Eight

On the day Gavin lost his job in New York, Daniel was sitting alone in a meth dealer's living room in the outer suburbs of Salt Lake City. He hadn't played a musical instrument of any kind in ten years.

   Daniel had lived in this house for a time just after high school, a few miserable long months after he'd driven up from Florida when he'd worked every day for his uncle's construction firm and fretted constantly about providing for a baby who had turned out not to be his and gone for long jogs in the deepening evenings with the neighbors casting suspicious glances at him. The jogs were meant to clear his head but they'd only made him uneasy. Moving through the streets toward or away from this house that he didn't particularly want to return to, wondering what he was going to do about the baby and the girl, feeling in those moments like the only black man in the entire washed-out state.

   But the house had been subjected to a gut renovation, and the interior was unrecognizable to him now. The room where he sat was a white rectangle where two stiff gray sofas faced one another under track lighting, a wall of windows looking out over an aggressively landscaped backyard. From the tint of the sunlight he could tell that the glass was one-way, that if anyone were outside on the empty white gravel pathways they'd see only a mirror if they tried to look in. The falling-down wooden fence he remembered from all those years ago had been replaced by a high stone wall. He had the disoriented thought that he was perhaps in the wrong house altogether.

   He'd come here to negotiate, but the negotiations hadn't even begun and already he was tired and shaken. Two hours earlier in the Salt Lake City airport the call had come through that his grandmother had died in Florida, and the sense of being in the wrong place was overwhelming. He wanted nothing more than to return to the airport and fly home. He'd been shown in by an enormous unsmiling man who'd told him to take a seat, that Paul would be right with him, but Paul hadn't appeared and it had occurred to Daniel that he might be killed here. He wasn't stupid enough to carry his service weapon— the enormous unsmiling man had frisked him just inside the door— and he felt defenseless without it. Through the mirrored glass the sky held a greenish tint, sunlight weak on the carpet.

   He had been waiting for an hour and twenty-two minutes now, and the silence of the house was absolute but he knew it wouldn't be possible to leave. Inside this house there were other people, he was certain of it, other people waiting as silently as he was or carrying out their business on the other side of soundproofed walls. He thought it likely that the man who'd frisked him was standing outside the door. It was possible that he was being observed. He looked around for a camera and didn't see one but that of course meant nothing. Daniel closed his eyes and thought of his children.