With a dog, a dark puppy who will grow well. A truck, wet winters and steep roads. Quiet and no talking in the evenings, stupid duck blankets. Hip music alone. The girls in town are interested. Big cities are downstream. Gas prices. The other men are hungry all the time. Their bodies are insisting. My piano teacher is obese. She wears floral prints and is not much better at the piano than I am, but I go to her and we enact a ritual of learning. The knowledge pretends to pass from her to me, although it actually travels from the piano directly into my hands. The two of us watch this miracle, and talk about the end of winter. My crush is on the checkout girl, in cowboy boots. She is clarity for me, the first time I have really looked at a woman in five years. The grocery scanner tells her what I have already read on the label, 89 cent peas, 3.49 hungry jack. I could arrange her a poem of prices, and she would recieve it electronically. She looks up from my peas as if this has actually happened. We both smile, knowing that she doesn't need to work here, and I don't need to eat hungry jack. She is beginning to fill the singular void in my mind. Her name is in my head when I wake up, before I open my eyes. She is different from my other obsessions, because I don't lose my faith in her each morning. I don't need to convince myself of her while I wait for the coffee to brew. I don't need to measure water to dose my conviction.
            It's my day off. I'm at the boot warehouse. The boots are amazing. The way they force me to walk,  to be decided, linear. There is only one way to walk in boots. I leave without buying them, I'm no cowboy boots guy. All accessories will eventually be forgotten; I know this about myself. Plus she probably wouldn't see them from the cash register. In the parking lot cradled by mountainsides, springtime is peeing its pants. The weekends don’t mean what they did when I was a kid. They have become another time slot. I can feel my heart becoming a man’s.  When I first moved to town, I believed I could get my footing if the ground would just stop moving for three days. I could be prepared, composed. Three days of movies in my bedroom with the curtains drawn, it became a week, and everything slipped, lost contact, second viewings. The carsick desire to never arrive, to never get out; I realized it's never going to go away. So I went to work with the other men, to increase my appettite. After work this week some of us drove to the stone quarry. I made a mortar that launches flaming paint cans, which explode when they hit something. The boom is deafening, and you can feel the heat 20 yards away. The guys were totally in awe- I was a celebrity. It was like we hadn't changed since 13, not one bit in relation to that ball of fire. I beamed. I’ve been hoping my checkout girl won’t catch wind of it.

The strangest news story I've ever seen is on when i get home, on every channel. Researchers have proved, conclusively, that computers do not actually do anything.
            "Test subjects have been able to produce identical results to actual computers when an empty box is plugged into monitors and keyboards." A press conference is frenzied, the speaking scientists look exhausted. "Without awareness that the box is empty, the participants achieved comparable results to those who operated actual computers. Upon seeing inside the empty cube, however, the device would cease to function." The news anchors are baffled and incredulous. Images of disassembled computers are narrated. They are filled with tiny black rectangles, silver boxes, impenetrable circuit boards. It cuts back to the recorded conference.
            "We realize how difficult this is to accept, but your home computer is just a convoluted heater.  The transistor is a semantic device. You remember what you remember. The computer just boosts your confidence."
            I change the channel and find similar coverage. I This is a totally inappropriate development for the modern world. I create mental secenarios that prove it is impossible. It makes me feel like I am floating a foot above my chair.  It takes me a second to realize that this is a good feeling. I try to call my father, but the lines are tied up. I look around the room, waiting for the power to go out. But it doesn't. I decide to go find something physical, something reliable, like vegetables. I hop in my truck and head to the grocery store.
            On the back of the local newspaper, a tiny ad promises me "Love is like water; we'll help you drink." No one is talking about computers. I pick up some bottled water. She isn't here. I will talk to her even if it ruins my life.
            I have ended up back at my house, I couldn't think of anywhere else to go. I stand outside and look at it for bit. I touch my beard and sink into the mud slightly.
            At work there is a palpable sense of joy. No one really knows enough to talk about it, but it seems the whole world is freed by the knowledge of the computer hoax. So far, out there, nothing much has changed. All the computers continue to work, or fake working. The price of a computer hasn't changed. We are taking a long break, sitting on stumps and listening to the snow melt.
When I get home my father calls me back. We exchange our awe at the world’s ability to surprise us. He owns a computer with hand-carved redwood casing, from Russia. It cost him a fortune. Strangely, it crashed as he was reading an internet article about the empty box study, never to turn on again.
“When I called a repairman, he actually laughed at me. I guess it was the emperor’s new computer.”
            “You’ve got bad luck with that kind of thing,” I tease him.
            “I haven’t talked to anyone else whose pc stopped working.”
            “Well, yours was made of wood.”

