(Tried to track that guy down, too, awhile ago. Asked the waitresses and the bartenders but only one waitress remembered him—said she tried to flirt with him and he shot her down but was nice about it—but she hadn’t seen him before or since.)
This guy has now figured out that I am not leaving before he does. No way. I will find some back-door-through-the-kitchen spy-movie-escape-route nonsense if he tries to out-sit me.
* * *
—
Later now. I won the ramen-place standoff, the guy eventually left, super slow and reluctant like he wanted to linger over the remains of his noodle bowl.
Never turned more than two pages of that book in ov
er half an hour.
I took a long looping route in the wrong direction when I left and now I’ve stopped in the park to dump out my bag.
There’s a tiny little button transmitter, like, watch-battery size and kinda sticky, so it stayed on the inside of the bag even after I dumped it and I never would have found it if I hadn’t noticed him drop it in there. I don’t know if it’s a GPS or a microphone or what.
This is all really weird.
* * *
—
Home now.
I bought an extra chain for my door and a motion detector on my way home.
Then I baked cinnamon sour cream cookies and mixed myself a clover club since I had the eggs out already and started a comfort replay of Dark Souls and now I feel a little better about life and myself and existence.
Every time the screen says You Died I feel better.
You Died.
You Died and the world keeps going.
You Died and it wasn’t so bad, was it? Have a cookie.
* * *
—
I just sat and cried for half an hour but I kind of feel better.
I think Z’s dead. There, I said it. I wrote it down, anyway.
I think at some point I stopped looking for him and started looking for why and now the why is messing with me.
* * *
—
I stuck that possibly-tracking-device thing on a cat in the park.
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER walks through a door and into a wide open cavern, far, far below the surface of the earth. Below the harbors, below the cities, below the books.
(The single book he carries is the first to be brought so deep. The stories here have never been bound in such a fashion, they are left loose and wild.)
Zachary wonders if he has been in this cavern the entire time, walking through it while he saw what looked and felt like snow and trees and starlight. If he has now traveled through his stories and come out the other side.