The pen was already dying when Daniel started writing on the inside of his coat.
He’d found it in the pocket, a cheap black stick pen he didn’t remember owning, and the canvas lining of the Brooklyn coat took ink better than he’d expected.
He wrote across the left panel, under the arm, where nothing would rub it off.
Fourth Ave walk-up.
Grocery man’s lettuce.
Rumpel, orange, sleeps on feet.
Kitchen chair, lightbulb, Thursday 11:47.
The ink bled a little into the wool.
It looked permanent.
He needed it to be permanent.
“Fourth Avenue,” he said out loud, to the empty room, to see whether saying it made it stronger.
Under his sternum the hum came up.
Not loud.
Attentive.
The same lean it had made outside the pawnshop window.
So that was the arrangement.
Say a Brooklyn thing out loud and something in his chest leaned in to hear it.
“Fine,” he told it.
“Listen, then.
The grocery on the corner had wilted lettuce every single day and the man behind the counter would say take it anyway, it’s fine, you’re a regular.
Every time.
Take it anyway, it’s fine, you’re a regular.” The hum listened.
“Write that down if you want,” Daniel said.
“I already did.” He wrote it down.
He wrote smaller than he’d started, because the pen was going and because the coat had edges.
The apartment had one window and the window faced a brick wall and the brick wall had a pigeon on it that hadn’t moved in twenty minutes.
He’d caught himself, somewhere around minute twelve, working out whether the pigeon was cursed too.
A pigeon with a fairy-tale life folded up under its feathers, sitting on that brick for twenty-eight years, waiting for somebody to come to town and give it back its name.
He was losing his mind.
Knowing it didn’t slow it down.
He’d tried the phone before the writing.
The nightstand had a rotary phone on it, which should have been the first thing to tell him, and when he lifted the receiver there was no tone at all, which should have been the second.
He dialed anyway.
Ten digits he’d had in his head since he was seven, written on the inside of his skull in ink that had never once run.
Nothing.
No click, no line, no anything on the other side of the town line.
He’d held it to his ear regardless.
“Dad,” he said into the dead receiver.
“It’s me.
I’m going to be out of touch a while.” The plastic was cold against his jaw.
“I’m fine.
I want you to know that first, because you always ask that second and then don’t hear the answer.” He shut his eyes.
“Feed the cat.
I don’t know who’s got him.
Somebody’s got him.” He put the receiver back in its cradle and sat down on the floor with his back against a bed frame that belonged to somebody else.
The mattress had somebody else’s indent in the pillow.
The sheets smelled of a soap he had never once picked off a shelf.
The photograph on the dresser was still there, and the woman in it was still smiling, and he still had no idea who she was.
“I’m not asking you about her,” he said to the hum.
“Whatever it costs to ask, I’m not asking yet.” The hum sat there, patient, and took that down too.
He went back to work on the coat.
“Radiator clanked at three in the morning,” he said, and wrote radiator clanks 3am.
“Bathroom door stuck.
You had to lift it by the handle to get it shut.” He wrote bathroom door, lift by handle.
“Restaurant downstairs.
The whole stairwell smelled like cooking oil.
Every landing.
Decades of other people’s dinners in the paint.” He wrote restaurant downstairs, oil smell, all four landings.
Those came easy.
Those were sharp.
He tested a harder one.
“Rumpel,” he said.
The hum came up higher than it had all night.
“Orange cat.
Warm orange, marmalade, a fruit left in the sun.
One ear’s got a notch out of the tip, the left one, a little triangle gone before I ever had him and he never noticed it was missing.” He was talking faster.
“Green eyes.
Short meow.
Businesslike.
A cat with things to do.” All of it was there.
He could produce every piece of it on demand.
He could not produce the face.
He tried again, from the top, and got the orange and the notch and the green and the meow, and where the face should have assembled itself out of those parts there was only a cat’s face, a general one, the face of any orange cat in any window in any city.
“No,” Daniel said.
He wrote cat’s face — white mark over the left eye, remember how big and stopped, because he wasn’t certain about the white mark.
He might be inventing it.
That was worse than losing it.
“He’s fading,” he said, to the room, to the hum, to whatever was keeping the minutes.
“Do you understand what that is?
That’s not a fact going.
Everything else I can list.
That’s the only thing I had that wasn’t a list.” The hum did not answer.
It read over his shoulder.
He could feel it read.
That was what the thing wanted, and he understood it now with the clean cold part of his brain that had spent four years in a Brooklyn back office reading other people’s contracts.
It wanted an inventory.
