Page 22 of Havoc

That's the first thing, before the doors and the water and the man. I woke up at six because the light comes in that window like a slap and I lay there for a while doing what I've done in every room I've ever been put in, which is read it.

You can read a room. Four years of sitting in one taught me that. My mother's living room told anybody who walked in exactly who she'd been — the ceramic rooster, the church directory on the side table, forty-one photographs on one wall and every single one of them me.

This room has a bed and a dresser and a lamp with no shade.

The closet has two wire hangers in it.

So I get up and I go looking, because he didn't tell me not to and because I have never once in my life been able to sit still in a house I don't understand.

Living room: a couch, a chair, a television on a milk crate. No books. No mail on the counter, which is the part that stops me — everybody has mail. Everybody has a stack of it somewhere going soft in the humidity.

Kitchen: one plate in the drying rack. One cup. One fork.

Bathroom: soap, a razor, a bottle of aspirin, and a towel that has been washed so many times you can see through it in the middle.

Hallway: nothing on the walls. Not a nail hole. Not a lighter square where something used to hang.

He's lived here long enough that the porch boards have rotted through and he has never put one thing on a wall.

By the time I get to the back door I'm not reading a house anymore. I'm reading a man, and what it says is that he could be gone from here in eleven minutes and there wouldn't be anything left to tell you his name.

He's out on the porch with his back to me and a cup in his hand.

No shirt. That's the other thing about a house with nobody in it — nobody bothers. The ink runs across both shoulders and down, black and heavy, some kind of thorn work with no picture in it that I can find, and there's a scar low on his left side about four inches long that's gone white and doesn't match anything.

I look at all of it for about two seconds longer than I mean to.

Then I hate myself for a bit, and then I get over it, because I'm thirty-three years old and I've been furious for nine days and neither of those things has ever stopped anybody's eyes from working.

"There's coffee," he says, without turning around.

"How'd you know I was up?"

"Floor."

"The floor."

"Fourth board from the hall door." He drinks. "Ain't a thing in the world I could do about it and I quit tryin' in about twelve."

I get the coffee. It's terrible and it's hot and I take it out onto the porch and sit down in the other chair, which is a dock chair with the webbing gone in one corner, and neither of us says anything for a while.

The water's forty feet out through the trees and it's the color of coffee too. A heron stands in it and doesn't move the entire time we sit there.

"So how does this work," I say.

"You eat, you sleep, you stay in the house."

"That's the whole program."

"That's it."

"For how long?"

"Ain't—"

"—worked it out yet. Yes. You've said." I put my feet up on the rail. "You know that's not a plan, right? A plan has more than one day in it. Right now you've got a woman, a house, and a lie, and you've told me two of the three."

He doesn't answer.