## Chapter 1: Tuesday

The plate had a chip on the rim at roughly two o'clock if you held it the way I was holding it, which was with my left thumb at six and my right hand doing the work with the sponge. The chip had been there for at least eight months. I had bought the plate as part of a set of four from a store on Canal Street that sold dishes and phone cases and extension cords, all of them arranged on tables outside the store in a way that suggested the owner had made a decision, at some point, not to distinguish between categories of thing. The set had cost eleven dollars. Four plates, eleven dollars, two dollars and seventy-five cents per plate. I had used this particular plate maybe three hundred times, which brought the per-use cost down to a little under a cent, which made it the most economically efficient object I owned, though I had not set out to calculate that and was not sure why I was calculating it now except that my hands were in warm water and my mind was doing what my mind did when my hands were occupied, which was to work the way a dog works a tennis ball — not to any end, just because the thing was there and the jaw was available.

The water was running at what I thought of as the right temperature, which was a temperature I had arrived at over months of small adjustments to the left-hand tap and which I could not have described in degrees but could identify immediately if it was wrong. It was not wrong. The water came over the backs of my hands and over the plate and carried the soap in a thin film toward the drain, and the soap made a particular pattern around the drain that was not quite a spiral and not quite a circle but something in between that I had never looked up the name for because I suspected it did not have one, or if it did it would be in a fluid dynamics textbook and knowing it would not change the pattern.

I rinsed the plate and set it in the drying rack. The rack was plastic and white and had sixteen vertical slots for plates and a separate lower section for bowls that I did not use for bowls. I used it for the lids of two pots I owned, because the lids fit better there than the bowls did, and the bowls I dried by hand and stacked directly in the cabinet, which was a system I had developed without thinking about it and then noticed I had developed and then, having noticed, continued to use, because it worked and because changing it would have required deciding to change it, which was a different kind of effort than the effort of maintaining it.

The sponge was from a dollar store on Mott Street. I had bought a pack of four. I was on the third. Each sponge lasted roughly six weeks if I wrung it out properly after each use, which I did, and roughly four weeks if I forgot, which I sometimes did, and the current sponge was in its fifth week and had the slightly compressed feel of a sponge that was approaching the end of its useful life but had not yet crossed the line into the territory where using it felt like a concession. There was a dark stain in one corner that might have been coffee or might have been the remnant of a tomato sauce I had made three weeks ago from a can whose label I could not now recall, and the stain had set into the foam in a way that wringing did not reach, and the edges of the sponge had started to fray along the seam where the yellow foam met the green scrubbing surface, the fibers separating like threads pulled from a hem. I would replace it by the weekend. I would buy another pack of four. The pack would cost a dollar. I would not think about the purchase again until I opened the cabinet under the sink and saw the remaining sponges and felt the minor satisfaction of having planned ahead, which was not really planning ahead but was buying four of a thing I needed one of, which is what stores on Mott Street were designed to make you do.

Upstairs, the man in 4C did the thing he did every evening at roughly this time, which was to cross his apartment from what I had decided was the bedroom to what I had decided was the kitchen, and the crossing took six steps, and the sixth step was heavier than the others because it landed on a part of the floor that was either damaged or hollow or built above a joist that had settled, and the sound it made was a sound I could have described as a thunk but that was more specific than a thunk — it was a thunk with a slight resonance after it, a secondary vibration that suggested the hollow was larger than the footfall, as if the space under his floor contained an emptiness that was slightly more generous than the one his foot was asking it to be. He did this at 7:04 most evenings. It was, I assumed, 7:04 now, though I had not looked at the clock on the microwave and did not plan to, because confirming it would have told me nothing I did not already know, and the small pleasure of being right about the time was a pleasure I preferred to leave unconfirmed, where it could continue to be a pleasure rather than becoming a fact.

I picked up the second plate. The second plate did not have a chip. It was the same plate as the first plate — same store, same set, same two-seventy-five — but it had lived a different life, which is to say it had not been dropped on the edge of the counter in February while I was trying to answer my phone, which is what had happened to the first plate, which I had picked up and examined and found chipped and then kept, because throwing away a plate with a chip that did not affect its function would have required a theory of plates I did not have.

The soap was almost out. The bottle was a plastic bottle with a blue label and a pump that had started to stick three days ago, which meant the internal spring was either corroding or the soap at the bottom had thickened to the point where the pump mechanism could not draw it efficiently. The pump was the kind with a narrow chrome neck and a head that was supposed to rotate to lock but had never locked, not once in the life of this bottle, the threading having been cut at an angle that did not meet itself. I had been compensating for the sticking by pressing the pump twice instead of once, which doubled the mechanical effort without doubling the soap output because the second press yielded roughly sixty percent of what the first press yielded, following some curve of diminishing returns that I assumed was logarithmic but might have been something simpler. I pressed the pump twice. A small pocket of air escaped before the soap did, making a sound like a word started and abandoned. I washed the second plate.