It wanted to know what he could not stand to lose, in order and by rank, so that when the bill came it would know exactly which line to draw from.
He kept writing anyway.
The defense was temporary.
Everything was temporary.
He wrote in ink that was almost gone.
“My father’s face,” he said.
“Sixties.
Beard gray in patches, not all over, patches.
Same eyes as mine, exactly the same, people said it in front of him and he’d pretend not to like it.” The face held.
The voice didn’t.
He could remember his father saying his name and could not get the tone back.
Warm?
Tired?
The particular tired of a man twelve hours into a double who was staying upright long enough to ask about somebody’s day?
Dad’s voice — asks about my day, off a double shift, he wrote, and the letters came out gray.
“Mom,” he said.
“Small hands.
Fast hands, five things at once, always.” He breathed in through his nose.
“Lavender hand cream.
The cheap drugstore kind, the one in the white tub.” It was there.
He could smell it, right then, in an apartment that belonged to somebody else.
“You can’t have that one,” he told the hum.
“That one’s in my nose.
You can’t price what’s in my nose.” He turned the coat and found bare lining along the shoulder seam.
“Court Street,” he said.
“Second floor, no elevator, and the copier jammed on page nine every single time.
Everybody knew.
Nobody fixed it.
I hand-fed page nine for four years and never once complained about it in writing.” He wrote Court St, copier jams p.9, hand-feed.
“That’s the sort of thing you don’t think you’ll want,” he said.
“And then it’s the thing you’d trade for.” He heard himself say trade.
He put the pen down for a second, and the hum held its breath, and he picked the pen back up and kept writing about something else.
Not yet, said nothing at all, in a hum, under his sternum.
At five somebody came up the stairs and knocked.
“Dan?
You home?” Daniel got up off the floor and opened the door.
The man on the landing was short and had a mustache that moved ahead of his words, and the borrowed memory was supposed to hand over his name and did not hand over anything, and Daniel stood there in the doorway of an apartment he’d apparently rented for four years, looking at his landlord, and had nothing to call him.
“Rent’s Friday.” “Friday,” Daniel said.
“You always have it.
Four years, you always have it.
I’m not worried.” The mustache worked.
“I’m also not not worried, is what I’m saying, because you didn’t come down for your mail.” “I’ll come down for my mail.” “There’s nothing in it.
There’s never anything in it.” The man frowned at that, a short frown, the same one Ruby had aimed at a coffee pot.
Then it went off him and he was fine again.
“You feeling all right?
You look like you’ve been sitting in the dark.” “I’ve been sitting in the dark.” “Huh.” The man leaned to look past him at the unlit room.
“You want me to send somebody up about the radiator?” “Does it knock?” “Does what knock?” “The radiator.
At three in the morning.” “Nothing in this building knocks at three in the morning,” the landlord said.
“Nothing in this building does anything at three in the morning.” Daniel held onto the door frame.
He had reported a Brooklyn radiator to a Maine landlord and heard it leave his mouth as a local complaint, and the two lives had lain down on top of each other for a second and he hadn’t caught which was which until it was out.
“My mistake,” he said.
“Well, don’t.” He said it with actual kindness, which was somehow the worst part.
“It’s a Tuesday.
Nobody should sit in the dark on a Tuesday.
Friday, Dan.” “Friday,” Daniel said again, and the word came out in the wrong voice.
Dan-the-cannery’s voice.
Dan who paid on time.
Dan who had never missed once in four years, four years that were now sitting in his bones as history he had not lived and could not return.
“Good man.” Footsteps down the stairs.
On the brick wall the pigeon finally moved.
It stretched one wing and folded it back and did not fly, and it was a pigeon, and it stayed a pigeon.
Daniel sat on the floor until the light went out of the window.
He didn’t turn on the lamp.
He didn’t get into the bed with the borrowed sheets.
He slept on the floorboards with the Brooklyn coat pulled up under his chin and the list pressed against his throat, and the hum kept a rhythm that wasn’t quite his heart and wasn’t a metronome and had no name he could find for it.
He dreamed of Brooklyn.
In the dream the cat was exactly right, whole and specific and sitting on his feet with all its weight, choosing to be there.
He came awake in the gray with it still on him and got the pen out before it went.
“Notched left ear,” he said, writing on the sleeve, pressing hard to drag the last of the ink out.
“Short business-meow.
He steps on your ribs before he lies down.” The hum came back with a low thrum, not approval and not the other thing, the sound of a record being kept by something that intended to be paid.
Daniel got up off the floor.
He pulled the coat on, list against his skin, and went down the stairs into a Wednesday that belonged to Dan.