The Prologue and Chapter 1

Thursday, November 18, 1999. 2:38 a.m.

Phil does not want to be up here.

He says so for the fourth time since midnight, which is three more times than he said it last night, and Trey Vogler, who has his boots wedged between two logs the width of his thigh and a coil of baling wire over his shoulder, tells him what he told him the other three times. Forty minutes. Then they climb down, they sleep until noon, and they never do this again.

“You said that Tuesday,” Phil says.

“Tuesday I meant it less.”

They are forty feet up, and the cold has gotten into the baling wire, so that every loop Trey pulls tight leaves a line of ache across his palm through the glove. Below them the stack spreads out in the floodlights like something that grew there, six tiers of logs lashed and wired and stacked around a center pole, a few thousand pounds of oak and pine for every one of the people crawling over it. Somebody down on the ground has a boom box going. Somebody else is singing over it, badly, and a girl’s voice tells him to shut up, and he does not. The air smells of cut wood and diesel and the particular cold of a Texas November that has not decided yet whether it is going to be winter.

Trey likes it up here. He has never said so, because Phil would take it personally, but he does. He likes the logic of it. Every log bears on another log. Every wire holds a weight that can be worked out on paper. When he was fourteen his father took him to the top of a grain elevator outside Lufkin and showed him how the whole thing was built so that nothing in it was ever asked to carry more than it could, and Trey has spent the seven years since looking for that in everything. He said it at the top that day, out loud, with the wind pulling at his shirt and his mother a small blue shape in the gravel lot below with one hand up against the sun: that’s not possible. His father laughed and said it was possible, son, it was just figured. The stack has it. The stack is a problem with an answer.

Phil is in the Corps because his father was in the Corps, and his father’s father, and Phil is the kind of person who agrees to things because the alternative is an argument. He has the haircut and the boots and the posture, and underneath all of it he is a soft-spoken kid from Beaumont who wanted to study music and did not say so until it was too late to matter. He was Trey’s roommate first, because the housing office put a sophomore physics major from Lufkin and a freshman from Beaumont in the same cinderblock room in Hart Hall the year before Phil’s father talked him onto the Quad, and he is still Trey’s best friend because neither of them has figured out yet that you can choose those. He has explained Muster to Trey twice, the roll call every April and the candles and the one word you say for a name when it is read, and Trey has nodded both times and never gone.

“You hear that?” Phil says.

“Hear what.”

“It did something.”

Trey listens. The boom box. The singing. Wire creaking under load, which is what wire does. Somewhere on the other side of the stack a crew chief is yelling for more hands on the third tier. Nothing is wrong. He runs the numbers in his head the way he always does, bearing, tension, the angle of the whole stack, and nothing is wrong.

“It’s settling,” he says. “It settles.”

“That wasn’t settling.”

“Phil.”

“I’m just saying.”

Trey loops the wire twice around the log in front of him and pulls it tight and twists it off with the pliers, and he is reaching for the next loop when the stack moves.

It does not move the way Phil meant. It moves the way a structure moves when every assumption underneath it has been false for an hour and has only now decided to say so. There is a sound Trey will spend the rest of his life failing to describe, a long wooden groan that comes up through his boots before it reaches his ears, and the floodlit world tilts six degrees to the left and holds there, and in the silence that follows, the actual silence, the boom box and the singing and the yelling all gone at once, he has time to think, very clearly: that’s not possible.

Then it goes.

2:42 a.m.

He does not remember falling. He will try, later, in rooms with soft chairs, and there is nothing there to remember. There is the tilt, and the thought, and then there is the dark, and between them there is a gap in the record the size of a life.

The dark is total. Not the dark of a closed room, which has edges, but the dark of being inside something. He is on his back. Something is across his chest, but it is not pressing; it is simply there, a log the width of his thigh, six inches above his jacket and not one inch closer. His right hand is flat against bark, which is how he knows the bark is there. His left hand is in the air. He moves his fingers and they move. His mouth is full of the taste of sawdust and something coppery that turns out, when he runs his tongue over his teeth, to be nothing more than a bitten lip. He breathes in and the breath goes all the way down, and comes all the way back, and nothing hurts.

Nothing hurts.

