The Empty Stool

Gladys Trent had been pouring coffee at the diner on Delancey and Fifth for thirty-one years, and in that time she had learned the sound of every footstep that came through the door, and so on the fourth morning, at ten to six, when the bell above the glass jingled and a man in a green jacket came in who was not Daniel, she did not even look up.

She knew the stool. It was the third from the end, by the window, with a split in the vinyl that she had patched with red tape in the spring. It stood there, as it had stood every morning of the week, empty, with the cup beside it that she had put out without thinking, and she had poured the coffee into it at a quarter past six on Friday, and Saturday, and Sunday, and Monday, and then stood looking at the cooling black liquid with the pot in her hand, and tipped it down the sink.

"Not today, honey?" said the man in the green jacket, who had followed her glance.

"Not today."

"Maybe he's sick."

"Maybe," said Gladys.

She wiped the counter. It was not a thing she needed to do. She wiped it all the same, in long slow circles, with a gray cloth that smelled of bleach, and in her mind she turned over the same few facts that she had been turning over since Friday. He was a creature of habit. He had never missed a morning in three years, not for snow, not for flu, not on the day his tooth was pulled and he had sat at the counter with a swollen cheek, eating soft eggs with a spoon. He came in at ten past six. He sat on the third stool. He had two eggs over easy, rye toast, no butter, and he put five dollars under the saucer, and if she pretended not to see, he looked as though he had won a small prize.

And on Thursday morning, the last morning, he had come in quieter than she had ever seen him. He had eaten everything on the plate, slowly, and looked at her a long time from the door as he went out, and the Thursday two weeks before, when she had asked if something was wrong and he had said I'm just tired, she had told him I'm here till two, if you want to talk, and he had not come back at two then, either, and she had told herself that it was only the shy way he was made.

On Thursday, she had said nothing at all. She had wished, ever since, that she had.

She had thought about that for four days.

…

She called his phone on Friday at noon, and again at supper, and on Saturday, and Sunday, and each time the line rang through to a flat polite voice that told her the number she had dialed was not available.

She did not have much to go on. She did not know where he worked, except that it was a warehouse, and she did not know the name of his mother, though he had spoken of her. But she knew the building. He had mentioned it once, in passing, over his toast, a brick house on Cooper Street above a shuttered dry cleaner's, and on Monday afternoon, after the lunch rush, she took off her apron, and hung it on the nail, and told Dot to watch the counter, and walked the six blocks in the wind.

The landlord was a short, bald man named Mr. Okafor, who lived in the basement flat and who opened his door with a newspaper in his hand and a pair of glasses halfway down his nose.

"Daniel? Third floor, in back. Quiet one. Never any trouble." He looked at her more closely. "You a relative?"

"A friend," said Gladys. It was a word she had not used of Daniel before, and it came out of her mouth like something that had been waiting there. "He hasn't been in to eat for four days. He's a regular. He's never been late in his life."

"People go away."

"Not Daniel."

Mr. Okafor considered her. He had been a landlord for twenty-six years and a policeman before that in another country, and he had a trained instinct for the faces of people who had reasons, and he saw one now. He sighed. He took a ring of keys off a nail. "I'll come up," he said. "But I don't touch anything. And if he's there and he's mad, you tell him it was your idea."

…

The stairs were narrow and smelled of old paint, and the door at the top of them was brown and had a brass number 3B, and Mr. Okafor knocked three times, and waited, and said, "Mr. Kessler?" in a patient loud voice. There was no answer. He tried the key.

The apartment was clean.

That was the first thing she noticed, and it was the thing that frightened her, though she could not at first have said why. She had expected dust and dirty plates. She had expected a bed unmade, a sink full of dishes, the sad loose disorder of a lonely man who has not felt like tidying. Instead the room was as bare and spotless as a ship's cabin. The bed was made, with a fresh sheet turned down at the corner. The little kitchenette was bright, and the stove had been scrubbed, and the dishcloth hung over the tap, folded in thirds. The floor had been washed so recently that it still smelled of soap.

On the shelf above the bed stood a loaf of rye bread in a paper bag, and beside it a jar of mustard. Neither had been opened.

"He cleaned," said Mr. Okafor, behind her, in a low voice. "He cleaned before he went."

"Went where?"

"I don't know, ma'am."

She walked through the room. It took six steps. A long sagging shelf ran along the wall opposite the bed, and on it stood the discs, hundreds of them, in rows, with the handwritten strips of masking tape. She had never seen anything like it. She ran her fingers along the spines. Black Christmas. Blood Feast. The Burning. She had never understood, and she did not now, what it was in them that a man could love. But she saw how carefully they were arranged. She saw how each strip of tape had been printed in the same small square capitals, in the same black ink, by one hand, over many years.

By the table at the window, on a stack of old film magazines, there was a clean, square patch where the dust had not settled. Something had stood there. A laptop, she thought. There was no laptop.

