as Jay had put it—which had felt so imperative the day before, when he was leaving his office. He pulled up his finances, and it did not take him long to conclude that, while not exactly a moot point, the concern was not particularly vexing. Hardly a year had passed at his firm when he did not receive a hefty bonus, which in turn had allowed him to make a second killing in the stock market after he invested in all sorts of Internet highfliers on their way up and—in a show of pessimistic bravado for his colleagues at the firm—shorted a good portion of them on the way down. All of these gains were now converted into a well-balanced selection of munis and slow-growth funds effectively impervious—to the degree possible—to market fluctuation. He concluded that barring some catastrophe—e.g., the one that had happened the day before—his portfolio could be expected to provide a reasonable per annum in the six-figure range.
He wondered if he could really be happy leading the life of a dilettante and recalled something his father had said to him after eighth grade in the context of giving him his first job. “I think last summer may have been a little too unstructured,” Hank had explained. “It’s not good for someone your age to sit around too much.”
Martin, who at that age had shared Jane’s views about the potentially stultifying aspects of the bourgeois workplace, responded with a prepared statement: “Do you think it would be better next year, when I’m a year older?”
Hank laughed but was unmoved. “Sorry, Marty; everybody has to work. It makes you a man. The job is three hours a day. You can work out in the morning, come into the warehouse after lunch, and spend the rest of the night doing whatever you want.”
Though Martin was annoyed—if not quite angry—at his father for framing the issue in such logical but repugnant terms, the job—as he now admitted—was actually one of the better ones he had ever held. Although the assembly-line work (screwing a seemingly infinite number of eyeglass temples to frames with an electric screwdriver) introduced him to an almost visceral and at times exhilarating form of tedium he would later understand to be a foundation of modern life, it was genuinely fascinating to watch the piles of tiny screws gradually disappear from the tray in which they awaited their fate like cattle at an abattoir. Sometimes they would briefly fall into perfect formation, twenty-five lined up in each of the ten slits designed to hold them, while at other times, such as when Martin poured in a fresh batch, they would be panicked and chaotic, rolling all over—as if succumbing to entropy—and would have to be corralled by an angry god before they were removed one by one to fulfill a destiny with the nonprescription safety eyeglasses of the world.
This was also when Martin first learned to appreciate the aural tedium of album-oriented rock radio, which at this point in his life was his primary source of music (not counting the classical works Jane