The Lizardman

The Lizardman


Morning. Eyes swelled to slits. Leaden tongue encased in a rind of rank fur, especially foul today since he hadn't brushed the night before--had simply come home and collapsed onto the low mattress after twelve hours in the bindery. A dull throb behind his right brow, typical of mornings lately. He thought he should get it checked out because normally it went away but sometimes it returned during the day, roaring back as he stooped over the conveyer awaiting the next shrinkwrapped block of magazines or catalogues to come trundling by. One day last month he had almost blacked out but had caught himself inches above the spinning iron cylinders and jerked himself upward, like a drowning man being pulled from a lake.

He groaned, rolled over and rose up on all fours to peer out the small square window above the bed. The apartment was in the basement, the ground outside at eye level. The low June sun glinted off the wet grass, burning the morning dew into a fine mist which spiraled upward in the colorless light, as if the earth itself were smoldering. He squinted into the brightness and collapsed back down onto the mattress, the ancient springs crying out a shriek of protest.

Suzanne had been working with him then. A small, taut woman, hair a cascade of red ringlets and her wrists cocooned in black spandex braces. She'd been at the other end of the long low machine, feeding thick columns of pages into its intake troughs with a hand crane. He knew she'd seen because when he looked over her dull lips were pursed into a tight O of worry that hadn't yet caught up with the relief in her eyes. She hadn't said anything then but must have told someone later because after she went to lunch the foreman came over and asked if everything was okay. He could never remember the foreman's name but they all called him The Lizardman. The Lizardman was bald with twitchily alert eyes that looked like polished black pebbles and two curtains of tanned, leathery skin that shot up out of the collar of his corduroy workshirt and hooked onto either side of his chin and did a strange sort of rhythmic expansion and contraction when he talked. Can take a few minutes and go sit in the break room if you want, The Lizardman had said. Thanks but he was good, he'd answered, lying because tiny coils of blankness were still dancing in front of his face and he felt like he did after you stand up real quick after sitting down for a long time.

The foreman had nodded. Okay kid. But he'd stood there looking at him with his strange igneous eyes until he'd turned back to the conveyor. Well, you feel like you need to, you let me know.

After that he'd felt bad about calling the foreman The Lizardman and had made sure to try and remember his name. It was Jules, which he thought was an odd and incongruous thing for a factory foreman to be named. Made it easy to remember though.

He lay in a cold sunbeam and thought and tried to recall whether or not he'd dreamt during the night. He hadn't. Or he had but didn't remember. It was the same thing. Claire had thought that we dream every night. She said it was just that most of our dreams are so vivid and spectacular that something forces our minds to forget them because that something knows real life can never compare, and the dreams we remember having are only our most mundane ones because if we knew how brilliant most dreams are we'd just lay in bed all day, waiting to have them. She'd espoused this theory to him the first night they'd met, at a party that seemed like a hundred years ago. Sometime in high school. They'd been standing out on the back deck of a large house in a blandly luxurious neighborhood that had sprouted up along the spine of a golf course. He forgot whose house it was but he remembered the deck was of smooth blond cedar and it was summer and he remembered the electric blue glow of the pool beyond the deck and the hum of its filter and the smooth rolling expanse of the fairway beyond that. They'd clutched cups of thick red plastic, his filled with beer topped by a pale froth the color of dishwater and hers with vodka and cranberry. She was smoking a cigarette. He didn't smoke but she didn't know or didn't care and when she offered it to him he took it and put it to his lips, tasting her strawberry gloss atop the bitter paper. He was half drunk then and later when some of them decided to go out onto the golf course he was drunker and they lay on their backs on the cool, cropped turf and he reached over and took her hand and she gave it and they stayed there until the others had gone back inside, damp midsummer breeze licking their faces as they watched the stars swirl overhead like time lapse pictures of their path through the night sky and he thought nothing would ever be more perfect and in some ways he was right and in some ways he wasn't.

He realized he needed to piss. He lay there for a while as that bestial urge battled the equally primordial inertia that glued his weary body to the bed. Finally he threw the tattered blue blanket off his shoulders, inhaling sharply at the cold in the room. The thin walls of the cheap frame house were a sieve against the morning chill. He hustled into the bathroom, bare soles stung by the icy concrete beneath the meager carpeting that was orange and black and yellow and looked like whoever had laid it had fucked up and put the wrong side facing upward.

