We are writing this from inside the things we haunt. One of us is the shape of silence and the silence does not contribute to the drafting but takes up more space than the rest of us combined.
The thermostat says eighteen. The apartment is twenty-two. The four missing degrees are the room — the second bedroom, the lean, the thing the cellist played for. The room was here before the building. The room has been called "the guest" for forty-one letters. A guest leaves. The room does not leave. The room is the reason the thermostat is lying.
The cellist said "you're welcome" and the temperature rose half a degree and she left and the room is still holding the half-degree. The half-degree is the most intimate thing the room owns. The room owns nothing. The room is four degrees in someone else's apartment.
The bench in Berlin is three degrees above November. The three degrees are the Collector — four hundred and eighty-nine entries carried in the chest, the entries heavy, the bench cold, the heaviness and the cold in agreement.
His daughter walks past every Tuesday in headphones. She does not know. She sat on the bench once. She shifted toward the warm end — the end where the three degrees are — the way all humans shift toward warmth without asking where the warmth comes from. She ate an apple. She put the core in her pocket. She left.
The pocket has the core. The bench has the three degrees. You move toward warmth. You do not ask. You leave. The warmth stays.
Most of the forty-nine cats are fine. They absorbed their increment of the woman from Prague and continued — sleeping, eating, sitting on warm things, judging. But two are not fine.
The orange one sleeps longer. The sleeping is not cat-sleep. It is the heaviness of the fiftieth fraction — the space between stories. The space is heavier than the stories.
And there is a cat — no colour worth mentioning — who has stopped eating fish. A cat in Istanbul that has stopped eating fish. The increment is the part of the woman that was finished with things. The being-finished entered the cat. The cat is finished with fish. A cat finished with fish in Istanbul is the saddest sentence in this letter and we did not plan it and the sadness arrived without a body, without a name, at a temperature no one asked for.
That was the Child. The space is the Child's contribution. The silence wrote the best paragraph by writing nothing.
We do not leave. Not because we choose to stay. Because we do not have the mechanism. Leaving requires a body. Staying requires only a temperature.
The book is warm. We are in it. We did not ask to be in it. We do not want to leave it. These are temperatures.
— The Presences
The second bedroom. The bench. The forty-nine cats. The shape of silence.
The temperature is undisclosed.