and cleaned the contacts. Millions of charges through the metal gates have left their mark, surges of electricity to the window regulator, seventeen years of it. And then one day the accumulated muck, the summer dust, spilled drinks, cement grains from runs to the dump and sandwich shreds from rained-off picnics, they finally coat the surfaces to the point where the switch won’t fire. I could have saved it, I figured out its workings. But the front rocker plastic was too fatigued, it crumbled away under another prober’s thumb. I laid out the ruin on the baize, the spring fragments that had burst out in one last spasm, the tiny smashed citadel of the plastic housing. All the parts and pieces of this world, all the intricacy. Plastix, meknix, electrix.