one

The city did not sleep but it pretended to. Somewhere out there the bridges held their lights above the black water and the trucks moved through the streets carrying what trucks carry in the hours when no one is awake to wonder. And in the building at the edge of the river where they kept the ones who could not be kept elsewhere a man sat on a metal bed and listened to the silence.

He had been listening for a long time.

The walls were the color of nothing. Of time spent waiting. Of all the men who had waited here before him and scratched their names or their despair into surfaces that held neither. The light came from somewhere above and it did not change. It would not change. Day and night were words that belonged to another world and he had left that world some weeks ago though it seemed longer. It seemed like years.

He was sixty-six years old. He had been other ages in other cells and in rooms where the walls were white and the men who questioned him wore suits that cost more than his father had made in a year. He had been young once in a place called Brooklyn and he had taught children and he had learned something in those years about want. About the particular hunger in certain men and how it could be used. How it could be fed and cultivated and collared like a dog and made to serve.

The bed was bolted to the floor. The sheet was thin and it was not the kind of sheet a man could use to do what they said he might do and this is why they had given it to him. Or this is what they would say. Later they would say many things and the things they said would not make a kind of sense that held together when you looked at it straight.

He looked at his hands.

He had not always been alone. There had been years when the phone did not stop. When the planes waited on tarmacs and the cars idled at curbs and the doors opened into rooms where the men who made the world sat with their drinks and their appetites and spoke to him as an equal. Or something like an equal. He understood what he was. He had always understood. A procurer. A collector. A keeper of secrets who was kept in turn.

The island had been his masterpiece. White sand and blue water and the peculiar freedom that comes from being far away from everything. From law. From consequence. From the way people behave when they know they are being seen.

He had seen them there. All of them. He had watched them become their truest selves.

Now he sat on a metal bed in a building by a river and the men who had smiled at him and clapped his shoulder and called him friend were somewhere else. In houses with gates. In offices with views. Making calculations he could feel like a change in pressure.

The guard had passed an hour ago. Or two hours. Time was hard to hold here.

He thought about the girl. Not one girl. There had never been just one. But the first one he had really seen. Fourteen and watchful and already wise in the way that such children become wise. She had looked at him and known what he was before he had finished knowing it himself.

Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed.

He listened.