Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.

If you thought about it, private security was just another form of Buddhism, tai chi. To live in the moment, fluidly, thinking of nothing more than where you are and what exists around you. Bodies in space and time moving along a prescribed arc. Shadow and light. Positive and negative space.

I’m a sensualist, she told people, which was something that sounded sexy and fun when she was twenty-five, but now—at seventy—just sounded wrong.