When i am awake

First day I decided to write

I don't know why I'm writing this in a notebook I found in the kitchen drawer. I think it's because if I don't write, I'll start doubting myself. It's been — I don't know how many days. I lost count somewhere between looking for people and giving up on looking.

I'm going to try to be specific. If somebody reads this one day, or if I need to reread it to remember something, I want it all here the way it happened, without dressing it up.

The city is working. That scares me more than it would if it had been destroyed. Destruction I would understand. This I don't.

The birds still sing in the morning, the way they always did.

No. That's a lie, and I promised myself I'd write the truth here. I don't hear a single bird in the morning. I don't hear a dog barking anywhere. At first I thought it was in my head, that I just wasn't paying attention. After a few days I understood it isn't in my head. There is no sound in this city that isn't mine, or the city running itself.

I want to be honest about that correction, because I noticed something while I made it. The lie came out first. It came out easy, and it came out complete, and if I hadn't stopped to read the sentence back I would have left it there and moved on. That means some part of me is still writing the world the way it used to be. I don't know how much of what follows is going to come out of that part. All I can promise is that I'll read every page back before I close the notebook.

One day later, maybe two

I did something today I should have done from the start: I paid real attention, instead of walking around like a lunatic after people I'm not going to find.

I went to the market on the corner. The lights were on, the shelves were full, the register was open with the drawer unlocked, like somebody had just stepped into the back for something. I stood there a long time. Twenty minutes, maybe more, just watching to see if anything moved.

Nothing moved. Not a light flickered. Not a sound.

It was on my way out that I noticed something strange: there was a big spiderweb strung across the right-hand half of the double door at the front, the half nobody ever pushes, built perfectly, no holes, nothing caught in it. I looked for the spider. There was no spider in the web. I stood there staring at it longer than I should have, not understanding why that bothered me more than the empty street did.

I understand it a little better now, writing it down. An empty street is an absence. A finished web is a presence. Something did that. It did it recently enough that the wind hadn't torn it. And it did it without me, in a city where I am the only thing that's supposed to be doing anything.

That gave me an idea I should have had earlier: what if I just don't sleep?

Night of the same day

I'm writing this now, on purpose, to force myself to stay awake. I sat in the kitchen with the light on and the notebook open, and decided I'd go to the end of the night without closing my eyes.

I won't lie: I was afraid. Not of something attacking me. Afraid of finding out nothing would happen, because then I'd have to accept that I'm the problem, that I'm broken somehow and inventing all of this.

Next morning

I stayed awake the whole night.

Nothing happened.

That is — nothing I saw. I spent most of the time at the window, looking at the same three cars on the street, in the same places, the same light on in the apartment across the block. I tried standing, sitting, walking around the living room, anything to keep from dozing off.

Around five in the morning I almost went out sitting in the chair. I got up, threw water on my face, went back.

At seven, with the sun already up, I looked out the window again.

The car that had been parked crooked on the corner, the way I've seen it for days, was gone. In its place was another one, a white one I'd never seen there.

I did not sleep. I'm certain I didn't sleep. And it changed anyway.

That breaks the only theory I had, which was: it only happens while I'm asleep. Maybe it isn't about me sleeping. Maybe it's about something else I don't understand yet — a schedule, a cycle, some rule that has nothing to do with whether I'm conscious.

Or maybe I dozed off without noticing. I can't rule that out. All I know is I didn't feel myself sleep.

The radio

I should have written about this on the first day and I didn't, and I want to be honest about why: because putting it on paper makes it real.

The radio works. Every radio works. The one in the kitchen, the one in the car, the little one I found in a hardware store two blocks over. They turn on, the dial moves, the needle sweeps the whole band, and every frequency is empty. Not silent — empty. There's the sound a radio makes when there's nothing there, that soft rushing, the same across the whole dial, AM and FM, top to bottom.

Silence would be a machine that's broken. That rushing is a machine that's working perfectly on a world with nothing broadcasting into it.

The television is worse in a way I have trouble explaining. Every channel is on. The picture is there, the signal is strong, and what's on the screen is a card — a still frame, color bars on some channels, a station logo on others, the little text that says programming will resume shortly. Somebody put that card up. Somebody is transmitting it right now, from a tower, with power going into it. The card is not a channel that went off the air. It's a channel that is politely holding.

