Jonah uncapped the pen before he could talk himself out of it and started with the easiest line he had: his own name.
The short-let above the laundromat smelled like detergent and wet carpet, and the floor was the right height for what he was about to do low enough that standing up again would feel too much like quitting.
The TV two doors down was running the late news.
A woman’s voice said Detective E.
Patch and unidentified customer and spoke to witnesses and he did not get up to turn it off because the floor was the right height for what he was doing and getting up would delay it.
He wrote: Name.
Jonah Vega.
Age twenty-seven.
Mother: Marisol Vega.
Died March 2022.
Diabetes.
Father: unknown name.
Died when I was twelve.
The pen stopped.
The line about his father sat there unknown name because the name was not there when he reached for it, and died when I was twelve because that was what he had written in the coffee shop this morning, and copying himself was not the same as remembering.
A single line through the ink.
Then again: Father: died age twelve.
Church unknown.
Cause unknown.
Woman held my hand unknown.
Pen down.
Pen up.
College roommate first year
The name was not there.
He tried again.
Roommate.
Tall.
Played guitar badly.
Left dishes in the sink.
Name:
Nothing.
Next line: Rita.
Barista.
Called me out once.
Said I didn’t let anyone see me.
Last name:
Nothing.
The page flipped.
Faster now.
Dispatch supervisor.
Walgreens.
Man.
Fifties.
Smoked Marlboros outside the loading dock.
Told me the eight-step de-escalation script.
Name:
Nothing.
High school teacher.
AP English.
Woman.
Assigned Orwell.
Made me rewrite my essay on doublethink three times.
Name:
Nothing.
Marisol’s sister.
My aunt.
Came to the funeral.
Held me.
Cried.
Name:
Nothing.
Jonah stopped writing.
The page stared back.
Six lines.
Six blanks.
When he turned back to the first entry the line about his father was still crossed out and the line about his roommate was still half-finished and the pen was still in his hand and his hand was cold.
Pad face-down on the floor.
In the kitchenette he opened the cabinet, took down the mug he had bought at the bodega for a dollar fifty, filled it with tap water, and drank it standing at the sink because sitting down again would mean going back to the pad and he was not ready.
The TV two doors down said something about a weather front and a traffic delay on the turnpike.
A man laughed.
A door closed.
Back to the pad.
Sat.
Flipped it over.
Marisol’s kitchen.
Arroz con pollo.
Smell:
The pen hovered.
Jonah tried to smell it.
The memory was there the day, the table, the plate in front of him but the smell was gone.
Steam rose in his mind’s eye.
No scent came with it.
Ink on the page: Smell unknown.
Gone.
The word gone sat on the page until the letters stopped being letters.
Fresh page.
A list every name he could summon.
Grandfather.
Second-grade teacher.
The guy at the Walgreens who’d been shot six months before the jump.
The woman at the DMV who’d processed his PA license.
The landlord who’d rented him this short-let without asking questions.
Eleven names.
Jonah read the list back to himself out loud, one at a time, and by the eighth name the second was already gone.
Back a page.
The second name was still there.
David Millner.
Grandfather.
The name was familiar.
The man behind it was blank.
Back to the list of eleven.
Fourth entry.
Caroline Trask.
Second grade.
Familiar too.
But the woman was gone the classroom, what she had taught him, why her name sat on the page at all.
Letters without a life behind them.
Jonah closed the pad.
Stood.
The kitchenette was three steps away.
The stove clicked twice before the flame caught, and then the corner of the top page was in it, curling orange, and the paper fell into the sink and burned.
Six pages.
The smoke alarm stayed silent.
Water ran until the ashes were gone, then the stove clicked off and the remaining pages came out and burned too.
One page survived.
The page with his name and his mother’s name and the line about his father and the six blanks and the word gone.
Folded twice.
Back pocket.
The bodega was two blocks east.
A small spiral notebook with a black cover.
A pen that clicked.
Three dollars to Marta, who asked if he was all right.
Fine, he said.