He lies still and makes himself do the thing he does. Inventory. Head: fine. Neck: fine. He turns it, slowly, and the dark turns with him. Ribs: fine. He pushes against the log over his chest with one hand, not to move it, just to know, and it does not move, and that is correct, that is what tons of oak are supposed to do. Hips, legs, feet. He can feel his boots. He can wiggle his toes inside his boots. He lies there in the total dark, forty feet of collapsed timber above and around him, and he runs the numbers, and the numbers say he is dead.

There is a space here. That is the only word for it. The logs have come down from six directions and stopped, every one of them, at the edge of him. He can feel the shape of it with his free hand: the bark above his face, the bark beside his knee, the gap by his left shoulder wide enough to put an arm through and nothing on the other side but more dark. The air in it smells of torn sap and raw oak and, from somewhere, diesel, and it is warmer than the night was. It is a pocket. It is exactly his size. It is as if the stack fell and left a Trey-shaped hole in itself and then put him in it.

He waits.

He is not sure, afterward, what he is waiting for. A voice, maybe. He is twenty-one and was raised Methodist by a woman who prayed over the dishwasher and he has read enough to know how this is supposed to go. The light. The hand on the shoulder. The sense, at least, of being seen. People in these situations report a presence. He has read that. He lies in the pocket with his eyes open against the dark and he waits for the presence.

There is a sound, somewhere above and to the right, of wood on wood. Then nothing.

There is a sound, farther off, that might be a person. Then nothing.

He says Phil’s name. He says it at a normal volume, as if Phil is in the next room, and the dark takes the word and does nothing with it. He says it louder. He says it as loud as he has ever said anything, and the sound goes about eighteen inches and stops against the oak and comes back to him smaller, and after that he does not say it again. He will think, later, that the second time was the mistake: that a thing said once into a dark like that is a question, and a thing said twice is a man who has stopped believing the first.

Time does something strange. He will learn later that it was two hours and forty minutes before they got to him, and that in that time men with saws and cranes and bare hands pulled twenty-five people out alive and thirteen out dead, and that the stack did not shift once while they worked, as if it had done what it came to do. He will learn that he was the last one out of the deep part, and, five years later, standing in a ring of granite doorways, that there is no stone for the ones who walked out; that the place where he lay is one of the spaces between, left empty on purpose. He will learn that two of the dead were within an arm’s length of him and that one of them was Phil, and that Phil’s parents drove up from Beaumont that afternoon, his father in his dress uniform, and stood at the edge of the floodlights for most of an hour and did not speak to anyone, and that by then his own mother would be in a hospital in Bryan with her hand on his face, telling him that God was not done with him, which she would go on telling him, every time she saw him, for twenty-six years.

In the pocket he knows none of this. In the pocket there is only the dark, and the breath going down and coming back, and the waiting, and the thing that does not come.

He thinks: if there’s something, this is when.

He thinks it very clearly, the way he thought that’s not possible on the way down. He offers it up to whatever listens to such things. He is not asking for rescue. He is asking for the smallest sign that this, the pocket, the breath, the one-in-whatever that put him here and not six inches to the left, is anything other than what it looks like. He would take a sound. He would take a feeling. He would take the sense of a hand. He does not put the question itself into words. He will not say it aloud for twenty-six years.

Sometime in the second hour a voice comes down through the logs from very far off, a man’s voice, hoarse, asking is anyone alive in there, is anybody in there, and asking it again, and Trey does not answer. He will never be able to explain this, either, in the rooms with the soft chairs. He has a voice. He has used it. He lies with his mouth open in the dark and does not answer, because if he makes a sound the question will have to stop, and he finds, without deciding it, that he would rather go on being asked.

The dark does not answer. It does not refuse to answer, either. It simply is, the way the oak simply is, the way the numbers simply are. Trey Vogler lies in the only place in the world where he could have lived, and he listens to nothing for two hours and forty minutes, and when a hand closes on his boot and the first saw bites through the log over his face and a flashlight finds his eyes and a stranger’s voice says we got one, we got a live one, he is already, without knowing it yet, the man he is going to be: a man who was handed the most inexplicable thing that will ever happen to him, and was given no instructions.

He will spend twenty-six years refusing to decide what it meant.

He will be very good at it.

And then, one night in a control room in Waxahachie, a histogram will lean a few percent off true, and the dark will finally say something back.

Monday, September 15. 6:40 a.m.

