I.

The ship from Cork brought me to New York in the spring of 1853 and the city smelled like salt and coal smoke and something I couldn't identify, which was the smell of money, because money has a smell, and I was twenty-three years old and I had never smelled it close up.

I worked on a construction crew building a warehouse on the Lower East Side. Marcus Whitcomb was the contractor. He was a man who spoke politely and counted carefully and never raised his voice. He was also the man who decided how much we got paid and when and whether the hours we worked counted as full hours or half hours or something in between that didn't have a name.

My contract said I would work until the job was done. That was the whole sentence. Work until the job is done. No definition of done. No definition of work. No definition of anything.

The crew stopped working at five o'clock every day. The job was never done at five o'clock. But at five o'clock, the crew stopped. And according to the contract, when the crew stopped, the job was done, and when the job was done, my obligation ended, and when my obligation ended, I was entitled to a full day's pay because the contract paid by the day and did not pay by the hour.

I figured this out in the first week. I told myself nothing about it. I went home. I ate. I slept. I came back the next day and the next day and the next day and every day after that, I worked from seven in the morning until five in the evening, exactly eight hours, and I collected a full day's pay, and the difference between what I earned and what I would have earned if the contract had defined hours was five dollars a week.

Five dollars a week. That was food for a week. Or coal for a week. Or both, if you were careful. I was careful.

II.

The materials clause was trickier. The contract said I was responsible for ordinary wear and tear on tools. Ordinary was not defined. Wear and tear was not defined. Ordinary wear and tear was not defined in any combination that anyone could point to and say, there. That is ordinary. That is not ordinary.

I found this out by watching the tools. The hammers got loose. The saws got dull. The shovels bent. None of this was my fault. None of it was not my fault. The contract did not say who was responsible for tool maintenance. It only said I was responsible for ordinary wear and tear. And wear is ordinary. That is the whole point of the word. Things wear. That is what wearing is.

I filed formal complaints. Three of them. Each one in writing. Each one citing the materials clause. Each one requesting that Whitcomb replace the tools at his own expense, because the tools were worn and the contract did not say I had to replace worn tools and therefore the replacement of worn tools was Whitcomb's responsibility, not mine.

Whitcomb replaced the tools. He replaced them himself. He stood there and watched me replace them and his face was the same face it always was, polite and even and counting, and I thought, this man is not angry. He is not even surprised. He is calculating. He is adding five dollars a week to three hundred dollars a year in tool replacements and he is deciding whether it is worth it to change the contract.

It was not worth it. The crew needed tools. If the tools were gone, the job would stop. If the job stopped, Whitcomb would lose more than three hundred dollars a year. He replaced the tools. I filed three complaints. He replaced the tools.

Then came the safety clause.

The city regulation required adequate safety provisions on construction sites. Whitcomb had none. The city was about to shut down the site. I read the regulation. I cited it in writing. I demanded that Whitcomb name me the official safety contractor for the site — a position that paid two thousand dollars a year.

Whitcomb had no choice. The city would shut down the site. He named me. I became the safety contractor. I made a list of safety provisions. I checked them off. I signed the city forms. I received two thousand dollars a year.

III.

The suit came from a tailor on Mulberry Street. It was cheap. It was wool. It was the kind of suit that a man wears when he wants to look like he belongs in a room that he has never been in before.

I stood in front of the mirror and tried on the name. Samuel Bright. Samuel Bright. It felt like lying. It felt like freedom.

I went back to the construction site one morning in a suit and Whitcomb looked at me and said, Mr. Bright. He said it politely. He said it carefully. He said it the way a businessman says the name of another businessman.

We were not enemies anymore. We were colleagues. I had become the thing I had fought, and the fight was over.

IV.

Samuel Bright sat at his desk and signed the labor contract with a pen that cost more than his father earned in a year. He handed it to the young Irishman on the other side of the desk. The boy was twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. He looked like Seamus O'Brien had looked in 1853, before the suit, before the name, before the desk.

The boy took the contract. He held it in his hands. He looked at it the way a man looks at a piece of paper that might contain the difference between survival and ruin.

Samuel did not tell him about the clauses. He did not tell him about the gaps. He watched the boy leave his office and walked to the window and watched the boy walk away into the street below.

The boy was already looking for loopholes. Samuel could see it in the way he walked.

============================================================ OTMES v2 Objective Code ============================================================

Code: OTMES-v2-D7AE86-1A9-M5-0E1-703C52-727D Variant: 06-New-York-Realism E_total (TI): 42.5 Dominant Mode (M): M5 Dominant Angle: 225.0° Irreversibility: 0.85 Dominance Ratio: 0.6 N vector: [0.6, 0.4] K vector: [0.3, 0.7]

M_vector: [2.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 9.0, 3.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0]

TI Classification: T4 遗憾级 (Regret)