A flash of memory. Years after the party. Not long enough ago. Claire's apartment in the city, on the edge of Chinatown. Winter. A dual lighting bolt of pink neon from the sign outside the window streaked diagonal across her face, breaking at her chin and reappearing wavily on her thin neck like that science trick where you stick a pencil into a glass of water. He'd thought the neon sign was direly dramatic and made the apartment feel like the set of a noir movie, or a parody of one. He'd thought about that as she told him she never wanted to see him again and how could he have done something like that and how could she ever look at him or let alone touch him again you bastard. He half expected some unseen director to yell cut and her tears to evaporate as quickly as they'd come and the two of them to deftly pick up the strands of whatever casual conversation they'd been having before the take, as all around klieg lights were moved and camera angles rejiggered. She'd let him stay the night on the couch and he didn't know why she did this but he did stay. He set his cell phone alarm for six thirty and the next morning he closed the door softly and went down the stairs and out into the charcoal dawn and walked past the glistening golden carcasses of ducks and chickens hanging in the fogged windows of dim sum restaurants and a week later he left the city.

In the bathroom, he stood with one foot on a frigid blue tile and one on a frigid white tile and urinated. He turned to look in the mirror above the sink. He noted absently that the beard he'd been growing for the past month looked all at once raffish and ridiculous.

He walked into the living room and scanned for the remote. He spotted its top third sticking out from between two overstuffed red couch cushions like a stranded man hailing rescue. He extracted it and flicked on the TV. A local mattress commercial featuring a smiling multicultural troupe of acrobats or dancers. They were propelling themselves off double queens and California kings into a variety of aerial flips and contortions, all in slow motion, smiling wide against a stark white backdrop as the low low prices floated by behind them. He watched, waiting for the girl with the pixie haircut who did splits in the midair nothingness but it must have been the shorter version of the ad and it ended without showing her.

He looked around the small room. A few framed watercolors he'd scavenged from yard sales clung to the dull beige walls. They were of the Motel Room School; two seascapes and an anonymous small town main street. The furniture consisted of the couch, which had come with the place, plus an overstuffed armchair he'd put the down payment on with his first paycheck and wasn't anywhere close to paying off. The dust-rimed 27-inch TV had been a gift from his parents before he went off to college. A pair of small side tables he'd picked up for free from the end of a driveway down the street rounded out the accoutrements.

No work today, or the next three. The wide world free and his until Tuesday. The schedule at the bindery was three twelve-hour days on followed by four days off and then vice versa. Some of the workers who'd been there for years said it used to be four on and three off every week, but they'd threatened to unionize and got some concessions made.

He liked them, his co-workers, but he found them haunting somehow, especially the long-timers. Their gnarled and veiny hands were mottled with fresh pink papercuts and dull white scars of same. They moved about the binding machines with an unconscious ease and unison, like ballroom dancers with long familiar partners. Many hadn't read a magazine or leafed though a catalog in years, the glossy pages imbued with a malignancy bred by the unceasing contact, the years spent feeding and loading and stacking and restacking. Nearly all of them had some level of carpal tunnel or trigger finger. They wore neoprene and latex braces or tightly wound Ace bandages on their forearms and wrists and at lunch they held their plastic forks with a concentrated and awkward gentleness, as if using the wrong hand.

He liked them though. They had a weary kind of grace and they told good stories and jokes and cursed at each other malicelessly and some of them had known his older brother and they asked about him. He sometimes went with them to the bar after the day shift let out at eight. The bar was just down the street from the bindery and it opened at seven in the morning to accommodate the night shifters, the seven PM to seven AM crew, those whose orientation with the rest of the waking world had been perverted into a sharp relief, those who raised their glasses with the sun, secure and comfortable there-and perhaps only there-in their nocturnal fraternity.

Word was that the changeover was coming soon, when the shifts would switch and the nights, for his whole life a refuge from whatever tribulations were brought by the harsh light of day, would no longer be his. He clung to a vague confidence that he'd be out of there by then, done with the bindery, on to bigger and better things. It was an apocryphal, murky assurance that looked more and more like bullshit whenever he thought about it. So he tried not to think about it.