The pills came in three colors, and Trey Vogler had learned to take them in the same order every morning so that he would not have to think about them.

White first, the small one, the antidepressant, with a mouthful of water from the bathroom tap that tasted of the iron in Waxahachie’s pipes. Then the pale yellow one, the antipsychotic, which left a chalk bitterness at the back of his tongue no matter how fast he swallowed. Then the orange capsule, the stimulant, which he held in his palm for a moment longer than the others because it was the only one he had taken before everything, the only one left from the long middle stretch of his life when the worst thing wrong with him, most days, was that he could not finish reading a paragraph. He swallowed it. He set the three bottles back on the shelf above the sink with their labels facing the wall, and he looked at himself in the mirror, and he decided the man there would do.

Forty-seven, forty-eight after the new year. Hair going gray at the temples in a way his mother called distinguished and he called gray. He had lost twelve pounds in the spring and put five of them back, and his shirt, a blue oxford he had ironed the night before because he had not been able to sleep anyway, sat on him the way a borrowed shirt sits. He had shaved. He had cut himself shaving, a little, under the jaw, and he pressed a square of toilet paper against it and watched the red bloom through and thought, for no reason, first blood, and then made himself stop thinking it. “It’s a cut,” he said, to the mirror, in a normal voice. “From a razor.”

The house was a rental, a two-bedroom brick box on a street of two-bedroom brick boxes six blocks off the courthouse square, and it smelled the way it had smelled since he moved in during the bad time: of carpet cleaner and the previous tenant’s cigarettes and, underneath, faintly, the dog he did not have. He had meant to do something about the smell. He had meant to do a lot of things. The kitchen had a coffeemaker he had not used since June because Bloch had said maybe not caffeine on top of the stimulant, for now, and a refrigerator with a half-gallon of milk in it that he checked, now, by smell, and poured down the sink.

He stood for a moment in the kitchen with the empty carton in his hand and the morning coming gray through the window over the sink and listened to the house. The refrigerator hum. A mockingbird outside running through its catalog, a car alarm, a cell phone, something that was almost a hymn. The window unit in the bedroom clicking on and laboring, its cold breath reaching him down the hall, dry against the back of his neck. It was the sound of a house with one person in it. He had gotten used to it. That was the thing nobody told you, that you could get used to it, and that getting used to it was its own kind of damage.

He put the carton in the trash. The card Bloch had stuck to the refrigerator door in February was still there under a magnet from a pizza place on the square, a phone number and a first name, its corners curling in the air-conditioning; he did not look at it, and he did not take it down. He picked up his badge from the counter where it had been sitting for four months, face down, and he went out to the truck.

The drive from Waxahachie to the Lab was ten minutes if the light at the farm road was green and fifteen if it was not, and Trey had made it, before, with his mind on anything but the road. This morning he drove it like a man taking a test.

The town fell away fast. The square with its red stone courthouse, all turrets and gargoyles like something a Victorian had dreamed after too much supper. Dove’s on the corner, the Lab’s bar for as long as there had been a Lab, with its neon dove that had lost its tail in the 2021 ice storm and read, at night, as a fish; he had not been inside since February, and he kept his eyes off the door. The strip of fast food and tire shops along the highway. The Dairy Queen where Bubba liked to eat lunch for reasons he had never adequately explained. Then the last stoplight, and the land opened up.

It was prairie, this part of Texas, or what was left of it: blackland, the soil so dark when it was turned it looked wet, rolling out flat and enormous under a sky that had not decided yet what it was going to do. The cotton was in, mostly. What was left stood brown and ragged in the fields with the white still clinging to it like something that had been forgotten. There were cattle, black ones, standing in the way cattle stand, as if they had been placed. There was a hawk on a fence post that paid him no attention. The air coming through the vents had changed; it smelled of cut hay and, faintly, of the feedlot east of town, and under that the dry mineral smell of the land itself that Trey had grown up with in the Piney Woods and still did not have a word for.

And there were the churches.

He had counted them once, during the bad time; it was the kind of thing he had done during the bad time: seven between his house and the gate. Baptist, Baptist, Methodist, a Pentecostal congregation in what had been a Dollar General, Catholic, Church of Christ, and a Cowboy Church in a red steel barn with a cross welded out of horseshoes on a pole by the door. Each of them had a sign out front, the kind with the plastic letters that slid into tracks, and each sign said something, and during the bad time he had read every one of them, every morning, looking for the one that was meant for him.

