Taylor has been in this office before, on a school trip where Mr. Fanta gave a tour and spoke about old newspapers and then spoke in unclear words for a long time about many other things and then cried. But Taylor had paid attention to what he could understand, and he remembers that this building exists because a rich man built a saloon and a pool hall beneath six hotel rooms. So where Taylor sits is the old saloon floor, which he remembers is from hickory trees, cut down in Town of Zion and made into floorboards by Quaker people. Behind the old saloon in the old pool hall is where Mr. Fanta used to make the newspaper before there were computers. In there, behind a curtain with pictures of ducks, is a urinal the size of a bathtub, and beside that tilts a rust-stained toilet that has a black seat and no lid. The stairs go over the toilet to the balcony above Taylor, where Mrs. Fanta used to work on the very first kind of computer, and that balcony used to be the hallway to the hotel rooms that Mr. Fanta told the class were crammed with old historical papers that nobody cared about but him. Taylor thinks of all this because several minutes ago the man had asked his mother for gasoline, which means he doesn’t know that underneath the hickory floor there would be a simple drain valve on the big tank that Mr. Fanta explained was in the basement, fuel oil to run the boiler that pushes steam to the radiators in the winter.

Or maybe the man does know. A boy like Taylor develops a sense of when to be quiet, which is almost always, rather than be behind, or wrong, or both.

Shut up, a voice often tells him. Just shut up.

He senses acutely a bull’s-eye on his back, and he often wants to cry like a baby in front of people, the way Mr. Fanta had cried in front of his whole first-grade class. Yet he is neither a baby nor an old man. He is a big and lucky boy, people tell him, loved by everyone, they tell him, but he doesn’t feel big or lucky or loved, and hearing this over and over without believing it feels like the wheel of a great valve screwing down on him and turning him off.