Driving home through the desert at the same time he did every night, Charlie Cutler thought about a lot of things; there were a lot of things to think about. Charlie pitied people who didn’t think about things intensely.

The drive home was long; Charlie didn’t mind that in the least. He was a man that liked to be alone some of the time. Coasting through the desolation surrounding the remote series of identical black boxes where he worked, the sand glowing bluish-purplish under the night, he felt serene. His mind felt clear here, sharp—like a knife.

Charlie Cutler liked to feel sharp like a knife.

Everything about his work was a black box, he often thought: the screens he worked on, the rooms he worked on them in, the buildings that housed those rooms, the ends and ideals those buildings served. What did a black box symbolize? Secrecy, confinement, uniformity; power.

Yes, there it was. But maybe everything about the world was a black box, Charlie thought on this particular night, as he watched the dust and sand swirling in his headlights with the wind. The lonely, otherwise shadowed road ahead was enflamed for a short distance with the hot, white light from his humble pickup truck. The others at work liked to joke about Charlie’s choice of vehicle; they were foolish. Charlie’s story was the tightest; he was the most committed.

Yes—maybe everything about the world was just another black box. In another life, he sometimes imagined, he must really be a psychiatrist; if there were other worlds, if we had prior lives—if anything like that were true, then he was sure of it. Charlie Cutler’s mind was too sharp to rule out the unknown.

That was the difference between Charlie and some of those clowns at work, the ones with ostentatious cars and ego-serving stories, who trusted the company talking points to always keep them under; Charlie didn’t take anything for granted. He didn’t assume the people in his life would never figure it out; in fact, he assumed that eventually they would, by default—unless he kept selling. Kept working them. Kept the box ever blacker.

Charlie Cutler never stopped selling; he never stopped calibrating; Charlie Cutler committed.

The images of ourselves that we project to the world around us: these were black boxes. The ways we manage our relationships, deciding what to keep and what to give: these were black boxes, too. The lies we told ourselves to sleep at night, the stories we wanted to believe—the kind of easy faith and trust we put in the untested, the comforting: these were the very blackest boxes.

Charlie Cutler was a man without assumptions. At every moment he was analyzing—calibrating—learning. Sharp.

Sometimes Charlie wondered if there was an even blacker box, holding it all from us: a box we could never know because we were so deep inside, obscuring the world, the truth, the true nature of ourselves. Sometimes he worried that there was a whole universe of information (and what else was a universe) beyond the reach of his senses and perceptions — the way that houses in the night look different, feel different, than houses in the day. That no amount of even the most silent, mindful, present focus, no amount of clarity or sharpness could show him the real nature of things; if we only existed in the day, so to speak, or if our eyes could only see in light, how would we know the houses in the night? We might know the houses, yes—but the houses in the night were not the same houses.

Driving home through the desert at the same time he did every night, Charlie Cutler thought about a lot of things; there were a lot of things to think about. Charlie pitied people who didn’t think about things; he pitied them intensely.