The phone works too. I get a dial tone. I've called every number I know by heart and every one of them rings. Not the fast tone that means disconnected. It rings, properly, patiently, forever. I've let one go for over an hour. Nobody picks up and nothing gives up.

I want to write down what I felt, because I think it matters later: I wasn't relieved that the systems worked. I was frightened by it. A dead line means the world ended. A ringing line means the world is standing there with its hand out, waiting.

The camera

I went and got a camera. There's an electronics store on the avenue with the doors open and the shelves stocked and the security gate raised. I took the best one I could find, the kind with a tripod and a long battery, and I took three more as backups, and I took a phone as well, and I set all of them up on the windowsill facing the street, and I let them run all night while I slept.

I want to write the next part carefully because I have gone over it maybe forty times and I still don't have a way to say it that doesn't sound like I'm making excuses.

The footage is fine. It is continuous. The timestamp runs from 21:14 to 07:02 without a break, without a stutter, without a single dropped second. I checked the file length against the clock and they agree. Nothing is missing.

And the grey van parked outside the bakery across the street is nose-out to the road at the start of the file, and nose-in at the end.

I sat down and watched the whole ten hours. All of it. I did not skip. Somewhere in the middle I realized I was blinking, and I got angry at myself for blinking, and I started the file again from the beginning and tried to watch without blinking, and my eyes watered, and I lost minutes that way.

So I stopped watching and started stepping. Frame by frame, with the arrow key, one frame at a time. I had set the camera to its slowest recording rate to make the battery last the night — two frames a second — which is the only reason this was possible at all, and it still took me two days.

The van is nose-out in frame 41,392. I checked it three times. And in frame 41,393 it is nose-in.

There is nothing between them. There is no cut, no glitch, no smear, no compression artifact, no change in the light, no change in the shadows of the other cars, nothing. One frame the van is facing one way, and the next frame it is facing the other, with the front wheels turned and its shadow fallen across the sidewalk instead of the road.

Then I went back to look at frame 41,392 again, to be sure I'd read the number right.

It was already nose-in.

I want to be as careful as I can here. I do not think the file changed. I think I misread the number the first time. That is the boring explanation and it's the more likely one and I'm putting it down first because that's the deal I made with this notebook. But I went forward and back through that stretch for most of a day, and every single time, the last frame with the van nose-out in it was the frame I had just left. Never the one on the screen. I could not get the change to sit still in front of me long enough to be looked at.

I have four cameras and the phone. All five files are like this. They don't agree with each other about which frame it is, and each one is internally consistent, and none of them will hold the moment where I'm looking.

So here is what I think I've learned, and I'm writing it as a question and not an answer because I don't trust it yet: what if the thing that hides isn't hiding from my eyes? What if it's hiding from the record? A camera is just a slower kind of witness. It looks later instead of now. If the rule cares about being witnessed, and not about photons, then a camera was never a way around it. It was just me, looking, at a delay.

I don't know that. I want to say clearly that I don't know that. But it's the first idea I've had that doesn't fall apart when I push on it, and I've pushed on it for a week.

Going back to the pattern notebook

I keep a second notebook. This one is for what I think and what I feel; that one is for what changed. I want to copy some of it here because I reread this diary sometimes and I catch myself claiming I've been rigorous when what I've actually been is scared, and the numbers keep me honest.

The entries look like this:

Day 29. Blue sedan, corner of the pharmacy, moved approx. 6m north and reversed orientation. Noticed 07:40. Confirmed against Day 28 entry.

Day 29. Third-floor window, building across the block, was open, now closed. Noticed 07:40. No other change on that facade.

Day 30. Nothing. Checked the same eleven landmarks. All identical.

Day 31. Nothing.

Day 32. Nothing.

Day 33. Front door of the green house on the next street: was closed, now open approx. 30cm. Noticed 09:15. Also: the traffic light at the avenue is cycling green-yellow-red on the north-south leg only. East-west stayed red all day. Yesterday both legs cycled.

Day 34. Fourteen changes. I stopped writing them individually because I couldn't keep up. Everything on the avenue between the bakery and the bank is different in some small way. Cars, awnings, doors, one whole newspaper stand moved to the other side of the sidewalk.

Day 35. Nothing.

That's the shape of it. Not a rhythm. Not a schedule. Long flat stretches and then a night where the whole street rearranges itself. I counted: in thirty-four nights with entries, twenty-one had no change at all, eleven had between one and three changes, and two had more than ten. Nobody with a shift works like that. No machine on a timer works like that.