GOD IS STILL SPEAKING. ARE YOU STILL LISTENING.

THE ANSWER IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK.

SHE IS COMING BACK TO YOU. BE READY.

That last one had not been on any sign. He knew that now. He had known it, on some level, even then. But he had read it, on the Church of Christ marquee, on a Tuesday in February with the sleet coming down, as clearly as he had ever read anything, and he had sat in the truck in the church parking lot for forty minutes with the engine running and his heart going like a drum, because the sign had said she was coming back and the sign would not lie.

The Church of Christ marquee, this morning, still said HE IS RISEN INDEED, as it had since Easter, and he went past it without reading it twice. The sign at the Methodist church said WEDNESDAY POTLUCK 6PM BRING A DISH.

He read it. He let himself read it. Then he looked back at the road and kept his eyes there, on the yellow line and the gray asphalt and the heat-shimmer already starting to come up off it even at this hour, and he said, out loud, in the cab of the truck, in the voice he had been taught to use: “Potluck. Wednesday. That’s all it is.”

It was all it was. He was almost sure. He tried, for one second, the other sentence, the one nobody had given him, the one that went I don’t know, and it would not hold; it slid off the windshield like rain off a waxed hood, and he went back to almost sure, because almost sure was something he could drive on.

The Lab did not announce itself. There was no sign on the highway, which was a decision somebody had made in 1994 when the ring was still half-built and Congress was still looking for reasons, and the habit had stuck. There was a farm road, and a turn, and a chain-link fence that ran off in both directions farther than seemed reasonable, and beyond the fence, nothing: more prairie, more cattle, a water tower, a scattering of low tan buildings that could have been a community college or a prison. Nothing to suggest that underneath the cattle and the cotton stubble, two hundred feet down, a tunnel fifty-four miles around ran in a circle so large that it took in three towns and a river, and that inside it, at this moment, protons were going around at a hair under the speed of light, thirty-four hundred times a second, waiting to be told what to hit.

Trey had explained this to his mother once and she had said, Under the cows? and he had said yes, under the cows, and she had said, Well, I hope they know what they’re doing, and he had thought about that answer more often than he would have liked to admit.

He turned in at the gate. The guard, a woman he did not recognize, looked at his badge and then at him and then at the badge again, and he watched her see the date on it and count back, and he waited to be told to pull over to the side.

“Welcome back, Dr. Vogler,” she said, and the gate went up.

7:02 a.m.

Bubba Delgado was waiting for him in the parking lot of the SDC hall with two coffees, which meant Bubba had been watching the gate camera from his desk, which meant Bubba had come in early to do it.

He did not say any of that. He stood by the tailgate of his own truck, a red Ford older than Sofia Marín, parked where it was always parked, under the one live oak in the lot, which was full of grackles going like a radio between stations, in a short-sleeved plaid shirt tucked into Wranglers, and he held out one of the coffees as Trey got down from the cab, and he said, “Howdy.”

“Howdy.”

“Black. The way God intended.”

“I’m not supposed to be having this.”

“Then don’t tell your doctor.” Bubba put it in his hand. The cup was hot through the cardboard sleeve, and the smell came up out of the little hole in the lid, dark and burnt and ordinary, and Trey stood there holding it and realized he was going to cry, and then did not, and then took a sip, and it tasted like every morning of the twelve years before this one, scorched and too strong and exactly right.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Yep.”

That was going to be all of it. He could see Bubba deciding that it was going to be all of it, the big square face under the gimme cap arranging itself into the expression of a man who was going to talk about anything but the thing, and Trey loved him for it so much that for a moment he could not look at him.

Ray Delgado was fifty, three years older than Trey, and he was the only person at the Lab who had ever called Trey brother and meant it in the Baptist sense. His people had been in Texas since before it was Texas; there was a Delgado on a land grant in Bexar County from 1790, and Bubba could tell you about it, and would, and he had never once in twelve years used it to make a point. He had built most of the data-acquisition system for the SDC detector with his own hands and a crew of six, and when it broke at three in the morning he was the one they called, and he came, every time, in that red truck, and fixed it, and went home, and was back at seven. He had a wife named Marisol who sent tamales at Christmas, every dozen labeled on a strip of masking tape in her square capitals, PORK, CHICKEN, THE GREEN ONES ARE HOT, so that nobody at the Lab ever had to ask. He had a son Trey had not heard him mention in two years.

