Shilo’s parents had converted his former bedroom into an office which they were too busy and too tired to use. If they had anything officey to do, they did it at the rolltop desk in the corner of the dining room like they had for going on three decades. And also, by “converted,” Shilo’s parents did not mean that they had done any actual remodeling. They hadn’t even purchased new furniture, not even used furniture. They’d just thrown Shilo’s old bed out, redistributed some bookshelves, pulled the two uncomfortable chairs out of the attic, moved the rolltop desk into the office, realized they preferred it in its traditional spot in the dining room, moved it back, and declared the whole project “complete for now.” In the eight years since, there had been no further progress. The office, like most of the home for most of Shilo’s life, was as it had been.

“Do you remember when we would get a milkshake?” asked Shilo. “And all us kids were supposed to share it? And we were on a strict rotation as far as who got to pick the flavor? But we weren’t allowed to pick anyone else’s favorite because that would mean they got their favorite more than someone else got theirs? And we weren’t allowed to change favorites? So I was stuck with chocolate for my entire childhood and Carson was stuck with vanilla and Brenda was stuck with strawberry and when Larissa was born she just never got to pick unless we happened to be getting the shake from somewhere with more than three options, which we almost never did because places with more than three options were more expensive? So then we’d share the shake and you’d time the lengths of our sips, but it still wasn’t fair because since Carson and Brenda were bigger than me and eventually Larissa, they could generate a lot more suction with the straw, which meant they were able to get more milkshake into their mouths during their timed sips? But there was no good way to figure out how many total sips there would be, so whoever went first almost always got more sips? But also, later sippers got, in general, a more melted milkshake, which meant they were able to get more volume up the straw with equivalent or near-equivalent suction?”

“Yes,” said Shilo’s dad, his small belly providing a nicer resting place for his hands than the seat of his chair provided his backside. He smiled at the series of images Shilo had conjured for him. “Good memories,” he said. “Happy memories.”

“But my point is they’re not,” said Shilo. “I’m just coming to realize this, Dad. They’re not good or happy memories. They’re bleak. They’re dark.”

“They’re not dark,” said his dad. “What’s dark about them?” His confusion, Shilo knew, was authentic.

“Other people have childhood memories of drinking their own personal milkshakes,” said Shilo. “Whatever flavor they wanted every time.”

“So?” said his dad. “Other people have childhood memories of getting toys for every birthday. More toys than they could ever play with. You envy them too, Shilo?”

“Yes!” said Shilo. “No else got exactly one toy for every other birthday. Not even other poor kids.”

“It takes more than one year for a kid to grow out of liking a certain toy,” said his dad. “And you knew your toys better than most other kids knew their toys. You knew them intimately. Every detail. You bonded with them.”

“And then you made us sell them at the garage sales,” said Shilo. “Once we were attached.”

“Well, sure,” said his dad. “You don’t want to be too attached to a toy. You don’t want to know a toy too well. That’s not healthy.”

“You wanted the money,” said Shilo.

“Sure,” said his dad. “For the siding fund.”

“You’ve never put new siding on!” said Shilo.

“That’s why we keep having the garage sales,” said his dad. “We’re getting there. Of course, the price of siding keeps going up. And the price of installation. At a slightly greater rate than our siding fund grows. Of course, if we had better stuff for the garage sale, we’d make more money. But that would require spending more to get the better stuff in the first place. So while it might be better for the siding fund, it would be very detrimental to some of the other funds. The clothing fund, the appliance fund, the decoration fund. I suppose we could make our initial purchases at garage sales with better prices than ours. Then leverage our superior location to sell higher than we paid. But that would require time, gas money. Or maybe it would just require better haggling skills. But that would require haggling lessons. But I can’t imagine those are cheap. And you might say, well, maybe you could talk the haggling instructors down on their prices. But, really, how am I, a person in need of haggling lessons, going to out-haggle the person providing haggling lessons? Well, OK, maybe they’re fraudulent. Maybe they aren’t actually that good at haggling despite their claims to the contrary. Maybe I could out-haggle them. But if that’s the case, if I can talk them down, what are they going to teach me? They should be paying me! Well, all right, maybe that’s a potential revenue stream: out-haggling fraudulent haggling instructors and then charging them for haggling lessons from me. But how much time and effort is it going to take for me to locate these fraudulent haggling instructors, if they even exist? How much time am I going to have to divert from other potential revenue streams, some of them much more promising, in order to get this one off the ground?” He paused as if waiting for a precise answer. As if Shilo might give him a number.

