Leaves the apple and goes to work

Sleep did not come in a piece.

It came in twenty-minute frauds. A bus on Broad. The radiator. His own shoulder when he rolled onto the bite and hissed awake and hated the sound because it was honest. At 4:11 he got up and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the apple.

It had not moved.

Green. Supermarket sticker, the little oval with a PLU and a cartoon leaf. Sitting dead-center on the table like a person had measured the distance from each edge. Reed's keys were where he had dropped them. The transit map was where he had shoved it. The notebook was in the drawer. The apple was the only thing in the room that seemed to know it was being looked at.

He did not touch it.

He made coffee that tasted like the paper filter and drank it standing at the airshaft. Lena's window was dark. The red kettle sat on her stove in the exact place it always sat. A dish towel hung off the oven door. Nothing in that kitchen admitted that a woman had crossed an alley at 1:19 and come on his tongue and told him not to text.

Reed showered again, shorter. The bite was a dull purple oval on the meat of his left shoulder, her teeth distinct at the top edge. Three thin scratches ran from his shoulder blade down toward his ribs, already scabbing in the middle. He put on a dark T-shirt and then a button-down over it, the one with the collar that sat right, and checked the mirror to see if any of last night reached the air. It did not. He looked like a man who shelved biographies.

He left the apple where it was.

On the way out he stopped in the vestibule. His name on the slot. Hers on the one below and to the left, MARSH, L. in the same municipal type. No new packages. No note. He stood there long enough that Mrs. DiNardo from the first floor opened her door to put out a bag and looked at him the way she looked at the weather.

"You're up early."

"Work."

"You look like work," she said, which was not a compliment, and she tied the bag and went back inside.

The street was the color of wet newspaper. September heat already lifting off the hoods of parked cars. Reed walked to Broad with the mechanical pencil behind his ear and his left thumb cracking itself without permission and the apple sitting on his table three blocks behind him like a sentence he had refused to finish.

The annex did not care.

That was the gift of municipal buildings. They had been standing since before he was born and they would be standing after whatever he had done in a second-floor bedroom, and the fluorescent lights did not adjust themselves for a man with a bite under his shirt. Reed badged in at 7:52. The security guard, Andre, was eating a bagel over a copy of the Daily News and lifted two fingers without looking up.

"Calder."

"Andre."

"They dropped eight more boxes in the bay. Church cleanout from up in Olney. Smells like a funeral."

"Thursday was box day."

"Today is also box day. Congratulations."

The bay was a concrete room with a roll door and a drain in the floor and a stack of banker's boxes that had gone soft at the corners. Reed opened the first one and the smell came up exactly as promised: old carpet, lemon oil, a sweetness that had once been flowers. Hymnals with names written in pencil on the flyleaves. A parish directory from 2003. Photographs in an envelope labeled CHOIR in a hand that shook.

Names. Faces, some of them, staring out of group shots with the stiff pride of people who had worn their good jackets on a Sunday. Reed held a five-by-seven of a women's circle and felt the book in the drawer on Passyunk as if the distance were a joke.

He put the photograph back. He shelved.

By nine the regular machinery of the place had started. Carts. The elevator that complained on two. Maya's laugh from circulation, two rooms and a hallway away, the silver tooth in it even when he could not see her. Chris from Facilities humming something that had been on the radio in 2011. Reed worked the hymnals onto a processing cart and tried to let the work do what work was for, which was to take a night and turn it into muscle memory.

It almost worked.

Then he reached up to the third shelf and the shirt pulled across the bite and he had to stop with his forehead against the metal upright and breathe until the heat in his face went down.

"You dying or thinking?" Maya said from the end of the aisle.

He had not heard her coming. She had a stack of holds against her chest and a pencil through the bun on top of her head and the look she wore when a public computer had frozen again. The silver cap caught the overhead. She was twenty-four, compact, a small gap beside the capped tooth that showed when she was about to be unkind in a way he usually liked.

"Thinking."

"That's worse. Andre said the Olney boxes are a biohazard."

"They're hymnals."

"Same thing on a Sunday." She tipped her head. "You look like you slept in a bus station again. Is this a bit now?"

"Long night."

"You don't have long nights. You have library nights. There's a difference. Library nights end. You look like one didn't."

Reed moved a hymnal an inch to the left so he would have somewhere to put his eyes. "I'm fine."