Bubba took his phone out of his back pocket, looked at it, and put it away without doing anything.

“Haines wants to see you,” he said. “Not now. After you get settled. He said to tell you it’s nothing.”

“He said to tell me it’s nothing.”

“He said to tell you it’s nothing.” Bubba drank his coffee. “Which, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Come on. Let’s go see if your badge still works.”

The SDC hall was the largest building on the site and from the outside it looked like a warehouse where someone stored other warehouses: a tan steel box three hundred feet long and a hundred wide, windowless except for one strip of glass at the mezzanine, with a loading dock at one end that could take a semi and a row of HVAC units along the roofline the size of school buses. It sat directly over the beamline. Two hundred feet below it, in a cavern blasted out of the chalk, was the detector itself, the Solenoidal Detector, eight stories of steel and silicon and scintillator wrapped around a pipe the width of a man’s wrist, forty thousand tons of it, built to catch what came out when two protons hit each other head-on at an energy nothing in the universe had seen since the first trillionth of a second.

Trey had been inside it, during a shutdown, years ago. He had stood in the gap between the muon chambers and the calorimeter with a hard hat on and a flashlight, and the thing had been so large and so quiet that he had felt, for a moment, what people must feel in cathedrals, and he had never told anyone that either.

His badge worked. The reader on the personnel door took it with a clack and a green light, and the door unlocked, and he stood there for a second longer than he needed to with his hand on the cold steel handle.

“You good?” Bubba said.

“I’m good.”

Inside, the hall was the hall. He had been afraid, without putting words to it, that it would be different, that something would have changed in the four months to mark that he had not been there, and nothing had. The same fluorescent light coming down from forty feet up, flat and shadowless. The same concrete floor painted gray and scuffed to bare cement in the paths people actually walked. The same sound, which was not one sound but a hundred layered on each other: the HVAC, the pumps, the transformers, the cooling water in the pipes overhead, a radio somewhere playing Tejano very low, a forklift backing up with its beeper going, and under all of it the thing you felt rather than heard, a hum at the bottom of the register that was the detector’s electronics, two hundred feet down, awake. It smelled the way it always had, of ozone and machine oil, and from the direction of the break room came somebody’s microwaved breakfast burrito. It was warm in the way big buildings full of electronics are warm, a dry heat that sat on the skin.

It was the best place he had ever been. He had forgotten that. He had let himself forget it, in the bad time, when the whole of the world had narrowed to a woman’s porch light and whether it was on for him, and now he stood just inside the door with a paper cup of coffee going cold in his hand and let it come back.

“Vogler!” somebody yelled from the mezzanine, and a hand went up, and he put his own hand up, and that was that. He was back.

7:40 a.m.

The control room was on the mezzanine, up a flight of steel stairs that rang under his boots, behind a door with a window in it and a sign that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL and, under that, in Sharpie on masking tape, in Gus Halloran’s handwriting, AND GUS.

It was a long room, low-ceilinged, lit mostly by its own screens. Three rows of workstations faced a wall of monitors twelve feet high, and on the monitors the detector told you what it was doing in a dozen different languages at once: beam status in green, luminosity in a slow climbing curve, the trigger rate in numerals a foot high, ticking over too fast to read anyway, because in the spring of 2014 Bubba had stood in the doorway and said make the rate bigger, I can’t see it from the door, and Trey, who had designed the display, had made it bigger, and in the center, the big one, the event display, where every few seconds a new collision bloomed out from the center of a wireframe cross-section of the detector in a spray of colored lines and faded and was replaced by the next. It was the most beautiful thing in the building and nobody looked at it, the way nobody in a house looks at the sea. It ran whether anyone looked at it or not. That was the point of it. That was, he would have told you that September, the whole point of physics.

The room had the warm-plastic, old-coffee air of every control room he had ever sat in, and somebody had left the dry-erase markers uncapped on the whiteboard by the door. It was cold; it was always cold, the server racks along the back wall needed it that way, and the people who worked nights kept fleece jackets on the backs of their chairs year-round. The air handler breathed. Forty keyboards clicked at forty different rates. Someone laughed, somewhere in the back, at something on a phone.

