This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

Moylan said the first law of engineering was to make the world a better place. (He didn’t state the second law, that without exception everything that was engineered would one day break down, that sometime, and usually one day after each machine had become indispensable to living, that machine would abnegate all responsibility and not turn on, you’d press its red button and it would just sit there looking at you, and you’d press the button a second time as though excusing it that one time it had forgotten its job and forgotten that its whole purpose was to serve this one simple function, and you’d press the red button or throw the switch and an absolute nothing would happen, a less-than-nothing, a minus action because it would seem you were in a worse-off place than nothing happening because now not only had you forgotten how you lived before but you had to find a service man, and while some part of you always realised that you were living in the forgotten edge of nowhere you didn’t have the hard proof until you tried to find a service man to come to Faha. Where? Oh there might be one coming next week, definitely the week after that, or the one following, and, as it slowly dawned on you that to make his journey worthwhile the same individual was waiting for more machines to break down, you kept pressing the red button because maybe today after the bit of a rest you never know it might turn on, and when it didn’t, when you’d tried the pressing combined with a small shove, w...