I tried to see if the big nights lined up with anything. Weather, moon, day of the week, how far I'd walked that day, how well I'd slept, whether I'd been drinking. Nothing lines up. If there's a pattern it's not in anything I know how to measure, which might mean there's no pattern, or might just mean I'm measuring the wrong things with the wrong instruments.

I also want to write down that I keep losing count of the days, and that this is a real problem and not a mood. I have entries labeled Day 12 and Day 13 and then a gap and then Day 16, and I have no idea whether the gap is two days or five. I started dating things properly around Day 20. Before that it's guesswork, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

About the animals I never see acting

I ran a test a few days ago that I only finished understanding now. I left a piece of bread on the kitchen floor, deliberately, to see what would happen.

First day, nothing. Second day, also nothing, at least nothing I noticed in the morning. Third day the bread was chewed around the edges, the way ants chew, gradually, outside in. By the fifth day there was almost nothing left.

Ants ate that bread. I'm sure of it, because I saw the result — the gnawed edges, the shape of the hole, the way it disappeared bit by bit instead of all at once. What I never saw, at any point, was an ant.

I put my face two inches from that bread and stared at it for an hour and a half. Nothing. I set a camera on it, and the camera gave me the same thing the street gave me: a piece of bread that is whole, and a piece of bread that is chewed, and no frame I can find that holds the tooth going in.

It's the same as the cars, the doors, the restaurant. Something acts. The result shows up afterward. The act itself, never.

That changes what I'd been thinking. It isn't that the animals disappeared along with the people. It's that whatever rule hides things from me doesn't distinguish between people and animals. It applies even to an ant carrying a crumb — something so small I wouldn't expect anyone, or anything, to bother hiding it.

I also noticed that the spiderwebs around the city are getting bigger over time, comparing them to what I wrote down before — more threads, more turns, the way a web grows when the spider works it. I have never seen a spider working. The birds' nests are getting bigger too, one more twig every so often. I've never seen a bird carrying a single twig.

The world isn't empty of life. It's full of life I never catch in the act.

The web as a clock

I want to write this one carefully because it's the most useful thing I've figured out and I nearly missed it.

If the webs grow, the webs are a clock. A spider builds at a rate. It isn't a precise rate, but it isn't random either, and it's the only process in this city that's still running on biological time instead of city time. Everything electrical here is running on a schedule somebody set. The web is running on an animal that's hungry.

So I picked five webs and started measuring them. Not well — I don't have any training for this and I'm using a plastic ruler and a piece of string. But I measured the outer diameter, and I counted the spiral turns, and I photographed each one against the same background with the same ruler in the frame.

The one on the market's right-hand door was 31cm across on Day 39, with about nineteen turns in the spiral. On Day 48 it was 34cm with twenty-three turns, and it had been rebuilt somewhere in between — the anchor lines had come off the glass and onto the door frame.

That last part matters. Rebuilt means it was torn. Torn means something walked into it. I am the only thing walking in this city, and I have used the left-hand door every single time, deliberately, since the morning I first saw that web.

The five webs give me roughly consistent growth. Working backward from what I know about how fast an orb weaver builds — which I know badly, from a book I found in a school library, and I want that on record — the oldest webs I can find in this neighborhood are somewhere around eleven to fourteen weeks old.

Eleven to fourteen weeks. That's how long this has been. Not "I don't know how many days." Not "I lost count." Around three months.

I sat with that number for a while. I had been telling myself it was maybe five or six weeks. I was off by half. I don't know whether that's because time moves strangely here or because I'm not well, and I know which of those two I'd rather it be, and I know which one is more likely.

I'm going to keep using my own day numbers anyway. They're the only index I have, and renumbering two notebooks off a guess about spiders would be worse than being wrong in one consistent direction. So when I write Day 48, I mean the forty-eighth day I managed to count. I no longer think it is the forty-eighth day.

The drive

Today I decided to go farther than I usually go. I always stay near home, within about ten blocks, I don't quite know why — I think it's fear of getting lost somewhere with nobody to ask directions, which is ridiculous, because ask who, even near home.

I took one of the cars from the street. The key was in the ignition, the tank had fuel. I drove for almost an hour, no particular destination, just to see how far the city went on like this.

It went on.

I passed a highway. There were trucks stopped on the shoulder, engines running, like the driver had climbed down to check a tire and never come back. I passed a gas station that was operating, pump on, nobody there.