"That's the sentence people say when they want you to stop talking. I'm going to keep talking anyway. There's a woman at three who wants every book we have on backyard chickens and she is going to cry if the ISBN doesn't match her list. If you need air, take it before I send her back here."

"I don't need air."

Maya looked at him for another second, the way she looked at a call number that had been written wrong. Then she shrugged with the holds and walked off, rubber soles on linoleum, and Reed stood in the aisle with a dead congregation in his hands and the taste of Lena's skin still somewhere behind his teeth no matter how much coffee he had put over it.

He took lunch at 12:10 in the break room because that was when he took lunch. The turkey sandwich from the day before was still in the fridge, worse. He ate half of it and threw the rest away and sat with his phone face up and did not open anything. Claire had sent a photo of the tomato plant at 8:03 with the caption it has aspirations. He liked it. He did not type. Typing felt like a door.

At 12:31 he did the thing he had told himself he would not do.

He opened the browser on his phone, not the work terminal, and he typed Lena Marsh Philadelphia into the search bar and then he deleted it before the results could load. He typed Penn Vet staff and deleted that too. He sat with the empty bar blinking and understood, with the same shelf-measurement clarity as the night before, that the wanting to know was its own kind of writing.

He put the phone in his pocket.

The afternoon was biographies, as promised. A donated run of mid-century lives: Eisenhower, a singer Reed did not recognize, three copies of the same Kennedy. He processed them the way he processed everything, pencil in the gutter, stamp, label. The stamp pad was drying out. He re-inked it. Chris came through with a ladder and asked if the third-floor vent was still screaming and Reed said it was and Chris said it would keep screaming then, budget season.

Ordinary. Almost.

At 2:47 a man came back into processing who was not supposed to be in processing. Public wasn't allowed past the door with the keypad. He was in his fifties, a polo, a visitor sticker already curling off his chest, and he had the lost, aggressive politeness of a person who had been told no once and had decided no was a misunderstanding.

"I'm looking for the parish records from St. Hilda's," he said. "Olney. They said the boxes came here."

Reed wiped his hands on his jeans. "Donations go through processing. They aren't searchable yet. If you fill out a request at the desk—"

"My mother's in those boxes," the man said. "Her name is on the hymnals. I just want to see if her handwriting is in there before you stamp it."

The word name landed in Reed's ear with a weight the man had not given it. He thought of the flyleaves. Pencil. The choir photograph. He thought of the notebook in the drawer and how easy it would be, tonight, to write a name he had only just learned and specify nothing, or specify everything, and watch a stranger's hunger turn around and walk toward him.

"I can't let you into the boxes," Reed said. "Desk. Request form. That's the way it works."

The man looked at him as if Reed had personally buried his mother a second time. Then he nodded, once, tight, and went back out through the keypad door. Reed stood there with the stamp in his hand until the ink spotted his thumb.

Maya appeared in the doorframe five minutes later.

"That was Mr. Parish Records. I sent him to you on purpose because he was going to cry on my counter and I don't get hazard pay. You all right?"

"You have to stop asking me that."

"I will when you stop looking like the answer is no." She came in far enough to set a hold slip on his cart. "Also, your sister called the main line. She said you don't answer your cell like a person and would someone please confirm you were not dead under a stack of encyclopedias. I confirmed it. You're welcome. She sounds like you but with better follow-through."

"Claire."

"Claire. She told me about the tomato. I like her." Maya paused. Her eyes went to his collar, where the button-down had shifted, and for a half-second Reed thought she had seen the edge of the bite. She had not. She was looking at a thread. She picked it off him with two fingers, automatic, the way she straightened spine labels. "Go home on time today. The hymnals will still be sad tomorrow."

"I go home on time every day."

"You go home. That isn't the same sentence."

She left. Reed looked at the hold slip. A biography. Eisenhower again. He stamped it and the stamp came down too hard and the ink bled.

He did go home on time.

The walk back was the same walk. Broad. The buckle in the sidewalk. The tailor shop still shuttered, UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT still lying. The low wall where the notebook had sat was empty except for a dried drip of something that had been soda. Reed stopped there the way he had stopped the first time. No book. No proof that a thing had fallen out of a place with no weather. Just brick and a wall and the ordinary trash of a street that did not keep secrets on purpose.

