Daniel got his palms under him and pushed.
The pavement pushed back, wet and gritty and solid, and that was all he wanted out of the next ten seconds.
One fact that would hold weight.
The pavement held.
Rain ran off the back of his neck into his collar, and the collar belonged to his Brooklyn coat, and the coat held too.
The third thing didn’t hold at all.
Low under his sternum, patient, something hummed.
It wasn’t his heart.
Hearts don’t listen.
He stood.
His left knee cracked, and the crack came out of his own body, which meant his own body had come with him.
He went through his pockets.
No wallet.
No phone.
A folded napkin from a diner he’d never sat in, and when he opened it the napkin was blank, and when he held the blank napkin out in the rain the rain made it wet.
Awake, then.
He would take awake.
The street said otherwise.
Seven in the morning and empty, but not Brooklyn empty.
A small-town empty with no reason to get out of bed.
Clean old buildings, every one of them too short.
A diner he half recognized by its neon.
A clock tower reading seven-oh-three in Roman numerals he had only ever seen on a screen.
A pawnshop with the curtains drawn.
Twenty yards up, a woman under an umbrella crossed the road with a collie dragging at the leash.
She stopped in the middle of it.
“Dan.
You’re soaked clean through.” “I’m fine.” “You were sitting in the road is what you were.” The umbrella tipped back so she could see him properly.
“Did you slip?” He opened his mouth, and another voice came out of it, a voice his throat knew how to make without asking him first.
“Curb got me.
I’m all right, Mrs.
Hennessey.” “You want me to call somebody?” “No, thank you.
I’m on my way.” “On your way where, in this?” “Cannery.” The word arrived before he chose it.
“Whistle’s at half past.” “Well.” She hauled the collie off a lamppost.
“I’ve got my grandson’s coffee going cold as it is, so I’ll leave you to drown standing up.
Get out of the rain, Dan.” “You’re standing there like you’ve never seen weather.” “I’ve seen weather.” “Not ours, you haven’t.” She tugged the leash.
“Go on.” “Is it going to stop?” “It never does.
Not this time of year.” She said it flat, without hearing herself say it, and walked on.
Dan.
The name landed on him the same as the rain landed on him.
It landed, and it didn’t belong.
Mrs.
Hennessey.
That one had been in his mouth before he decided to use it, and he didn’t know a Mrs.
Hennessey, and he had no idea why his voice did.
He put his hand on his own face.
Cold.
His.
Wrong in some fashion he couldn’t get a word around, past the one certainty he could hold onto: he had not lain down on this pavement.
He’d been in Brooklyn.
His kitchen.
The chair.
The lightbulb.
Eleven-forty-seven on a Thursday, up on a kitchen chair reaching for a bulb, and his left foot went out from under him, and the back of his head met the counter on the way down.
He remembered the sound.
A dull wet thud, not loud, not quiet, the worst sort, the ones that happen inside your own skull.
And then here.
Pavement.
Rain.
A town he knew, not from living in it but from watching it twice through with a notebook on his lap and a cat on his feet and the volume down low, because it was one in the morning and his neighbors had thin walls.
The hum pressed once against the inside of his ribs.
A question.
He had no idea what it was asking.
He walked.
Main Street ran three blocks and he walked all three of them twice, counting the town off by its storefronts.
Granny’s Diner.
The corner drugstore.
A bed and breakfast with white trim.
A library.
The pawnshop again, and this time the curtain stirred, and he didn’t stay to learn what had stirred it.
He stopped at Main and a side street with no name he knew and put his palm flat against the drugstore brick.
Cold.
Real.
The hum pressed twice, and twice wasn’t a question.
Twice was an acknowledgement.
“I’m in Storybrooke,” he said out loud.
The rain took it.
The hum took it.
Then the hum came back with a low thrum that was not a word and not a sound, and to the part of him that was still a paralegal from Brooklyn it read like the first line of a contract being written onto paper he hadn’t signed.
“I’m not signing anything,” he told it.
The thrum didn’t argue.
It didn’t stop, either.
The cannery whistle went off at the far end of the street, and his feet turned toward the gate before the rest of him had voted on it.
Behind him, Mrs.
Hennessey looked back once at the young man in the wet coat who had used her name without knowing it.
She thought nothing of it.
She went on thinking nothing of it until noon.
The gate stood open.