On a stretch of road surrounded by pasture, I didn't see a single animal. But I want to be careful here, because I stopped the car and got out and walked into that pasture, and what I found isn't nothing.

The grass was grazed. Not evenly — grazed in a line, the way cattle move across a field, close-cropped on one side of an invisible boundary and long on the other, and the boundary was ragged and curved the way an animal's path is curved and not the way a machine's path is straight. There was dung. Some of it was old and dry and cracked, and some of it was fresh enough to have flies on it, except there were no flies on it, and I stood there for a long time understanding what that meant. There were hoofprints in the soft ground near the trough, layered over each other, dozens of them, going both directions. The trough had water in it and the water level was lower than the pipe would have filled it to.

So the cattle are there. They are eating and drinking and walking around and shitting in that field, at a scale I can't miss, a scale of hundreds of kilos of animal, and I stood in the middle of it and saw grass and mud and sky.

That's worse than an empty field. An empty field would have been a fact. This is a field full of animals I'm standing among.

I got back in the car. I didn't go to another town. I got scared of running out of gas far from home and having to walk back down an empty highway at night. That's a stupid thing to admit, but it's true: I'm afraid of ordinary things, even in this world without people. Afraid of running out of gas. Afraid of cutting myself with no help coming. The end of the world didn't take those small fears away, it just piled one enormous fear on top of them.

After the drive

I kept thinking about why I never tried that before. I think, deep down, I didn't want to confirm it was that big. As long as I stayed on my block, I could pretend, a little, that maybe somewhere else it was different. That maybe it was just here.

Now I know it isn't just here. I don't know how far it goes. I'm not going to pretend I know things I don't.

The refrigerator

My milk went bad.

I need to explain why that sentence is the most alarming thing I've written since the camera.

I brought a carton of milk home from the market on what I'm calling Day 6. It sat in my refrigerator. On Day 11 it was sour, and on Day 14 it had separated, and it went bad exactly the way milk goes bad, on exactly the schedule milk goes bad on, and I poured it down the sink.

There is a carton of milk on the shelf of that same market, in the refrigerated case, ninety steps from my kitchen. I have been checking it every few days for three months.

It is still good.

I opened it. I smelled it. I put my finger in it. It's fresh. The date printed on the carton is a date that passed a long time ago and it is fresh anyway.

I've tested this seven different ways now. Bananas on my counter go brown and then black and then liquid. Bananas in the market crate are yellow and have been yellow since the first week. Bread I bring home molds in five days. Bread in the bakery case is soft. A tomato I picked up and put back on the pile is fine. A tomato I picked up and carried out the door and set on my windowsill collapsed into itself in nine days.

It isn't the building. I tried leaving my own milk on the market's own shelf, in the case, next to theirs. Mine went sour in the case. Theirs didn't.

So it isn't location, and it isn't temperature, and it isn't some preservative in the food. The difference is me. Something I have taken becomes mine, and the moment it's mine it starts obeying the ordinary rules — it rots, it wears, it runs down. Everything I haven't taken is maintained.

I have gone back and forth on how to read this and I want both readings on the page.

The generous reading is that the world is keeping the shelves stocked for me, and the things I take are simply released back into normal physics, which is fair, because I've been given them.

The other reading is that everything not-me is being held in a condition, and the only thing in this city that is genuinely decaying is me and whatever I touch. I am the rot. Everything I put my hands on starts dying.

I don't know which of those is true. I know which one I think about at three in the morning.

Counting the cans

If the shelves are being maintained, they're being maintained by something that has to know what's missing. So I decided to find out how carefully it's watching.

Aisle four, the canned goods, left side, top shelf. Corn. I counted them: forty-one cans.

I took one. I carried it home and left it on my table and did not open it.

The next morning there were forty-one cans.

I did it again with a different product and a longer wait — I took six jars of coffee, all six, cleaning out the row, and I waited. Day one: the gap was still there. Day two: gap still there. Day three: gap still there. Day four: gap still there, and I started to think I'd found a limit, that it only fixes small things or only fixes things I don't notice.

Day five, the row was full. Six jars. Same brand, same size, and I checked the lot codes against the photograph I'd taken, and they were different lot codes. Not my jars put back. Other jars.

