For a moment he thought that washing the dishes might have been a mistake. Having created a single bright spot, no matter how small, seemed to make the rest of his life look even more dismal by contrast. Maybe he should have just gone with the downward flow, like the pilot who pushes down the stick to pull out of an uncontrolled spin.

Secretly, Robert believed that if things got so bad that he couldn’t see his way out, something would come along and not only save him from disaster but improve his life overall. It was a skewed brand of faith that he had developed through years of watching television—where no problem was so great that it could not be surmounted by the last commercial break—and through two events in his own life.

As a boy in Ohio he had taken his first summer job at the local county fair, picking up trash on the midways. The job had been great fun for the first two weeks. He and the other boys on the cleanup crew spent their days wandering the midways using long sticks, with nails extending from one end, to spear paper cups and hot dog wrappers as if they were hunting lions on the Serengeti. They were paid in cash at the end of each day. The next day they spent their pay on games of chance and repeated rides on the Zipper, which was the beginning of Robert’s lifelong habit of exchanging money for dizziness and nausea.

The day after the fair ended, Robert and the boys were told to report to the livestock area of the fairgrounds. They arrived before dawn, wondering what they would do now that the colorful carny trailers and rides were gone and the midways were as barren as airport runways.

The man from the county met them outside the big exhibition barns with a dump truck, a pile of pitchforks, and some wheelbarrows. “Clean out those pens, boys. Load the manure on the truck,” he had said. Then he went away, leaving the boys unsupervised.

Robert had loaded only three forkfuls when he and the boys ran out of the barn gasping for breath, the odor of ammonia burning in their noses and lungs.

Again and again they tried to clean the stables only to be overcome by the stench. As they stood outside the barn, swearing and complaining, Robert noticed something sticking up out of the morning fog on the adjacent show ground. It looked like the head of a dragon.

It was beginning to get light, and the boys could hear banging and clanging and strange animal noises coming from the show ground. They stared into the fog, trying to make out the shapes moving there, glad for the distraction from their miserable task.