“This is why we can’t make money,” said Shilo. “None of us. Not me, not Carson, not Brenda, not Larissa.”

               “What is?” asked his dad.

               “All of this,” said Shilo, his gesture encompassing all of that. “You, Mom, how we were raised, this place, this conversation, this moment, everything. It’s all come together to ensure that none of us know how to make money. We’re smart enough to make money. We’re educated enough. We’re not distinctly unambitious, I don’t think. Not less ambitious than many people who have figured out how to make money.”

               “There’s more to life than money,” said his dad. “There’s other ways to define success.”

               “Great,” said Shilo. “Which definitions of success apply to us? To any of us?”

               His dad said nothing, which was the only appropriate thing to say.

               “I’m not saying it’s your fault,” said Shilo. “How could you teach us something you don’t know yourself?”

               His dad continued to say nothing. Maybe it would have been appropriate to say something now, but he remained silent.

               “Do you know how many people in Multioak alone own houses bigger or newer or nicer than ours? How did they do that? How did they get those houses? I have no idea. I don’t even know where to begin. I went to college. I got good grades. I got a degree. I have no idea how someone ends up with a nice house.”

               “Other people have advantages,” said his dad. “We’re not worse than them, Shilo. We’re better than them.”

               “They have advantages we don’t have?” asked Shilo. “Everyone does? Everyone?”

               “They use them,” said his dad. “We don’t. Everything we have, we earned. No extra assistance. No boosts. No intervention on our behalf. Every scrap of anything we own, that was all us. Who else can say that? Very few. Very few.”

               “I,” said Shilo, “do not know what you’re talking about, Dad.” Shilo and his dad rose from the uncomfortable chairs. They hugged. Shilo walked out through the house in which he’d been raised, in which he’d been poisoned with character, in which he had absorbed so many lessons with no utility, lessons with, if anything, anti-utility.

               After another period during which Shilo and his parents and his siblings lived lives of no tangible progress, his sister Brenda started experiencing health problems which an unlicensed medical expert eventually diagnosed as an extended allergic reaction to living a life of no tangible progress. The only treatment was to get a more fulfilling job, or at least a better paying job, or at the very least achieve some level of public recognition for a project, any kind of project. Brenda tried all of these things more than once, but failed every time, and these moments of failure, such stark examples of her life’s lack of tangible progress, exacerbated her symptoms. The rest of the family, marshalling their paltry resources to support Brenda, found themselves exerting more energy for even less reward than usual. Things got worse for all of them. Time, money, satisfaction, joy, rest: they had less of all of it. Less of all good things, it seemed. And of what did they have more? Only bad things.

               On an afternoon made eveningish by a spiteful cloud cover, Shilo left early from his latest inadequate job and drove to his parents’ house to tell them how Brenda had reacted to his suggestion that she pay to break her apartment lease so she could move in with roommates more willing to tolerate her clutter.

               “How did she react?” asked Shilo’s dad. The men, father and son, were back in the study, but they had this time swapped uncomfortable chairs and were now facing each other from other directions.

               “She refused and cried and then she got the body aches,” said Shilo. “The full-body ones.”

               “No improvement, then?” asked his dad.

               “Not that I saw,” said Shilo. “Worse, if anything, but maybe my suggestion also exacerbated her symptoms.”

               “Lots of things do that,” said his dad. “Unfortunately.”

