I stuffed only a few items of clothing into the backpack. It was summer, and something within me knew this would be a short trip.
When I got off the train, I saw D at the station and noted that, despite the heat, he was wearing winter clothing.
We went to his house to have some coffee.
I wanted to ask him why he’d said nothing about Kramp products disappearing, nothing about the pistol he’d bought, and nothing about the money he owed me.
But instead I lit a cigarette and said the coffee was excellent.
As if something was urging us on, before midday we took a bus southward and stepped off it in the first town we came to.
I told D that this time I wouldn’t go with him into the hardware store, that I had come solely to keep him company and would wait for him in the town square. I had brought a book with me: Gulliver’s Travels.
D went off with his sample case to try to sell his nonexistent products. Seen from a distance, the hardware store looked unreal to me too.
Half an hour later he came back and sat down beside me.
“How did you go?”
“I sold two-hundred door viewers and collected the amount owing for ninety saws.”
We were silent for a bit. And that was when I saw the mulberry tree and realized we were in the same town square where I’d collapsed from fear years before.
We lit a cigarette, and then another.
For hours that seemed like years, D and I stayed seated, silent.
“Keep it.”
“Keep what.”
“The money.”
And when I finished speaking, I understood I was telling him goodbye.
We had been deeply united by a catalogue of hardware store products: nails, hammers, door viewers, screws. But that catalogue no longer existed.
Everything kept on according to inner workings that we couldn’t stop.
We saw the first star of the night.
Billions of years before, on that same night, the big bang had taken place, and from then on everything drew apart, and continued to draw apart, irretrievably.
Up there, the waning moon was the same one that Neil Armstrong had walked on years before. But other things had changed forever.
My father left me at the station where I’d arrived the same morning. And we said goodbye knowing we would never see each other again.
Surprisingly, the train pulled away on time.
I rested my head on the window.
I fell asleep.