The Breezes by Joseph O'Neill Page B

as a highway through wheatfields, one that took you cleanly through bright and glassy distances, through exams, years in junior andmiddle management, a partnership in a small firm, through a mortgage and kids and retirement and through, finally and blindingly, to the end. The end! It hit me night after night. No matter how tired or drowsy I was and no matter how many sheep I counted, inevitably it flapped down towards me as I lay there in the distractionless dark; and then it suddenly arrived, all claws – that realization. The repercussions were physical. My entire organism was thrown into confoundment: something catapulted in my gut, my face flushed with heat, my brain dispatched furious signals to my extremities. Most strongly of all, though, in the midst of this panic, I felt hoodwinked. Most of all I felt like a man stung by a terrible con.
    I would leap out of bed in horror. I would hit all of the lights, grab a cigarette and begin walking around in my bare feet, trying to clear my mind. I would switch on the radio and, if things were really bad, the television, trying to find a late-night movie or game show, anything. Only when Angela lay with me, when, the warm freight of her breasts in my hands, I glued her to me for the long duration of the night, were things any better. But it was not enough – a man cannot lead the life of a limpet. So I turned my hobby into my career. The make-or-break, one-day-at-a-time life of a chair-maker, I reasoned, would be a life of corners, of hairpin twists and turns. There would be no long view. There would be nothing in sight but the job in hand.
    Fat chance. I was like the prisoner who lowers himself down on a rope of bedsheets only to discover that he has escaped into the punishment wing. That is to say, for a while, my extrication looked like coming off. I worked hard, ideas came, I worked hard at the ideas. I made chairs, sold them all and made a small name for myself. But as soon as things started to go right, things started to go wrong. ‘Your struggling days are over,’ Pa said, hugging me like a goalscorer when he heard the good news about the exhibition. ‘You’re getting there, son. Now you’ve got some light at the end of the tunnel.’ This immediately made me feel uneasy: the whole point of the exercise was to stay in the tunnel, in my burrow of activity. A day or two later, I received an enigmatic telephone call. ‘Put ona jacket and tie,’ my father said. ‘I’m picking you up in fifteen minutes.’
    â€˜What for?’
    â€˜Just get dressed,’ Pa said.
    I did as I was told and put on the outfit Merv’s tailor had made for me. It didn’t fit, but it was the only suit I had.
    In the car, Pa said, ‘Johnny, I’m taking you to see a friend of mine – an adviser. I’d like you to listen to what he has got to say. Just hear him out, that’s all I’m asking.’
    â€˜Who is this guy?’ I said.
    â€˜Mr O’Reilly,’ Pa said.
    â€˜Who’s Mr O’Reilly?’
    The pensions and insurance man, that was who. The last person in the world I needed to see. But fifteen minutes later, there I was with my father at the office of the man to whom he had entrusted the best part of his income. O’Reilly worked high up in the Wilson Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the city, its transcendent bulk edged with blinking lights to warn off aircraft. Those beacons were redundant when Pa and I arrived there when the huge dusk sun reflected on the Tower’s steel-and-glass flanks lighting the building like a blaze. Inside, though, all was cool and regulated, and when the bing of the elevator sounded and we were delivered into the air-conditioned chill of the thirty-first floor, it felt like we were aboard a jet plane, as though the Tower gathered momentum as it gained altitude until, at a crisis in its ascent, it took flight.
    Before us was an enormous open-plan working-space