The third plate. The fourth plate. A fork with a tine that was slightly bent, the way cheap forks bend when you use them to pry open the lid of a container they were not designed to open, which I had done once with a container of spackle I had bought to fill a nail hole by the front door, a project that had taken four minutes and that the fork had not recovered from. I had been unable to unbend the tine, and it caught on the sponge in a way that I had learned to anticipate and work around, rotating the fork a quarter turn so the bent tine faced away from the direction of the stroke. Two spoons. A butter knife with a hairline scratch across its face that caught the overhead light when I held it at a certain angle, which was the angle I was holding it at now, and the scratch threw a thin line across the backsplash tile before I turned the knife and the line disappeared.

A bowl.

The bowl was ceramic. It was heavier than the plates. It was the color of the inside of an almond and it had a weight that was — I held it. I held the bowl under the water and the water ran over the ceramic and over my hands and the bowl was in my hands and I was holding it.

I am not going to be able to say what happened next. I am going to try and the trying is going to be the wrong shape for the thing it is trying to hold, and I am going to leave it here anyway because the alternative is to say nothing, and saying nothing would be more wrong than saying it badly.

The bowl was in my hands and the water was running over it and something that had been making noise stopped making noise.

The water was the same water. The bowl was the same bowl. The faucet was running. The drain was doing what the drain does. My hands were on the ceramic and the ceramic was smooth where it was smooth and slightly rough near the base where the glaze had not fully covered the clay, and I could feel both textures, the smooth and the rough, and between them the seam where one became the other, and the seam was a fact. It had always been a fact. The seam between the glaze and the unglazed clay at the base of a bowl I had bought for two dollars on Canal Street was a thing that existed and I was touching it and the touching was not a thought about touching, it was the surface under my fingers, which were pruned from the water, and the water was warm, and the warmth was on the backs of my hands, and the warmth was the warmth. Not a temperature I had opinions about. Not a setting I had calibrated. Warm water on the backs of my hands.

I washed the bowl. I turned it under the stream and the water took the soap off the ceramic and the soap went down the drain and the bowl was clean. I set it in the rack. My hands found the next thing, which was a pot, a small pot with a copper-colored bottom and a handle that was loose because the screw that held it had stripped eighteen months ago and I had never replaced it, and I washed the pot. The handle wobbled and I held it steady with my left hand and washed the body with my right and then I washed the inside and rinsed it and set it upside down on the rack next to the bowl.

The kitchen was there.

The kitchen had been there before. The kitchen had been there every time I had washed dishes in it for the twenty-seven months I had lived in this apartment. The counters were the same laminate. The cabinet above the sink was the same cabinet, slightly warped on the left side where moisture had gotten into the pressboard. The window above the sink looked out on the same airshaft it had always looked out on. The kitchen was the kitchen.

But I was in it.

I dried my hands on the towel that hung from the oven handle. The towel was white with a thin blue stripe and the stripe was the same blue as none of my shirts. I folded it once and hung it back on the handle. I picked up the pot from the rack and opened the cabinet to the left of the sink and put the pot on the shelf where the pot went. The shelf was slightly bowed under the weight of the other pots, two of them, and when I set the third pot down the shelf accepted the weight and the three pots were on the shelf and the cabinet was open and I was looking at three pots on a bowed shelf.

I closed the cabinet.

The refrigerator was humming. It had always been humming. It hummed the way a room hums when there is a room and no one has asked it to be quiet — a low tone, steady, with a grain in it, the grain of a motor that was older than the lease and would be running after the lease was done. The hum was in the room with me. It had always been in the room. But it had been the room, before, the way the walls were the room — not a sound, a condition. Now it was a sound.

On the chair by the small table where I ate was a coat I had put there when I came in from work. The coat was a dark navy that was almost black and it was draped over the back of the chair the way I had draped it, which was without attention, one arm hanging toward the floor and the other folded underneath the body of the coat. The arrangement was still there, holding the shape of a gesture I had already forgotten making, and I could see the gesture in the shape. The arm that hung toward the floor had a crease at the elbow where the fabric had caught against the chair back and stayed, and the crease was the record of a motion that had lasted less than a second and would last until I picked the coat up again, which might be morning.

I stood in the kitchen. The overhead light was off. The light above the sink was on, the small fluorescent tube that buzzed at a pitch close to but not the same as the refrigerator, and the two pitches were in the room together, and they did not harmonize and they did not clash, they occupied the same air the way two people in a laundromat occupy the same room, neither one listening for the other.

I reached up and turned off the light above the sink. The kitchen went to the version of dark that a kitchen goes to when the only light is coming from the streetlight through the airshaft window and the small green LED on the microwave clock, which I did not read. The dark was not dark. It was a kitchen with less light in it. The streetlight came through the window at an angle that put a pale rectangle on the floor between the sink and the table, and the rectangle had the faint grid of the window screen in it, and the grid was on the linoleum, and the linoleum was the linoleum.

I stood there.

The refrigerator hummed. The water in the pipes behind the wall made a sound I had been hearing for twenty-seven months without knowing I was hearing it, a sound that was not quite a ticking and not quite a settling but was the sound of water finding its level in pipes that were older than I was, and the sound was in the room, and I was in the kitchen, and the dishes were done.