Locked

The diner on the corner of Delancey and Fifth opened at five in the morning, and by a quarter past six on that Thursday the windows were steamed gray on the inside, and the coffee machine behind the counter had begun its long weary gurgle, and Gladys had put the plate in front of Daniel before he had finished taking off his gloves.

"Two over easy, rye, no butter," she said. "Same as always, honey."

"Same as always," said Daniel.

It was the sort of thing she said every morning, and he had heard it perhaps three hundred times, and it never lost its power over him. She did not say the usual. She said same as always, as if the two of them had a long history together, as if the plate and the stool and the cup that she set at his elbow before he asked were all the proof that two people needed. He ate slowly. The yolks broke yellow across the toast. Outside, the street lamps went off one by one down the length of Delancey Road, and the first buses came by with their windows lit, carrying nurses and cleaners and men in boots, and the light that came into the diner changed from orange to gray.

"You're quiet this morning," said Gladys, and wiped the counter beside his elbow though it was already clean.

"I'm always quiet."

"No. You're always shy. Quiet's different." She leaned on the counter. She was looking at him with her head a little on one side, and her hand, with its knotted knuckles and chipped red polish, lay flat on the formica a few inches from his. "Something happen?"

For a long moment he did not answer.

He knew that if he were going to say anything, to anyone, it would be now, to this woman in her gray bun and her white apron with the coffee stain, who knew his name and his order and nothing else about him. He could feel the words gathering in his throat. They were not words about what was going to happen. He did not even have those. They were smaller and stranger than that. They were: I think I've decided something, and I don't know if it's a good idea, and nobody has asked me not to.

"I'm just tired," said Daniel.

"Eat your eggs, then."

"I am."

"I know you are." She gave the counter a last wipe. "I'm here till two. If you want to talk."

"Thanks, Gladys."

She went away down the counter to the man at the end who was waving his empty cup, and Daniel sat looking at his plate. He ate the toast. He ate the last of the egg with the edge of the fork. When he got up to pay, she waved her hand at him and said, as she always did, "Get out of here, I'll put it on your tab," although he had never had a tab, and he laid his five dollars under the saucer, as he always did, and she pretended not to see.

At the door he turned and looked back. She was laughing at something the man at the end of the counter had said. The light fell across her shoulder. It was an ordinary picture, a woman in a diner at dawn, and he looked at it for a long time, as if he were trying to learn it by heart.

…

It was his night off, and he spent the afternoon doing things that he could not afterward have explained.

He cleaned the apartment. He did it thoroughly, on his knees, with a bucket and a rag, as he had not done since the week he moved in, and he scrubbed the little stove and the sink, and the tiles behind the kettle, and the floor under the bed, where three years of dust had gathered in gray drifts around the box with the old notebooks in it. He took the box out. He sat on the floor with it between his knees and opened the first one, the child's one, and read down the column in the round clumsy hand, Halloween, Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, each with its little circle, and found that he was smiling, and that the smile hurt.

He washed his sheets. He took them down to the machines in the basement and sat on a plastic chair among the lint and the humming, watching them go round, and a girl from the second floor came down with a basket and said hello, and he said hello, and they did not say anything else. He walked to the corner and mailed a rental disc back to the video store in the next county, in a padded envelope, with a note of apology for the lateness. He bought a loaf of rye at the bakery and a jar of the mustard his mother liked, for no reason, and carried the bag home and put it on the shelf without opening it.

None of this seemed odd to him at the time. It seemed only that there were a number of small things that wanted doing, and that it would be a pity to leave them undone.

The message came at seven that evening, and it was not what he had expected.

He sat at the little table by the window with his knees against the radiator, in the yellow light of the lamp, with the laptop on its stack of magazines and the green notebook beside it, closed. He had slept badly, in pieces, with the covers half off. The kettle was ticking on the stove behind him. On the screen the forum lay open to the private window, where a single line had appeared a minute earlier in the plain white type.

Good evening, Daniel. Have you eaten?

Yes, he wrote. I had a salad. With a vegetable in it.