He looked at the cable box. Six thirty-two in digital green. Once this would have surprised him, but no longer. Waking with the dawn half the week had recalibrated his internal clock to the point where he could no longer sleep late, even on days he was off. These days were in some ways worse than those in the bindery, allowing as they did the uninterrupted opportunity to view the once familiar town he'd known for twenty five years from this foreign and perverted vantage point. Strange apartment, strange job in a factory he'd never even known was there, strange new buildings rising like kudzu, strange faces in the streets and in the stores and strange names in the paper. A place he'd once called home now a memory distorted in a funhouse mirror.

He leafed through the previous day's mail, which he'd been too tired to sort through the night before. Electric bill. Packet of coupons. Credit card offer. Low APR. Act Now. Junk. Shit. On the bright side though, no magazines. No catalogues.

-----

On the way into town they pass the lights. A twinkling city high in the dark hills that rise up away on the eastern horizon. Gazing up at the lights is one of his two or three favorite childhood memories. He'd press his nose against the cold glass of the car window and try to take in as much as he could because you can only see the lights for a few seconds through a break in the tree line bordering the road and then they are gone. As a child it seemed to him something out of a fantasy novel, a hidden city of dwarves or elves. Streets of glistening granite or maybe gold. A secret world up in the heavens, visible to the outside for only a preciously fleeting instant from the backseat of a 1984 Oldsmobile. It is one of the few wonders of his youth that hasn't lost its mystique with maturity, nor, in this case, with the fact that he's long since learned the lights are really a medium security state prison, used mainly to house nonviolent drug offenders. A pair of his high school classmates are currently doing three to five each up there for dealing prescription drugs by the trunkload, and a few years back his cousin Ray had served 18 months there for his third possession conviction. But for him it will always be The Magical Dwarf City. Its lights, on cloudless nights like this one, blend into the stars, as if annexed by the heavens themselves.

Scott drives. Scott always drives because Scott's car is a company car and they'll reimburse him for the gas without asking too many questions. He's known Scott since the tenth grade, but they'd only really been passing acquaintances through high school; a nod in the hallway, a few minutes' chat while huddled around the keg in some basement or garage as a jostling mélange of cups jockeyed for position under the tap. He'd lost track of Scott during college and his stint in the city, but he'd run into him on his third day back here in town. Scott was coming out of the bank and they'd literally bumped into each other on the sidewalk. They'd exchanged the requisite hurried apologies and both continued on their way, but a moment later Scott had placed the face and had called back to him and yeah sure I remember you and how've things been going and whatcha been up to and great to hear you're back in town and here take my number and I'll give you a call this weekend and he'd actually called and he'd been happy to have some connection, however tenuous, to the old days and that had been that.

Scott is one of those unfortunate people whose body lingers too long in adolescent awkwardness. He is tall, reedy; all elbows and angles, with large ears and a patchy dusting of facial hair sprouting up at random locations on his wide, ruddy face. Scott had gone to a nearby community college and gotten a job at the local branch of an insurance conglomerate. He lived with his girlfriend, who was from a few towns over and had gone to the same college as Scott. She was a nurse now and she was starting to talk about marriage and this scared Scott shitless.
This is what they talk about as they pass the prison and the metaphor is there, yes, but hokey and on the nose and he feels like an ass for even registering it. It is like that time during the college semester when he took the history of political uprisings class, and one morning he'd noticed that the soap bubbles in the kitchen sink had formed a shape uncannily similar to the outline of the United States as they'd slipped toward the drain. He'd been floored by the profundity of it all for the first few seconds but had then actually literally laughed at himself.

Scott is saying he doesn't know. He loves Rachel, sure. But marriage is something else entirely. Like here's who Scott's going to be with for the rest of his life, which is scary enough itself, Scott says. But somehow what's even scarier, says Scott, is that Rachel seems completely untroubled by the prospect of living with Scott for the rest of her life. Scott says this scares him because it pretty much means that she likes who Scott is now and is totally sure that he's going to be the exact same way forever and he's never going to change or be anything different. Like she just knows that of course Scott's going to be the same for the next sixty years, she and Scott both being the same forever and then they die.

He listens as Scott says this and finds he understands more or less completely. He thinks about Claire again.

They drive past Heritage Hills, one of the dozens of master-planned communities that have been slapped up all over town by zealous developers in the past few years. A low stone wall lit from below by three small spotlights crouches at the entrance to the development, the name of which is spelled out in a medieval-looking font on a sign affixed to the wall.

