For Powell it was simply a matter of time. Up to that point he considered his life a worthless and hollow endeavor, and he did not intend to misspend what time he had left on nonessential matters--not if he could help it. He estimated that he had left approximately twenty-seven years. Perhaps thirty, if he exercised and avoided red meat and worry.

Like an apple-bloated worm, the wasted years gnawed at his heart. Particularly his unproductive late teens and twenties, when he was at his ‘peak,’ so to speak, when there were more days ahead than behind, and possibilities were bounded only by the limits of one’s imagination. ‘What a fool I was to fritter away those years in idleness and dreams. And the hours offered up to TV. Lord, to think what I could do with them now!’ Powell’s few friends began to avoid him, considering his conversation tiresome, particularly his obsession with time past, present and future. He was impatient, impetuous, full of wanderlust, invariably preferring to be some place else, talking to anyone else. He loathed small talk, particularly that involving weather, or worse, sports, anything that did not really matter.

An extreme form of torture was to be suffered waiting in lines. Hadn’t he read in Quality Life Magazine that the average Joe wasted up to forty-five minutes per day queuing up at restaurants, supermarkets, shops, lobbies, waiting rooms, delicatessens, the bank, the post office (oh my god, the post office!), and the dreaded convenient store? Powell’s contempt for convenient stores was almost debilitating for he was constantly running out of gas rather than submitting to the agony of the lottery line. ‘Back in my day,’ he told for the umpteenth time his long-suffering children, ‘we had something called a service station where the attendant would fill up your tank (Filler up, you’d say), check the oil, wipe the windshield, and you’d pay the man and you’d be on your way. Now you got your Gas N Grabs and Moto Marts where they expect you to pump your own and (the final insult) to languish forever behind a cortege of welfare queens gambling on the Quick Pick. What the hell’s convenient about that, I’d like to know?’

He cut back on sleep. Given the chance, as a young man, he would nap till noon without remorse or regret. Now he went reluctantly to bed, able to get by with a mere five hours. True, he was groggy most of the day, not as sharp as he would have been with the recommended eight, but that was fine since he was groggy and muddled at the office, where everyone was naturally groggy and muddled. No one noticed. He had read somewhere that Margaret Thatcher and Napoleon Bonaparte had gotten along quite well on four hours sleep, and he hoped to reach that goal by mid-September. He had only pity for those sleepyheads who snoozed away their best years. Up at four a.m., he found the still, silent dawn to be the most productive time of day, ideal for exercise and solitary walks accompanied by awakening birdsong and untroubled by teenage motorists and gawking neighbors. And his thoughts were clear, uncluttered by the detritus of everyday life. But these were trivialities compared to the great blocks of time Powell squandered every weekday at the office. It was this waste that blackened his heart with a deep, rumbling rage, beginning each morning with the forty-five minute commute, followed by eight soul-killing hours at his desk, and finished off with another fifty-minute commute home (depending on traffic, downtown sporting events, signal outages, weather conditions, bridge and highway construction, accidents). And how his heart flamed when his loathesome boss slapped on the additional insult of overtime hours or weekend work.

As far as he could figure, only he, Powell, harbored these feelings. He, and of course, his inspiration Henry David Thoreau. But Thoreau had been single, with few responsibilities, living in far simpler times. It had been relatively easy for him. But once you married and had children you were forced into a life of mind-numbing servitude. The remarkable thing was that everyone else (as far as he could tell) seemed quite satisfied with this arrangement. And while Powell understood the necessity to earn a living, he nevertheless deeply lamented it.

For instance, he noted, much to his bewilderment, that he was one of the few employees who took a full lunch hour, who actually left the sacred confines of the office, carrying his paper sack like crime to a nearby park and tried to enjoy his bunch of grapes and bottle of juice on a shaded bench. It was no doubt because of his standoffishness and his inexplicable attitude toward work that co-workers considered him a slacker, and he had long ago stopped considering them. They got together often for after-work drinks. Powell would rather drink toilet water than spend another second with those people. When five p.m. finally crept round he was ready to flee like an East German over the Berlin Wall and would try desperately to make up some of his lost time. If he was able to slip out the back exit with a few of the temps and part-timers, he would hustle to his car, hoping to beat the worst of rush-hour traffic, for nothing maddened him like traffic jams, especially on his own time.

On this particular late afternoon traffic oozed like an open sore: thousands of peevish, bottom-sore office workers frantic to get home simultaneously merging on four lanes of eastbound cement. Powell was in a particularly foul mood. He was expected to come in early the next morning--six o’clock--for a project committee breakfast. Naturally, he would not be compensated for those two lost hours. They would simply disappear like Chinese dissidents. His cubicle colleagues hadn’t blinked an eye when the last minute meeting was announced, but Powell’s left eye twitched like an innocent man at the end of a rope.

Powell noted the clock on a roadside billboard: 5:20 p.m. He was making excellent time. Ahead traffic merged and divided and merged again, a roadway designed by hell’s engineers, and Powell found himself suddenly surrounded by a circle of white minivans. Briefly, in his side mirror, he glimpsed an opening and broke for daylight, cutting off a middle-aged woman in a white minivan. The woman’s features contorted and her pale mouth formed cruel obscenities. Unappeased, she shook her fist and managed to maneuver again alongside him. Powell, feeling his neck muscles tighten like elevator cables, stared ahead, avoiding eye contact. All manner of automotive vehicles, ever-increasing in size, sped by, brake lights popping off and on like cherry fireworks. An SUV cut in front of Powell, producing his fifth adrenal rush since leaving the office.

Finally, his curiosity overcoming him, Powell ventured a glance to his right, and found the minivan momma continuing to sling silent curses at him from behind a rolled-up window, across five or six feet of pavement and yet another window. Powell found that she communicated much more effectively with her fingers. Meanwhile the SUV in front of him had — without warning – slammed on its brakes, too late for Powell to notice or do anything about it. He attempted to squeeze in front of the nightmare face of the van woman, but she cut him off with a triumphant gleam in her eye. Powell in panicked desperation pulled hard to the left not seeing the overpass abutment until it was essentially in his lap.

Some time passed before the paramedics appeared, poking gingerly through the shards of ragged metal before at last one of them found an arm to plumb. ‘There might be a pulse,’ the paramedic said. ‘If so, not much.’

From within the wreckage the man stirred ever so slightly. ‘Wasted. Wasted,’ he muttered. ‘What’s he saying?’

‘I think he said he’s wasted.’

‘He’s wasted all right.’

The paramedics stepped aside for the firefighters and their emergency vehicles and their bulky rescue equipment and turned and watched with indifference the rush-hour traffic funneling itself into one lane, like a fat woman squeezing into a new pair of pumps, and the weary drivers who slowed down to a crawl and with a mixture of pity and irritation at being held up, looked on for signs of death.

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