Good. There was the brief pause that he had come to know, the length of a man's breath. I would like to ask you something, and I would like you to take your time. You do not have to answer tonight.

Okay.

You said, a few weeks ago, that you had been thinking about it your whole life. I believed you. I would like to ask whether you still feel the same, now that some time has passed.

His hands were cold on the keys. It was a curious thing, and he noticed it with some detachment, as one notices a draft: the room was warm, the radiator was hissing, and his hands were as cold as if he had been holding snow. He looked at the question. It was an unhurried, courteous, careful question. It sat in the white window like a hand held out in the dark.

Yes, he wrote.

Are you sure?

Yes.

I ask because it is a serious thing, and because I think you are a thoughtful person, and a thoughtful person is entitled to ask himself twice. The cursor blinked. Are you sure, Daniel?

I'm sure.

There was a longer pause this time.

He found that he was looking at the green notebook beside the laptop. It lay closed, with the rubber band around it. He had thought, all week, about the final line, the one that came after four hundred and twelve, the one that he could not write. And he thought now, with a sudden clarity that made his throat tighten, that there was something absurd in how lightly the whole matter was being handled. They were speaking to each other with extraordinary politeness. They might have been arranging a dinner. Behind the screen, in a room he could not see, a man was asking him, with perfect kindness, whether he was sure, and with every question he asked, the whole thing grew a little calmer and a little quieter and a little more like something that could not be undone.

One last time, wrote Exterminators. I would like to hear you say it in your own words.

Daniel took a breath.

I want to, he wrote. I've wanted to my whole life. I'm sure.

Thank you. The pause was very short. Then it is settled.

He sat motionless.

Locked, wrote the man. I will send the details in the usual way. Rest tonight. Eat something. And Daniel...

The line stopped, and the dots went on moving, as a man thinks.

I am glad you wrote to me.

The message was over. Daniel stared at the final sentence on the screen, and a feeling rose in his chest that he could not at first put a name to, and then did. It was gratitude. It was the most terrible thing he had ever felt in his life, and it was a warm, clean, helpless gratitude, for a pair of kind words in a white window, and he put his hand over his mouth and sat very still.

…

He did not know how long he sat there.

The kettle had boiled dry and clicked off. The window had gone dark. When he stood, his knees were stiff, and he went to the shelf and took the telephone down, and turned it over in his hand, and looked at the single name at the top of the screen, which he had not touched in eleven days.

He pressed it.

It began to ring, thin and faraway, with the sound of a bell in a hallway somewhere. He stood with the phone against his ear and looked at the long shelf of discs, hundreds of them, with their strips of tape and their small square capitals, and he thought of the house in the suburbs, the kitchen with the plastic grapes. He thought of the way she answered the phone, always on the fourth ring, with a breathless hello? as if she had been running. He thought that he could say it. He could say Mom, I'm gay, and I watch terrible movies, and I'm lonely, and I think I'm about to do something. He could say it in one breath, and the line would hum, and she would say Daniel?

It rang twice. Then three times.

He took the phone from his ear and pressed the red button with his thumb, and the screen went dark, and the room was very quiet. He was surprised to find that his face was wet.

He did not feel sorry for himself. He had thought he might. He felt, instead, a kind of tenderness toward the man in the room, the thin figure standing under the lamp with his chin tucked, whom he seemed to be seeing from some distance away. He thought: poor guy. He thought it with great kindness, the way one thinks of a stranger on a bus.

Then he went to the table, and sat, and picked up the green notebook, and slid the rubber band off it.

He opened it to the last page. He found the line he had left empty, ruled and blank, after the four hundred and twelfth title. He held the ballpoint above it. He did not write anything. He only laid the notebook open on the table under the lamp, with the pen across the page, and left it there, the way one leaves a door ajar for someone who is coming home late.

At eleven the laptop chimed.

He did not go to it at once. He washed his cup, and dried it, and turned off the stove. Then he crossed the room and looked at the screen, where the forum had come to life, and the new thread stood at the top of the page in the plain white type, above the long scrolling lines of cheerful strangers, with its title in bold and its count of replies already climbing.

Exterminators: Locked.