Richard Hall sat on a park bench in New Harmony and looked at the bottle caps in front of him.

There were forty-seven of them. He had counted them three times. The count was always forty-seven. This was important. The count had to be right.

He sorted them by color. There were twelve red ones, mostly from soft drink brands. Eight blue, from laundry detergent bottles. Sixteen green, from beer bottles and some salad dressing brands. The rest were clear or translucent, with a few that were a color he could not name - a yellow-green that existed somewhere between two categories and refused to be assigned to either.

He had been collecting them for eleven months.

New Harmony was a small town in Iowa, or somewhere in Iowa. Richard could not remember which state. It did not matter. All towns in New Harmony were the same: standard-issue houses, standard-issue parks, standard-issue benches. Everyone had the same income. Everyone lived in the same kind of house. Everyone ate the same food from the same ration system. There was no poverty. There was also no point.

Richard used to work on Wall Street. He managed a hedge fund. At the height of his career, he managed approximately two billion dollars. He made decisions every day that moved markets. He ate at restaurants where the menus had no prices and the waiters did not ask if he wanted to sit at a table or on the floor. He had a apartment in Manhattan with windows that went from floor to ceiling and a view that included the entire harbor.

None of this existed anymore. The wealth equalization program had eliminated it, along with everything else that made life worth living. Not because the program was cruel. It was not cruel. It was generous. It gave everything to everyone. And in doing so, it took everything from everyone.

Richard's apartment was comfortable. It had a bed, a desk, a chair, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. Everything was standard. Everything was equal. Everything was exactly what he did not want.

He sat on the bench every day and looked at the bottle caps. He did not collect them because he liked them. He collected them because the act of collecting was the only thing that made him feel like he had something. Not everything - something. A small, meaningless, worthless something. But something.

Tom Brennan sat down on the other end of the bench.

Tom was perhaps fifty-five, with a face that had been weathered by sun and wind before the equalization program put him in a standard-issue house with standard-issue windows and a standard-issue life. He had been homeless before the program. Richard had seen him once, years ago, sleeping under a bridge in Chicago. He did not know how he had ended up in New Harmony. Nobody did. The program had simply assigned him here, like it had assigned everyone else.

Tom had a small pile of bottle caps in front of him too. Richard noticed this for the first time. He had seen Tom on this bench before, sitting in silence, staring at the ground, but he had never noticed the bottle caps.

They sat in silence for a while. The park was quiet. A few children played on the swings in the distance, but even their play seemed mechanical, as if they had been told how to play and were following instructions rather than inventing games.

Tom reached down and picked up a bottle cap. He turned it over in his fingers, examining it, then placed it on his pile. Then he picked up another. And another.

Richard watched him work. There were approximately twenty-three caps in Tom's pile. Fewer than Richard's, but not by much. They were sorted the same way - by color, roughly. Tom's sorting was less precise, but it was sorting nonetheless.

After a long time, Tom spoke.

"I used to sleep under a bridge."

Richard did not look at him. He kept looking at the bottle caps.

"Now I sleep in a nice apartment."

Still Richard did not look. He picked up a red cap from his pile, examined it, and placed it back down.

"And yet."

Tom gestured at his pile with his chin.

Richard nodded. He understood completely. He did not need to understand it verbally. The understanding was in the bottle caps, in the forty-seven of them sorted by color on the ground between two men who had nothing left to say to each other except what the bottle caps said for them.

A woman walked through the park. She was perhaps forty, wearing the same standard-issue clothes as everyone else. She stopped at a bench across the path and sat down, took a small object from her pocket, and began examining it. Richard could not see what it was from this distance. It might have been a pebble. It might have been a button. It might have been a bottle cap.

He thought about the woman at the bench across the path. He had seen her here before, sitting on the same bench, examining the same small object, over and and over. She did it every day. It was her routine. Her purpose. Her reason for coming to the park.

He thought about the man who spent three hours a day walking the same block, counting his steps. He thought about the woman who arranged her cutlery in different patterns every morning. He thought about all of them, in their standard-issue houses, performing their standard-purposeless routines, trying to create a sense of having in a world where everyone already had everything.

The streetlights came on, one by one, illuminating the park in a soft yellow glow. The bottle caps on the ground between Richard and Tom caught the light and reflected it back, small metallic eyes blinking in the dusk.

Richard picked up a clear cap and turned it over in his fingers. It was warm from being in his pocket. He could see his reflection in it, distorted and small, like a face seen through the bottom of a glass.

He put the cap back on the ground.

He did not know what would happen tomorrow. He did not know what would happen next week or next year. He knew only that he would sit on this bench, and Tom would sit on this bench, and they would look at their bottle caps, and they would not speak, and that would be enough.

Not good. Not bad. Enough.

The children on the swings stopped swinging and sat still, their feet dragging on the ground, watching the streetlights come on, waiting for something that was not coming and did not need to come because the waiting itself was the point.

Richard closed his eyes. The bottle caps were still there behind his eyelids, forty-seven of them, sorted by color, glowing faintly in the dark like stars in a sky that no longer meant anything but was beautiful anyway.