Chapter 20 — The First Day

The coffee was good.

He had made it the same way as always: same ratio, same water temperature, same timing. But it tasted better. Or not better exactly: different. With the clarity of something done without resistance.

Hugo drank it standing by the window.

The neighbourhood at that hour. Cars, people, dogs. The same scene as every day, and yet something in it was more coherent, like an image that had been slightly out of focus for months and suddenly wasn’t.

He went down to the mailboxes.

His name. His handwriting. Hugo Martínez. 3B.

Mrs. Ferrando from 3A passed through the lobby with her grocery bag. She looked at him. Nodded. Hugo nodded. Nothing more than that. The exact gesture they had always had.

Hugo went up. Worked. Ate. Read.

---

Mid-afternoon he went to the bedroom.

The east wall was smooth. No frame, no handle, no mark of what had been there. He pressed his hand to it. Normal temperature. No heat from inside.

He went to the living room bookshelf.

The books were organized by colour. The front row, left to right, lightest to darkest. The back row, the broken-spined ones, pushed to the rear.

Hugo looked at them. He didn’t remember organising them that way. He almost moved them. Then he thought they were fine. That this was fine.

The afternoon passed without him doing anything in particular, and without that bothering him.

While making dinner he found something in the cutlery drawer.

A small cup. With a blue rim at the edge.

Hugo went still.

He picked it up. Held it in both hands.

He looked for something inside himself. Anything. A name, a scene, someone’s gesture holding it this way.

Nothing.

Beneath the cup, at the back of the drawer, there was a folded piece of paper. File update. Unit 3B. Correction complete. Unit 2A: process initiated. He didn’t finish reading it. He folded it back. Left it where it was.

The cup was there and it told him nothing. As if it had always been his and had never belonged to another story.

And that didn’t hurt.

That was the worst of it.

That it didn’t hurt.

He put it in the cupboard. Kept cooking.

---

At dusk he looked out the window.

A man on the pavement across the street. Looking up. Towards his window.

The man was his height, wore his kind of coat. Stood with his weight slightly to the right.

Like him. But three months back.

Hugo raised his hand. The man didn’t respond. He kept looking up with the expression of someone searching for something they don’t yet know the name of.

Hugo lowered the blind.

He went to bed at half past ten. Something he had never done.

He was asleep immediately.

At 23:12, somewhere in the building, a chair began to drag.

Not from above.

From below.

From 2A.

Hugo didn’t hear it.

He no longer needed to.