On the uncluttered side of his desk his typewriter sat like another mundane god — a boorish, trivial, over-demanding god — still holding the seventeenth page of a paper on the effects of ionizing radiations upon polyester resins, a paper unsought, unhonored and one that would probably always remain unfinished. Bryce’s gaze met this sullen disarray; the scattered paper sheets like a fallen, bombed-out city of card houses, the endless, frighteningly neat student solutions of oxidation-reduction equations and of the industrial preparations of unlovely acids; the equally dull, dull paper on polyester resins. He stared at these things, his hands in the pocket of his coat, for a full thirty seconds, in black dismay. Then, since it was hot in the room, he pulled off his coat, threw it on the gold brocade couch, reached under his shirt to scratch his belly, and walked into the kitchen and began making coffee. The sink was littered with dirty retorts, beakers and small jars, together with the breakfast dishes, one of them smeared with egg yolk. Looking at this impossible confusion he felt for a moment like screaming with despair; but he did not. He merely stood for a minute and then said, softly, aloud. “Bryce, you’re a damn mess.” Then he found a reasonably clean beaker, rinsed it out, filled it with powdered coffee and hot tap water, stirred it with a lab thermometer, and drank it up, staring over the beaker at the big, expensive Brueghel print of
He set the beaker down, unrinsed, on the stove. Then he rolled up his sleeves, took off his tie, and began filling the sink with hot water, watching the detergent foam bubble up under the pressure from the faucet like a multicelled living thing, the compound eye of a huge albino insect. Then he began putting glassware through the foam, into the hot water beneath it. He found the dishwashing sponge and began working. He had to start somewhere….