The shift foreman waved him through, and Daniel’s mouth had a name ready for the man, and Daniel refused to spend it.
“You’re wet.” “It’s raining.” “It’s been raining since Tuesday, and you’ve owned that coat since before Tuesday, so I’d have thought by now you’d have worked out the sequence.” The foreman jerked his chin toward the floor.
“Line two.
Same as always.” “Line two,” Daniel said, and his hands were already moving.
“You want the seamer after?” “I’m always on the seamer after.” “See, there you go.” The foreman thumbed his cap back.
“Man knows his own schedule, he can’t be too far gone.” That was the part he couldn’t get his teeth into.
He worked, and he worked well.
His hands knew the belt and knew the crates and knew which lids ran short and wanted a knock at the seam.
Nobody corrected him.
Nobody looked at him twice.
Six hours of a job he had never been taught went through him like water through a pipe that had been laid for it.
At noon he sat on a crate in the loading bay with a sandwich he didn’t remember buying.
The bread was wrong.
Too dense, too sweet, the wrong flour altogether.
The foreman dropped onto the crate opposite him and unscrewed a thermos.
“Bread’s wrong,” Daniel said.
“Bread’s what it’s been.” “Since when?” “Since always.” The foreman drank.
“How long have you worked here?” “Long enough.” “How long is long enough?” The foreman chewed.
The chewing went on past the point where an answer should have arrived.
“Long enough,” he said again, at the same speed, in the same voice, and reached for the thermos with the same hand, and Daniel watched him not hear a word of it.
“Right,” Daniel said.
“You ever think about going somewhere else?” “Where else.” “Anywhere.
Portland.” “What’s in Portland.” It came out with no question in it at all.
The foreman capped the thermos and stood.
“Ten minutes on the clock, Dan.” He put the sandwich down and did not pick it up again.
The hum had no comment.
He tried to remember his cat’s name and got there on the second pass.
Rumpel.
He’d picked it years before he ever expected to meet one.
Rumpel was in Brooklyn, on the counter of a fourth-floor walk-up, under a lightbulb that still needed changing.
In the afternoon the rain stopped.
The sun came out too yellow, weather written by somebody who had never been through a Brooklyn winter.
Walking back toward Main he passed a woman with short dark hair and a badge on her hip.
She slowed down.
She was trying to place him and couldn’t.
“You look like you’ve had a morning.” “Long shift,” Daniel said, and kept walking.
“That’s not what I asked.” “No,” he said.
“It wasn’t.” “You got a name?” “Everybody in this town has a name.” “That’s not an answer either.” He didn’t turn around.
Emma Swan.
The name came up his throat and he swallowed it back down.
He wasn’t going to talk to anyone whose story he already knew, because knowing the story meant standing in it, and he wasn’t standing in it.
He was wet.
He was going to wake up.
At dusk he found the laundromat, and the stairs beside it, and the door at the top of them that his key opened.
The key had been in his coat pocket all day.
He stood in the dark of an apartment that was his and wasn’t and counted what was wrong with it.
Someone else’s indent in the pillow.
Sheets that smelled of a soap he had never once chosen.
A photograph on the dresser of a woman he didn’t know, smiling, and the smile was aimed at him.
He sat on the floor with his back against the door and put his hand flat over the hum, and the hum was still there, low and patient.
A contract he hadn’t read.
A signature he hadn’t written.
A first line he could already feel was going to cost him something.
Rain started again at midnight.
He didn’t sleep.
He counted what he had instead, out loud, because out loud made it evidence.
“Daniel Ashford.
Twenty-seven.
Paralegal, Brooklyn.” His breath fogged in front of him.
“Fell off a kitchen chair at eleven-forty-seven on a Thursday.
Storybrooke, Maine, which is a town off a television show I watched twice.” The hum listened.
“There’s something under my ribs keeping tabs on my heart,” he said.
“I answered to a name that isn’t mine and my hands know a job I’ve never done.” Nothing came back with words in it.
“My coat’s my coat,” he said.
“My hands are my hands.” The hum pressed once, and pressed again, and the second press came down square on the beat of his heart and stayed there, keeping time with him, matching him stroke for stroke and holding.
He sat with that until the window went grey.
Then he got up, pulled the wet coat back over his shoulders, and took the stairs down two at a time, out into the street, with the hum keeping his time for him.