He had a BlackBerry, an iPad, an iPod, and a third-generation Kindle.He had a pain, mild but constant, a fluttery twinge in the soft tissue just above his left eye, deep in the hollow where you’d put your thumb if you were going to try lifting him by his cranium. Sometimes late at night, in his tiny apartment in a grimly forgotten, perpetually unfashionable corner of Lower Manhattan, he would find himself Googling: twinge, eye, flutter. Or: thumb, skull.When it occurred to him what that last pair rhymed with—numbskull—he stopped Googling it. But he couldn’t forget.Each weekday, Harold took the subway to his job at a video store a few blocks from Ground Zero, a place with a sale bin out front and a sputtery neon sign in the grimy window. Once it had thrived, but the only videos people rented nowadays were ones they wouldn’t dare view on the Internet for fear of prison time.The films didn’t have brightly illustrated cardboard sleeves, or even titles. Furtive men—no women, in Harold’s depressingly extensive experience—entered the store with money in hand, and asked without looking up at Harold for number 19, or number 204.Harold wondered if they were ashamed of themselves, or if maybe they just didn’t like seeing his eye twitch.
