Harry likes to make plans. At forty-eight, he doesn't need to and he knows it, but he enjoys thinking about processes, thinking them through. Usually, Harry reflects upon the small and mundane, creating, adapting, adopting benign models for confronting the world. The amount (and denominations) of change needed for a successful encounter at the post office, for instance, or the number of minutes to allot to the cleaning of this room or that. He doesn't need these plans because he has internalized them all, from the optimal route to work, to the number of scoops of ice cream he can have per evening between shopping days.

Harry delights most in assessing small variations and in incorporating his analyses into his life work, his schema, a model dynamic in conception and execution. These assessments are barely conscious and thoroughly pleasurable. Artificial intelligence be damned. Here is the real thing.

If pressed, Harry might admit to his plans and brush away the question. Didn't everyone have plans? If pressed further, he might consider the possibility of some life form that simply reacted to stimuli without forethought, conditioned responses, or biological imperatives. I say he might consider such a possibility. More than likely, however, he would quickly assess the time, thought, and energy such a consideration would deserve relative to its return. In this case, Harry would find such speculation of little consequence, except insofar as such speculation itself affects the speed at which he is currently dialing the phone or changing a razor blade.

Small variations are easily assessed and integrated into his plan and are met with little or no outward expression. An accident blocking traffic for miles might result in a twitch or two as he considers alternate routes. Larger variations can manifest themselves to a considerable degree before they are integrated properly. Consider the opening of a new bridge/road perpendicular to his normal driving route. In and of themselves, neither the bridge nor the intersection would have been enough to raise a twitch. But the design of the intersection, with its lack of lanes for turns, revealed a complete disregard for the intersection's impact on the standard flow of traffic and for the general stupidity of a population that finds no compelling reason against swerving around cars waiting their turn at the intersection. It was not only asinine but criminally negligent on the part of the designers. As for the general population, it quickly forgot the death of an eight-year-old girl who was following traffic regulations as she approached the intersection.

Perhaps it is best that Harry never knew of the little girl. He was upset enough over the sheer mass of negligence and stupidity (yes, these states have mass, volume, and duration Harry has argued) that he made phone calls and wrote letters to the city, the county, and the state. He considered adding his voice to the clamorous murmur heard by the Feds but rejected that course after considering that the government, at the federal level, was designed to reward citizen input with a barrage of responses, solicitations, promises, and calls for action issued by both parties and the members of the bureaucracy at a ratio approximating twenty to one. Calls to the Department of Transportation, both illustrious senators, and the upstart representative would have resulted in eighty or so federally supported, federally created, and federally delivered bits of mail having little or nothing to do with his complaint. An accident involving the mail truck would have had a greater impact on the problem at hand.

As it was, the city, the country, and the state did absolutely nothing. A few weeks passed and the intersection became integrated into the grand order of the world.

So. It is Saturday. Harry needs gasoline and a spark plug for his lawn mower, five simple items from the grocery store, and to return a movie to the newly-opened video store (quickly accessed by the new intersection). He has wasted almost no energy on the calculation of the number of stops he has to make, nor of the money he needs to spend. Hoping to dispense a few pennies here and there, he counts out a handful from a clay dish exclusively dedicated to pennies but actually holding pennies, paper clips, the odd button or two, and a variety of slips of paper waiting to be thrown away. He has the movie in hand, the empty gasoline can, the old spark plug, and the barest of intentions regarding the route he will take, intentions informed by the proportion of left to right-hand turns, the presence of the aforementioned intersection, and the (again barest) notion that the grocery store should be stop number three or four owing to the relative ill effects of a hot day on a gallon of milk sitting in a car.

So. It is Saturday. Harry is pulling out of his driveway en route to his first stop: the hardware store for a spark plug. Harry is smiling as he sets out. If you pressed him about the spark plug, you might ruin his day. The lawn mower repair shop neglected to change the plug (as well as the air filter and who knows what else) when they performed their overhaul one week ago. But such aggravations are a week old. Harry is admiring his neighbor's lawn and the effort it represents. A true Yard Master, his neighbor owns no less than five lawnmowers, three weed wackers, and assorted spreaders, sprayers, and seeders. A true juggler, his neighbor can keep any three of these lovelies darting about his yard at the same time. Harry, on the other hand, is testing his limits with the spark plug and a twenty-five-year-old machine.

At least a new spark plug won't hurt. The old one has to be bad, charred and black as it is. He's brought it along so he can match the new to old and is proud of his foresight. Harry is humming along. The world is humming. Even Harry's car is humming, having undergone a recent tune-up of its own.

If Harry's foresight is truly as deserving of his pride as he thinks it is, he might turn around in the hardware store parking lot, go home, and wait for a more auspicious day. But, as has been already mentioned, Harry can easily accommodate minor variations into his plans.

