Jamais Vu at the Dead Letter Office

Nadia

The waiting room had forty-three chairs.

She counted them because counting was what she did. Fourteen years on the same mail route and you learn to count without choosing to. Mailboxes on Pulaski Street: thirty-one. Steps from the truck to Mrs. Hernandez’s porch: fourteen. Letters that scattered from her hand when the tightness in her chest became a fist: she didn’t get to count those. They went into the air like startled pigeons and then she was on the sidewalk and the concrete was cold against her cheek and the sky was the white of a dead channel and then the sky was a ceiling.

Fluorescent. Paneled. Two of the tubes flickering in a rhythm that was almost a pattern but never quite completed.

The chairs were green. Molded plastic. Budget from a different administration. They were arranged in rows facing a counter, like a DMV, and most of them were occupied. Forty-three chairs and maybe thirty-five people, and the people were doing what people do in waiting rooms: sitting, reading, staring at nothing, holding Styrofoam cups.

They looked up when she appeared. Some smiled. One man in the second row nodded the way men nod at each other across parking lots — minimal, committed to nothing. A woman near the window waved.

The vending machine against the far wall offered sandwiches. Ham. Egg salad. Tuna. The prices were in a currency she didn’t recognize. The expiration dates on the sandwiches all read the same thing: FRESH.

A girl stood up from the corner chair. She was twelve. She had brown hair in a braid that fell over her left shoulder in the way Nadia had braided it a thousand mornings before school, pulling the sections tight the way Zosia liked, the way Zosia said made her feel like a knight getting ready. She had Zosia’s hands. Narrow fingers. The thumbnail on the left hand bitten short.

She did not have Zosia’s scar.

The girl said, “Mom, you’re here.”

Nadia said, “Yes.”

She said it the way she said it when someone on the route asked if it was cold out and the answer was nineteen degrees and obvious.

The girl crossed the room and put her arms around Nadia and the arms were warm and the height was right and the smell was nearly right — the shampoo Nadia used to buy, the green apple one, discontinued two years ago — and somewhere in the architecture of the hug there was a gap she couldn’t name, like a word on the tip of a tongue that won’t arrive.

A figure appeared at the counter. Not approached. Appeared. There was no sound of footsteps, no opening of a door. The figure was simply present in the way that furniture is present, as if the counter had always included a person behind it.

“Welcome to the Office,” the figure said. “You have been assigned Chair 27. Window-adjacent. Good light.”

The figure placed a mug on the counter. The mug was white ceramic with a name printed on it in a plain sans-serif font. The name was NADIA.

“The wait,” the figure said, “is as long as you need it to be.”

Pell

So the thing about the new one is she has this look like she’s cataloging the room, which, believe me, I get that, I cataloged this room in (I want to say) 1987 or possibly early ‘88 — the timeline gets a little, I won’t say blurry but impressionistic, like a painting of a clock rather than a clock — and I remember thinking: forty-three chairs, one vending machine, one counter, one Attendant, and roughly two dozen people who seem unreasonably comfortable for people sitting in molded plastic chairs under fluorescent lights. And my first thought, my very first thought, was: this is fine. I can work with this.

Which is, in my experience, the thought that precedes most of the major mistakes of a person’s life.

But let me back up. My name is Pell Durbin and I died (and I use that word loosely, in the sense that I don’t use it at all, I prefer the word “settled,” which has a nice real-estate quality to it, as in: Pell Durbin has settled in the Office, the way you’d say someone settled in Akron, which is where I also settled, previously, before settling here, which is to say: I am a man of sequential settlements) — I settled in the fall of 1987 in the parking lot of a Sears where I had gone to buy a socket wrench because the downspout on the house was loose and Gail had mentioned it twice, which with Gail meant she had mentioned it a hundred times internally and was giving me the courtesy of two externals before she fixed it herself, which she would have done competently, because Gail was competent at everything, and I remember reaching for my keys and then not reaching for my keys and then the asphalt was very close to my face and then the asphalt was a ceiling and the ceiling was here.

Aortic dissection. Which is a fancy way of saying my body committed a fundamental error of engineering.

I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know it for years. You don’t come in knowing. You come in and the room is warm and there’s a chair and the Attendant gives you a mug with your name on it and you think: this is a waiting room, I am waiting for something, and waiting is a thing I know how to do because I am (was) an American and waiting is our national sport, surpassing baseball, which is itself mostly waiting.