So there is a supply chain. Somewhere there is a truck, or a warehouse, or something standing in for a truck and a warehouse, and it is running, and it delivered six jars of coffee to a market with one customer, four to five days after that customer took them.

I've been writing about this place like it's a photograph of a city. It isn't. It's a city that is operating. Somebody is doing inventory.

A bad night

Today I wanted to scream in the middle of the street just to hear a voice that wasn't mine. No birds. No dogs. No crickets. Nothing. Just me. I screamed. My voice came back off the buildings in a way I'd never heard before — because normally there are people, there's noise, there are cars honking, there's something absorbing the sound. With nobody there, the echo comes back clean, and long, and slightly wrong.

I'm not going to pretend I'm fine. I'm not. But I also have nobody to not be fine to, which in a strange way makes it easier and in another way makes everything worse.

I want to add one thing while I'm being honest. The echo came back clean, and for about half a second I heard it as another person answering me, and I turned around. I knew what it was. I turned around anyway. Something in me is still doing arithmetic that assumes other people exist, and it doesn't ask my permission before it does it.

Trying again

I decided to try staying awake again, but this time differently: I wouldn't stay home. I'd be out in the street, sitting on the hood of a car, watching a busy corner — well, "busy" isn't the right word anymore, but a corner that used to be busy, with a restaurant on one side.

I stayed there the whole night again. I brought water, a jacket, the notebook. I brought a camera too, on a tripod, running.

Around three in the morning the restaurant — which the night before I'd seen with the shutter half down — opened.

That's the wrong word and I'm leaving it on the page so I can watch myself do it. Nobody opened it. The shutter was all the way up and there was the smell of food coming out from under it. Hot food. I smelled it before I saw it.

I didn't see anyone go in. I didn't see anyone come out. I didn't hear a door, a stove, anything. One moment the shutter was one way, and after I blinked — and I swear I only blinked, I did not doze — it was different.

That scared me more than anything so far. Because it means it isn't about being asleep or awake in the obvious sense. It's about something that can happen right in front of me, between one blink and the next, without my catching the exact moment.

Or I really did nod off for a second, sitting there, tired. I'm not ruling that out either. I have to be honest with myself on these pages, even when the boring explanation is likelier than the frightening one.

The camera has the shutter down and then the shutter up. I already know what I'll find if I step through it, and I stepped through it anyway, and I found it.

Later, same night

I went into the restaurant.

The food was there, on a tray, still hot, like it had been made minutes before. One plate. Not a kitchen full of plates for a room full of customers. One plate.

I stood looking at it for a long time before I let myself see the obvious implication, the one I'd been avoiding. It wasn't left over from ordinary business. It was one plate, portioned for one person, and it was hot.

I didn't eat it. I couldn't. I walked home, left the car there, and I don't even know why.

Some time later, I didn't write down how many days

I haven't gone back to that restaurant. I know I should. I know it's the kind of lead I ought to be following instead of avoiding. But I'm not ready yet.

Instead I've been thinking about what my life was like before all this. I'm not going to write my name here, or anyone else's — I don't really know why, maybe because writing a name feels like admitting that person is never going to hear anyone say it again. But I can say I had a routine, I had people I argued with over nothing, I had things I put off doing because I thought there'd be more time.

That seems like a joke now. Time is the only thing left.

The cut

I cut my hand opening a can. Deep, across the base of the thumb, the kind of cut that in the old world would have been six stitches and an afternoon in a waiting room.

I want to write down that this was the fear I'd already named on these pages. I wrote it after the drive: afraid of cutting myself with no help coming. And then it happened, and I want to be clear that I don't think that means anything. I named an ordinary fear and then an ordinary thing happened. I'm not going to start reading the world like it's answering me.

I washed it. I wrapped it. I found antibiotics in a pharmacy and read the box and took them, and I was frightened for about a day and a half in a way I hadn't been frightened since the beginning, because it was a small, stupid, human fear with an obvious mechanism, and it was almost a relief to be afraid of something that made sense.

On the fourth day I changed the dressing and the cut was closed.

Not scabbed. Closed. Pink, knitted, a thin line, the way a cut looks at three weeks. I know what my own healing looks like. I've had cuts my whole life. This was not that.

I have sat with this for a while and I can only think of a few ways to read it.

I could be wrong about how long it's been. Maybe more days passed than I counted, which given my record with counting days is not a small possibility, and I want to put it first for exactly that reason.

