"Thirty days."
"And use the card before you talk yourself out of it. You always talk yourself out of it."
"I know."
"Go do something nice for yourself, buddy.”
He clapped me on the back and walked off toward the train.
I stood on the sidewalk for a long time, watching the headlights go by.
I madeit almost six days.
That sounds like a long time. It was not a long time. It was the time it took for one bad partners' meeting on a Tuesday and one passive-aggressive email from a client on a Wednesday and one lonely Thursday night spent eating cold leftover pho over the kitchen sink to grind down whatever was left of my resolve. By Friday afternoon I was sitting at my desk staring at a model I should have been reviewing, and instead of reviewing it I was thinking, in a quiet steady way I couldn't seem to interrupt, about the black card in my wallet.
I got up. I closed my laptop. I told Mira I was leaving early.
She raised both eyebrows. "Early?"
"Early."
"It's three-fifteen on a Friday and you are leaving the office."
"Yes."
"Are you dying?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Mira."
"All right, all right. Have a good weekend, Mr. Reeve."
She watched me walk to the elevator, and I had the distinct sense that she was making a note of the date in some private internal calendar.
The warehouse district was about a twenty-minute drive from my building, on the south side of the river, in the part of the city that had been industrial for so long it was starting to comeback around into being fashionable. The streets got wider. The buildings got squatter. The signage got sparser. I followed the address on the back of the card, and the GPS guided me through three turns and onto a stretch of road I had genuinely never been on before, between a self-storage facility on the left and a row of low brick buildings on the right.
I pulled over and checked the address.
There. That one. Set back from the curb a little, sandwiched between what looked like a defunct printing company and what looked like a place that used to be something and was now nothing. A flat metal facade. No windows. A single metal door, painted a flat industrial gray, with one bare bulb burning above it in the late-afternoon light. And in the small window beside the door, the only window in the entire face of the building, was a small red neon sign, glowing steadily in only three of the four letters.
OPEN.
I sat in my car with the engine off and my hands on the wheel and felt the structural confusion come back into my body. It was the same sensation I’d had with Hollis at the bar, but worse this time. Much worse. Because the function on offer here was to letyourself want something for once in your life,and I genuinely was not sure my equipment could perform it.
I took the card out of my wallet. The silver foil caught the gray afternoon light, that wave symbol shifting subtly as I turned it.
I thought about Adrián, sitting across the kitchen table from me, sayingI can't keep dating someone who isn't here.
I thought about Mira, in her quiet voice.You look like a man who's died and kept coming to work anyway.
I thought about Hollis.Thirty days, Cal.
I thought about the back half of my brain, flickering faintly back online for the first time in months, in a bar with my oldest friend, two drinks deep.
I got out of the car.