The sandwiches. I should address the sandwiches. The ham is reliable. Reliable in the way that a 1984 Toyota Corolla is reliable: it will not inspire you, it will not let you down, and it has somehow outlasted everything else in the lot. The egg salad is — look, the egg salad has a relationship to eggs that I would characterize as aspirational rather than achieved. I have eaten the egg salad twice. Both times were acts of optimism I do not intend to repeat. The tuna is fine. I want to stress that: the tuna is fine. Not good. Not bad. Fine. And if fine is enough for you — and I have come to believe that fine is enough for most of us, that the whole architecture of human desire is just the inability to accept that fine is enough — then the tuna will sustain you indefinitely.

(Indefinitely is a word that works differently here.)

But the new one. Nadia. She comes in and she’s got this postal uniform on, and her hands are red from cold, and she’s got that look — I know that look — the look of a person who has been carrying things for other people for so long that she’s forgotten what her hands feel like empty. And the girl goes to her, the girl who’s been sitting in the corner chair reading a magazine about horses for (and I mean this literally) as long as I can remember, and the girl says Mom and the new one says Yes and something in the room shifts, something I haven’t felt in years, which is the weight of a person who has not yet decided to stay.

Most of us decided fast. Mrs. Takahashi, she was here maybe three hours before she had her chair arranged and her mug on the side table and a routine that included two walks around the perimeter of the room (left to right, she was particular) and a conversation with Franklin Boyd about the weather, which is an impressive commitment given that we don’t have weather. Kip Landers took longer — two days, maybe three — but Kip was the anxious type, bounced his leg, asked questions the Attendant would answer in that way the Attendant answers questions, which is to say: technically, without information.

Some didn’t stay. I should mention that. There’s a door. Back of the room, past the water fountain (room temperature, always, which is a metaphor I have chosen not to examine). Metal door, push bar, little window of wired glass. Through the window you can see a hallway. Fluorescent, same as here, but a different hum, a different frequency, and if you get close enough — and I don’t, I don’t get close — you can smell something. Cold air. Diesel. The outside of something.

Mrs. Takahashi walked through that door in 2003 and did not come back. She left her mug on the side table — GRACE, it said, because her first name was Grace, which I always thought was perfect for a woman who moved through this room like it was a garden she was tending — and nobody picked it up. Kip Landers ran through it in 1991, fast, like he was late for an appointment he’d forgotten about and just now remembered, and did not come back. Others have gone. A few a year, sometimes fewer. The Attendant calls it “resolution of case,” which is a phrase that I find neither comforting nor uncomfortable but merely the kind of phrase that institutions produce the way bodies produce sweat: automatically, without malice, as a byproduct of functioning.

I have not gone near the door. The room is fine. My chair is fine. The tuna is fine.

(Tommy was seven. He had a gap in his teeth from where the front ones came out three days apart and he put them both under his pillow and wrote a note to the tooth fairy that said BULK DEAL. He was that kind of kid. The kind of kid who negotiates with supernatural entities. I don’t talk about Tommy much.)

The Attendant

The Attendant notes that the new arrival (Kowalczyk, Nadia, 41, letter carrier, cardiac event, provisional status) has been assigned to Chair 27 as per standard intake procedure. The Attendant selected this chair with the care the Attendant applies to all assignments: window-adjacent for natural temperament types, aisle-adjacent for the restless, back row for the watchful. Chair 27 offers good light and a clear sightline to the girl in the corner, which the Attendant judged appropriate given the nature of the arrival’s attachment.

The Attendant has prepared a mug.

The mugs are not retrieved from storage. The Attendant wishes to be clear on this point. Each mug is specific to its recipient. Each mug has always existed in the cabinet, waiting for the person whose name it bears, in the manner that a seat at a table exists before the guest arrives. This is not magic. This is administration.

The Office has served four hundred and eleven thousand, six hundred and nine residents since the Attendant was first appointed. The Attendant does not recall the date of appointment. The Attendant recalls the feeling: the sense of a door closing behind, of a uniform settling onto shoulders, of a name being replaced by a title, the way a key is replaced by a lock.