The variations begin at the parking lot. Upon initiating his turn, he sees one car—parked. This leads to an immediate inference: he will be in and out the hardware store in moments. Upon completing the turn, he sees no less than four cars careening about the parking lot in an apparent sudden and inexplicable collapse of matter—as if the whole world was meant to occupy but one parking space, the space he himself selected as he began his turn. From a distance, such a sight would elicit scarcely a snort. Harry is not far enough away, however, to merely integrate this aberrant pattern of events. Far more than a snort or a twitch, he is required to immediately and purposively act.

Car doors swing open. People spill out, rush into the store, out of the store. Car doors swing shut. An unexpected reversal of gravity flings them from the parking lot. All this as Harry collects himself behind his steering wheel, spark plug in hand, the gap visibly too close under the chars and pits from thousands of ill-timed explosions. Harry eases off the brake and allows himself to exhale.

Exiting the parking lot is easier. The acceleration is normal, expected, a hic and another before smoothing out. The wheel has its customary play. The brakes go quietly about their business as he approaches the stop sign. His heart and lungs perform regularly under an ever-so-slightly heightened focus in his attention. He is not surprised as a woman in a red pickup nearly scrapes his headlights in a foreshortened left turn. Surprised? Hardly. He saw it before he braked and stopped well before the intersection. The pickup passes. Harry takes his right.

So. It is Saturday. It is summer. Fresh-cut grass. The muck and coolness of the marshes as the road dips. The road itself has a clarity as if he were walking, the reds and grays of the aggregate, the sparkles. His tires click along. Summer. He tops a rise and slows. Another pickup, coincidentally red, coincidentally driven by a woman, a different red pickup driven by a different woman is moving much too quickly toward the intersection ahead. Barely a moment's attention followed by a brief relaxation of his foot on the accelerator makes a collision impossible. She throws gravel as she comes to a stop. Harry speeds on, pleased with his minor adjustments. Red pickups fall securely into their allotted spots in his mind, soon to be forgotten unless they became part of some larger pattern not his own. Surprised? Hardly. If pressed, he might admit to a tiny curiosity over his initial slowing as he topped the rise. If pressed further, he might have connected that with the early braking at the previous intersection. He might then have shown some sign of surprise. But it is summer. Nothing is pressing. He has all day.

Harry negotiates a left to the new bridge. To the right is a new park on the river bank. Ahead, a traffic light turning yellow. He slows again, the sound of his tires changing from the concrete hum and click of the bridge to a slower, steadier whirring over the macadam. The road shimmers again with the summer smells. Ahead, beyond the traffic light, stretches his morning plan—his first glimmer of its definite and luminous essence. Another intersection, a right, a left, and a left coming slowly into focus.

By the time he reaches the video store, the morning's route stands out vividly as a yellow-on-black diagram. Details, individual points, are indiscernible in the distance, but the luminosity of his morning, of this fragment of his schemata, of the black background between and around these lines are positively enhanced by the faint pastels with their promise of a neon-like clarity. The plan itself, the diagram, is familiar, comfortable, comforting. Harry is beginning to glow.

On entering the video store, the plan, comfort, sight, and insight turn to static as quickly and surely as pulling a cable from the back of a television. All is chaos. Spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, siblings, and parents hold up boxes and shout at one another across the aisles. Six children practice their screaming in the corner of the building designed expressly for them. A plastic play house, a slide, several dolls, and assorted blocks provide the initial impetus for the outcry, but the noise itself quickly becomes a plaything. Three shrieks collide and break into pure static.

Four televisions, contrapuntal, decibels throbbing, lay a largely ignored soundtrack to a different drama, one enacted on the screens. Though ignored and overdubbed with the static outcries, the subliminal soundtrack fills the cracks of those minds foolish enough to enter the store. Rent me. Rent me. Rent me.

Harry scans the two walls devoted to recent releases, calculating the number of copies the store has. In some cases, more than fifty. All out. All rented. He can't remember which he's seen, or which he's wanted to see. He jostles, is jostled, in the crowd standing before the new releases, all studying the empty boxes of movies, movies they can't see. Harry looks for an escape. Comedy, too frantic. Drama, too tense. He walks along the Wall of Classics. Casablanca. Citizen Kane. Has he seen these movies? He can't recall. Shrieks increase. A parent joins the game. Static. Rent me.

So. It is Saturday. Outside it is summer. A breeze. Harry catches the scent of a deep fryer as he surveys the fifteen acres of macadam separating him from the low L-shaped complex—department, drug, and grocery stores inconveniently interspersed with a variety of specialty shops. The static dissipates with the smell of French fries. Harry shakes his head and discovers the beginnings of a headache, a subliminal headache. Without thinking, he adds aspirin to the grocery list.

