Tricia, he wrote, I know this is going to sound crazy, but at one point last night, I had this strange thought that I’d died the day before. I know something big happened to me that day, he explained. Probably I forgot that I was walking across the street, or on the side of the street, and a car hit me. 

 

You know that sometimes, he went on, his hand moving faster, I take to the street because the people on the sidewalks are too slow. I was probably doing that when a car got me. He stopped and looked at his silhouette on the wall. There was something peculiar about it, but he couldn’t say what it was. He continued: The cars might honk, or maybe even swerve a little, but they always slow down. You told me once that they won’t always do that. I think maybe one of them got me yesterday, but I can’t remember anything anymore. 

 

He put down the pen and folded the letter, watching his shadow on the wall all the while. It moved as he did, but not exactly. Maybe it knew something he didn’t. Or maybe it was here and he was gone. He put the letter in his right pants pocket and checked the left for his keys. They chimed when he tapped his thigh, his hand lingering for a moment, then falling to his side. His hand remained steady when he opened the door and entered the hall. He just needed to go somewhere. All a man needs, he thought, all a man needs sometimes is a destination. His was a mailbox two blocks down, on the other side of the street. There was a coffee shop there. He would mail the letter and get some coffee. Then he’d walk to the park and back and go to bed directly after, writing a new letter to Tricia the next morning: The feeling is gone now. I am alive again. I am sorry.

 

As he made his way to the mailbox, he removed the letter from his pocket and held it in his hand. It felt better that way. Everything felt better when you could hold it in your hand like this, he told himself. He considered removing his keys and holding them in the other, but he decided against it, and then suddenly he decided against mailing the letter or doing anything at all. I will go, he thought, and then he stopped and began anew: I do not remember how it happened, and it could have happened at any time that day. 

 

He paused at the mailbox and inserted the letter halfway into the slot. He did not yet release it. He just held it there, his hand a little less steady. As he did, another thought struck him: the car. Tricia, he started, I remember the car. It was not black, as they are in movies and in dreams. It was tan, neutral in color, and so it was easy to forget. It was something of a blur now. He imagined the car’s wheels still spinning, even as it was parked, even as it remained otherwise immobile. An odd, high clanging reverberated from behind its windshield. Tricia, he continued, it was a car the color of dried earth, or a wasp’s nest. But I can’t see it for very long. 

 

He slipped the letter into the mailbox and walked to the corner, pausing to let traffic pass. He let all of it pass, everything, and nodded as he looked into the window of each vehicle. None of the drivers were visible. Even those cars with the windows down seemed unattended, appeared to cruise without pilot or passenger. He glanced down the block and watched their taillights inflame and cluster at the reflection of a stop sign. The lights were like kindling against the sky, which was now much lower, much darker than before. It would rain today.

 

Today the coffee shop was full of people he did not know and did not care to know and who did not know him. Today, he thought, Tricia, today I have forgotten where you went and why I am mailing letters instead of calling you. When they called his order and placed his coffee on the counter, he considered leaving without taking it. He picked it up anyway, holding the cup by its rim to avoid its scalding heat, switching it from hand to hand as he left. The rain started when he moved onto the sidewalk, but it was soft, slow, and he ignored it.

 

He looked into the windows of each building as he walked. In these windows, he’d once told Tricia as he paced the length of her apartment, his hands safe in the pockets of his jacket, you’d sometimes see the strangest things. Once he’d seen two men standing arm in arm, staring at something together, their eyes wide with expectation. As he passed, the men exclaimed, grappling each other in a faint glow that radiated from elsewhere in the room. It was as if they’d danced before a pyre, he’d said to Tricia. Another time, he’d seen a naked woman. She stood in the center of a room, her arms over her head, withered breasts swaying, eyes closed. He’d immediately written to Tricia about that one. I know, he’d said in that letter, that I’ve seen so many things in these windows, but most I’ve forgotten. I’ll never forget this one. 

 

The others were hard to recall. Everything was hard to remember now. Now, he thought, now that I’ve even forgotten that I might’ve died. It was embarrassing to consider. Tricia, he began, writing yet another new letter to her inside himself, it embarrasses me to tell you about the car that must’ve killed me, and my death that I can’t remember, and so many things leading up to it. Just then the rain picked up, hissing along the street, and he ducked under the boughs of a low pine. He lingered between the branches and stood beside its trunk, watching the downpour with a helplessness that fell to numb disinterest. The coffee was still very hot in his right hand. He cupped it with both palms for as long as he could, then switched it to his left, holding it by its lid. It felt good to hold something in his hands like that, even if it hurt a little. 

 

He didn’t notice the man at first, and so when he saw the hunched figure standing at the door of the nearest building, he did not know how long the stranger had been looking at him. It dawned on him, then, how he might appear to a bystander: hair like wet ropes against brow and neck, shirt stuck to the small of his back, pants damp and pinned to his lower legs. His appearance no longer concerned him. The man did not concern him, either, and he stared back at the stranger as if daring him to continue. 

 

He couldn’t say exactly what he saw, but there was something he didn’t like in the man’s eyes. It was like a scene he might’ve spied in the windows of one of those buildings. But these were uglier sights, somehow: unfinished, grotesque. And if a man’s eyes are windows, he told himself, opening into the house of a man’s body, this one’s eyes gave onto something worse than his own: worse men, false men, half-formed men leaving homes made of faulty parts, in search of other faulty people to live inside them. 

 

The man soon looked away and turned to the door, running a sure hand over the left pants pocket, right pants pocket. It was just as he’d done with his hand earlier that day. He used his hand now to remove the lid from his coffee. The man did not notice him as he approached. 

 

Hey.

 

Tricia, his next letter would begin, the man could not know that the hot coffee would close his windows, that these hands would silence his home. It’s mostly the chimney, Tricia. A building can’t breathe with its chimney closed tight like that. And everything feels better when you can hold something like that in your hand. 

 

And with the same steady hand, he tapped a thigh again, and heard the chiming again: another’s leg, another’s keys, found in another’s pockets. The eyes were closed and so he could not see into the windows of the man to tell who had been inside. But he could look into the building: the real building, there in front of him. 

 

He took turns inserting the man’s keys into the front door, trying one after another until it opened. When he entered the front hall, he was determined: he would finally write the next letter to Tricia. Two in one day was permissible. It’s the circumstances, he thought to himself. She would understand. He needed her to understand that he was sorry for troubling her with the car, with his forgetfulness, his life. He tried the next door he saw, directly to his right in the front hall, and found it unlocked. It gave into a small dining room. A window to the right looked onto the street, the sidewalk. The low pine bristled between these two points. He stared at it now. It seemed different to him from this room. Maybe, he considered, because it was no longer raining. It felt like days had passed since he stood under it.

 

Now he stood before a long table. Unopened mail lay in neat piles on its surface. He took an envelope from the top of one stack and found a pen at the table’s opposite end. He threw the keys there. They landed with a dull skid, an odd, high chime. 

 

Hello? someone called from the next room.

 

Tricia, he thought, seated at the table. Tricia, there’s something I need to tell you. And he prepared to write what he’d planned on writing all along: that the feeling of dying was gone now, that he was alive again, that he was sorry. He couldn’t. He looked at his silhouette, the shadow darkening the wall.

 

The shadow watched as he scrawled on the back of the envelope. The paper flapped like a wing between his burning hands, his new pen struggling to find it. From the other room, the voice called out to him again: Is someone there? He did not answer. 

 

Tricia, he wrote, I still can’t remember the car that got me yesterday. But now I can remember who was driving it.