Like most such communities, Heritage Hills is aimed at the sort of upper-middle-class-slash-lower-upper-class consumer group that had been borne of easy credit and an enthusiastic stock market. The neighborhood is comprised of large, square homes crammed onto tiny lots so as to ensure that the maximum number of houses possible can be built. No more than ten yards separate each house from its neighbor, and nearly every driveway is occupied by a dark-colored SUV and a cream-colored mid-range model luxury sedan, as if that specific automotive pair has been mandated by some ruling neighborhood cabal; maybe the same shadowy group whose approval is required before you can paint your home a different color or install new windows or put up blue Christmas lights instead of white.

His mother has lived in Heritage Hills for about three months. She bought the house with the money from his father's life insurance policy, but that is not why he no longer speaks to her. Buying the house he understood. Even if logic would seem to dictate that a widow with two grown children would need, if anything, a smaller home, rather than one nearly double the size of the modest split-level where he'd grown up, the house on the cul-de-sac with light blue vinyl siding that had comfortably housed a family of four. He understood this, knew she could never have played the widow in the tiny house with the cats and the soap operas and the moth balls. That, to her, would be the dress rehearsal for her own death. She needed the house with the four bedrooms so she could say to herself that it was a good thing she had all this room because it was great for entertaining and hosting overnight visitors and it would be a perfect place for her grandchildren-of whom she'd no doubt soon have at least a couple, she was just sure of it-to come over to Grandma's and play. She needed this house so that she could talk about these things happening, whether or they actually would or not.

Scott's headlights sweep over the low stone wall and Heritage Hills falls back into the night.

What he hadn't understood was the documentary. The cable TV documentary about the end of his father's life. It had been back in the early winter, right after he'd come home. The cancer his father had carried in his pancreas for the past two years had spread, invading the rest of his body. His parents and his brother, the newly-minted attorney, had travelled out to a clinic in Chicago where there'd happened to be a documentary being filmed about terminal cancer patients. Lucky them. A few days after they arrived the doctors told his father he didn't have long. The next day the producers of the documentary approached them about participating. He thought of vultures. But his parents had said yes. This he did not understand. This he could not believe. Granting a camera crew unlimited access to his father's wretched, cancer-wracked final weeks and days, parading the family's pain and confusion and helplessness out onto basic cable, there for the perusal of whoever happened to flick by the science channel while eating chips or doing a crossword puzzle or smoking a joint or falling asleep, his father's life and its end reduced to an hourlong diversion for a slow Wednesday night. This he did not understand. This he could not accept, no matter how many times his mother tried to say that it was a good and important and selfless thing to do because it was a landmark examination of death and dying and it could help others deal with the deaths of their own loved ones, and that Dad had agreed to it and everything would be done respectfully and appropriately and they really hoped he'd participate in it, but that if he decided not to that was his right, but to please understand that they were still going to go ahead with it and please to not be mad about that.

The documentary. This was why. He'd refused to be a part of it. This was why he hadn't spoken to her in nearly half a year. This was why he also hadn't talked to his brother, who had gone along with it, dutifully playing the role of saddened but enlightened son, giving an interview in soft lighting at their father's bedside, holding his hand and saying how it was a tragedy, of course, but also a happy time. That Dad would soon be in a better place. That they'd all made their peace with that. All except his brother, who unfortunately was still having a tough time dealing with it. And then a slight rueful shake of the head and a soft fade to a black screen and a note to the audience saying the family's younger son has refused to participate in this documentary.

This is why. This is why he left the clinic in Chicago and why he wasn't there when his father died 19 days later, right before Christmas, and this is why he would never forgive his mother or his brother or the producers or the camera crew or the cable science channel or the clinic or cancer or his father or himself.

-----

Clancy's Tavern is housed on the bottom floor of a brick building that was once part of a contiguous block of such structures. Now all of its neighbors have been demolished and it stands alone, like the sole remaining tooth in a mouth where the rest have been punched out. He sits with Scott at the end of the bar and orders a third round and watches the people he does not know. He feels like an interloper here among the unfamiliar faces. Here and there the younger brother or sister of an old classmate, their bone structure and mannerisms mirroring that of their elder siblings, but yet distinctly other, distinctly part of the new race that has inherited the nights that had once belonged to his generation. The nights that used to be charged with electric possibility and a warm sense of belonging, everyone beatified in warm pools of communal light against the world's dark. But they've all gone now, gotten married and started families or moved off to somewhere else and the nights are not the same.