The Attendant has observed that new arrivals pass through predictable phases. Phase One: orientation (duration: variable, typically 1-6 hours). Phase Two: inquiry (duration: variable, typically 6-48 hours; characterized by questions the Attendant is equipped to answer). Phase Three: integration (duration: indefinite; characterized by cessation of questions). The Attendant finds Phase Three the most rewarding. Phase Three is when the mug begins to feel like the resident’s mug rather than a mug with their name on it. The Attendant considers this distinction important.

The Attendant observes that the new arrival has not yet entered Phase Two.

The Attendant will wait.

The Attendant is skilled at waiting. It is, in fact, the Attendant’s primary function. To wait, to maintain, to ensure that the room remains the room: warm, lit, stocked, inhabited. The Attendant does not leave the room. The Attendant has no need to leave the room. The room is sufficient. The room contains everything that the Attendant requires, which is: residents who require the room.

Nadia

The girl knew things.

She knew the name of the cat. Bernard. She knew that Bernard was orange and had one eye that didn’t track right and that he liked to sit on the heating vent in the kitchen and that Nadia’s husband — ex-husband — had been allergic but tolerated it because Zosia had said, with the unassailable logic of a seven-year-old: “Bernard was here first.”

She knew the song. The one Nadia sang at bedtime, the Polish one, the one Nadia’s mother had sung, the one about the cat who sleeps on the moon. She hummed it and the melody was right. She got the words right too, even the third verse that Nadia always fumbled, the one with the line about the river that sounds like silver thread, which Zosia used to correct her on every single night with the ferocious precision of a child who has memorized something and will not tolerate deviation.

She knew about the route. She said, “You still do Pulaski Street?” and Nadia said yes and the girl said, “Mrs. Hernandez still has the dog?” and Nadia said yes and the girl said, “I always wanted to pet that dog,” and that was true. Zosia had always wanted to pet that dog.

She knew about the drawing. The one Zosia had taped to the inside of the mail truck’s visor — a crayon portrait of Nadia in her uniform, the blue exaggerated to the shade of a cartoon sky, the mail bag bigger than the body. Nadia still had it there. The tape had yellowed. The crayon had faded. She looked at it every morning before she started the route and every morning she did not think about why.

The girl was twelve. She would have been twelve. Three years since the leukemia finished what it had started and Zosia was cremated in a box that was too small for what it meant and Nadia went back to work on a Tuesday because Tuesday was Pulaski Street and the mail doesn’t mourn.

The girl’s laugh came out at the right moments but it was thin. Not wrong the way a stranger’s laugh is wrong. Wrong the way a recording is wrong — the shape preserved, the air removed. A photocopy of a photocopy. If you weren’t listening for it you wouldn’t hear it.

The scar was missing.

Zosia had a scar on her left knee. Bicycle. Age six. A Saturday in October, the leaves orange and dry and loud under the wheels, the hill on Kedzie that Nadia had said was too steep and Zosia had said was fine and the hill had sided with Nadia. Seven stitches. Zosia had wanted to watch them go in, which the nurse said was unusual for a six-year-old, and Zosia had said: “I want to see how they fix it.”

This girl’s knees were smooth and unmarked. Both of them. The skin was the right shade but it had no history. It was skin that had never fallen off a bicycle or been stitched by a nurse while its owner watched with fascination.

The girl said “Mom” often. She said it when she wanted to show Nadia something in the magazine. She said it when the vending machine restocked and the fresh sandwiches appeared. She said it the way Zosia had said it, with the emphasis on the vowel, turning a single syllable into something round and open. But sometimes the word arrived wrong, like a letter put in the correct mailbox at the wrong address. It reached Nadia and it did not land. She heard it and understood it and did not feel it. The word “Mom” delivered by a stranger who had studied the pronunciation.

Nadia sat in Chair 27 and the girl sat on the floor beside her, leaning against Nadia’s leg, reading the horse magazine. The magazine was called EQUINE MONTHLY and the date on the cover was blank.

The Attendant appeared at intervals. Not walking. Present, then absent, then present. Offering things. A blanket. A sandwich (ham). A refill for the mug that Nadia had not drunk from.

“Adjustment periods are normal,” the Attendant said. “Recognition variance decreases over time.”

“Recognition variance,” Nadia said.

“The feeling that familiar things are not quite familiar. It passes. The room calibrates.”

The Attendant said “calibrates” the way Nadia’s supervisor said “bereavement leave.” Gently. As if the word itself might bruise.