Or something is taking care of me the way it takes care of the shelves. Which would mean the maintenance doesn't stop at the edge of my skin, and that everything I wrote about the milk was wrong in the most important part. I said the difference was me. I said everything I touched started to rot. But something reached into a bandage I had wrapped myself, while I slept, and did work on the inside of my hand.

I don't know when. I never saw it. Of course I never saw it.

The park

I hadn't written for several days. I don't know exactly how many — I lost count again, which seems to happen every time things get too heavy to write down.

Today I went to the park near my house for no particular reason. I just wanted to lie on the grass and not think about plates, or webs, or anything to do with what I've been trying to understand.

I lay down. I closed my eyes, without sleeping, just resting.

And I heard a cicada.

I stayed still, afraid it was my imagination, or that it would stop the moment I really paid attention. It didn't stop. It went on singing, loud, somewhere in the trees behind me.

I got up slowly. I followed the sound. It took a while — a cicada is hard to find even when it's screaming, the sound deceives you, it seems to come from everywhere at once. But I found it. On a low tree, near the ground, visible if you knew where to look.

I stood looking at that animal for a length of time I can't measure. It was the first living thing I'd seen besides myself since this started. And more than that: it was the first time I'd seen something acting, live, in front of me — not the result of an action, the way it always goes with everything else in this city. The cicada singing there, without my having to deduce anything afterward, without depending on chewed bread or a fuller web to prove something had been there.

I can't quite say what I felt. It wasn't relief, exactly. It was closer to hearing a voice after being mute too long — wanting to cry and wanting to laugh at the same time, without choosing either.

I stayed until dark. The cicada stopped singing at some point, the way cicadas always stop when the light changes.

I have to write the rest of this, and I've been putting it off for eleven days.

I have doubted every single thing on these pages. I doubted the car. I doubted the shutter. I doubted the frames. Twice I have written down, in this notebook, that maybe I fell asleep without noticing, because the boring explanation is more likely than the frightening one and I promised to say so.

I did not doubt the cicada for one second.

I didn't touch it. I didn't photograph it. I didn't measure the tree or mark the spot or go back the next morning to see if it was still there. I walked across the neighbourhood with a plastic ruler and a piece of string to check a spiderweb against a number I had written down nine days earlier, and I did not go back to the one thing that broke the rule.

And I know why. Because I wanted it. Because it was the only kind thing that has happened to me here, and I understood, without letting myself understand it, that testing it was the way to lose it.

So I have to write this down: the cicada is the least examined observation in this notebook, and it is the only one I've built a conclusion on. That's backwards. Everything I know about how I think should have made me go back to that tree first.

I went back yesterday. There's nothing there. No shell on the bark, no husk in the grass, no droppings, no chewed leaves, nothing that says an insect the size of my thumb lived on that tree and screamed for an afternoon. Just a tree.

I want to be exact about what that does and doesn't prove. A cicada can leave and take everything with it. That's ordinary. But everything else in this city leaves evidence and hides the act, and this left the act and hid the evidence. That's backwards too, and it's backwards in exactly the direction that would matter if I were the one making it up.

I don't know. I heard it. I saw it. I'm still sure of that, and I'm putting on record that "still sure" is not the same as "checked."

The substation

If the lights are on, something is generating. That's not a metaphysical question, it's a wire going somewhere.

The substation is out past the industrial road, behind a fence with the gate hanging open. I found it by following the big lines out of the neighborhood, which took two days because I kept losing them behind buildings and having to backtrack.

It's running. The transformers are humming, the yard is lit, the whole thing has the sound a working substation has, which I only know from movies but which is unmistakable — a low, permanent hum, like a very large thing breathing evenly.

The control building was open. Inside there's a room with panels, and on the panels there are needles and digital readouts, and I stood there for probably an hour writing down numbers I only half understood.

Here's the part that made me sit down on the floor.

There's a big display for the feeder that comes back toward my neighborhood. It shows load. And the load is not the load of a city. I don't know the units well enough to be exact, but I could see the shape of the day on the trend graph on the wall, and the shape was wrong. A city's demand has a morning ramp and an evening peak and a trough at four in the morning, big and smooth, thousands of homes averaging into a curve. What was on that graph was jagged. It was a step up around seven-thirty, a step down about forty minutes later, flat, a step up in the evening, a long flat block through the night, a step down at dawn.

That's not a city. That's a kettle. That's one refrigerator cycling. That's a bedside lamp being switched on and off.