She did not believe him and she did not push and he left.
Steps outside his building.
The black cover open on his knee, pen clicked:
October 1.
Protocol: external facts only.
No names that cannot be verified.
No internal history.
The kit edits retrieval.
Cataloging IS bleeding.
Lost today: roommate’s name.
Aunt’s name.
Dispatch supervisor.
AP English teacher.
Smell of Marisol’s kitchen.
Kept: badge numbers.
Dates.
This address.
Patch’s name (public record).
Marisol’s name (on the lease agreement, on the death certificate, on the will I have in the folder under the bed).
Rule: if it can be cross-checked against a document, it can be written.
If it lives only in my head, it stays there or it dies.
Cover shut.
The street was quiet a car, a man walking a small white dog, the man wearing a coat Jonah recognized from two nights ago when he had been arguing with someone on a cellphone outside the bodega.
The argument, yes.
The man’s face nothing.
Back inside.
Up the stairs.
The key turned in the lock and the door opened and a woman was standing in the corner of the room near the window.
Translucent.
Wearing a dress Jonah had seen in a photograph he no longer owned.
Looking at him as his grandmother had looked at him the last time a hospital he could no longer name, a city he could no longer place and she was dead, and he could see her, and the Séance had let her in.
Jonah put his hand on the door.
Did not open it.
The woman stood where she was.
“I can’t.”
She did not speak.
The Séance was witness, not conversation.
She was there because the grief was there and the kit had cracked a door he had not known existed and she had walked through it the dead do not knock.
He said it again.
“I can’t.”
She raised one hand.
Palm out.
Not reaching.
Not waving.
Just raised.
Jonah closed his eyes.
Opened them.
She was still there.
Past her.
Floor.
The black cover opened under his hands.
Séance T1 uninvited dead arrive.
Grandmother (name unknown) in the room.
No conversation.
Witness only.
When he glanced up, the corner was empty.
Cover shut.
Jonah lay down on the floor with the spiral pressed under his head and did not sleep and the TV two doors down went quiet around midnight and he lay there until the sky outside the window was gray and the laundromat downstairs started its machines and the smell of detergent came up through the floor.
Morning.
Face washed, instant coffee in the dollar-fifty mug.
Jonah sat at the window and drank it and opened the black cover and read the protocol again and the protocol was still true and that was all he had.
External facts only.
No internal history.
The kit edits retrieval.
Cataloging is bleeding.
Bitter.
No sugar he had not bought any because he had not planned to stay in Bradford longer than a week and the week was already gone.
Mug washed, spiral in his back pocket, door locked behind him.
Down the stairs and into the bodega for a newspaper.
Page three had a photograph of Detective Eudora Patch under a headline that said HERO CUSTOMER SOUGHT IN BANK STANDOFF.
Jonah folded the paper under his arm and walked four blocks west to a diner he had passed twice and never entered and ordered eggs and toast and sat in the back booth with the black cover open on the table and the newspaper beside it.
Pen on paper: Patch ID-ing me from the tape.
Timeline: forty-eight hours.
Cover intact.
Address on the license is this address.
She will come here or she will call or she will wait.
Eggs eaten.
Three dollars on the table.
The walk back was four blocks, then stairs, then the key in the lock, then the floor.
The black cover opened.
The protocol one more time.
External facts only.
Cover shut.
Back pocket.
The corner where his grandmother had been was empty and her name was gone and whether that was the Rumor’s cost or his own he could not say.
In the basement archive beneath the Academy, a hand in a leather glove pulled a folder from a shelf of forty-three identical files.
The label read: 44 Vega, J.
The hand opened the folder.
Read the cover page.
Noted the intake date, the rejection code, the observation hold.
Closed the folder.
Returned it to the shelf one position higher than it had been.
The hand withdrew.
Footsteps receded.
The fluorescent lights hummed.
The folder sat in its new position, slightly out of sequence, and no one would notice until Pogo came down on Wednesday to pull the Five file and saw the gap.