The Attendant

The Attendant observes that the new arrival is displaying Phase One behavior consistent with the 73rd percentile of intake profiles: physical stillness, ocular scanning, somatic rigidity in the hands and jaw. These are indicators of pattern recognition, which the Attendant considers a positive sign. The residents who notice the room’s features are the residents who come to appreciate the room’s features.

The Attendant notes that the girl (designation: 27-A, companion unit, configured to arrival specifications, active since initial intake request was — )

The Attendant notes that the girl is performing within expected parameters.

The Attendant has placed additional reading material in the corner: three magazines (equine, two issues of a puzzle periodical, one National Geographic dated to no particular year). The Attendant selected these based on the arrival’s companion profile. The Attendant takes pride in the specificity of these selections. The room provides what is needed. The room has always provided what is needed.

The Attendant would like to note, for the record, that the room has never failed to provide.

Pell

So Tommy was seven when I settled and Tommy would be (math was never my strong suit, Gail handled the finances, Gail handled most things) — Tommy would be forty-five now. Forty-six maybe. A man. A man with his own kids possibly. A man who maybe still has the gap-tooth smile or maybe got it fixed, kids get things fixed now, I hear, or I don’t hear, I imagine, which is different and worse.

I bring this up because the new one — Nadia — she asked me about Tommy and she asked in a way that I recognized, which is: directly. Not the way most people here ask things, which is sideways, parenthetically, enclosed in qualifications and conditions like a gift wrapped in so much tissue paper that you forget there’s something inside. She said: “You had a son?”

And I said: “Have. I have a son.”

And she looked at me in a way that I did not enjoy.

“Tell me about him,” she said.

So I started. Tommy. Seven years old. Red hair — (Gail’s side, the Irish contingent, every third generation produces a redhead like a factory defect that nobody wants to fix) — and freckles across the nose in a pattern that (I swear this is true) roughly approximated the constellation Orion if you squinted and wanted it badly enough. And the gap-tooth grin. And the BULK DEAL note.

And then she said, “What did his face look like? All together. Not the parts. The whole face.”

And I.

And the thing is.

I had the parts. I had the red hair and the freckles and the gap and the nose (Gail’s nose, straight, dignified, a nose that took itself seriously) and the ears (mine, unfortunately, slightly protuberant, ears that had never quite committed to the head). I had all the parts. I had a complete inventory. I could pass an audit.

But the face. The way the parts sat together. The composition. The thing that makes a face a face and not a list of features — I reached for it and it was not there. Not gone the way a word is gone when you can’t remember it. Gone the way a room is gone after you close the door and walk down the hall and turn the corner. It still exists. You just can’t see it from here.

And I couldn’t.

(Gail’s face went first. I noticed it in — when? I don’t have the year. The year when I reached for Gail’s face and found instead a warm blank space, like the feeling of a name you’ve forgotten: the shape of the absence exactly the size of what used to fill it. I didn’t tell anyone. Who would I tell? The Attendant? The Attendant would say integration is proceeding as expected. The Attendant would say that the room provides what is needed. The Attendant would not say what the room takes.)

My parenthetical closed and I looked at Nadia and I said something that I had not said to anyone in this room in thirty-eight years, which was: “I can’t remember.”

And she didn’t say it was okay. She didn’t say that was normal. She put her hand on my arm and her hand was cold — actually cold, not room-temperature cold, but cold from an outside I could no longer imagine — and she said nothing. And the nothing was the kindest thing anyone had said to me since the parking lot of the Sears.

Nadia

She touched the girl’s hand.

The girl was sitting beside her, doing a word search from the puzzle magazine. The pencil moved in the girl’s hand the way Zosia’s pencil used to move: circling the found words with a little flourish, a small unnecessary celebration of each discovery. The girl found HORSE and circled it. She found SADDLE and circled it. She found GALLOP.

Nadia touched the girl’s hand.

The hand was warm.

The warmth was wrong.

Not cold the way a dead thing is cold. Not warm the way a living thing is warm, the way Zosia’s hand had been warm — alive warm, blood warm, the warmth that pulses and shifts and is different in the fingers than the palm. This warmth was even. Consistent. The same temperature as the chair. The same temperature as the mug. The same temperature as the room.

The girl looked up. She had Zosia’s eyes. Brown, with the fleck of gold in the left iris that Nadia had noticed when Zosia was three days old and had carried with her since, a piece of information so private that she had never told anyone, not even Zosia.

