Part One

If you want to get rich you have to get lucky. Most everybody gets lucky a few dozen times in their life, but they don’t know it when it hits, they don’t keep their eyes open. They keep racing after their lusts and dreams as if they have any say in the types of luck that will be granted them.

A few years ago I would have counted myself among those blind masses, but fortunately I lost my lusts and dreams. Not that it matters, but here’s how it went down. Since the day I could speak, I spent hours each week watching the giant bone blades of the wind farm across the valley. My master plan was to expand the farm to our side, so as the years blew by I studied and dreamed solutions to every foreseeable issue. At 19, I brought it to the state and they said it was a stupid idea, the topography was all wrong.

My parents smiled sadly at me that night, and the next night my girlfriend said she was bored of me. Hell, I was bored of her. I waved her goodbye without reciprocation and sat on the bed, watching the distant flashes atop the turbines until I couldn’t stand the lurid yellow lamplight reflecting off my viewing window. It had always been a pointless venture. I didn’t give two damns about those wind mills.

I turned to the lamp with annoyance––surely there’s a shade in the world that isn’t so damn yellow.

Beneath sat a letter, the typical Thursday sight. It was from this old madman I once found lost across the creek, who began to worship me the second I told him I knew the way back to town. The short journey took us a baffling while, because he kept stopping in his tracks to speak insanities about my sacred past. But finally I delivered him to the marked streets. I offered to escort him all the way to his own residence, but he declined with a quick bow and a shamed shake of the head. Spluttering profuse thanks through his smooth beard, he bowed again and hiked off, following his long sunset shadow down Bank street.

That was just a few months before the evaporation of my passions. I hadn’t seen him since, but he sent me weekly updates from the big city––not sure how he got there––updates on his “brothers” who were excited to meet me. I always read his letters, even thought about responding a few times. Nobody else sent me letters.

I opened this particular yellow envelope and read the insane contents which never failed to lighten my heart a little.

“YOU mustn’t delay!” he wrote. “The temple district is overcrowded already! We are doing best to keep a bit of space in the park for YOU!” and so on. I’d like to think my parents saw as much in me as Pinto did––that’s his name. But their sad smiles never really gave that vibe.

The page did a fine job neutralizing my mood. I yawned and looked at the door, fidgeting with the corners of the paper, which then split, jolting my absent mind back to attention. There was a second page, glued to the back of the first with the ink of a hundred signatures.

“The brothers want to see YOU in the flesh! Proof below. PLEASE consider.”

This really made me laugh. I looked over the insane scribbles with the calm fascination that a child feels looking over a picture of the jungle, naming each animal. Indeed, no two signatures were alike. I couldn’t imagine anyone having the creative capacity to adopt so many manners of handling the pen. Yet if Pinto was such a man, he really deserved a visit for the effort. I yawned, shook my head and cut the light. Dreamed of a hundred signatures sprawled over my building contract.