There was no phone.

There was a green clothbound notebook on the table.

It lay open, with a ballpoint pen across the page, and when she bent over it, she saw that it was a list: line after line of small capital letters in blue ink, each one a title, each one with a date, and a small mark beside it. She turned back a few pages. They were all alike. She turned forward again to the last, and found the place where the writing ended, and ran her finger down to the final entry.

412. A title she did not know. A date a fortnight old.

Beneath it the pen had written one more line. It was in the same small capitals, but heavier, as if the hand had pressed hard, and the ink was darker than the rest.

413. THIS ONE I WILL WATCH IN PERSON.

There was no title after it. There was no date, and no mark.

She stood there for a long time with her hand over her mouth.

"What is it?" said Mr. Okafor.

"Nothing." She heard her own voice, thin and strange. "It's a list of his movies."

"The last one?"

"I don't know what it means."

She did not. That was the dreadful thing. She had read the sentence three times, and she understood every word of it, and the whole meaning slid away from her like water. This one I will watch in person. It might have been a joke. It might have been a plan to go to the theater. It might have been the sort of thing a lonely man wrote when he had come to some decision of his own, a trip, a change of work, a woman. She wanted it to be that. She wanted it so badly that her knees ached.

"I'm going to call the police," said Mr. Okafor, after a moment, quietly. "Whatever it is."

"Yes," said Gladys. "Do that."

…

The officer who came was young. He had a thin brown mustache and a notebook of his own, and he walked through the apartment with his hands behind his back, looking at the shelves, and asked a number of polite questions in a voice that was neither unkind nor interested. He wrote down Daniel's full name, and his date of birth, which Mr. Okafor had in the lease. He wrote down the name of the warehouse. He looked at the clean floor and the made bed, and at the open notebook, and he said, with a gentle shrug, that there was no sign of a struggle, and no sign of anything wrong, and that a grown man was entitled to leave a place.

"He didn't leave," said Gladys. "He cleaned."

"People do that, ma'am. Before a trip."

"Where's his phone?"

"Probably with him."

"He didn't tell anyone. Not me. Not his mother."

"We'll file it," said the officer. "If he doesn't turn up in a week or so, we'll look at it again."

He took the notebook's number down. He did not take the notebook.

She walked home alone along Delancey Road in the early dark, under the swaying streetlights, past the shuttered dry cleaner's and the closed hardware store. She had a card in her pocket with the name of a sergeant on it, and a case number, written in ballpoint. She felt the cold in her bones. She stopped at the corner, where the traffic light changed over and over for no one, and took from her purse a small address book, and found the number that the landlord had read out from the lease, under the heading Emergency Contact.

She dialed it on the old flip phone that her niece had given her, pulling off one glove with her teeth.

It rang four times. A woman answered, breathless, as though she had been running. "Hello?"

"Mrs. Kessler? My name is Gladys. I'm... I run the diner where your son eats breakfast. On Delancey."

"Oh," said the woman. There was a small, hesitating pause. "Is he in trouble?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry to call. He hasn't come in since Thursday. I went to his apartment. He's not there. His phone is gone, and I..."

"He does this," said Mrs. Kessler.

"I beg your pardon?"

"He goes quiet. He's always done it. Since he was a boy." The voice was light and rapid, and not unkind, but it had a worn smoothness, like a stair that many feet have crossed. "He'll call when he's ready. I've learned not to chase him. It only makes it worse. He's very private."

"Mrs. Kessler, he cleaned his apartment. He left a note in his book..."

"He's always been like that, dear. Thank you for calling. You're very kind to worry. I'll tell him you rang."

"But..."

"Goodbye now."

The line clicked. Gladys stood at the corner with the little phone against her ear, listening to the flat empty silence on the line, and she thought of the napkin she had written on a week ago, with a pen from her apron, and the five words on it.

Call your mother.

She folded the phone shut. She went back, in the dark, up Cooper Street, to the brick building with the dry cleaner's below it. The door was locked, and Mr. Okafor had gone down to his flat. She knocked, and he came, with his glasses on his forehead, and she said, in a voice she did not recognize, "I left something upstairs." He gave her the keys without a word.

She climbed the stairs alone. The room was cold, and dim, with the faint glimmer of the streetlight on the table. The notebook lay where it had lain. She stood over it, not touching it, with her bag against her chest, and then she picked it up, carefully, and closed it, and slipped the rubber band around the cover.

She put it in her bag, between her purse and her gloves.

She did not know why. She told herself that it was safer there, with someone who cared. She told herself, going down the stairs, that she would give it to the police in the morning, or to the mother, when she called back. But she knew, in the cold part of her mind where she kept the things she did not say, that she would not, and that she had taken it because someone should have. She remembered, absurdly, that he liked his pancakes with far too much syrup, and ordered them only when he was happy, and had not ordered them in over a year, and she walked on with the book against her side, and did not look back at the dark window on the third floor.