Page 35 of After His Eulogy

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I get up at six-fifteen, make coffee in the small pot, drink two cups, and go to the desk. I open the laptop and the response paper — due in five days. I read what I have written, then the sentence I added a week ago. The archive holds what it cannot say. I leave it. I get to work.

NINETEEN

REECE

I see the car on Wednesday. I am walking back from the proseminar. Tuesday’s seminar, which had been the first one after Saturday, which had been fine, which had been weirdly fine, in the way that things become weirdly fine when both people have agreed without agreeing not to make them weird. I sat across from him. He sat across from me. We did not look at each other except when we were responding to each other on the readings, and then we looked at each other in the seminar way, and the seminar way held. After class he said Saturday, quiet, on his way past my chair. I said okay. It is now Wednesday and I am walking. The same route I always walk on Wednesdays, the route I have walked for fifteen months. The route goes from campus down Walker, across Mason, up the small side street with the garage on the corner, past the elementary school. The elementary school has just let out. There are kids on the sidewalk and parents waiting and a woman in a yellow coat who I see most Wednesdays and who I do not know the name of. The woman is there. The kids are there. There’s a car in front of the elementary school, parked at the curb on my side of the street, not in a way that’s unusual. A sedan. The driver is holding aphone, not looking at me. I have seen this car before. I notice this because my body notices it first. My body slows down before I’ve processed it’s slowing down. I’ve walked twenty steps and the car has been in my peripheral vision for those twenty steps. My body has been telling me, the whole twenty steps, there’s something I should be paying attention to. I have not been paying attention because I have been thinking about Saturday and the seminar and the response paper.

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I look at the car. I have seen this car. I have seen it on Mason on Saturday morning. I had walked past it then. I had not registered it then. I am registering it now in the kind of layered way you register a thing when you are realizing you have already registered it once and have been carrying the registration in the back of your head without acknowledging it. The car is not the same color as the one on Saturday. The Saturday car was, I am pulling up the file, the Saturday car was darker. Blue. Or very dark gray. It was in front of a building on the corner of Mason and Spring. I had walked past it without really seeing it. This car is gray. Lighter gray. Not the same car. There are gray sedans everywhere. Half of all cars are gray sedans. I am being — I am being.

I keep walking. Past the car. I don’t turn my head. I don’t look in the driver’s seat. I walk at the same pace I was walking before. Past the elementary school. Past the woman in the yellow coat. I make myself not look back for two blocks. At the third block I cross the street. I pretend I am crossing because I am turning. I turn. I look back as I am turning, the way someone naturally checks for traffic. The car is still there, in front of the school. The car has not moved. The driver is still in the driver’s seat. The driver is still holding the phone. The driver is, as far as I can tell from a block and a half away, not looking at me. Okay. Okay okay. I keep walking. I take a different route home than the one I usually take. I add five minutes. I walk past a hardware store I donot usually walk past. I walk past a coffee shop I do not go to. I walk in the front of my building. I unlock the door. I go upstairs. I close the door of my apartment behind me. I lock it.

I stand in the entryway. I stand there with my coat on for a minute. It’s one car.One.It’s a Wednesday afternoon and there’s a car parked at the curb in front of the elementary school. There are gray sedans everywhere. The car on Saturday was a different car. I am pattern-matching from a place of nervousness because something happened on Saturday with Griffin and it has had me on edge. I take off my coat. I put it on the hook. I put my keys on the counter. I sit at the desk. I open the laptop. I look at my contacts. Mendez. I look at the name. My thumb is over the name. The thumb is over it, not on it. I think I should call. I think if I call now and there is nothing this is the version where the program is annoyed with me for the wrong reasons. If I call now and there is something the call is the right call.

