The game on Sunday had a 2 p.m. start, and Usl was featured on the Jumbotron intermittently from 4:02 to 4:09. By eight-thirty, his home phone was ringing. His home phone never rang. It was a holdover from another time. His mother had told him that it was essential, a matter of safety—for hurricanes, or blackouts, or terrorist attacks. You never knew what could happen until it happened. She had insisted on paying the bill so that Usl would keep the landline. She had pleaded, “Please grant me permission to protect my child,” and so he had.

The landline was ringing because Usl had become an Internet sensation. Usl had been sleeping when he appeared on the Jumbotron at the Yankees game; the cameras and the commentators had turned on Usl numerous times, and at length, and he had slept through it all. It wasn’t until the voices of strangers over that old-fashioned telephone alerted him that he understood how widely watched his sleep had been. Now a gentle feminine voice pitched him: “What we’re thinking is that you come into the office and we’ll take a top-quality, nice photo of you. We really love the idea that you get a chance to present yourself. You’ll recapture control over your image.”

Usl looked online to reconfirm who he was in the eyes of the world:

Fatty cow that needs two seats at all time and represent symbol of failure

had been posted one minute earlier in the comments section under a YouTube clip. The clip had more than seventy thousand views. Wasn’t it really just footage of a man dreaming? No one seemed to see it that way. Usl was only twenty-eight years old—could his life already be ruined? Could he save it?

Usl told the woman on the phone that he needed to think about her idea, that he would call her back.

He called Gregory.

“People at a newspaper are not your allies,” Gregory said. Gregory was Usl’s friend but also his boss. Usl worked the buyback end of Gregory’s storefront diamond-district place. Customers ascended the back stairs to consult with Usl about their old jewelry, and Usl weighed, assessed, proposed prices, bought. Gregory liked to say that it was a sultanate there on the second floor; the sultan was Usl. Now Gregory said, “These are people who demeaned Eliot Spitzer over private issues, who—”

“But people are saying untrue things about me—”

“You’ll be extending the time that you’re at the center of attention—”

“If you were me—”

“I’m not you. I’m not interested in fame. I am me. I’m interested in coming to work. I hope you’re not thinking of not coming in to work tomorrow.”

The angle of the camera in the footage was particularly unflattering—distorting, really. It wasn’t a strong likeness.

Usl called the voice from the newspaper back. “I will come in.”

The now slightly less kind-sounding woman informed Usl that if he made it in before 11 a.m. they would run the photo online the same day.

Usl trembled.

Or was the trembling elsewhere?

They had found his cell-phone number?

“I love you!” the text message read. It was his mother. “You are a great and successful and handsome and very good and nice man!!!” Even she had seen the footage? Usl’s mother was very loving, had always been very loving. Good mothers are bad mothers, Usl thought. Only bad, mean mothers prepare you for what is to come. If Usl was ever a mother, whatever, a father, he wanted to be a bad one.

More calls came in, through the night, from television programs that had once seemed to occur in inaccessible lands but that turned out to be really less than thirty minutes away; they would send a car service. Usl couldn’t sleep. When, as a child, he encountered characters six feet tall, fuzzy, offering hugs, or flyers, or hot dogs, he had been frightened. He unplugged the phone.

Then there was a knock at the door. Was he O. J. Simpson? They were pursuing him everywhere.

“It’s me! It’s Berge!”

Berge was Usl’s neighbor. Usl let him in.

Berge said, “You’ve had a huge piece of luck. Huge. I know you may not see it, but this is the luckiest day of your life.”

“I’m very tired,” Usl said, and then felt ambushed by fresh shame—after all, why was he so tired? “People laugh, but I was sleeping because I haven’t been getting my sleep. When you don’t sleep, you’re not yourself. When you don’t sleep, you find yourself sleeping all the time.”

“You’re going to sue,” Berge declared. Sue somebody. Berge would figure it out. He wouldn’t charge—he would just take fifteen per cent upon collection. Did Usl feel damaged? Yes, Usl did feel damaged. Then there should be damages. Berge had recently passed the bar. He wasn’t lying about that, Usl thought. Berge often shared his magazines with Usl; he was a nice guy, basically.

“But I can’t sue thousands of people,” Usl said. “It’s thousands of people who have damaged me.” He caught a glimpse of his screen:

He’s dreaming of cupcakes.

“No, thousands wouldn’t be sensible,” Berge said. “We’ll sue the Yankees.”

“But I love the Yankees.”

“We’ll sue the Stadium.”

“I love the Stadium. I’ve been happy there.”

“You’re very stressed. Let me figure it out for you.”

By 1 a.m., Berge had prepared papers for Usl to sign—Berge was also a notary, he said—naming a broadcasting corporation. “They won’t take it personally,” Berge assured him. “It’s business.”

By Tuesday, views of the YouTube footage had exceeded a million. Usl abandoned the Internet, turned on the radio for escape, and there learned that he, Usl, was a too sensitive behemoth who needed to be *#&$ed in his cookie-dough face; also, that he should eat celery. Normally, if you heard people talking about you on the radio it meant that you were crazy, since of course no one on the radio was talking about you, and if you thought that people on the radio were talking about you, as had happened to Usl’s uncle, then you were supposed to go see somebody, a professional. Usl didn’t want to see anybody.