And there were people. That was the part he had not prepared for, somehow: that the room would be full of people, a shift change’s worth, the night crew logging out and the day crew logging in, and that every one of them would know. Not what had happened, maybe, not the details. But that he had been gone, and why, more or less, and that he was back. He felt it move through the room ahead of him like a pressure change. Heads came up. Heads went down. A postdoc he half knew gave him a nod that was two parts welcome and one part please don’t make this weird. Sofia Marín, at the far end, headphones on, never lifted her eyes, which he decided to take as a kindness.

And Alina was there.

She was standing at the data-quality station with a tablet in one hand and a stylus in the other, talking to a shift leader about something on the screen, and she had cut her hair. That was the first thing. It had been long, in the spring, long enough that she had worn it up at work, and now it was at her jaw, dark and straight and severe, and it made her look like someone he was being introduced to. She wore the gray cardigan. He knew the gray cardigan. He knew the way she stood with her weight on her left foot and the way she tapped the stylus against her lip when she was thinking and the small frown she made when a number did not agree with her. He knew the smell of her, soap and the cedar of the closet in the house in Red Oak, and he could not smell it from here, across forty feet of cold air, and he could smell it anyway.

He did not move. He had promised Bloch he would not move, and he had promised himself, and he stood just inside the door with the paper cup in his hand and he did not move, and he watched her finish her sentence to the shift leader.

She turned. She saw him.

He had imagined this, of course. He had imagined it four hundred ways over four months, lying awake, and in none of them had he gotten the thing that actually happened, which was nothing. Her face did not change. Not anger, not pity, not the small guilty flinch he had, God help him, been hoping for. She looked at him the way you look at a piece of equipment that is back from repair: a glance to confirm it is where it should be. Then she said one word to the shift leader, which he could not hear across forty feet and did not need to, because he had watched her mouth make it a thousand times, Noted, and tucked the tablet under her arm, and walked out the far door of the control room into the Zone B corridor beyond, where the Fishbowl was, and the EXIT sign that had buzzed for as long as anyone could remember, not hurrying, not looking back, and the door closed behind her with the soft pneumatic sigh those doors made, and she was gone.

The whole thing took perhaps six seconds.

Bubba, beside him, said nothing. Then he said, “There’s a desk for you by the window. Same one. I had them leave it.”

“Okay.”

“Your login’s reactivated. Haines signed off Friday.”

“Okay.”

“Trey.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know you are.” Bubba put a hand on his shoulder, briefly, the weight of it solid through the oxford cloth, and took it away. “Go sit down. Drink your contraband.”

He went and sat down. The desk was the same desk. The fourth screen was still on its arm at the end of it, the monitoring station, angled toward the chair the way he had left it in May. The chair had the same wobble in the left front caster that he had meant to fix since the night in 2021 Gus swapped it on him. Somebody had wiped the surface down and it smelled of lemon cleaner, and under the monitor, where he had left it in May, was a legal pad with nothing on it, and a pen. He logged in. His password worked. The system welcomed him by name and told him he had four thousand one hundred and six unread messages, and he sat and looked at that number and felt, at last, something that was almost like being a person: a specific, ordinary dread.

He drank the coffee. It had gone lukewarm and tasted of the cup. He drank it anyway, all of it, and he was crumpling the cup when his desk phone rang, the first time it had rung in four months, and he looked at the display and it said HAINES, W.

He picked up.

“Trey.” Walter Haines’s voice was the same as it had always been, deep and unhurried and careful, the voice of a man who had learned early that he would be given one chance, and only one, to say anything. “Welcome back. I mean that.”

“Thank you, Walter.”

“Come on up when you’ve got a minute. No rush. I just want to put eyes on you.” A pause, in which Trey could hear him deciding how to say the next part. “And we should talk about the fitness-for-duty piece. It’s ongoing. It’s nothing to worry about. It’s just the process.”

“Okay.”

“Ten minutes?”

“Ten minutes.”

He hung up. Across the room, the event display bloomed and faded and bloomed again, one picture in every few million of the sixty million times a second that protons found each other in the dark two hundred feet beneath his chair, and nobody looked at it, and he picked up the empty legal pad, and the pen, and he went to find out what ongoing meant.