I think I do not know which one. I think I should not be deciding this by myself. I lock the phone. I put it face down on the desk. I thinkI will call him tomorrow. I’ve been thinkingI will call him tomorrowsince the coffee shop. It’s been thirty-four days. I haven’t called.I’ll call him after Saturday.That’s the version I’m going with. I’ll call him after Saturday because if I call before Saturday the call will mean Saturday doesn’t happen, and I’m not giving up Saturday before it’s been a thing twice. I sit at the desk. I think you chose to want him to come over Saturday more than you chose to call. I think you have been doing this for thirty-four days. It is not a choice anymore. I sit. I think about the car. I think about the car on Saturday. I think about whether they are the same car. I think, I make myself think, about whether I would tell Griffin. I think about telling Griffin and it lands wrong. Telling Griffin anything lands wrong now, because it is not the same as it used to be. He does not know how to hear something like this. He does not know whatthe sentence I have seen the same car twice on different streets means. He does not have the ability to put it in context. To him it would be the sentence in the context of the rest of the situation, which I have given him in pieces, and he would be afraid. Giving him something to be afraid of, something that had come from the thing I was, that I had brought into his life. That would be the same thing as bringing the people on the case into proximity with him, which is what I have been telling myself I am not doing because they cannot find me here, which is the assumption.

The assumption. I sit with it. The assumption is they cannot find me here. The program put me here. The program is good. The program has placed me well. The assumption is two years old and I have been operating on it without re-checking it. Not checking is what I am doing instead of calling Mendez. I think one car is one car. I think two cars on two days is two cars on two days. I think I will call after Saturday. I get up. I make coffee one cup at a time over the cone, the kettle whistling at the wrong moment because I had not been counting the right beats. I drink the cup. I sit on the couch with the cup. The couch smells less like him than it did Saturday night. The smell is fading. I have not let anyone else sit on the couch in five days. The smell is just fading on its own, the way smells fade. I think if he comes Saturday the smell will come back. I think that is a thing I am thinking about. I think I am thinking about whether the smell of him on the couch will come back if he comes back on Saturday and I am not thinking about whether to call Mendez.

I do not call Mendez. I drink the coffee. I open the laptop. I work on the response paper, which is no longer due in five days, which is now due in two. I look at what I have written. I look at the sentence in the middle of the third page. The archive holds what it cannot say. I have not deleted it. The sentence does not belong in the response paper. The sentence is in the response paper anyway. I have decided the sentence is going to stay. Itis not going to stay because it is a good sentence. It is a good sentence, but that is not the reason. It is going to stay because deleting it has begun to feel like deleting a fact, and I am not in the business of deleting facts right now. I am in the business of accumulating them. Saturday. After Saturday, I will call. I go to bed at eleven-thirty. I do not sleep well. I do not sleep until three. When I do sleep I dream of a gray sedan parked outside a building I have never been in. In the dream the driver is holding a phone. The driver is not looking at me. In the dream I walk past the car and I don’t look at the car and I don’t look at the car and I don’t look at the car.

In the morning I do not remember the dream. I remember it in the afternoon, walking to campus, and I think that is. That is a dream I had, and I do not slow down. I do not call Mendez on Thursday. I do not call Mendez on Friday. On Saturday at three in the afternoon I clean the apartment. I change the sheets. I put a glass of water on the desk. I leave the lamp off because turning it on at three would be too obvious. I turn it on at six because by six it will be dark. He gets to my apartment at eight-oh-four. I open the door before he knocks.

TWENTY

REECE

I open the door before he knocks. I have been waiting for him.

I’d been at the door for forty seconds — heard the building door downstairs, heard him on the stairs, heard him on the landing, counted his steps the last six feet. I opened it before he could lift his hand to knock. He looks at me.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

I step back. He comes in. I close the door behind him and lock it.

The kitchen window is doing what it does in the evening light, which is to say almost nothing — the brick wall of the next building is three feet away and the light off it is the color of brick. The radiator is doing what it does. He looks around. He does not say anything. He is taking it in.

He is here now on a Saturday at eight in the evening, in this apartment, for the first time. He is letting himself look around because looking around is a thing he gets to do now.