               “I just wish there was something we could do,” said Shilo. “Something more. Nothing we try works. I don’t see how she’s going to get better.”

               Shilo’s dad shook his head.

               “And if she doesn’t get better,” said Shilo, “then what’s gonna happen to the rest of us?”

               Shilo’s dad kept shaking his head. It seemed to mean something beyond a general displeasure with the family’s current situation.

               “What?” asked Shilo. “What is it, Dad?”

               “I won’t do it,” said his dad. “Of what value is unearned comfort?”

               “What’s that?” asked Shilo. “What’s that from? Who said that?”

               “It’s from this conversation,” said his dad. “I said it. Just now.”

               “You’re genuinely asking me the value of unearned comfort?” asked Shilo.

               “No,” said his dad. “The question was rhetorical.”

               “Unearned comfort is comfortable,” said Shilo, answering the question anyway. “Which is better than being uncomfortable. That’s the value. Why, with the way everything’s been going, would we care about how much pride we can take in our comfort? Why would we need a sense of accomplishment too?”

               “That’s what you say now,” said his dad. “While you’re uncomfortable. But you wouldn’t feel that way once you’re comfortable. You’d regret it. That’s why you can’t make these decisions while you’re uncomfortable.”

               “Regret what?” asked Shilo. “Make what decisions?”

               “All right,” said Shilo’s dad, rising from the chair as if hoisted by a chain. “I’ll show you.” He turned sideways to scoot past Shilo’s knee-propped foot and vanished through the office doorway. Shilo waited for him to return with whatever he was talking about.

               But after a few silent moments, Shilo’s dad’s voice came to him from just around the corner. “Are you coming?”

               “I didn’t know I was supposed to go with you,” said Shilo. He stood, walked, followed.

               His dad led him down the hall to the utility closet at its far end. Shilo kept his distance as his dad opened the closet and began to withdraw things that had either been repeatedly spurned or never offered up at the garage sales. These included a vacuum cleaner Shilo’s parents had received as a wedding present and which, by some miracle, still worked, a folding ironing board used for many purposes other than ironing clothes, a laundry basket half full of folded sheets, a bucket with a smaller bucket with a smaller bucket in it in it, a binder full of notes sent home from Carson’s fifth-grade teacher serving as a record of his scholastic triumphs and misdeeds of one year.

After a time, enough stuff had been displaced to the hall for Shilo’s dad to reach the closet’s back wall. Shilo stepped into the closet and watched as a large, rectangular piece of drywall popped loose in his dad’s hands. As his dad rested the removed panel on the floor in front of him, leaning it against the wall beneath the opening it had just vacated, Shilo tried to grasp what it was his father was revealing to him. In rows of five and columns of twenty, Shilo saw one hundred vertical switches, all of them switched down. To the right of each switch was a light, each light glowing a dull red.

“OK,” said Shilo’s dad, short of breath, leaning aside to give Shilo an unobstructed view of the switches. “So, OK, look.” His gesture encompassed every switch. “None of them are on, Shilo. Not one. If a switch is up, the light next to it turns green. How many switches are up, Shilo? How many green lights do you see?”

“None,” said Shilo.

“Right,” said Shilo’s dad. “And they never have been. And they never will be.” He paused to behold the switches and red lights for himself. “This helps,” he said. “Knowing this looks like this. Whenever we’re struggling as a family, which is most of the time, I just think about this. Or, sometimes, like now, I actually come in here and take a nice, long look. It never fails to bring me satisfaction, Shilo, and I hope it does the same for you. Or, that it will once I tell you what you’re looking at. Unless you’ve figured it out?”

               “I have not figured it out,” said Shilo.

               “Well, that’s OK,” said his dad. “It isn’t necessarily that intuitive. I didn’t expect you to figure it out on your own. I planned on explaining it.”

               “Great,” said Shilo. “Go ahead.”

