He sits with the apple and waits

He sat.

The chair was the same chair. The table was the same table. The apple held its center like it had been assigned the job. Reed put his hands flat on the wood on either side of it and felt how stupid that looked and left them there anyway, because standing up would have been a different chapter and he had chosen this one.

8:41. The microwave gave him the numbers in that cheap green that made every hour look like a break room. Across the alley Lena's dark window sat in its frame and did not comment. The building made the noises buildings made when they were pretending to be empty: pipes, a television two floors up turned too low for words, Mrs. DiNardo's door on the first floor opening and closing as if she had remembered a bag and then remembered she had already taken it out.

Reed watched the apple.

He watched it the way he watched a box he had not opened yet, which was a habit that had not protected him from the last thing he had picked up off a wall. The sticker was a little oval. PLU 4017. Granny Smith, if he was remembering the produce codes from a summer he had bagged groceries in high school, which he was, because his mind would rather file fruit than admit he was waiting for a mouth.

"I'm not eating that," he said again.

The room did not argue.

At 9:03 he got up and filled a glass at the sink and drank it and sat back down. At 9:11 he cracked his left thumb knuckle and then the right one, which he almost never did, and the sound was too loud. At 9:20 he opened the junk drawer, looked at the black cover under the rubber bands, and closed the drawer with his hip.

The warmth of the book stayed in his palm anyway.

He thought about calling Claire. He thought about the sentence that would come out. There is an apple on my table that I did not buy and last night I wrote a woman's name in a notebook and she knocked on my door and I let her. Claire would drive up from Collingswood with a cucumber and a look that had buried their mother and she would not laugh. He did not call.

At 9:34 the apple was still an apple.

At 9:35 it was not the only thing on that side of the room.

Reed did not see him arrive. That was the first unkindness. There was the table, the fruit, the crooked lamp in the bedroom throwing a sliver through the door, and then there was a height in the corner by the airshaft that the corner had not had a breath ago. The height had joints. The joints were a little wrong, as if whoever had hung the limbs had worked from a description. A mouth that looked borrowed. Eyes that were too finished for a face that unfinished.

He was tall in the way a shadow is tall when the lamp is too low.

He was eating an apple. Not the apple. A different one, already started, pale flesh going brown along the bite. Juice on the long fingers. The supermarket sticker was on this one too, hanging by a corner.

"You left it," the height said. The voice was dry. Not deep. Not young. Like paper that had been folded too many times. "Most of them touch it by the second hour. You went to work. I almost respected that. Then I got bored of respecting it."

Reed's hands were still on the table. He could feel his pulse in his palms. The bite on his shoulder had started throbbing as if it wanted to be part of the conversation.

"You're in my kitchen."

"I'm in the room with my book. The kitchen is incidental." The being took another bite. Chewed with his mouth open in a way that seemed less like manners and more like he had never been taught a face. "Vesh. Since you're going to ask and I don't like the asking part. I dropped it. You picked it up. You wrote two names. One of them came to your door and left a mark I can see through your shirt, which is either sloppy or honest. I haven't decided."

Reed did not look down at his shoulder. "The rules said the writer has to have the face in mind."

"The rules said a lot of things. You read them standing under a dead tailor. I watched. You have a habit of stopping for abandoned objects. That's why it was you. Not fate. Not chosen. You are the kind of animal that picks up a book on a wall." Vesh gestured with the apple, a small arc that left a drop on the linoleum. "I was bored. The place I come from has no weather. You have weather. You have alleys. You have women who wash plates at sinks and men who stamp Eisenhower until the pad dries out. I wanted to see which hunger you'd feed first. You fed the measurement. That's rarer than it sounds."

"Get out."

Vesh smiled with the borrowed mouth. It did not improve the mouth. "No. That's the other rule, the one I didn't write on the cover because it ruins the surprise. The one who uses it keeps me. Until you die, or until you give the book away and forget you ever had a night like last night, which is a kindness the book offers and almost no one takes cleanly. I don't sleep. I don't leave. I don't do dishes. I eat. You already declined the first apple, so I brought my own. Hospitality is not required. Silence is also not required. I can talk to the plant if you prefer. It looks dramatic enough."

The pothos on the sill hung there being green. Reed's throat had closed down to a slot. He made himself breathe through his nose the way he had in the aisle when the shirt pulled across the bite.

"Lena doesn't know," he said.

"Lena Marsh knows she walked up a flight of stairs at one in the morning and fucked a man she had filed under mail. She knows it doesn't fit. She is, right now, lying on her back in the dark on the other side of that glass trying to make it fit anyway. I can see the shape of it on her. That's a thing I can do. Names. Faces. The wanting. Hers is still pointed at you, even with the lamp off. The default doesn't clock out because she put her shirt back on."

Reed stood up too fast. The chair barked against the floor. "You don't talk about her like that."

"I talk how I talk." Vesh took the last bite of his apple and held the core by the stem, considering it, then tipped his head and ate the core too, seeds and all, with a click of something that was not quite teeth. "You wrote her name with nothing under it. That was the cruel version of careful. You wanted to know if the book was true and you wanted her to come and you wanted not to have asked. She came. You opened the door. You put your mouth between her legs and you told her about a pothos and a sister in Collingswood while she came on you, and then you let her walk back across the alley with your come on her thigh so she could invent a dry spell. I watched that too. I watch everything the book touches. If you wanted privacy you should have left it on the wall."

The room was too small for the height of him. Reed could smell the apple and, under it, something like hot dust and old metal. He thought about the vestibule, Mrs. DiNardo, the slots. He thought about Maya picking a thread off his collar. He thought about Claire's tomato plant with aspirations.

"Can she see you?"