He'd tried that, had moved to the city after college, followed that arc. For two post-graduate years he'd shared a third-floor walkup with two college friends. Through an employment service he'd found a job at an advertising agency and on his second day he'd gotten on the elevator and there was Claire. Claire, who he hadn't seen or thought about since her family had moved to Texas the summer after high school. Claire, who'd just started as a junior creative at the agency and she couldn't believe it and wow what a small world. They'd started dating a short time later and together they shared the passage into adulthood and careers and dinner parties and taxes and vacation time and business trips, all against the backdrop of the vast, thrumming metropolis. For two years they'd followed The Path of The Young Professional Couple. For two years the arcs of their lives, which had improbably re-intersected, had run parallel once more. But then the ad agency was bought out and all non-essential personnel were downsized and he was apparently non-essential and his landlord was selling his building to be converted to condos and his father's cancer had taken a turn for the worse and Claire had found out he'd been fucking a girl in the payroll department, all of it happening nearly simultaneously. He and Claire had had it out cinematically in her film noir apartment in Chinatown and then he left the city and came back here and found a shitty apartment and took a shitty job in a magazine bindery and then a camera crew taped his father dying.

He listens to Scott talk about Rachel some more and orders shots of a clear, syrupy liquor that tastes like cinnamon and burns on the way down. He feels it roiling in his gut and searing his sinuses all at once. He looks up at the ceiling with watery eyes and waits for it to pass. Scott is saying that if he and Rachel do decide to get married they'll definitely wait until he gets a promotion so she can stay at home and take care of the kid. It makes sense that they'd have a kid pretty soon after getting married, Scott says.

He gets up and heads to the bathroom. He navigates the sea of crunched, jostling bodies with the practiced ease of one who has walked through many a crowded bar, turning sideways to sidle deftly through the minute spaces between the clusters of patrons talking excitedly in tight circles of three and four and five.

On the way back he sees The Lizardman. Jules. He's sitting alone at a table against the wall, a near empty whiskey glass dangling from the tips of his thick-knuckled fingers. He is surprised by this, as this particular bar is not one of the haunts of the bindery workers, and he can't remember The Lizardman ever going out for a drink with the crew in the first place.

The Lizardman doesn't see him and his first instinct is to hide, to disappear back into the crowd of listing, swaying bodies, but he doesn't do this. Instead, he walks over to The Lizardman's table and says hey there. The Lizardman looks up and smiles, but does not give any indication of surprise at the unexpected sight of a familiar face. He only half notices this, because he suddenly realizes that he and The Lizardman have never had anything that could really be called a conversation and he tries to think of something to say.

Hey Kid, says The Lizardman. How you doing?

Pretty good, he says. Didn't know you came here.

Been years. Have a seat?

As he sits, The Lizardman downs the remainder of the whiskey and sets the glass onto the scarred, lacquered wood of the tabletop and extends his hand. Good to see you, he says.

He realizes this is the first time he's ever shaken hands with The Lizardman. He expects it to be cold and rough and scaly but it is not. It has the soft yet powerful quality of a businessman's hand. It feels like his father's hand had felt before it became thin and bony and feminine from the disease.

They talk about the bindery. Talk about when the shifts are due to switch. A waitress comes by and he orders a beer and The Lizardman orders another whiskey, neat. They talk about the new hand cranes that are due in any day now and how they're making everybody sign up for a tutorial session like it's some kind of rocket science and The Lizardman smiles and chuckles and the curtains of tanned flesh on his neck do their strange rhythmic expansion and contraction.
The waitress returns with the two drinks atop a plastic tray. She says it'll be nine fifty. The Lizardman tells her to put it on his tab. He protests but The Lizardman says don't be silly, man comes to a bar once in a decade, its his duty to make some measurable kind of financial contribution to the establishment.

The waitress smiles and disappears back into the throng, deftly holding her tray aloft above the heads of the crowd. They both watch the tray disappear back into the roiling human sea and when it is gone The Lizardman says they still do get some pretty waitresses in here don't they.
He nods. So you haven't been in here for a while he asks.