The fleck was in the wrong eye.

The girl said, “What’s wrong, Mom?”

Nadia said, “Nothing.”

The clock on the wall had hands that moved. She had been watching it. The second hand swept around and the minute hand crept forward and the numbers it pointed to were in the correct order. But the time it showed now was the same time it had shown when she arrived. The mechanism was running. The clock was not advancing. It was counting without accumulating.

The Attendant

The Attendant remembers —

The Attendant notes that adjustment variance is normal and encouraged. The Attendant has observed that new arrivals often experience a period of heightened sensitivity to environmental detail, during which minor inconsistencies may appear magnified. This is a feature of the integration process, not a flaw. The room calibrates to each resident. The resident calibrates to the room. The process is mutual, organic, and, in the Attendant’s experience, invariably successful.

The Attendant’s experience encompasses four hundred and eleven thousand, six hundred and nine cases.

The Attendant does not recall a failure.

The Attendant does not recall many things. This is efficient. Memory, in the Attendant’s view, is a filing system, and a good filing system is one that discards what is no longer needed. The Attendant has discarded extensively. The Attendant has retained: procedures, protocols, the location of the mugs, the optimal assignment of chairs, the particular needs of each resident (cross-referenced, indexed, available upon request). The Attendant has discarded: a name (the Attendant’s own, prior to appointment), a face (the Attendant’s own, which the Attendant has not seen in — the Attendant does not track personal duration), and the answer to a question that a resident asked once, years ago, which was: “Were you ever one of us?”

The Attendant answered that question. The Attendant does not recall the answer.

Nadia

The door was at the back of the room.

Metal. Institutional. A push bar across the middle, the kind you lean into with your hip when your hands are full. A window of wired safety glass, small, about the size of a letter. Through the glass she could see a hallway.

The hallway was lit by different fluorescents. A different hue. Cooler. And there was a smell that came through the seams of the door frame, faint, like a rumor of a smell: cold air. Diesel. February. Wet asphalt. The particular mineral scent of snow that has been on the ground for weeks and turned grey and granular along the curbs.

She knew that smell. It was the smell of her route. It was the smell of six a.m. on Pulaski Street when the truck hasn’t warmed up and the leather of her mail bag is stiff and her breath comes out in shapes.

“Don’t,” the girl said.

Nadia turned. The girl was standing behind her, three feet away, the horse magazine rolled in her hand. Her face was Zosia’s face. Every feature in its correct place. The braid over the left shoulder. The bitten thumbnail. The gold fleck in the — right iris. The right one.

“Don’t go through the door,” the girl said. “Everyone who goes through the door doesn’t come back.”

“I know,” Nadia said.

Pell

She’s standing at the door and I’m in my chair — my chair, fourth from the left, second row, the chair I have sat in for thirty-eight years, the chair that has the shape of me in it the way a bed has the shape of a sleeper — and I’m watching her and I’m thinking: don’t. Which is also what I thought when Mrs. Takahashi put her mug down on the side table and walked to the back of the room and didn’t walk back. And what I thought when Kip Landers took off at a run like the hallway was a finish line. Don’t. Not because the room is better than the hallway. Not because I know what’s in the hallway. But because the room is known and the hallway is not and the distance between known and unknown is the distance between a chair and the absence of a chair, and I have learned, in thirty-eight years, to prefer the chair.

(I am afraid. I should say that. I have said a lot of things with a lot of parenthetical machinery designed to avoid saying that, but: I am afraid. I am afraid that the hallway leads to a place where Tommy’s face is not just blurry but fully gone, where there is no inventory of features, no red hair, no gap-tooth grin, no BULK DEAL, no freckles in the shape of almost-Orion. I am afraid that the hallway leads to the end of the parts. And I have been surviving on the parts. The parts are what I have.)

She’s at the door and the girl is behind her saying don’t and the room is doing what the room does, which is: being fine. The lights hum. The vending machine offers its sandwiches. Thirty-five people sit in their chairs with their mugs and their routines and the Attendant stands at the counter with the posture of a person who has never needed to sit down.

And Nadia puts her hand on the push bar and the metal is cold. Actually cold. Not room-temperature. And she pauses and I think: she’ll stay. They sometimes do. They get to the door and the cold comes through and they remember that the room is warm and they come back to their chair and the Attendant brings them a fresh mug and the mug still has their name on it, it always has their name on it, and the name is enough.

