The paint was peeling off the walls of Room 214 in long brown strips, like sunburned skin. Frank Callahan had been meaning to report it to the maintenance office for three years. The maintenance office had never responded.

He stood at the front of the classroom, chalk between his fingers, looking at twelve students of whom three were paying attention. The board was green and stained with the ghosts of last semester's equations. The projector had been broken for four months. The heating system made a rattling noise that sounded like a dying engine.

"Newton's first law," Frank said. "An object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an external force."

Kevin Dunne was asleep in the third row. His head was on the desk, mouth open, a line of drool connecting his cheek to the notebook. Frank didn't wake him. He'd stopped trying to wake students up two years ago.

The bell rang at 2:50 PM. Students filed out without a word. Frank packed his briefcase and walked back to his office, a small windowless room in the east wing that smelled of stale coffee and floor wax.

His office mate was Marie Dufour, who taught French and literature. She had been a professor at Penn State until she refused to sign a loyalty oath during the McCarthy investigations of the faculty. She'd been demoted to community college teaching ever since. They rarely spoke about work. They spoke about the weather, their children, the price of groceries.

"Raining again," Marie said, looking out the cracked window.

"Yeah," Frank said. "Raining again."

He drove home forty miles through rain-slicked roads. The town of Iron Creek spread out before him: a main street of boarded-up storefronts, a closed-down steel mill that had been closed for five years, a church with a steeple that leaned slightly to the left.

His house was a small bungalow at the end of a dead-end street. He'd bought it twenty years ago when the mill was still running and his salary had been enough to afford it. Now the house was worth less than he owed on the mortgage, but he stayed because his son Kevin was in college in Pittsburgh and his ex-wife Carol lived three towns over and this was the only place he had left.

He opened a beer in the kitchen and sat at the table and watched the rain hit the window.

He used to work at a national laboratory. That was before the community college, before the divorce, before the world stopped making sense. The lab was in New Mexico, or maybe Colorado, he couldn't remember which. It didn't matter. What mattered was that he had been part of a project that studied atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena, and that the project had been canceled, and that he had been let go.

Not fired. Let go. There was a difference. Fired implied wrongdoing. Let go implied optimization.

He'd been optimized.

The beer was cold and bitter and exactly what he needed. He finished it and opened another one and thought about the equation on the board in Room 214. An object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an external force.

He had been an object at rest for three years.

The next morning, he taught Newton's second law: F equals MA. Force equals mass times acceleration. The harder you push, the faster things move. He said it with a flat voice, the same flat voice he used for everything now.

"Sir?"

Frank looked up. It was a girl in the second row, dark hair, serious eyes. He couldn't remember her name.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Lisa."

"Okay, Lisa."

"Did your research ever work? The thing you used to do?"

The class went quiet. Three students who hadn't been paying attention before were now listening. Kevin Dunne lifted his head from the desk.

Frank thought about this. He thought about the equations he'd spent ten years developing, the theories he'd published in journals nobody read, the breakthroughs that had been canceled before they could be implemented. He thought about the laboratory, the equipment, the colleagues who had become friends and then became strangers.

He thought about what he was supposed to say. The honest answer was complicated, and complicated answers didn't fit in a community college physics class at 8 AM on a Tuesday.

"It was canceled," he said.

Lisa nodded, as if this was the answer she had expected. As if she understood.

Frank turned back to the board and wrote F equals MA and moved on to the next problem.

At 3 PM, he drove home. At 4 PM, he called Carol. She didn't answer. He left a message: Hey, just checking in. How's the new job? He didn't know why he'd called. He wasn't sure what he'd wanted to say.

At 6 PM, he sat at the kitchen table with a beer and watched the rain. The mill was still closed. The town was still dying. The world was still moving forward without him.

He finished the beer. He opened another one. He thought about Newton's first law.

An object at rest stays at rest.

Unless acted upon by an external force.

He wondered what his external force would be. He wondered if he had one coming. He wondered if he cared.

The rain kept falling. The mill stayed closed. Frank Callahan sat at his kitchen table and drank a beer and thought about nothing at all.