               Shilo’s dad paused to consider his words. “These switches,” he finally said, “would make things better for us. But only if flipped up! If we flipped the switches up, the lights next to the flipped switches would turn green, and our lives—the lives of everyone in this family—would improve. If we flipped one switch, our lives would improve a tiny bit. If we flipped all of them, our lives would improve a lot. I mean, all one hundred switches? Our lives would improve exponentially.” He shook his head, marveling at the extent to which their lives would improve provided all one hundred switches were flipped. “But, of course, we’ll never flip all one hundred switches, nor will we ever flip even one switch. The switches will stay down and the lights will stay red.”

               Shilo’s disbelief was overshadowed by his confusion. “Where did this thing come from?” he asked. “How long has this been here?”

               “We’ve always had it,” said Shilo’s dad. “Everyone has one. Every head of a family. Or, most of them, anyway. Most families. No one talks about them, of course, because they don’t want to admit how many switches they’ve flipped up. They don’t want to admit that that’s why they’re more successful than us. They flip the switches. You wonder why people have more than us? Why people with less intelligence, less charm, less wit are more famous than us? Well, now you know. They flip the switches. Or their parents do. Sure, maybe some don’t, maybe some are just lucky. But most of them flip the switches. Maybe all the switches, maybe some, maybe just one. Most people can’t resist the temptation, that’s what I think. But I can. We can. Whatever we have or don’t have, that’s entirely on us. The credit is ours, good or bad.”

               “Mostly bad,” said Shilo.

               “Not true,” said his dad. “You’re only saying that because you’re comparing us to people who have flipped one or more switches. Often many more, if I had to guess.”

               “Let’s pretend what you’re telling me is true,” said Shilo.

               “It is,” said his dad. “We don’t have to pretend.”

               “Well, OK, let’s say it is,” said Shilo.

               “We are,” said his dad. “We already are saying that.”

               “OK, then, given everything you’ve said,” said Shilo, “why wouldn’t you at least flip a switch or two once Brenda got sick?”

               “That’s an easy one,” said his dad. “I want her to get better by her own merits.”

               “What if a doctor cures her?” asked Shilo. “But he’s only able to do so because he flipped, say, twenty of his switches?”

               “That would be fine,” said his dad. “I can only control what I can control.” He waved at the switches to indicate what he could control. “But Brenda would be able to afford to see the switch-flipping doctor because of her own merits, not because I flipped any switches.”

               “But she can’t afford to see a switch-flipping doctor,” said Shilo. “She can’t afford to see any doctors. She can only see that unlicensed medical expert. Whatever his name is.”

               “Grant Growth,” said Shilo’s dad.

               “What?” asked Shilo.

               “That’s the name of the unlicensed medical expert,” said Shilo’s dad. “I don’t think that’s his real surname, though. I do not harbor similar doubts about his first name.”

               “I’m not going to argue about this,” said Shilo. “It’s not worth arguing about doing something I think is fake. But I do think it’s sad that you believe in it, but you still won’t do it, not even to help Brenda. Not to help any of us. I mean, if there’s one thing we’ve proven over the course of our lives, Dad, it’s that we could use some help.”

               Shilo’s dad actually smiled at this. “Exactly,” he said as he picked up the panel of drywall and fitted it back into place over the switches. “‘Could use some help’ is the perfect way to put it. Because we could but we won’t.” He was beaming now. “And that’s what makes us superior.”

               Two days later, Shilo’s roommates got so fed up with his clutter that they forced him out of the apartment, which was not, in principle, hard to do because he wasn’t on the lease, but was, in practical terms, hard to do because of the pervasiveness of his clutter. With nowhere else to turn on such short notice, Shilo moved back in with his parents, although all of his clutter which did not seem likely to sell at a garage sale had to go to the dump. It never occurred to anyone that he should stay in any room other than his old bedroom, which was now the office. The uncomfortable chairs were lugged to the attic, an air mattress too short for Shilo’s height appeared on the floor, and several sheets from the half full laundry basket in the utility closet were plopped at the foot of the air mattress. Shilo did not feel very welcome.

