The Routine

A short story by Dakota Vale

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She still made the coffee at 6:15.

Not because anyone was drinking it. Not because the machine had been plugged in for eleven months. The kettle still worked - the power grid had held longer than anyone expected, which was either a kindness or a joke. She boiled the water, measured the grounds into the French press, waited four minutes, pressed down the plunger. She poured one cup. She left it on the counter.

The smell filled the kitchen the way it always had. That was the thing no one had taken from her. Not the building, not the city, not the job she'd walked to every morning for nine years - the job that had made her press ID badges against glass doors and say good morning to a security guard named Paul who always said "Morning" back, as if the word were a baton in a relay race and the day were something you could pass forward without dropping.

Paul was not here. The building was not here, or rather the building was here but the building was not. The lobby had filled with water in the second month and then with leaves in the fourth and then with nothing at all, which was worse than both.

She drank the coffee. It was good. She had learned to ration the beans - twelve more weeks at this rate, maybe fourteen if she skipped Sundays, which she didn't, because skipping Sundays would mean admitting there was a calendar.

After coffee, she walked.

Not far. The same route she'd walked to work, minus the destination. She turned right on Granger, left on Holly, straight past the dry cleaner where a man named Eduardo had pressed her shirts and always said "See you Thursday" with the confidence of someone who believed Thursdays were permanent. The awning had collapsed in the third month. The shirts were still on the rack, pressed and wrapped in plastic, waiting for Thursdays that would not come.

She photographed them every week. The shirts. The awning. The way the light came through the broken window at different angles as the seasons turned. She had started the blog in the first month, when the internet still worked in patches. NY Ghost, she'd called it. The name was not clever. It was accurate.

Eduardo's shirts were her favourite subject. She had photographed them forty-six times. In the early pictures, they looked like shirts. In the middle pictures, they looked like a installation - someone had dressed a dry cleaner's rack for a gallery show about the end of commerce. In the late pictures, they looked like something Varda would have filmed: the gleaners' harvest, the residue after the harvest, the value in what's left.

She didn't think about it in those terms. She thought: Eduardo said "See you Thursday" and he meant it.

She walked home. She made the coffee. She left the cup on the counter.

The cup was the routine. The routine was the architecture. The architecture was the staying.

She had read somewhere - a magazine, a doctor's office, another life - that people with memory loss repeat the gestures that made them feel like themselves. The hand reaching for a banister. The foot finding the bottom step. The body rehearsing the shape of a life it can no longer name.

She had not lost her memory. She had lost everything else. The memory was all that was left, and it was the heaviest thing she carried, and she carried it lightly, the way Zarina carried her floor plans: folded small, not heavy, present.

The coffee cooled on the counter.

She would make it again tomorrow.