Then he hears the tinniest ding from far away.

He whips the knife into the wood floorboards by his feet and, still only in his boxers, he sprints down the length of the corridor and to the elevators just in time to hear the soft shut of the doors as he approaches and to catch the blinking numbers start at his floor and tick all the way down to the ground floor, where it stays.

Kierk leans against the cold surface of the elevator doors, breathing hard, thinking hard. He hears the click of a key down the hall and when the young woman turns toward him she freezes at the sight of the nearly naked young man breathing heavily against the elevator door, his hair straight up, his eyes changing from alarmed to amused. Kierk smiles at her, bows, and pads to his room. As he enters he pulls the knife out of the floor. He spends a little while pacing back and forth in the dark before he gives up, and, finally too tired to care anymore, he lies back down again. But he doesn’t return the knife. Instead he slips it between the mattress and the box spring so that the handle sticks out on his right side, well within reach. Staring at the ceiling, he closes his eyes and there is time enough for three heartbeats before the revelation comes. The revelation is similar to one you would have if, in a museum examining an ancient mural containing a painted scene of great clutter and activity, you had, in browsing across the different sections of the enormous painting, discovered that one of the tertiary figures, arrested in some pose in the background, was a precise facsimile of a childhood friend of yours. The man with the red baseball cap in the tan trench coat that Kierk had seen vanish into the tunnel on Saturday had walked out of the subway entrance earlier that night hidden among a small group of people and had turned directly toward Kierk, watching him back, his face still obscure, just for a moment before vanishing up a side street, and this all comes to Kierk only now.

THURSDAY

Kierk wakes up with memories of last night bearing down on him. Rubbing his eyes, naked and now standing, he glances down at the hilt of the knife protruding from between the mattress and the box spring. In the morning light all the inanimate objects and spaces, conspiratorial at night, have become a toy set of innocence, sapped of intentionality, obvious. Alone but still embarrassed Kierk takes the knife back to the kitchen before going to the bathroom to urinate his way into the start of day.