That's my day, drawn on a wall in a building I had never entered, by an instrument that has been recording my hours for three months.

The rest of the grid is doing something else. There's load out there, real load, industrial-looking, steady. Something is drawing power at scale in this city and it is not me and it is not the buildings I can see into.

And there's a logbook on the desk. A paper one, ruled columns, the kind where you write the time and the reading and initial it. It's filled in. Written in a steady hand, in blue ink, and the entries continue up to a time about six hours before I walked in.

I read every page. The entries are readings and switching operations and one note about a tap change. They are entirely ordinary. They are the most ordinary thing I have found in three months, and that is what's unbearable about them. Nobody in that logbook thinks anything is wrong.

The initials are the same on every entry. Two letters. I sat on the floor of that control room with the book open on my knees for a long time, and then I closed it and put it back exactly where it had been, squared to the edge of the desk, the way I found it.

I am not writing those two letters here. I want it on record that the reason I'm not writing them is not that they mean nothing to me.

Rereading the pattern notebook

I read the whole pattern notebook again last night, cover to cover, the way I do when I'm stuck.

Between the entry for Day 46 and the entry for Day 47 there is an entry I did not write.

It's in my handwriting. I have compared it to the pages either side and it is my handwriting, the way I make a 4, the way my e's close up when I write fast. It's in my pen. It's in the right place chronologically.

It reads: Web over market door, right side. 33cm, 22 turns. Anchor lines have come off the glass onto the door frame. Rebuilt sometime in the last two days.

I never measured that web a third time. I measured it on Day 39 and on Day 48 and I remember both mornings, and there is nothing in this diary about anything in between, and I have no memory of standing in front of that door with the ruler on Day 46 or 47.

The number is right. 33cm sits where it has to sit between 31 and 34, on a growth curve I had not finished drawing when that entry was written.

The rebuild is worse. I wrote in this diary that I found the anchor lines moved when I measured on Day 48, and I was pleased with myself for catching it. The entry I did not write caught it two days earlier. In my handwriting. In my pen.

So either I did the measurement and lost the memory of doing it, which I have to put first because it's the explanation that doesn't require the world to be strange, and because a man who cannot reliably count days is a man who might not reliably remember an afternoon.

Or something used my hand.

I don't have a third option. I've looked for one for a week.

I'll write down the thing I keep circling and won't land on: everything in this city acts while unwitnessed. I have written that sentence nine or ten times as though I were outside it. I'm not outside it. I sleep here. I have hours every night where I am not witnessed by anything at all, including myself, and I have never once asked what I do during them.

What I think the rule is

I've had three theories and all three broke. I want to lay out the wreckage before I put up a fourth, because I've noticed that I get attached to theories in proportion to how tired I am, and I'm tired.

It only happens while I sleep. Broken by the white car, the night I stayed up.

It only happens far away from me. Broken by the restaurant, four meters from where I was sitting.

It only happens when I'm not looking. This is the one I held longest and it's the one that's hardest to give up, because it almost works. But the camera was looking. The camera looked all night without blinking, and the file is continuous, and the moment still isn't in it. And the cicada sang for an afternoon while I sat two meters away with my eyes open. If the rule were about eyes, the cicada is impossible — and I know exactly what the cicada is worth, having spent eleven days admitting on these pages that it's the one observation here I never checked. I'm leaning on it anyway. I'm writing down that I'm leaning on it.

Here's the fourth, and I'm putting it down knowing it might break too.

I don't think it hides from my eyes. I think it hides from my proof.

Look at what's permitted and what isn't. A cicada singing is permitted. A web I measure at 31cm is permitted. A grazed pasture is permitted. Fresh dung is permitted. All of that is evidence of something that was — and none of it is evidence of something happening. I can hold all of it up and it says only: an animal exists somewhere. It doesn't say: here is the moment, here is the transition, here is the seam.

And every single thing that would be a seam is gone. Not blurred, not obscured — gone, cleanly, in a way that leaves the record perfectly intact everywhere else. The film has all ten hours. The pasture has every hoofprint. The bread has every tooth mark. What's missing is never the fact. What's missing is only ever the demonstration.

That's not a thing hiding from a man. A thing hiding from a man would hide behind a building. That's a thing managing what can be shown.

Which raises the question I've been walking around for weeks and am going to write down now: shown to whom?

