A Very Unremarkable Day in the Life of Walter Francis Tadworth

Walter Francis Tadworth awoke at 5:45 a.m. He turned off his alarm exactly three seconds before it rang. He sat upright in his king-sized bed, upholstered in beige fabric, and stared at the beige wall across from him for several minutes. Then he stood, stretched his arms once, and walked to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth using a battery-powered toothbrush and Colgate Total toothpaste. He used lukewarm water.

At 6:15 a.m., Walter walked downstairs and made breakfast: one hard-boiled egg, sliced exactly in half, and a glass of room-temperature skim milk. He read the Wall Street Journal at the breakfast table, paying particular attention to defense sector stock fluctuations, though nothing out of the ordinary was reported. He frowned anyway. He often frowned at inanimate things, especially newspapers.

At 7:00 a.m., Walter took the elevator to the parking level of his condominium building and got into his 2012 Lexus LS. It was black. The leather interior was grey. The car smelled faintly of air freshener labeled "Ocean Breeze." The commute took twenty-eight minutes. During this time, Walter listened to a podcast about municipal bonds.

He arrived at Tadworth Technologies headquarters at precisely 7:32 a.m. The security guard at the entrance waved him through. Walter nodded curtly. The guard's name was Zachary Bancroft, a tall man with broad shoulders and a jawline that Walter occasionally thought about for slightly too long. Zachary had once played college football at a Division II school in upstate New York. Walter did not bring this up in conversation, ever, though it was included in a short biography he had memorized from Zachary’s HR file.

At 7:40 a.m., Walter entered his office. The walls were painted taupe. There were five framed degrees on the wall: two from Yale, one honorary from Liberty University, and two from minor institutions with Latin names. On his desk sat a small pewter figurine of Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows. It faced him at all times. Walter once submitted an internal company memo requesting that Disney reconsider the closure of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in Orlando. The memo was ignored.

At 8:00 a.m., Walter held a meeting with the Deputy Director of Missile Logistics. The discussion was dry and mostly involved acronyms. Walter nodded several times and made one marginally sarcastic remark that no one acknowledged. He sipped coffee—black, no sugar. The mug had the phrase "Strength Through Stability" printed on the side.

At 11:45 a.m., Walter had lunch in the executive dining room: a plain turkey sandwich on wheat bread with no condiments. He sat alone, facing a wall with a framed aerial photograph of a munitions testing facility in Nevada. Once, Zachary Bancroft entered the room to speak with another executive and briefly made eye contact with Walter. Walter looked down and focused intensely on the sandwich crust.

At 1:00 p.m., Walter read a quarterly report. He annotated several margins with vague criticisms in red ink. No specific recommendations were made. At 2:30 p.m., he sat in silence for ten minutes thinking about the direction of the country and the downfall of American culture. He stared at the Mr. Toad figurine and muttered the word “Eisner” under his breath. No one was around to hear it.

At 4:00 p.m., Walter took a call with a congressional liaison. Nothing of consequence occurred. He agreed to a tentative dinner the following month and immediately made a note to cancel it later.

At 6:00 p.m., Walter drove home. He briefly considered turning on the classical music station but decided against it. The drive took twenty-nine minutes. Traffic was slightly heavier.

At 7:00 p.m., Walter microwaved a frozen lasagna and watched thirty-five minutes of a documentary on Cold War-era bunkers. He paused the program at a segment featuring cement specifications and rewound it once to write something down.

At 8:15 p.m., Walter stood in front of a bookshelf and stared at a leather-bound edition of The Wind in the Willows. He did not open it. He went to bed at 9:00 p.m., precisely. Before turning off the lamp, he looked briefly at a photo on his nightstand. It showed him shaking hands with Ronald Reagan in 1987. He did not smile.

Walter fell asleep silently, his dreams uneventful.