I put down the phone  and sit down on the living room couch, with my dog. I can feel a pressure building now. If I wait too long, she will become a figment of my imagination. It’s always embarrassing to think about someone so much more than they think about you. Soon I will have created a monster of her in my head, a perfect beast that could never be reconciled with her. The mental image will become jealous of the real girl; sabotaging me, tying my tongue. My puppy slides off my lap while I’m thinking about her, landing on his tiny head with a dull thud and a small yelp. I pick him up in an instant of minor terror. He is squinting and licking his chops, it was a stinger. But he is undamaged, not visibly stupider. He will not carry a trauma into his life, or even beyond the sensation of pain in real time. I carry him into the kitchen and give him a bisquit.
 
            It’s another Saturday afternoon. I’m at my piano teacher’s birthday party. Her grandchildren have loaded her cake with the actual number of candles for her age, 63. There are no longer individual flames, they have all merged into a single rocket cone of fire. The frosting is glistening in the orange light, becoming a sugary lake in the intense heat. My piano teacher approaches the cake, squinting and ducking, trying to get close enough to blow at the base of the flame. Everyone is laughing hysterically, even her husband.  He is a retired lumberjack who slowly became too fat to work; who came down the mountain one day as a log instead of a logger. Candles start to fall off the side and onto the table cloth- he grabs a fire extinguisher and bursts a cloud of CO2 over the cake. People are on their knees laughing without noise now. I feel like I am watching the scene as an America’s funniest home videos clip. Obnoxious narration is eerily absent. It will become a family legend extending through every birthday. We eat the cake despite the extinguisher. Later this year my piano teacher and her husband will drive off a cliff on vacation in Yellowstone. They will both fall asleep on a narrow mountain highway; their stomachs, inches from the dash, rising and falling in slow, serene sleep breath. Or so I will picture it later on. I will make an oil painting of the scene, in mountain night blues, lit by the orange glow of the speedometer and radio. It is the only good painting I will ever make. Somehow, without picking up a brush since high school, I will have matured immensely as a painter. I won’t show it to anyone for another five years.

“I know who you are,” she says, “it’s a small town.” I’m here, I’m doing it- introducing myself. My mind is racing. I am trying to analyze the coyness in her response. There is no reliable data. It’s like war. She rests some bananas on the scale.
            “I’m flattered.” The ways my response could be faulty: effeminate, over-educated, snide, over or under-confident. Light is just pouring off her face, like watching a movie star on screen, a glow that won’t focus. She’s going to cook my face off. I am fighting for the power to overcome her effect on me. Now I have completely lost track of how long you should look at someone in the eyes. But I’ve looked away early too many times in my life, so I look longer. Puppy food scoots across the laser scanner. It’s funny. I came to this town to be comfortable, but I have sought out the person most able to make me uncomfortable. I can feel the echoes of the instant replay that will happen in my mind over and over later on, one million interpretations silence me before the words come out, leaving the silence subject to intrepretation. What is it like on the other side of this conveyer belt boundary? In her world, knowing her family, waiting for her to get into her own bed.
My brain and mouth reconnect. “So I guess that scanner isn’t actually doing anything right now, right?” I’m trying to bring the mystery of the modern world into our lives. It is a nerdy risk to take.
            “I’ve been thinking about that. So what am I doing right now, you know?”
The scanner beeps as the laser lines up with package of oreos.
Later we will go out for beer. She will tell me that she is leaving town, moving to Helena, to be with her fiance. Being happy is not what I have always thought it was, I’m realizing. It ‘s like flexing a muscle. Everything can be in place, but it’s hard to really feel it for any length of time. I am endlessly able to take it for granted, to adjust to the odor of it. There’s the point with someone where you are comfortable enough to be confessional, or to share a subtle joke and not explain it, or just to lie there. There is a brief period when the gates are open, when bashfulness is dissolved, but before you really know her. It’s too bad that we can’t always live in this realm, of graceful people who are not defined by habits, who can surprise each other with lifetimes full of wit and observation streaming smoothly into the present moment. Knowing that she and I will never get to this point, we kiss behind the building. I say goodnight, and wish her good luck in Helena. I need to let my dog out.