He hadn’t always held this outlook; it had grown and developed over many years, and more or less in tandem with his professional responsibilities. Zachary was a busy man, a man Nick Roma frequently called upon to perform impossible tasks within unimaginable deadlines. This was not done out of disrespect, not really, but, as with most overlords, Roma’s mind lacked the fine appreciation, so to speak, that would allow him to understand the hard work, the painstaking discipline and attention to detail, that went into the creation of a convincing fake, a successful lie, a counterfeit passport, visa, marriage license, or birth certificate that would deceive even the most careful and discerning eye. To Roma, Zachary was little more than a forger of papers, a duplicator of documents, a living stamp pad, a photocopy machine that happened to be made of flesh and blood, a tinkerer who did what anyone else could do if only he had the spare time. By Roma, craftsmanship was appreciated only insofar as it translated into instant results; fail to meet his demands just once and you were labeled incompetent, inept, a fool who could not perform a task that could have been assigned to any dilettante, perhaps even some drunk who had been dragged out of the gutter by his collar.

Zachary knew and accepted this as the lot of the artist. What incomprehensible pressures must Michelangelo have faced under the demands of his patrons? Or Shakespeare? Paint that ceiling now! Finish that play by tonight and give us some damn good lines! Make us laugh, cry, gasp with awe and excitement, and hurry, hurry, hurry! Ah, how they must have despaired. Yet where would they have been without those financial supporters? What would they have done for a livelihood? The tension between art and commerce was a vital if maddening constant. The fuel of productivity. The yin and yang—yes, yes!—the yin and yang of the creative process.

If only it didn’t result in insomnia, heart palpitations, ulcers, and premature hair loss.

Now, as he walked across the boardwalk on Brighton Twelfth Street, the weathered wooden planks under his feet bare of snow due to some vagary of the ocean gusts, gulls wheeling and scissoring above his head, the roiling gray sea to his left, Brighton Beach Avenue to his right, his apartment building behind him, the newsstand where he bought his Russian-language newspaper two blocks ahead, the bakery where he would pick up his breakfast rolls two blocks farther on, his travel agency a block beyond that across from the elevated D train tracks ... as he walked to work this morning along the route he took every morning at six o’clock on the dot, never a second shaved—never, never a second—Zachary told himself it was time to push these useless, egocentric musings, these petulant blips of dissatisfaction, out of his mind and get down to thinking about the important business of the day.