XL

Just a few months earlier, I’d been with D, trying to sell products that no longer existed, which was the equivalent of saying that D had lied to me.

What I felt wasn’t anger.

I remembered him saying, so many times, that it was improbable that a house constructed from 80 percent Kramp products would collapse in the event of an earthquake or a tornado, and realized that mine was one of the unfortunate cases that fell within the improbability.

For the earthquake had come, the feared tornado, and my construction, made from 95 percent Kramp products, was now a pile of sticks.

What I felt wasn’t anger, but an emptiness that turned into a black hole. One that fit perfectly inside my other black hole, the one I’d carried within me since visiting D without knowing why. Now I knew.

I sat down to wait for the next call. I knew D was very organized and that, come December, he would look at his diary and see the note he’d jotted down at the beginning of the year: Call M.

On December 1st, at seven o’clock in the evening, the telephone sounded.

I was too tired to be original, so I repeated the same words from the time before. I would be there, in one month exactly, at the station.

D responded, with a similar weariness, that he would be waiting.