He keeps a flat the way other men keep a razor. One room over the funicular's middle station — a bed, a fork, a bicycle with good brakes. He has timed his exits. Any room in the city, under a minute, nothing left behind but heat in the sheets.
Nights he works the middle station. Two cars run on one cable, the up car balanced against the down car; they meet at the loop outside his window, twelve seconds of lit glass level with lit glass, then apart. He checks tickets. He frees a jammed door with the flat of his hand. He passes a cellist her case through the gap and her fingers are all callus and no ring. The hill's bodies ride through him all night — clerks asleep standing up, boys wet from the pools, a man who rides down every midnight and is never on the up car.
Sundays he swims in the sea until his shoulders burn, eats standing at the fish counter, sleeps alone with the window open. He would sign for it again.
In March the cellist rides up twice in one week without her case. Both times he is on the platform and says the thing he says, easy and warm and costing him nothing. The second time she looks at his hand on the closing door, and the tips of her fingers close once against her palm. After that she takes the stair street. He has worked out why. He has not changed anything.
The service knows the hill. NEW NEARBY, it says at ten. The lifeguard with chlorine still on her collarbones, who bites his shoulder and admires the mark like her own signature. The surgeon who sleeps holding his wrist, thumb on the pulse. The baker up at four, gone by five, who leaves flour on him like weather. He is polite in the mornings and means it. The assistant suggests a warmer opening. He accepts the suggestion. Five stars, five stars, five stars. He sleeps best on the nights someone has just left.
In March a woman with cold hands spends three nights with him. She walks her thumb down his spine one bone at a time and stops at the seventh. She presses once. His whole back answers and his breath stops with it. She notices and says nothing. Afterward she dresses with her back to the window, her face to him. On the third night, at the door, she says, "You're good at this, the way a hotel is good at it." The door locks itself behind her.
In early December the service sends him his year. Eleven names, four and a half stars, a map of the hill with his nights on it like pins. He remembers nine bodies. Two of the names carry photographs taken in his room — his blanket, his window, the cable crossing the glass at the angle it only crosses from the bed. He cannot put a face above the blanket in either. In one photograph the pillowcases are a set he has never owned. He checks the cupboard. He owns them. In the mirror there is a healed bite on his shoulder — two ridges gone silver — that matches none of the eleven names. He opens a safety pin and puts the point to one ridge, then beside it. The skin stings. The ridge gives him nothing. He catches himself admiring it the way the lifeguard admired hers.
The mornings get loud. He buys a second plate. He goes back to the March thread with the woman who counted his spine. His last message is still there: Say when. He types his own sentence, spelled wrong, no suggestion accepted. This person is no longer nearby. He widens the radius by two hills. You have used your free introductions. He pays. The introductions arrive, warm as the middle setting. The surgeon comes back once. They lie side by side like two good reviews. Nobody arrives.
On the last shift of the year the two cars meet at the loop and hold their twelve seconds. In the down car a hand comes up, palm to the glass. He raises his. He does not see whose it is. He is still holding his hand up when the cars have gone their ways, the cable ticking as it cools, and in his room above the station the second plate sits where it can be seen from the door.