"No. Only you. And anyone else who touches the book and means it. A shoulder-brush in a crowd doesn't count. A hand on the cover with the idea of using it does. Your sister cannot see me. The girl with the silver tooth cannot see me. The old woman downstairs cannot see me. Lena Marsh cannot see me unless you put the book in her hands and she decides to write, which I would enjoy and you would not."

Reed's laugh came out wrong. "Enjoy."

"I dropped it because I was bored. I am less bored now. That is the whole of my ethics." Vesh moved. The movement was the second unkindness. He did not walk so much as decide he was nearer, and then he was nearer, hips against the counter, looking down at Reed with those finished eyes. "Ask the questions. You have that face. The filing face. You are going to try to put me in a box with the hymnals."

Reed put his hands on the back of the chair because the chair was a real object. "Once a name is written it can't be taken back. That's on the cover."

"Correct. You cannot unwrite her. You can write under her, if you want to spend the six minutes and forty adding a memory or a duration you already missed. It will not erase the night. It may change what she carries of it. It may not. The book is not a kindness engine. It is a binding. You bound her to a hunger for you. The hunger will ebb. It will not vanish on your schedule. If you write forget, she may forget the act and keep the ache. If you write remember it as your choice, you are stacking a lie on a theft and calling it mercy. I have seen men do that until they believed themselves."

"Have you seen this before."

"Not in this city. Not with your weather. The book has had other hands. Other rooms. A woman in a different century used it to make a husband stop looking at a door. A boy used it on himself and that went poorly in a way I still think about when the ridge is quiet. You are not original. You are specific. Specific is enough for me."

Reed looked at the apple on the table. The uneaten one. Vesh followed his look and made a sound that might have been amusement.

"That one is yours if you want it. I leave them. Habit. In my place there is nothing that sweet. Your world grows sugar on trees and then puts numbers on the skin. I find that funnier than I can explain to you." He leaned his head a degree. "You went to work. You stamped names. A man asked you for his mother's handwriting and you felt the book in the drawer. You almost searched for her on your phone and you deleted the words. You are trying to be a person who found a weapon and put it under rubber bands. I am telling you, so you don't waste both our time: the rubber bands are not a philosophy."

"What happens if I give it away."

"You forget the book. You forget me. You forget why Lena Marsh knocked. You will keep the night as a night you cannot explain, or you will lose the night too, depending on how cleanly you let go. She will not forget unless you write that she does before you drop it. The next animal who picks it up will get me in their kitchen and an apple on their table. I will be bored again until they write. You will go back to biographies and your sister's cucumbers and a neighbor who looks at you in an airshaft like she almost raised her hand. That is the door. It is available. Almost no one uses it while the bite is still dark."

Reed's mouth was dry. He drank nothing. "And if I keep it."

"Then I stay. You write or you don't. The book does not starve if you starve it. I do not starve. I watch. Sooner or later you will see a name you cannot leave on a flyleaf. That is not a threat. That is the measurement coming back around. You already know how it feels to want to know. That wanting is the first page. The rest is handwriting."

Vesh reached out with one long hand and tapped the uneaten apple, once, a tick of nail on skin. The fruit turned a quarter inch. Reed flinched and hated the flinch.

"She is awake," Vesh said, almost idle. "Across. On her back. One arm over her eyes. She has tried the inventory out loud twice. It is not taking. The default is still in her. Not enough to make her knock again tonight. Enough that if you went down the stairs and stood in the vestibule she would open her door before you raised your hand. You could go. You could write. You could put the book on the tailor's wall and walk away from the only interesting thing that has happened to you since the hospital corridor. I do not care which. I care that you do not sit in this chair until the apple browns and call it a moral system."

"You don't know what happened in the hospital."

"I know the shape of the wanting you put down there and picked up again when your mother stopped. I can see that on you the way I can see Lena's name. I am not your priest. I am the thing that came with the cover." Vesh's mouth did the borrowed smile again. "Ask one more. Then I am going to sit on your counter and eat and be quiet, which you will hate in a different way."

Reed heard himself say it before he decided to.

"Is there a way to see a name I don't know. A face without the rest."

Vesh went still in the way a photograph is still.

"There it is," he said, softly. "The second page. Yes. There is a way. It costs. Not money. Time. Half of what you have left, paid in the eyes. After that you look at a person and you get the true name and the true hunger and how much of them is still unspent. You would have looked at Lena Marsh eleven months ago and known MARSH, LENA and the exact temperature of what she wanted, and you would not have had to steal it with a blank line. You would have stolen it with a glance instead. Cleaner. Not better." He tipped his head. "I will not offer it tonight. You are still shaking. Come ask when you have decided you are the kind of man who pays. I like a paid thing more than a found thing. It lasts longer."

The airshaft window held the dark of Lena's kitchen. Reed's hands on the chair had gone bloodless. He could hear his own breathing again, the way he had heard it the night he wrote her name, as if it belonged to someone he had not met yet.

Vesh was already on the counter. One heel hooked on a drawer pull. Another apple in his fingers that Reed had not seen him take. The first core was gone. The uneaten fruit still sat in the measured center of the table, a green planet with a number on it.

"You can sit," Vesh said. "You already chose sitting. I will be here when the sitting stops being enough."

Reed sat because his knees had made the decision without him.

The microwave said 9:52.

In the other place there was still no weather. In this one a radiator ticked and a being with a borrowed mouth ate sugar that had grown on a tree and a man in a second-floor kitchen tried to file a god under miscellaneous and felt the folder fail in his hands.

Across the alley, Lena Marsh took her arm off her eyes and stared at her own ceiling and said, very quietly, to no one Reed could hear, a sentence that was trying to be what the hell and had already become his name.