the key
The code came by message, and the box on the railing gave up the key with a click like a full stop. The street had not changed, the way a photograph has not changed. Eleven years, and the door recognized the key with no feeling either way.
the stairs
The sixth stair still spoke under weight. The file, on its first page, in the keeper’s early hand: stair six: reported. not repaired. character. Beneath it, later, in the same hand: stair six. The word had been ticked at some point, by somebody, as if character were a service.
the light
light: even. It was. The sheets over the furniture held the shapes of things the way snow holds a parked car — accurately, and without interest. Whoever drew the curtains to this exact gap had measured it. The light lay where the file said it would. The air had been changed on schedule. He breathed it, and there was nobody in it to breathe.
the wardrobe
contents: as left. strips: renewed each spring. moth: none. year six: one, dealt with. Inside, the coat for a different climate hung facing the wall, the way it had gone on being left, professionally, eleven times.
the bed
aired monthly, year one. schedule reduced, year two: quarterly. Under that, a column for use, headed slept in, and then the years, one to eleven, and the column bare all the way down — the straightest line in the building.
He sat on it, once, for as long as it takes to sit down and stand up. The sheet kept the shape.
the file
The entries thinned as they went. Year one wrote sentences. Year four wrote clauses. Year nine wrote as year eight, and year ten agreed with nine, and year eleven, in a hand that had signed forty pages without once forming a whole word, offered as year ten, and rested. Above the first entry, ruled and headed, in the form’s own print: reason for vacancy: —
On the inside cover, stamped, not written, in ink gone the brown of old tea: A PLACE IS HELD.
the account
holding, standard rate, eleven years, paid in full and current. Nothing was owed. That column had never once been the interesting one, and it was the only column that had run the whole length of the page without a change of hand.
the entry, not yet written
year twelve: attended. one hour. bed: sat on, remade. strips: due spring. as year eleven.
the door
There was a line for the visit, ruled and waiting, the only fresh thing in the room. Date. Duration. Purpose — left blank, and the blank was accepted; the form had a box for declining the question. Then the closing formula, printed, requiring only a signature: received back into holding, unchanged. The pen was attached by a chain long enough to sign and no longer.
The next line was ruled and headed, and had been headed that way for eleven years: next visit, expected. Under it, in the early hand, before any of the thinning, before as year ten, somebody had written a date, and gone on renewing the strips and airing the bed quarterly against it, and the date was a Thursday in the second year, and nobody had ever crossed it out.
Outside, the box on the railing took the key back with the same click, a full stop that had learned nothing, and the street went on being a photograph, and upstairs the light lay even on the sheeted shapes, held, whether or not.