Read the beginning of the title story, "Bliss" from Bliss and Other Short Stories by Ted Gilley:

"All my life, I seem to have been mistaken for someone else. The other day, a woman stopped me in the produce aisle at the market and said, “Michael?” When I pick up heart pills for my dad, the pharmacist always says, “Hi, Tim.” When I correct him, he smiles and says, “Good to see you.” When I walk down Idle Road from my apartment to my job, or along the highway, people I don’t know wave at me from cars. I wave back, it can’t hurt. One day a girl leaned out of a car as it shot by and yelled, “I love you, Jamie!” I am introduced to people over and over again. “Have we met?” they say. “It’s Walter, or Phil, or Daniel, isn’t it?” I have wondered if wearing a name tag would be a bad idea. Hello, I’m Cleave. Who could forget such a name? When I look in the mirror I realize that I am, to some extent, a fabrication. The face looks like mine, all right, but also looks, vaguely, like anyone’s: a racial cameo of smooth skin, fine hair. Mouth, nose, and eyes all where they should be, but somehow indistinct—the anonymous, undeclared face of a baby. A face you could put a face onto, including your own, or that of someone close to you whom you’ve not seen in you can’t remember how long. “Michael?” When the lady in the store said that, I just smiled and shook my head—and she looked confused, hurt, angry. Who had she lost? Yes, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Yes, it’s me.

I stepped from the mud and rain of my midday duties into the outer sanctum of the Pritchard Publishing Company. It isn’t what people think. No one ever says to me, Oh—you work for a publisher, because everyone around here knows that there is only one such outfit in this part of the state and that it is owner-operated by the crazy Pritchards, purveyors of four-color brochures to the attractions of the Green Mountains. It’s a reprint operation.Mr. Pritchard is our only “author.” Oh, folks are more likely to say. You work for them.

And there is nothing glamorous about what I do: I am the “general help.”

When I came in, Mrs. Goodell, our executive secretary, blinked her smartly made-up martyr’s eyes at me in a code I could not interpret. She held up her heavily ringed hands; silver bangles rattled into the sleeves of her red blazer. Mr. Pritchard was burning up the telephone in the inner sanctum. “I can’t stand this,” Mrs. G. said. But I knew that she could. “And Cleave,” she added in a register of confidence and woe, “I have to tell you, there are no checks today.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

One of my jobs is to take paychecks to Billy and Jill, who make runs to the printer and distribute our materials. They usually hang out at the warehouse on Idle Road, minutes from here but far from here, if you know what I mean. Naturally, it registered that Mrs. G. meant my check, too, and I went into meditation mode, or tried to—not easy, what with Jack Pritchard ordering his daughter, LeeAnne, in a voice normally reserved for summoning Satan, to bring him the receivables, and she screaming that she could not find them and had he forgotten that receivables were not her bailiwick?

Their offices are two doors apart.

Nevertheless, I willed an interior stillness, visualized the cosmos within, and ascended: I looked down on the building, then rose higher, floating over the local greenery, then the county, the state—and on and on in a series of diminishing images until the earth disappeared in the litter of space and I approached the peace and quiet of infinite distance with its cool, clean open-ended light-years.

Someone spoke my name.

I opened my eyes. Mrs. Goodell was looking at me with concern.

“Cleave, are you all right?”

“Mrs. G.,” I said, “I’m fine. But I do need to be paid.”

“You will be paid.” Her face darkened with anger. “We will all be paid.”

I first encountered the Goodells years ago, when I was waiting on tables in a restaurant in the next village. As I made the rounds of my station, I saw that Mr. Goodell was in something like a drunken coma. I’d never seen anyone that paralyzed. On a return trip from the kitchen, I glanced at Mrs. Goodell, and her face wore the look of concerned and painful anger I was seeing now.

Mr. Pritchard called to me from the inner sanctum. As I entered, he turned his attention from the window and pointed at a package lying on his desk. “Take that to the post office, then go over to the warehouse and tell Billy to close up.” The telephone rang, but Mr. Pritchard just ignored it. He ignored me as well: his chair pivoted silently back to the window, to which watery view he appeared to surrender himself. From her office, LeeAnne yelled, “Dad, pick up!” But Mr. Pritchard did not pick up. For a few moments, he and I watched the rain paint the windowpanes.

I made myself ask him about the checks. A glimmering light washed pale shadows down the length of his face. “Cleave,” he said, as the phone continued to ring, “please just go.”"