Robert

Who by Fire: Chapter 10: Audio and prose

Out of The Blue by Spryguyuk on deviantart

Note: You can start reading here or anywhere, then go back. See Table of Contents. Come in the middle? Robert is the narrator who discovers after his wife Lena has died that she had a lover, Isaac. Evan is Isaac’s wife. Robert is on a search for how he lost Lena: He’s creating the story through memory, invention and a search for the truth and his role in what happened—and by stalking Isaac.

Robert

I parked in a garage five blocks north of Dupont Circle and began my one-mile walk to my office on K Street, where financial matters bustled in computer-generated spreadsheets, in market prices ticking away at the bottom of a screen, in AP reports rolling out of the ticker, in questions requiring answers.

I’d changed my route every day until I’d found the one that suited me. I hadn’t looked for a sunny route, or a shady route, although sometimes weather would cause me to break my pattern. What I looked for was the route with the fewest interruptions by cars, noisy trucks or foul-smelling buses that disgorged loads of people—the route with the fewest walkers. Silence in the midst of the wakening city was what I sought in the face of the morning fury of the business day.

On 21^st Street, near the Phillips Museum, the houses differ distinctly from my brick and decked house that sits in the middle of the grass I used to mow.

That morning after Lena had slept apart from me in the bedroom that faces east, I walked 21^st, looked at the copper bays gone to verdigris, mossy green and blue, on the brownstones I passed, and in that passing, knowing like sea salt on hard metal came: that Lena slipped away from me, that she was missing and that I was letting her go missing.

It could have been what she’d said last night, her dream, or her questions about my job, and then, “Who do you think you are? Socrates?”

I had no one to talk to because I had only Lena to talk to and I didn’t know how to talk with her about what I now knew, that I had no safe place to go—at work or at home.

I’ve considered my dilemma. I didn’t want to be interrupted because I craved her attention that I knew was slipping away.

I walked the streets to my office, past the darkened houses, shut down for the day by city dwellers who had like me walked to work and who would return unlike me to these same streets to light their houses in the night. I walked to the office and in copper gone to mossy green I saw sea and salt, I saw hard metal changed, brisk in my walk, sharp in my thought like the metal when new and now gone to verdigris.△

Love,

Parsing Lena, Chapter 11 next

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