In real life he actually did perform impressions of market customers to make me laugh. There was a short old guy named Spitz, for example, who had been grizzled with work and age and a two-pack-a-day habit, and who was also a regular asshole, and sometimes when there was a lull Hernan would hunch himself over and contort his face and pretend to suck lustily on a cigarette. “I just really need my smokes,” he would say in a wheezing, asshole voice. “Please, I gotta have ’em! Jiminy Christmas, do I need my smokes!” He’d do it over and over again, his pleas becoming more and more absurd, until I and whoever else was around would be dying from laughter.

Other than these little interludes, and the nights when he’d walk me home, we never interacted much. Other people were always around when we worked together. All of my fantasies involved just the two of us. I didn’t know how to navigate the presence of other people. Beyond the mental script I used at the store, or when I was joking with the old men, being easy with other people was exhausting. I never spoke with Hernan at length about much at all.

So Hernan was dead. What else is there to say? In that whirlwind first year after he died, I’d helped Krystal clean out his apartment, which took less than a day. There was no secret journal exposing all his hopes and fears, not even a laptop with a pervy internet history. His phone had been damaged during the robbery, and had either been thrown away or handed back to Krystal, so I never knew what the last song he listened to was, who he’d been texting recently. In death he gave me no more insight into who he was than he’d given me in life, not really. That was when I knew it was really over, that there was truly nothing left.

I could have been someone who pined, who thought about him each and every day, who listened to sad songs and mourned for all that could have been. But there had been nothing between us. There was nothing to mourn. I had known him, and now he was dead. If any feeling stronger than that cropped up and threatened to obliterate me, I circumnavigated it. I was the Magellan of misery, a master of escaping my brain’s busy, killing work. At first, all I wished to do was to blunt my feelings, to head them off at the pass like I would a migraine. If I could just get away from everything, if I would be allowed that, I was confident I could extinguish them forever.

I woke each day at the mountain place in a bath of morning light. The sun climbed into my room slowly, minute by minute, and on clear mornings it seared through the windowpanes, opening my eyes all at once. People who say that money cannot buy happiness have never woken in sunlight after years of waking in dark rooms, places where the blinds are shut day and night to preserve the last scrap of privacy. Before, in the trailer park, my insomniac nights had ended in a few hours of sleep before dawn, and each morning began with a shrill alarm, distant yelling or engines revving, and schoolchildren chattering so close outside my thin walls that they might have been in the room with me. So many tiny assaults were endured in the dark, first thing, before I slid out of bed and into the world. Now sleeping and waking were like coming through a door.