Mrs. DiNardo's bag was gone from the vestibule. The slots were the same. MARSH, L. He climbed the stairs and the cheap door rattled when he opened it and the apartment smelled like coffee grounds and the onion from two nights ago and, faintly, Lena, which was impossible after a shower and a workday and was not impossible at all.

The apple was on the table.

Unmoved. Unbruised. The sticker still on it.

Reed set his keys down next to it and did not look at the drawer. He went to the airshaft window first, which was a mistake he made on purpose.

Lena's lamp was off. The kitchen was empty. The kettle. The towel. At 5:40 on a Saturday-schedule Friday she was often not home yet; the twelves ran long. He stood there anyway until his feet hurt and then he changed out of the button-down and looked at the bite in the bathroom mirror. Darker now. The tooth marks had filled in. He pressed it with two fingers to see if it was real and it was real and he stopped pressing.

He heated leftover rice because that was what there was. He ate it at the counter, not the table, because the table had the apple. The rice was dry. He ate all of it. His phone buzzed.

Claire: the girl at the library said you were alive. proud of you for the bare minimum

Reed: her name is Maya

Claire: tell Maya I like her pencil bun. also eat a vegetable. I am serious. I will mail you a cucumber

He sent back a period, which was their old joke for I heard you. Then he put the phone down and sat in the chair facing the table and looked at the apple until looking at it felt like a conversation.

"I'm not eating that," he said, out loud, to a room that did not answer.

The radiator ticked. Somewhere on the block a dog started and then thought better of it. Reed opened the junk drawer because he was going to have to open it eventually and the notebook was where he had left it, under a tangle of rubber bands and a dead flashlight. Warm. Not pocket-warm. The other warm.

He did not take it out.

He closed the drawer.

At 7:22 her lamp clicked on.

Reed stayed in the chair. He did not go to the glass. He heard, through two panes and the alley, the small sounds of a person coming home from a body of work that had actual blood in it: keys, water, the refrigerator seal. He heard her window go up two inches, the same two inches as last night. He did not stand. If he stood he would see her. If he saw her he would know whether the inventory she had promised herself was working.

A chair scraped over there. Then nothing for a long time. Then her voice, not singing, talking, too muffled to be words, a phone call maybe, or the radio, or a woman telling an empty kitchen that she had done a stupid thing and the stupid thing had a nice mouth.

At 8:05 Reed got up and went to the glass anyway.

She was at the sink. Hair up. Navy cardigan over a different shirt, white, V-neck, the kind of tired clothes a twelve left on you. She was washing a plate. Her shoulders were doing the work and her face was doing nothing. The mole at her jaw. The nick in the eyebrow. She did not look at his window. She finished the plate, set it in the rack, and stood with her hands on the edge of the sink exactly the way she had stood at 10:41 the night before, head bowed, as if a shift had followed her home and sat on her chest.

Then she looked up.

Not at her own reflection this time. Across. At him.

The distance was maybe twenty feet of airshaft and two panes of old glass. It was far enough that a nod could be a nod and close enough that it could not be anything else. Lena Marsh looked at Reed Calder for four seconds. Her face did the inventory she had promised: dry spell, dumb night, proximity, nice mouth. None of it stuck. He watched it fail on her. He watched her mouth tighten. He watched her almost lift a hand and then put it back on the sink.

She looked down first.

She pulled the window shut. The lamp stayed on. She left the kitchen.

Reed stood there with his palm on his own glass and the bite throbbing in time with nothing in particular.

The apple sat behind him on the table, patient.

He turned around.

It was still a green apple with a sticker. It had not grown a mouth. It had not moved. The only new thing in the room was the knowledge, sitting in him as plainly as a call number, that he could go to work for the rest of his life and stamp Eisenhower until the pad went dry and the night would not stay in the biographies. It was in the drawer. It was in the bruise on his shoulder. It was in the way Lena had looked at him like she was trying to make a stranger out of a man she had come on.

Reed pulled out the chair and sat.

He could leave the apple until it browned and throw it away with the coffee grounds and call that a decision. He could take the notebook on the next walk and put it back on the tailor's wall and let the city choose a different animal. He could write a second line under her name — remember last night as your own idea and feel nothing you don't want to feel — and find out if the book took revisions, or if once a name is written, it cannot be taken back meant what it said.

He could also sit here until the thing that ate apples decided he had been polite long enough.

Across the alley the lamp went out.

The apple did not.