Tom O'Connor lived above a bodega on Essex Street in a fourth-floor walk-up that smelled permanently of boiled cabbage and someone else's fried onions. He was twenty-eight, Irish-Catholic on his father's side and unspecified-European on his mother's, which in Manhattan meant his grandfather had been a potato-famine refugee who changed his name from O'Connell because he thought the L looked foreign. Tom had kept the O'Connor.

He worked at a shipping company on the West Side, moving boxes from one ledger to another, which is to say he typed numbers into a machine and the numbers moved from one column to another and nobody ever thanked him for it, which is also to say it was honest work and Tom liked that.

The disc arrived on a Tuesday. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, no return address, just his name written in a handwriting that looked like it belonged to someone who wrote letters by hand: *Thomas J. O'Connor, 3B.* He opened the paper and found the brass disc, small as a saucer, covered with engraved gears. He struck it against the fire escape railing.

It chimed. He had wished for a sandwich, and when he opened his apartment door, a man from a deli three blocks down was standing on his threshold holding a wrapped ham on rye and looking profoundly confused.

"Someone ordered this," the man said. "I don't know who. But it's yours."

Tom ate the sandwich. It was excellent. He went to work the next day and did not think about it again until William arrived.

Bill O'Connor was Tom's brother-in-law, married to his sister Margaret, who was married to Bill in the sense that two ships can be moored to the same dock without liking each other. Bill was forty-five, unemployed, and possessed of a skill that Tom both admired and despised: the ability to convince anyone of anything, provided the anyone was gullible and the anything was a lie.

Bill showed up at Tom's door with a duffel bag and a story about being between places. Tom gave him the couch. Margaret gave Bill a look that meant *fix this or I'm leaving*, and Bill gave Margaret a smile that meant *I will fix it eventually, probably by Tuesday.*

The disc sat on Tom's windowsill. Margaret saw it on the third day. She was a sharp woman with sharp hands and a sharper instinct for value. She ran her fingers along the brass surface, felt the engraved gears, and looked at Tom with an expression he recognized: hunger.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Nothing," Tom said.

"Tom, I'm not stupid. You struck it and a sandwich appeared out of nowhere. What is it?"

He told her. About the brown paper, the string, the delivery man, the sandwich. Margaret listened without blinking. When he finished, she said: "Strike it for me."

"I don't think—"

"Strike it. For me. For us. For Bill, who needs a job. For you, who needs a raise. For me, who needs to know that something in this world still works."

Tom struck it. "Margaret needs a new coat," he said.

A woman appeared at the door holding a mink coat and looking profoundly confused. Margaret took it inside.

Bill found out within the week. He was not subtle about it. He asked Tom three times in as many days. On the fourth day, while Tom was at work, Bill opened the front door, stepped inside, took the disc from the windowsill, and struck it against the wall.

"I want everything," he said. "I want money. I want power. I want Margaret to stop looking at me like I'm a mistake. I want everything I've ever wanted, right now, all at once."

The disc chimed. Bill felt nothing happen. He felt relieved, actually—a lightness in his chest, as though a weight he had been carrying for decades had been lifted. He went to the kitchen and made himself a beer and sat at the table and thought about calling Margaret to tell her he had found a job, that things were going to be different now.

He picked up the phone. He could not remember his own phone number. He put it down. He could not remember his name. He stood up. The room was familiar—he knew it was his apartment, he knew he had lived here for fifteen years, he knew Margaret slept in the bedroom down the hall—but he could not connect any of it to himself. He was a man in a room, and the room was real, and he was not.

Tom came home to find Bill sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the wall, smiling slightly, tears on his cheeks.

"Bill?" Tom said.

Bill looked at him. "Do I know you?"

Tom struck the disc. "Let him remember who he is."

The disc chimed. Bill blinked. He looked at his hands. He looked at Tom. "Tom?" he said. "Tom, I—"

"You wanted everything," Tom said. "The disc gave it to you. Everything is everything. You don't get to pick and choose."

Bill spent six weeks in a facility on the outskirts of the city. Margaret visited him every day. She brought him photographs and old letters and a copy of the baseball program from 1963, the year they had met at a Giants game in the Polo Grounds, which no longer existed, which was appropriate, because Bill was beginning to understand that some things are lost and cannot be restored, only remembered.

Tom kept the disc. He struck it occasionally—food, rent, a winter coat for Margaret's children. He was careful. He asked only for what he needed. He kept a list on the back of an envelope: what the disc had given him, what it had taken in exchange. The list was balanced. It always would be.