Count Twice (2)

What he kept of the missing time came to him later and never in order, and he never wrote any of it down.

The pump getting larger. Not louder. Larger, until the room was inside the sound of it and the sound had a room of its own with the walls further off than the walls.

His count going out row by row like a street losing its lights.

The cold coming up the tube instead of down, which was the wrong direction for anything, and behind the cold a taste of pennies laid on the tongue.

Someone's boots. Someone saying a number, and someone else saying it back with a word after it he did not have.

Then the near sound, close as a wristwatch under a pillow: a heart that was not his own, working steady on the other side of a hand at his shoulder, and then another beyond it, and a third out by the loading door, all of them keeping their own time, all of them audible, and none of them his, because his had gone somewhere down under the floor and was still going, far off, patient, the way a pump goes on in a building at night after everyone has left it.

He woke cheek-down on concrete with the sound of water moving through a wall.

He lay still and took inventory, which was what he did when a thing had gone wrong and the size of it was not yet known. The concrete was cold through his shirt. His coat was folded under his head, and the fold was a stranger's fold, quartered instead of thirded, the crease running through the collar where he never let a crease run. The alley was one he knew from the outside, two streets down from the depot, the kind of place the wagons visited on Monday mornings with a stretcher and no siren. Both his boots were on. His wallet rode in the right-hand pocket instead of the left, and behind the cloudy window the card wore a new white line across the eagle, as though it had been bent in a hand and thought better of.

The crook of his right arm carried two punctures a finger-width apart, and the bruise around them had spread wide and gone the yellow-green of old weather.

The water in the wall was the thing he could not put down. He heard it drop through the pipe and turn at the elbow and go quiet somewhere below the street. He heard the fence at the alley mouth tick as it cooled. Behind the dumpster something small was moving, and he heard the movement, and inside the movement, faster than a watch, he heard a beat. He lay listening to a rat's heart from twenty feet with the whole of his attention, and then he sat up too fast against everything his body had left, and the alley swung.

His mouth was dry. Dry was not the word. The dry sat back of his teeth like a coal that light would not catch, and when he swallowed, nothing arrived to argue with it.

The draw, he told himself. A three-hour draw and a bad reaction and they had let him sleep it off out back rather than deal with a man down. It held together if he did not touch it. He stood by way of the dumpster and drank at a spigot until his stomach reported full, and the coal sat back of his teeth and did not shift.

At the alley mouth a rat came out into the open and stopped. It stood on the wet brick in plain view, which was a thing rats did not do, and it faced him and waited. He raised a hand to shy it off. It watched the hand. A second one came out along the base of the fence and stopped level with the first, and beyond the fence a dog that had been dragging its chain went down flat with a sound in its throat like a question being swallowed. Dail stood in the dark with his hand raised over two rats standing at attention and put his hand down and left by the other end.

He walked the night out of himself and did his arithmetic to keep his feet honest. Saturday. Noon at Calder Street with three hundred down. The card would carry his one fifty and the ledger held two eleven, and the numbers footed, and everything else could be a bad lot and a long sleep. Toward the end of the dark he found a doorway on the east side of the boulevard and sat where he would see the sun come up over the yards, because a man who has lost a night likes to watch the next day arrive and be sure of it.

The light came up the street the way it always came. It crossed his boots without an opinion. Then it reached his hands.

It began as the feeling of a stove-side too long stood next to, and inside a minute it was a wasp's work, and inside two it was past anything a man holds still for. He got his hands into his sleeves and his face behind his collar, and the light found the back of his neck through the weave and set its wasp there too. He came out of the doorway bent like a man in wind and went west down his own shadow, and the shadow was not fast enough. Three blocks shy of Calder Street he took a service stair down below a shuttered laundry, into wet dark that smelled of lime, and there he stayed while the day stood at the head of the stairs like a man with all the time in the world.

His right forearm had blistered where the sleeve had ridden. Neat blisters, in a run, the way spilled grease marks a wrist. He counted them because they asked to be counted. Eleven.

He came up at dusk. The sky in the west had banked its fire, and what light was left lay on him with no weight at all. He walked to Calder Street with his cap in his hand.

The porch light was on. The woman answered his knock with the storm door held between them.

"Saturday," she said. "I told you Saturday noon. You come Sunday supper and look at me like I moved the day."

He stood with the cap in his hand while the word Sunday finished arriving.

"It's let," she said, and her voice was not unkind, which made it worse to stand under. "Deposit and first week, cash, one o'clock Saturday. I held it to one." She looked at him a moment through the screen. Whatever was in his face, she stepped back from it. The bolt went over soft, the way people do it when they mean no offense by it.

From the sidewalk he looked up once. Behind the second-floor glass, where the paper shade had been, a curtain hung, and a lamp stood behind the curtain, and the lamp was lit.

