A Magnificently Useless Man

Chapter One: The Last Public Intellectual on Oleander Street

Howard Plunkett had not held a paying job in two years, and he wanted everyone to understand that this was a choice.

He explained it most mornings, usually to his mother, usually while she was doing something else. "A society," he said on the third Tuesday in April, seated at the kitchen table in a green corduroy sport coat and pajama bottoms, "gets the thinkers it deserves. Fulton, Ohio, does not deserve me. And yet here I am."

"Here you are," said Connie Plunkett, who was scraping the burnt part off a piece of toast into the sink.

"That was not a complaint."

"No, honey."

"It was a diagnosis."

Connie was seventy-one years old and had spent thirty-one of those years in the billing office of the Fulton Water Department, where she had learned that most human beings could be handled the way you handled a delinquent account: patiently, repeatedly, and without hope. She set the toast in front of her son. He examined it the way a jeweler examines a suspicious diamond, then ate it in four bites.

The Plunkett house sat at 1147 Oleander Street, a sagging yellow bungalow with a porch that leaned six degrees to the east and a concrete donkey in the front yard. Howard had bought the donkey at a yard sale for eleven dollars and had, over the past three years, delivered no fewer than forty separate defenses of it to anyone who slowed down to look. It was not a lawn ornament. It was a statement about labor. If you couldn't see that, said Howard, that was frankly a *you* problem.

He had moved back into his childhood bedroom three years ago, after his wife, Lori, had informed him with terrible gentleness that she wanted a life in which the phrase "epistemically indefensible" was not used about a grocery list. Howard had taken the divorce as further evidence of a general cultural collapse. He had also taken the good reading lamp.

At forty-four, Howard was six-foot-three and something close to three hundred pounds, and he moved through the world like a piano being delivered. He had a master's degree in philosophy from Mahoning Valley State, a diploma he had framed himself, badly, so that the mat sat crooked and the whole thing hung in the hallway at an angle that made visitors want to fix it. He owned exactly one hat, a brown porkpie he believed made him look distinguished, and he wore it indoors when he was thinking hard, which was most of the time.

His mornings had a liturgy. Coffee, four sugars. Then the letters.

Howard Plunkett was, by volume, one of the most prolific correspondents in the state of Ohio. He wrote to the city council. He wrote to the editor of the *Fulton Ledger-Dispatch*, which had stopped printing him in the fall after a nine-hundred-word letter about crosswalk striping that had somehow arrived at the Peloponnesian War. He wrote to corporations. He was currently three letters deep into a dispute with a chain restaurant about the phrase "boneless wings," which he had described in his most recent draft as "a lie of geometry, a lie of anatomy, and a lie of the spirit, sold at eleven ninety-nine."

"They sent you a coupon," Connie said, going through the mail.

"They sent me a *bribe*."

"It's for a free appetizer."

"They believe I can be purchased for mozzarella sticks." He held out his hand. "Give it to me."

After the letters came the Great Work.

The Great Work lived in the hall closet in eleven three-ring binders, arranged by color in a system only Howard understood, and it was titled *Geometry and the Decline of the Moral Stomach*. It was a treatise. It concerned, in Howard's words, "the shape of appetite in a nation that has forgotten how to be hungry for the right things," and in the words of the one graduate school friend who had ever read part of it, "honestly kind of great in places and unreadable in others, man, you have to cut like two hundred pages." Howard had not cut two hundred pages. He had added four hundred.

No one else had read it. Connie had tried once, in 2019, and had gotten as far as page nine, where Howard had used the word "chyme" six times.

At one o'clock, Howard took his afternoon constitutional.

This was the sacred part of the day. He put on the porkpie hat, took his handheld tape recorder — an actual cassette recorder, purchased at an estate sale, which he preferred because "a machine that hisses at you keeps you honest" — and walked next door to the vacant lot.

The lot at 1149 Oleander had been empty since before Howard was born. There had been a building on it once; nobody in the neighborhood could agree on what. It was now a rectangle of weeds, gravel, three volunteer maples, a shopping cart that had achieved a kind of geological permanence, and a rusted sign so faded it read only *NG*. Howard walked its perimeter at the pace of a man in mourning, eleven minutes a lap, four laps, dictating.

"Recording one thousand and six," he said into the machine. "The moral stomach, as I have established, does not merely digest. It *chooses*. Consider the county fair. Consider the funnel cake."

He walked. A dog barked two yards over. A truck downshifted on Fifth.

"Consider," said Howard, "that no one has ever been improved by a funnel cake, and yet."

He stopped. He rewound. He listened to himself say *and yet* and nodded, satisfied, because it was good, because he was good, because somewhere out beyond the transmission shop and the Dollar General and the shuttered Kroger there was a world that would one day discover that in Fulton, Ohio, in a rectangle of weeds, a serious mind had been at work.

On the fourth lap he noticed the notice.

It was stapled to the telephone pole at the corner of the lot, a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve, already curling at the edges. Howard read it twice. Then a third time, moving his lips, which he only did when something was wrong.

**NOTICE OF PROPOSED DEVELOPMENT AND ZONING VARIANCE**
**Parcel: 1149 Oleander St.**
**Applicant: Fullerton Ventures LLC**
**Proposed Use: Collaborative Workspace Facility ("The Hive")**
**Public hearing: Fulton Zoning Board, April 29, 6:30 p.m.**

Howard stood very still in the weeds. A grackle landed on the shopping cart.

"The Hive," he said.

He said it the way other men said the names of diseases.

He raised the tape recorder to his mouth, and for the first time in perhaps three hundred recordings, he could not think of a sentence. He clicked it off. He clicked it on. He said, "Recording one thousand and seven," and then, in a voice that had gone strangely quiet, "They are going to build a *hive*."

He walked home so fast that his hat came off and he had to go back for it.

Connie was in the front room with the television on, watching a program about people buying houses in Tennessee.

"They're developing the lot," Howard announced.

"Mm. I heard."

Howard stopped in the doorway, filling it. "You *heard*?"

"Fern Dombrowski told me at church. Some young fella bought it. They're putting in one of those offices where nobody has an office."

"And you didn't *tell* me."

"Howard, you were writing to the wings people."

He took off the hat and pressed it to his chest, which he did when he wanted a moment to be historic. "That lot," he said, "is a commons. It is the last unimproved ground in a nine-block radius. It is where I *think*, Mother. Where I do my *work*. And they are going to put a — what does it even say — a collaborative workspace facility. Do you know what that is? That is a room where thirty people who don't like each other pay rent to sit near each other and pretend to be founders. That is a barn for the mediocre."

"There's a barn for the mediocre at the mall," said Connie. "It's called the food court and you eat there twice a week."

"Do not confuse me with my enemies."

"Sit down, you're breathing funny."

Howard did not sit down. He was seeing something, and it was glorious. He was seeing himself at a podium. He was seeing a room full of people who had come to be bored and who would leave transformed. He had spent twenty years waiting for the world to bring him a subject worthy of his instrument, and now the world had come to Oleander Street and stapled it to a pole.

"I will object," he said.

"To who?"

"To the *city*. Formally. There is a process. There is *always* a process, Mother, and the beautiful thing about a process is that it is the only place in America where a man with nothing is theoretically equal to a man with everything."

Connie looked at her son. He was standing in her front room in a corduroy sport coat with a mustard stain on the cuff, forty-four years old, with four dollars in his wallet and eleven binders in her closet, glowing like a lighthouse.

"Do you want a sandwich first?" she said.

"I will take the sandwich," said Howard, "to City Hall."

He took two.