I'm the only one here. If it were only me, it wouldn't have to be this careful. I've been sitting on a car hood in the dark with a plastic ruler; I am not a serious threat to anybody's secret. You don't run an operation this thorough for an audience of one confused man with a notebook.

Unless the notebook is the point.

I have written every day. I have written down the frame numbers and the web measurements and the load curve and the six jars of coffee. Somewhere in this apartment there are two notebooks that together are the most complete record that exists of what this place is.

The paper is going yellow at the edges, the way paper does, the way everything I take goes. They're decaying. By the only test I have, that means they're mine.

And in three months the single thing that has ever been done to them was done in my own hand, and it did not tear out a page or put a line through anything. It filled in a measurement I was missing. Whatever came into this apartment while I slept, and opened that notebook, and wrote in it, did not censor the record.

It corrected it.

The restaurant

I went back. I brought the notebook. I sat inside this time, at a table, not on a corner watching from across the street.

The plate came while I was sitting there with my hands flat on the table and my eyes open, and I did not see it come, and I am not going to spend another page on that, because that is simply how things arrive here and I have finally stopped being surprised by the mechanism and started paying attention to the content.

It was rice and beans and a fried egg with the yolk broken and the edges lacy and burnt, which is wrong, which is how nobody serves an egg, which is how my grandmother made it because she cooked in a pan that was too hot and never once apologized for it. There was cinnamon on the rice. Nobody puts cinnamon on rice. She did.

I hadn't thought about that plate in twenty years. I want to be precise: I hadn't forgotten it, I had never once retrieved it, it was not a thing that existed in me in any form I could have gotten to on purpose. It didn't come to me and then appear on the table. It appeared on the table and then came to me.

So whatever is doing this has access to something in me I don't have access to.

I ate it. I want to write down why, because I spent weeks refusing that plate and I don't want this to read like I gave in from hunger — I have four blocks of stocked shelves. I have never once been hungry here.

I ate it because I finally understood what I'd been refusing. I'd been treating the plate as bait, and refusing it as a kind of resistance. But nothing here needs bait. It's inside my dressings. It's using my hand to write in my notebook. If it wanted me somewhere it would not need to cook.

It cooked because it wanted me to eat.

There was a ticket on the table, the kind that comes off a pad, with the order written on it. The dish, and a number, and a name.

The name is mine.

I'm not writing it here. I've never written it here and I'm not starting now, and I know that when I explained that rule to myself months ago I said it was because writing a name felt like admitting the person was gone. That was true. It isn't the reason anymore.

The reason now is that this notebook is the only thing in this city that is still mine, and I don't want my name in a document I am no longer certain I'm the only one writing in.

Tonight

I've stopped trying to catch it. I want to be clear that this is a decision and not a surrender, and I want the reasoning on the page so that when I reread this in a month I can check whether it was reasoning or just exhaustion wearing reasoning's clothes.

Catching it was always going to fail. Not because I'm not clever enough — because the thing I was trying to do was produce a proof, and the one consistent property of this place is that proofs are not permitted. Every instrument I bring is another witness, and every witness gets the same treatment I get. I could fill this street with cameras and I would only be building a larger blindness with more angles.

So I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to stop trying to see it and start being seen by it on purpose.

I'm going to keep writing. Every day, whether anything happens or not. Measurements, load readings, the shelves, the days I lose and the days I lose count of, the entries in my handwriting that I didn't write, all of it, including this. I'm going to leave the notebook open on the table when I sleep instead of closing it.

Because there are two things I now believe and can't reconcile, and I'd rather live inside both of them than pick the comfortable one.

The first is that I am being kept. Fed, healed, supplied, powered, and held inside a city that is running a full-scale operation for one household's worth of load. That is not abandonment. That is care, and the amount of work in it frightens me more than neglect ever could.

The second is that everything doing the keeping refuses, absolutely, to be witnessed doing it. Three months, and not one seam. That's not shyness. Something is being protected, and I don't think it's the secret. I think it might be me.

I don't know what I am to this place. I know I'm the only thing here that leaves a record, and the only thing here that's allowed to.

So I'll write. As long as I'm writing, it's as though someone is paying attention to what happens to me. Even if that someone is only me, rereading these pages later, trying to remember who I was before I learned to live like this.

I no longer think it's only me. That used to be the frightening thought. It isn't anymore.

Tomorrow I'm going to go back to the park, and lie down in the same place, and close my eyes, and wait.