               The accommodations were part of it, but there was also his dad’s naked suspicion that Shilo’s return was all a ruse to gain access to the switches so he could flip a few red lights to green. Shilo assured his dad that, as he did not believe flipping the switches would accomplish anything beyond greening the lights, he would not be struggling his way to the back of the utility closet and pulling the panel out of the wall so he could do so. His dad did not believe in Shilo’s disbelief. He thought it was also a ruse, a second ruse or another component of the initial ruse, to make him un-wary so Shilo could gain access to the switches without detection.

But this paranoia irritated Shilo so much that he started to seriously consider flipping the switches for his own reasons. He wanted to prove to his dad that they were phony, that they did nothing. He began to develop a plan. Shilo would find an opportunity to flip a switch or two or a hundred, then he would wait a while, being sure to observe how nothing had gotten better for anyone in his family, and then the big reveal: Surprise, Dad, look: these switches have been flipped this whole time and nothing’s gotten better. In fact, things have gotten worse! Shilo thought it safe to assume things would have gotten worse by then, although if they had only stayed the same, then he would drop the “In fact, they’ve gotten worse!” line. Of course, it would be a disaster if things actually got better. If things got better, Shilo would have to find an opportunity to flip the switches off again so his dad, skeptical of this uncharacteristic turn of good fortune, didn’t check them, find them flipped, and both have his idiotic belief confirmed and freak out at Shilo for improving their lives the wrong way.

When Shilo had been staying with his parents for five weeks, conditions aligned to make his plan possible. A virus entered the house, either a flu virus, a cold virus, or a lesser-known virus that produced symptoms similar to those. Shilo got it first, and then it spread to his parents, felling them just as Shilo was starting to again feel like himself. Shilo knew firsthand how exhausted his parents would feel once the virus took hold of them. Every few hours, he strolled casually past their closed bedroom door, listening for the specific silence of sickness-induced sleep. At 10:00 p.m. on their second full day of bed-rest, Shilo felt the time had come. His dad, he felt certain, was now fully submerged in thick, clotted unconsciousness, insensate until morning.

Suppressing his lingering cough, Shilo tip-toed to the utility closet, opened it, and began to clear a path through its occupying things as gingerly as he could manage. The clicking, clacking, and light thumping he could not avoid, however, did not wake his dad. The bedroom door at the opposite end of the hall stayed shut, sealed like a tomb. Arriving now at the back wall, it took Shilo a moment to find the edges of the panel of drywall, so fine was the cut. It took him even longer to figure out how to pop the panel loose without breaking it, but he had plenty of time, no need to panic, no need to hurry. He tried to recall how he had seen his dad handle it. But he hadn’t been paying attention when his dad did it, he only recalled that it had been quick, seemingly effortless. Shilo was just beginning to wonder if he would be able to use a tool to pry the panel loose without damaging it in a way his dad would notice when, his fingers sliding along the bottom edge, it tipped outward on top of him, his forehead leaving a slight dent in its top third.

Well, there was nothing Shilo could do to repair the panel. Nothing that he was willing to attempt, anyway. He leaned the panel against the wall at his feet and turned his attention to the columns of switches and red lights. How many should he flip? Flipping all of them would make the strongest case for his point, but it would also represent the most flagrant defiance of his father’s wishes. On the other hand, only flipping one would leave the door open for his dad to claim that their lives had been one percent better since Shilo flipped the switch since such a small improvement could be mostly a matter of interpretation. Should Shilo split the difference? Fifty switches? Ten switches? He knew he was going to flip at least one. He would start with one and go from there. If, after flipping one, he felt he should flip more, he would flip a second switch, pause, evaluate, and then either stop or flip a third, and so on. Perhaps the light would impact his decision, the shade of green either prompting him onward or urging restraint.