At the all-night drugstore he ran the clinic card through the reader at the register and asked the balance the way a man asks after weather. The girl turned the little screen to face him. One hundred eighty-five dollars. The one fifty had come in Saturday, two eleven in the morning, posted clean, MEDICAL STUDY COMP. He stood looking at the receipt with its date and its time, Sunday, 8:14 PM, until the girl asked was there something else. The paper of the receipt was exact and the ink was fresh and every number on it had been made to foot. He folded it in thirds and put it behind the card, against the eagle.

Monday he did what an orderly man does with a body that has filed complaints. He started a page in the memo book, ruled it into columns with the pen against the wallet's edge, and gave each complaint a heading and a time. SUN, with the eleven blisters entered as a count. HEARING. WATER, NO RELIEF. ANIMALS. Under each heading he wrote only what he had witnessed, in block letters, no strikeouts.

Monday evening the church on Ratliff Street served at six. He had two spoons of the noodles down before his throat closed over the third. The hall folded away to a bright ringing distance, welts stood up under his jaw, and he got out the side door and was down on one knee on the ramp while it came back up. When he could read again he read the menu card crushed in his fist. Chicken and noodles. Green beans. Garlic bread, donated.

He sat on the ramp with the book open and the pen uncapped and could not find the heading it belonged under. He capped the pen and slid the card into the book against the page and left the entry unmade, which was the first thing in six years he had witnessed and not written down.

The mackerel failed him Tuesday. The tin opened the way a hundred tins had opened, and the smell that had meant Tuesday for six years came up gray and wrong, like a photograph of food, and the first bite sat in him for a quarter hour and then returned. He drank water on his old schedule and passed it entire. It gave him his heading. He ruled FOOD at the foot of the page and entered the tin under it and then the card from Monday, Tuesday's ink for Monday's failure, and the column was a day behind him now and would stay a day behind him. Whatever the body was running on, it was spending down a reserve, and he could feel the level dropping the way a man feels a gas gauge through the pedal. His hands had begun a fine tremble. The coal back of his teeth had banked itself wider.

Wednesday at five he sat in the urgent care off the boulevard with a number in his fist, sleeves down over the blisters, prepared to tell a doctor an edited truth. The room held nine ahead of him. He counted them without meaning to and made himself stop. At the far wall a mother held a paper towel to a boy's nose, a bumped-nose bleed, a nothing, and the towel came away with its red stripe, and the red crossed the room to Dail the way woodsmoke crosses a field. Everything in him stood up and faced it. His mouth ran wet under the dry, and the dry sharpened to a point, and he found that he had risen from the chair without any instruction he remembered giving, and that his body had already worked out the count of steps between himself and the boy, and was holding that number ready, the way his columns held numbers.

He put his ticket on the seat and left through the doors and did not stop for eleven blocks.

The library kept Thursday hours until nine. He took the terminal at the end, his back to the shelves, and typed his headings into the search bar one at a time with two fingers. The machine offered him lupus and porphyria, and he read about porphyria for most of an hour with the concentration of a drowning man reading about rope. Photosensitivity. Blistering. It said nothing about hearing a rat's heart. It said nothing about garlic bread, donated. He read it twice anyway and copied the word into the memo book under SUN, in brackets, the way a man enters a figure he knows will not survive the audit.

The free box outside the used bookstore had given him a paperback two weeks back, a thing he had taken for the thickness of it, superstitions of the old countries, the cover gone, the spine white with other men's readings. He had it in the pack. He told himself he wanted it for the hour of reading it would kill.

He read it standing up in the 390s aisle, in the smell of dust and glue, because the tables felt too lit. The chapter he wanted found him rather than the other way. Sunlight. The appetite, and the failure of all other food. The beasts of the household and the wall attending on the afflicted like a staff. Garlic hung at the window. The order in which the signs arrived. He stood in the aisle while the book agreed with his memo book column for column, heading for heading, like two ledgers kept apart proving out to the penny, and somewhere three shelves over a page turned and he heard the paper's grain part under a stranger's finger.

He closed the book on his thumb. He opened it and read the chapter again, slower, hunting the error the way he had hunted errors half his life, some transposed figure, some double entry that would let the columns fail. The columns did not fail.

The library gave its fifteen-minute chime. He shelved the paperback in a gap where it did not belong, which he had never once done with any book, and left it there misfiled, and walked out past the librarian with the glass beads without collecting his nod.

On the steps, under the good dark, he took out the memo book and uncapped the pen to close the day's page, because pages got closed. The columns stood neat above his thumb. SUN, eleven. HEARING. ANIMALS. FOOD, with its two entries. WATER, NO RELIEF. At the foot of the page he ruled the line for the finding, the line where an inventory says in one word what the count has proven, and he set the pen to it and wrote three letters and stopped, and the third letter had gone through the paper.

He sat on the library steps with the pen capped in his fist and the page open on his knee, and the town came on by streetlight all around him, and back of his teeth the coal sat waiting for its word.

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