Thompson
“fine.” Jensen has never had a strong feeling about food in his life
Jensen
i have feelings. i keep them private
Lundy
the dumplings
Kowalski
Lundy that is not a review
Lundy
it doesn’t need to be
Ash
can we get back to the part where Marchetti’s cat committed a crime at 3 AM
Marchetti
thank you Ash. THANK YOU. she’s a menace. a beautiful, perfect menace who i love more than anything in this world
Mäkinen
sure
Avi
Replace the shoe rack. Anchor it to the wall this time. She’ll do it again.
Marchetti
...yes cap
wait. how does cap know she’ll do it again
Ash
he has a cat Marchetti. he knows
Marchetti
fair. yes cap
Chapter 24 — TEO
The facility is quiet at seven forty-five. I come in early now because early means fewer people in the corridor and fewer people means fewer conversations I have to hold at half-volume. The lights in the hallway are the same fluorescents they’ve always been. The coffee station has the same bad coffee. Nothing in this building has changed and I move through it like a man visiting a place he used to live.
Four days. Four days of walking past the treatment room without stopping at the door. Four days of catching a lyric in my throat and closing my mouth before the first note lands. The impulse hasn’t stopped. My body still reaches. A hum starts in my chest walking through the tunnel after morning skate and I kill it before it hits my teeth. My hand lifts toward a doorframe and I pull it back and put it on my bag strap and keep walking. Every time. The reaching and the catching. The silence afterward. It isn’t discipline anymore. Discipline was the first day. This is just the way the building sounds now.
Mueller is early too. He’s at the coffee station pouring something that smells burned, and he nods at me andsays “Marchetti” and I say “Mueller” and that’s the whole conversation. Three weeks ago I would have had an opinion about the coffee. I would have told him the roast was criminal and offered to bring beans from the place on Ponce and turned a thirty-second interaction into a five-minute bit about proper extraction ratios. The bit doesn’t come. Mueller takes his coffee and goes. The hallway holds the space where my voice should have been and I stand there with my bag on my shoulder and the quiet pressing into the places I used to fill.
Berger’s stall is neat when I get to the locker room. Third shirt hung on the hook, collar straight, shoes paired beneath the bench. He isn’t here yet. Or he came and left before anyone else arrived. The quiet from his corner has its own weight and I don’t have room to carry it right now, but I notice it. I notice that two of the loudest people in this building went silent in the same week and the building absorbed both absences without adjusting. The coffee is still bad. The fluorescents still hum. The schedule board still has the same handwriting. We disappeared from the noise and the noise closed over us like water.