The Attendant

The Attendant observes that the new arrival has reached the door.

The door is always available. The door is not locked. The Office operates on the principle of voluntary residence. All residents are free to leave. The door exists as proof of this freedom. The Attendant has observed that the existence of the door is, for most residents, sufficient. The knowledge that departure is possible renders departure unnecessary. This is the door’s primary function: not as an exit, but as evidence that an exit exists.

The Attendant does not recommend the door.

The Attendant has never used the door.

She was not always the Attendant.

The Attendant has prepared refreshments for those who wish to remain. The coffee is adequate. The ham sandwiches have been restocked. Chair 27 has been reserved.

Nadia

“You’re not my daughter,” Nadia said.

The girl did not flinch. She stood with the rolled magazine in her hand and her face was still and patient in the way that Zosia’s face was never still and never patient because Zosia was a child who vibrated with the want of the next thing, who leaned forward in chairs, who ran when walking was available.

“That’s a strange thing to say,” the girl said. She smiled. The smile was correct.

“The scar,” Nadia said.

“What scar?”

“She had a scar on her left knee. From a bicycle on Kedzie Avenue. Seven stitches. She watched them go in.”

The girl looked down at her knees. Smooth. Unbroken. When she looked back up the smile was still there, unchanged, which was wrong because a real face would have shifted.

“The room adjusts,” the girl said. “The Attendant said. It calibrates.”

“The gold fleck is in the wrong eye.”

“Mom —”

“Her laugh had a catch in it. From the breathing tube. After the second round of chemo her laugh had a hitch at the top, like a hiccup, and she hated it and then she didn’t hate it and then it was just how she laughed. Yours doesn’t catch.”

The girl was quiet. Then she said: “Stay anyway. I know the song. I know about Bernard. I know Mrs. Hernandez has a dog. I have all the pieces. Isn’t that enough?”

The smile was gone. What replaced it was not grief — the girl was not built for grief. What replaced it was effort. The visible work of a thing trying to be what it was made to resemble.

Nadia touched the girl’s hair. The braid was tight, the way she used to do it. The hair was soft. It was room temperature.

She said something. It was quiet enough that from across the room, from the vantage point of a man in the fourth chair from the left in the second row, it would have been inaudible. It might have been a name. It might have been goodbye. It might have been the first line of the song about the cat on the moon. It started in one register and ended somewhere else entirely, and the girl did not respond because the girl was looking at her knees, at the place where a scar should have been.

Nadia pushed the bar.

The door opened.

The hallway was cold and smelled like February and somewhere very far away, or very close, a siren was making the sound that sirens make when they are coming for someone and Nadia stepped through and did not look back. Not because she was brave. Because looking back would end her.

The door closed. The pneumatic hinge gave its slow exhale, the seal met the frame, and the hallway smell was gone.

Pell

She’s gone.

The girl is back in the corner. She’s reading the magazine. EQUINE MONTHLY. She reads it every day. I don’t know what she finds in there that’s new. Maybe nothing is new. Maybe that’s the point.

The room is fine. The lights hum. The vending machine has been restocked, or has never been unstocked, which is the same thing here. My mug is on the side table. PELL. Black letters, white ceramic. It’s warm in my hands. The coffee tastes the way it always tastes, which is: like coffee the way a photograph of coffee is coffee. Close. Almost.

Mrs. Takahashi’s chair is empty. It’s been empty since 2003. Nobody sits in it. That’s not a rule. The Attendant doesn’t make rules about chairs. It’s just that nobody sits in it. The mug that says GRACE is still on the side table next to the empty chair and the coffee in the mug is still warm because the coffee here is always warm because warm is what the room does.

I hope she found something. Nadia. Through the door. I hope the hallway leads somewhere and the somewhere is cold and smells like diesel and has weather and has endings and has the kind of mornings where your breath comes out in shapes. I hope it’s February and the mail is heavy and the route is long and none of it is fine. I hope none of it is fine. Because fine is —

The ham is reliable. The egg salad is inadvisable. The tuna is

The tuna is fine.

Tommy had red hair. He had freckles. He had a gap in his front teeth. He wrote a note that said BULK DEAL.

I have these facts. I have them the way you have things in your pockets: accessible, present, worn smooth by handling. I do not have his face.

My chair is the fourth from the left. Second row. It has the shape of me in it.

I don’t think about the door.

(