Story Excerpts
Wheel of Fortune
by Bill Cameron
Had he cared to fit in with the other custodians, he might have groused, “I’ve run the buffer up this hallway more times than my daddy whipped me.” But that would be a lie, for Caspar Bresman had never known his father, and he was a diligent recordkeeper.
Growing up in a Latvian orphanage in a small town outside Riga had drilled into him the need to keep track. It was the only way to be sure he got what little was due to him, whether it was treats earned from chores or the correct number of socks back from the laundry. Now, as an adult, Caspar kept data on everything: feral cats in the alley behind his apartment; the arguments and intimacies of his neighbors; package and food deliveries to his building. On a personal level, he recorded the hours he slept, the foods he ate, and the distance walked or covered on his bicycle. In his student days, he tracked that last with a map. Now, the device in his pocket recorded his movements to the step or meter. He could tell you his blood pressure on any date, or his heart rate and body temperature. And he knew the number and length of his calls with his daughter Liene, now in her first year at university ten time zones to the east.
So he knew he’d waxed the ground floor corridor of Pearson Hall sixty-three times since he started working at Enderly University. During that same period, he’d emptied 11,775 waste baskets, and scrubbed 3,768 toilets. Seven times, he’d cleaned the blinds on ninety-four windows. And, exactly once, he’d corrected someone’s math.
For that, they threatened him with jail.
Enderly was Caspar’s fifth stop since arriving in America. His first job, accepted on a temporary basis with payment under the table, had been with a company that serviced a New Jersey community college. He didn’t mind custodial work—it got him through the University of Latvia, after all. But he hoped to find a position commensurate with his education and experience once he got his immigration status in order. Yet no institution would hire him. His doctorate and years of teaching weren’t enough to convince faculty committees once they learned why he’d fled Europe.
He moved west, time zone by time zone, keeping up with his field through journals in university libraries. But as months became years, he failed to land even a position as an adjunct teaching introductory courses to first-year students. When an Idaho liberal arts college let him go on the grounds that even a custodian with his history brought disrepute to the institution, the harsh reality grew impossible to ignore. Using his meager savings and a furtive introduction from another custodian, he bought a new identity and moved once more. At Enderly, in what felt like one last twist of the knife, they assigned him to the very building where he might have worked as a professor. Not that anyone at his latest stop knew of his past as the disgraced Casimir Briesma. His only remaining links to his old life were too rare video chats with his daughter and his pointless habit of reading academic journals.
And in one of those journals, perused a few months into his Enderly sojourn, he read an item that stoked the last fading ember inside him.
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Copyright © 2025. Wheel of Fortune by Bill Cameron