The yellow on black begins to resurface, not, however, with the intensity or certainty of its previous incarnation. The store offers its own flow of traffic, arguably alien to the path his five, now six, items prescribe. Usually conforming to the general flux of fits and starts, carts inching down the aisles, nudging and encouraging one another through the canyons of food, Harry finds himself out of phase, the carts as impenetrable as log jams, the aisles themselves as eddies and backwaters. The aspirin is easy to find. Milk, bread, and cheese will come as he makes his sweep through the other half of the store. But, for now, he is lost. Olives? He looks to the ceiling. A canned vegetable? Ordinarily, he would come to them as a matter of course, but his course, his plan, his design, though returning after his bout with the video store, is jumping about in his head; his horizontal hold on the world requires fine-tuning. He returns to the fresh vegetable section in search of burrito skins but finds only egg rolls. The kid stacking lettuce speaks a truncated English that only occasionally matches his own. A computer guide to the store takes thirty, forty, fifty seconds to scroll from potato chips to burritos before listing them as frozen foods. He scans to taco shells, with the hope that tacos and burritos might be shelved together. He finds the tacos in the ethnic aisle with the spaghetti sauces. No skins.

He bangs against the carts in the dairy section. He steps in a puddle of cream. He plucks a white cheese from the deep bin and a gallon of milk from the shelf. By sheer surprise and luck, in a fortuitous moment of overlapping design, Harry finds the burrito (tortilla) skins he has been seeking. Ecstatic, if such a state can be aptly applied to a man who has seized one package of burrito (tortilla) skins, Harry experiences a moment of utter quietude. He doesn't even notice the rising static of a child crying in a cart, nor her sister dancing along the bin slapping each and every carton of eggs with an open palm.

The irritation preceding his lucky moment, however, returns full force when, advancing upon the bread of his choice, he finds a woman reviewing her shopping list blocking his way. He hems. He haws. He hurrums. She checks one item after another. Item by item. Line by line. Harry has a momentary glimpse of a future that gives line vetoes to presidents and governors: bread lines running a moldy green-gray weave counter to his fading yellow line. He haws. He hems. He hurrums an excuse me and reaches for a loaf.

"Masher!" she shouts, slapping his hand away. Silence descends. Twenty-five heads, or more, swing to Harry, his hand stinging and red. The PA goes quiet. Checkers check out Harry, his face pinched and red. The store is deathly still. Harry watches the woman huff away, the horizontal lines on her dress flip and blur with her attitude. Harry grabs his loaf and makes for the express lane.

In the relative safety of his car, Harry pauses to consider the life forms he has just encountered. Resting comfortably on the seat beside him are the milk jug, tagged with a piece of plastic tape that indicates its legal procurement, and the bag of groceries—sans olives. It hasn't occurred to him yet that he has forgotten them. The milk jug is already sweating. On the floor sits the empty gasoline container that represents his last stop, his last encounter with the world at large on this, a Saturday, in summer.

His deliberations don't take long. There is really nothing to think about. The video store and the grocery, he recalls, have served only to cloud his thinking. It isn't so much the stores, but Harry himself. He is overexposed, is out of sync, has lost something. . . . Karma? He can't remember the name of the person at work who would have used that term. Karma? He'll have to look it up.

Even as his mind drifts to faces at work, to company picnics, to this evening's dinner, he feels his attention narrowing, focusing again. There is the now familiar yellow on black, yellow lines in a twisted curving loop. Pastel lines inside becoming neon, sharper, clearer.

One is precisely the color of the gasoline he is pumping, the pink/red of the premium. One? A host of red/pink lines, of swirls, of small wispy curls. Dizzying paths leading to a series of rich blue circles. Circles? Ponds? Eyes? Blinking to the attending click click click and summer sparkle of the road. Liquid life.

It takes no effort to let go of everything for a moment, for a sidelong view of this plan, this pattern, this dynamism. Breeze through his hair. Hands through his hair. He recognizes its form as something seen before. On the tip of his tongue, unfolding to confirm a butterfly wing in flight, flapping, two wings, four wings, two butterflies atumble through the air half a dozen feet from his windshield. His plan, two butterflies in synchrony.

He is almost too late in his reflexive swerve, and almost successful in keeping his car on the road. But the front tire only kisses the lip of the macadam and he takes flight, gliding down the embankment.

Atop the rise, two butterflies in the neon sun of a Saturday morning. Two butterflies afluttering.

At the bottom, Harry, standing, scratching his head at this new variation. A swirl of milk and gasoline on the front seat. An explosion of grasses from the grill. The smell of the freshly scarred marsh. Everywhere and all about Harry, hundreds of butterflies winking.