Shilo placed his finger beneath the bottommost, leftmost switch. This, to him, seemed like the place to begin, this seemed like the first switch. With the application of gentle upward pressure, he flipped the switch. But the switch did not flip all the way up. The light did not turn green. Instead, the switch flipped to a middle position, sticking straight out from the wall, perfectly horizontal. The light was now neither green nor red. It was off.

Shouting, growling, Shilo dragged his unwell dad out of his bed and into terror-stricken wakefulness.

“What’s wrong, Shilo?” his dad kept asking, banging against the door frame, staggering against the wall as Shilo yanked him toward the utility closet. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

Shilo didn’t answer, pausing only to hoist his dad back to his feet when he stumbled, forcing him onward, onward, onward. Reaching the closet, Shilo flung his dad inside. His dad fell forward, too groggy and ill to catch himself, knocking over the vacuum cleaner, landing in an awkward heap both on and in the laundry basket.

“Get up,” said Shilo, his voice pitiless.

“What is this?” asked his dad. He could not—or, at least, did not—get up. “What’s this about? I knew you were after those switches. I knew it.”

“Look!” screamed Shilo, pointing at the bottommost, leftmost switch. “Look at it!”

Shilo’s dad directed his squint where Shilo was directing him to direct it. For a moment, it was unclear that he had grasped any import in what he was seeing. Then, at last, he grunted. “And?” he said.

“It’s off.” Said Shilo, his voice a hiss. “I switched it up and now it’s not green, it’s off.”

“And?” said Shilo’s dad, using a sudden burst of indignation to tip himself out of the laundry basket and claw his way up the ironing board until he had achieved a standing, albeit stooped, position.

“And?” said Shilo, cruelly mimicking his dad’s tone. “And? And?”

“Make your point,” said his dad. “So I can go back to bed.” He straightened his shoulders as if preparing himself to be martyred with honor.

“We haven’t been living life with no advantages,” said Shilo. “We’ve been living life with disadvantages. All one hundred switches. Every one of them not ‘off’ but down. Holding us back! Weighing down on us! Crushing us!” Shilo had never believed in something so strongly. He had never been so sure of anything. Nothing had ever made more sense to him. It explained everything perfectly. “The only thing I don’t know is how much you knew,” Shilo continued. “Did you really think ‘down’ meant that all advantages were switched off? Or did you know the red lights meant all disadvantages were turned on?”

Shilo’s dad gazed at him levelly, now. Not unblinking, but the blinks, when they came, softened nothing. “Do we have roofs over our heads, Shilo? Do we have food to eat? Do we have clothes to wear? Are we in prison? Are we dead?”

He waited for Shilo to say something, which did not happen.

“Do you realize,” asked Shilo’s dad, “what every one of those shared milkshakes meant? Do you realize what each one represented?” He thrust a finger at the rectangle of ninety-nine red lights and one dark one. “You look,” he said. “You look. Every good thing that’s happened to us. We overcame this. Every bad thing that hasn’t happened to us. We overcame this. Shilo, we’re the most impressively successful people to ever live.”

“How do you know other people don’t have all their switches down?” asked Shilo. “Maybe even people doing better than us? How do you know?”

Shilo’s dad scoffed. “Really, Shilo? How likely do you think that is?”

Shilo had to admit to himself that he did not think it likely at all. “Why did you keep this from us, Dad?”

“You wanted your own milkshakes,” said his dad. “You wanted multiple toys for every birthday. You wanted nice jobs and cars and houses and spouses and awards and acclaim and admiration.”

“Is that so bad?” asked Shilo.

“No,” said his dad. “Not at all. I hope we all get all of those things and more.” His voice grew husky, then, his eyes shone as they moistened. He pointed again at the switches, his finger trembling with reverence, with holy wonder. “But just imagine how it will feel if we get it like this. Imagine what it will signify if we get it like this. Imagine what we will know for certain about ourselves if we get it like this.”

“Well, not like this,” said Shilo. He flipped the bottommost, leftmost switch. “Like this.” Every light glowed a dull, hostile red, straining with the immense collective effort required to keep Shilo and his family from conquering the world.