An online novel by Gillette Edmunds

Heat waves floated across the gray, flat distance. The heat forced up the alcohol from the past days, churning in Michael’s chest, sweating out his red forehead. A face bobbed around in Michael’s mind. Someone last night, maybe a friend of the prostitutes. Dark black eyes under purplish, swollen lids. Puffy, red cheeks, a thick black beard and thick black hair above the eyes. The eyes squinting, becoming slits under the throbbing purple lids. Something horrible, embarrassing, had happened. What did I do last night, Michael asked, now sweating profusely under the arms. He could not place the face. He wanted a glass of Orvieto but he was never going to drink again. Now he knew why he quit years before. Just drink nothing today and tomorrow will be fine. No hangover. No memory loss. God, who was that? Focusing on the olive groves, his mind wandered away from the guilty image.

He drove several hours in the same lane, not looking at the others in their cars, just staring down the gray road and out into the countryside. This is nothing, he kept thinking. I should be doing something. I haven’t accomplished anything on this trip and I have clients waiting for me at home and stacks of memos piling up. Every small return has to be finished and pending audits have to be completed or assigned to one of the CPA’s under me before September 1. Then I devote full time, full time, to the Aramco Steel refund return. Michael had to complete this return before the merger of Aramco and Constant Petroleum. The merger, if it went through, could take a year and he would be fully responsible for the tax research, the tax ruling and the tax aspects of the written merger agreement. And here I am, he thought, on some goddamn highway in the middle of Italy doing nothing to get ready. A disaster.