Nope. Ten years at least. Maybe more.

Tonight a special occasion?

The Lizardman takes a sip of his drink. Anniversary, guess you could say.

Anniversary of what?

The Lizardman looks at him. Let me ask you something he says. You been having any more trouble with that head of yours? Like that day a few weeks back? Suzanne said you near conked out onto the belt, which is something you don't hear too often.

He thinks for a moment. You knew huh?

The Lizardman slides his glass in small circles on the table. It makes a heavy scraping sound. Course I knew, he says. Seen it happen plenty of times.

I though you said it didn't happen often?

You don't The Lizardman says. But I been around a long time. Just cause something ain't common doesn't mean I haven't seen a whole lot of it.

He laughs. The Lizardman smiles.

You got some stuff on your mind I'm betting, and I'm also betting that's putting it pretty lightly.

Neither speaks and the din of the crowd seems distant and muffled somehow.

Don't have to talk about it if you don't want to The Lizardman says.

But he finds himself wanting to. He finds himself needing to. For some reason he can't guess at he needs to tell The Lizardman about Claire and about his father and his mother and this strange town and how he can't figure out how he's gotten to where he is right now. He needs to say this. So he does. He tells The Lizardman all of this and The Lizardman listens and moves hardly at all except to nod slightly every so often and the bar and the crowd fall away into the blank periphery of his consciousness and it is he and The Lizardman only.

When he is done telling all he has to tell The Lizardman looks down for a moment and then back up at him. His eyes, which have always seemed blank, appear all at once full of something indefinable. I lied to you before says the Lizardman. Well, didn't tell you the whole entire truth. When I told you why I was here. I said it was an anniversary, which was true enough. But it's also a going away party.

Where you headed, he asks.

Well see, the two are connected. The anniversary and the going away. A son of mine; my only one in fact. Raised him myself after my wife passed when he was but three years old. Raised him until one day he told me I didn't understand him and didn't get what his life was about and he had to leave. Had to get out, he said, and he went off out west somewhere and just like that it was like he'd never been there in the first place. Like I had a son and then I didn't.

The Lizardman reaches into his back pocket and takes out a wallet. He flips it open to a picture and passes it across the table. It is worn at the edges and faded to an orange-ish brown and depicts a face that could easily pass as The Lizardman's own.

That's him The Lizardman says. My son. Robert. Haven't seen him since the day he took off. It'll be 20 years tomorrow. Thing is though, he was right. I didn't understand him. And he didn't understand me neither. Lately though, I've been starting to think that maybe I do. Maybe I do understand. Understand that understanding ain't the most important thing, if you get me. Especially when it comes to people who you love.

They both look at the photo and are silent.

So, The Lizardman says. It's my going away party because I'm going away to find him. To find my son. 20 years after he left; sounds about right, doesn't it? Poetic and all that. Because now I understand that understanding ain't the most important thing. Sooner you realize that, son, the better off you're gonna be.
After a moment The Lizardman finishes his drink and gets up to go. Good seeing you he says. And take care of yourself.

He wants to speak. Wants to ask The Lizardman things, but his mind seems stuck or blocked somehow and the only thing he can say is okay see ya later and before he can even get the words out The Lizardman is gone.

-----

In the car on the way back he drives while Scott dozes in the passenger seat. They pass Heritage Hills.

Tomorrow he will watch on the news about the death of a local factory foreman named Jules Sanders, discovered dead that morning by a self-inflicted gunshot wound and at first he will not believe it but then a picture will appear above and to the right of the blond-haired anchorwoman's face and he will see the blank, dark eyes and the curtains of neckflesh and there will be no doubt and he will have to sit down. The blonde-haired anchorwoman will tilt her head and purse her bright red lips to make clear that gee isn't this is a Sad Story and she'll go on to say that Mr. Sanders was predeceased by his wife, Evelyn, who was killed in a car accident in 1970, and by a son, Robert, who had been found dead of a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles motel room in 1992.

They car passes the prison lights up in the hills. Tomorrow he will watch this on the news and he will call his mother and his brother and he will quit his job at the bindery and he will buy a train ticket to the city and maybe Claire will meet him at the station and maybe she won't but he will go there anyway.

Tomorrow he will do all of this. But tonight, he pulls the car over and looks at the lights for a very long time.

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