The fluorescent light in the convenience store hummed at a frequency that made Danny's teeth ache. He had been standing at the counter for four minutes, waiting for the kid behind the register to finish his phone call, and in those four minutes he had thought about nothing and everything and arrived at the conclusion that thinking about nothing was easier.

The kid was maybe twenty. He had a tattoo on his left forearm that said MOM in script, and he was wearing a uniform that was one size too small, and he was scrolling through something on his phone with the focused attention of a man defusing a bomb.

Danny cleared his throat.

The kid looked up.

"Do you know what Carver said?" Danny asked. He did not know why he asked this. It was a Tuesday night. He was buying coffee. He was alone. There was no one to say it to but a kid who worked at a convenience store and whose name he did not know. But he said it anyway, because saying things was what he did. It was the only thing he did.

The kid shook his head. It was not an affirmative shake. It was the shake of a man who is prepared for anything and committed to nothing.

"Carver said, 'Writing is writing.' That's profound."

The kid looked at him. He did not smile. He did not frown. He looked at Danny the way you look at a street you've walked a thousand times and only now notice has cracks in it.

Danny continued, because stopping was harder than continuing. "Carver is the founder of dirty realism. He writes about ordinary people's lives."

The kid put his phone down. "You teach creative writing?"

"Yeah. At the community college."

"Who to?"

"Students."

"Any students?"

Danny paused. He had not expected this question. It was simple. It was direct. It was the kind of question that cannot be answered with a quote. "Occasionally."

The kid looked back at his phone.

Danny stood at the counter. The coffee in his hand was already cold. He had bought it to warm his hands, not to drink. He was cold inside. He had been cold inside for a long time.

"Carver said," he said, and he did not know why he kept saying it, "if you don't know where to write, write about a man walking into a room."

The kid looked up. "Okay. A man walks into a room. Then what?"

"Then he finds out the problem isn't in the room. It's in him."

The kid put his phone in his pocket. He looked at Danny. He looked at Danny the way you look at a mirror you didn't know was there.

"What about you?" the kid said. "When you walk into a room, do you find out the problem is in you?"

Danny did not answer. He put a five-dollar bill on the counter. He took his change. He walked out of the store without his coffee.

---

The next day, he did not go to the community college. He sat at his kitchen table in his apartment above a laundromat in a town in Ohio that had a Walmart and a closed-down factory and a diner that served coffee that tasted like pennies, and he opened his laptop and he wrote an email to the department chair.

Subject: Resignation

I won't be teaching anymore.

That was it. That was the email. He hit send before he could change his mind.

The chair replied ten minutes later.

Okay. Thanks for letting me know.

Danny closed the laptop. He went to his bedroom. He took the shirt off the hanger. It was a plaid shirt, white and blue, washed so many times it was almost gray. He had bought it the day he got the teaching job. He had worn it every day for two years. It was the shirt of a man who taught creative writing at a community college. It was the shirt of a man who believed, or pretended to believe, that words mattered.

He put the shirt in the washing machine. He turned it on. He watched it spin.

When it was done, he hung it on the line in his backyard. The wind was blowing. The shirt swayed. It looked like a person standing at the end of the yard, waiting for something.

He did not wear it again.

---

He stood on the balcony and watched the shirt sway. It was just a shirt. It was a plaid shirt from a department store, bought on sale, washed until it was almost gray, hung on a line in a backyard in a town in Ohio. It was nothing.

But it had been something. For two years, it had been the uniform of a man who told other people how to write and could not write a sentence of his own.

He went back inside. He opened his computer. He opened a blank document. He sat for ten minutes. He typed three words. He deleted them.

He closed the computer. He went to the kitchen. He poured a glass of water. He stood at the window and looked out at the Walmart parking lot. A car was parked in the shadows. Its turn signal was blinking. On. Off. On. Off. Like a heartbeat. Like a man walking into a room and finding out the problem was in him.

Danny drank his water. The glass was cold. The water tasted like nothing. He stood at the window and watched the blinking light and thought about nothing and felt nothing and that, he realized, was the problem.

Not the shirt. Not the job. Not the town. The nothing. The empty room inside him where the words were supposed to be but weren't.

He finished the water. He put the glass in the sink. He went to bed. He did not dream.

--- OTMES v3.0 客观张量编码 编码: OTMES-v2-AAD983-073-M2-023-8R723-1CF0 总体文学势能 E: 7.36 主导模式: M2 (喜剧) 方向角: 23.2deg 张量秩: 8 M向量: [1.0, 8.5, 9.5, 1.5, 2.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.5] N向量: [0.65, 0.35] K向量: [0.7, 0.3] 不可逆性 I: 0.3 无辜受难 C: 0.2 原始作品: 愚蠢的毛拉