The Professor's Walk

At fifty-nine, Professor Eli Margolin had decided that the only reliable thing left in this world was the click of his shoes on the cracked pavement of Hyde Park. Every morning at precisely seven o’clock, he left his narrow apartment on the second floor of a grimy, red-brick building, walked down the steps with a slow, cautious dignity, and set out for his constitutional. He said it was for his health, but the truth, one he admitted only in the hush of his own mind, was that he needed to see the world still existed, that the universe hadn’t yet been swallowed by some cosmic emptiness.

It was 1949, and Chicago teetered between the war’s bitter aftertaste and the bright neon promise of the American century. For Eli, the recent years had taught him that a man could wake up one day and find his old ideals gone, crumpled like yesterday’s newspaper. The question was if they could ever truly be recovered.