In the parking lot the sky was the color of a bruise that had not decided to be a bruise. I sat in the car before I started it. James came out talking to a woman from another floor, laughing, a man whose Monday had been a Monday. He saw me and lifted the coffee cup he was still holding like a prop from morning. I lifted a hand. Citizen. Coworker. Same old.
I drove home the blank way, not remembering two of the lights, which is a trick my mind has always had when it does not want to be in a body. A radio host laughed at a joke I had not heard. I turned it off. Silence in my own car was different from silence in a van. This silence belonged to me. I did not trust it yet.
The house was the house. The couch still smelled like sleep. The bedroom doorway was a mouth.
I stood in it and admitted, quietly, that Luis had been unfinished business even finished, and Mira was still in the mattress whether she was in the house or not. I wanted to see inside a person. I will say that as hunger, not as a manual. Hunger is honest. Manuals are how you get caught.
The kitchen drawer waited. I opened it. Two dark rectangles. Off. Still heavier than they should have been. I did not turn them on. I put my palm on them the way you check a forehead for fever. They were cool. They were patient. They knew more than I wanted a piece of plastic to know.
I closed the drawer with my hip and stood in the kitchen dark listening for a siren that did not come. The absence of sirens had been the theme of the weekend. I did not trust themes. Themes are what you notice after you have already gotten away with something, or after you think you have.
I made a list in my head that I did not write down, because writing is a witness. I would need tape and gloves and a place that was not my driveway. A second car or a walk I planned this time. A style, even, if style is what keeps a man from walking home across a county in the dark.