The cover calls this a guide. It is not a guide. A guide assumes you should go. I am writing the opposite of that.
I am sixty-one, or I am a number close enough that the difference does not matter. I live in a walk-up in a city I will not name. The radiator knocks in the winter the way a person knocks when they have decided not to use the bell. I have been retired long enough that my hands have forgotten the work. I have not been retired long enough that my sleep has forgotten it.
The apartment is two rooms and a kitchen that is not a kitchen so much as a corridor with a sink. The chair faces the door because my body has not been given permission to face anything else. There is a table that wobbles if you set a glass too close to the edge. There is a window that looks onto a brick wall the same color as Elena’s brick wall, which is not a coincidence of architecture so much as a coincidence of what a person can afford when he has decided not to be found interesting. I have a radiator, a drawer I do not open, a key I do not use, and a jar of olives that has outlasted several versions of my resolve.
In January the radiator is a companion I did not ask for. It knocks at three, and I answer it in my head, and the answering is the closest I come to conversation until the grocer uses a name. In June the radiator is quiet. The quiet is a different knock. I sit in the same chair and I wait for a sound that will not come, and I understand, each June, that I have made a religion of a piece of iron. In October the building smells like someone else’s cooking and the pipes tick as if they were practicing for winter. I wind a watch. I wash a glass that is already clean. I look at the brick. The brick does not change. I have counted the bricks in the square the window gives me. I have stopped counting. Counting became a habit I was trying to break, and then I started again, because a habit that is only bricks is kinder than a habit that is faces.
My name does not matter. The name I use at the grocer is not the name my mother put on a certificate. The name my mother used is a sound I have not said aloud in years. I spent fifteen years in a profession that does not have a pension, does not have a dinner, and does not have a word for what you are when you stop. I have done things I do not talk about. I have been in rooms I remember too well. I have met people I hope are dead, and people I hope are not, and I am not always sure which wish is the kinder one.