Chapter 1 - The Arithmetic of Nothing

FUERA DE SERVICIO. Third time this month.

Teo read the handwritten sign taped to the elevator door and started up the stairs. The delivery bag went over his right shoulder out of habit and the strap found the groove it had been grinding into his muscle since noon. He did not shift it. Shifting it would mean admitting it hurt, and he had five more hours left in the day when he had made that decision, and now it was just what the shoulder did.

Four flights. He had done this math before too: the $18 tip from the restaurant supply drop on Westchester Avenue, minus $5.50 for the MetroCard swipe, minus the coffee from 7 a.m. because he was not going to make it through the morning without something. $11.33. The number had been behind his teeth since noon and it came out the same every time. That was the thing about math.

On the second floor landing the cooking smell from 2A hit him — rice and something sofrito, thick and warm — and his stomach pulled toward it before his head could catch it, and then he was angry at his stomach, which was a stupid thing to be angry at and did not help anything.

The kid from 2C had left the bicycle in the stairwell again, front wheel jutting out across the riser. Teo moved around it without stopping. Third floor smelled like a pipe fitting that needed caulk. Four was just heat. July in a building without central air. The fourth floor held the day's temperature past midnight like it had paid good money to do it.

He pulled out his key before he reached the door.

His eyes went to the kitchen counter first. No bottle on the Formica. Either Fernando had not started or had put it away, and those were different situations. The TV was on in the living room, volume too loud. Not angry loud. Absent loud, the kind that filled a room because silence cost something. Fernando sat on the couch with his feet up on the arm, watching a rerun of something from the nineties where everyone had the wrong haircut and nothing terrible had happened yet. He kept his eyes on the screen.

The delivery bag went on the floor by the door. Teo straightened, rolled his right shoulder once.

"Hay arroz," Fernando said, still watching the screen.

"Yeah," Teo said. "Thanks."

He went to the kitchen. The rice was in the pot on the stove, covered with a glass lid, still warm under his palm.

Fernando had made rice.

Plain, no sofrito, but warm, and there was the problem with Fernando right there. Even failing, he could still hand Teo something that made anger feel ugly. Both things sat in Teo's chest at the same time — the thin warm gratitude, and the larger darker thing underneath it that he was not going to name — and he took a bowl from the cabinet and spooned rice into it and stood at the counter and ate. His thumb worked the rim of the bowl. Eleven-thirty-three on a loop.

Through the pass-through to the living room he could see the side of Fernando's face in the television glow, soft at the jaw. The right lens of his glasses had gone the year before and he hadn't replaced them, so one eye saw clearly and one eye managed. He had been large once and was a different version of large now. His hands rested in his lap. They were big hands for a man who did not use them anymore.

Teo ate his rice and did not look at the hands.

Then he saw the bill.

On the kitchen table, aligned with the corner, the ConEd envelope sat with its red PAST DUE stamp facing the door. Fernando had put it there. Set it square with the table corner like the angle made it less of an ask.

Don't do that.

Teo set his bowl in the sink. He picked up the bill.

$214.17. Service interruption if unpaid within thirty days of the original due date. Seventeen days remained on that clock.

He set the bill back at the same angle.

The junk drawer stuck on the right side. He pulled it past the stick. Inside: takeout menus from two restaurants that had closed. A screwdriver with a stripped head Fernando had been meaning to replace for eight months. A ConEd reminder from February, creased from being folded and unfolded. At the back of the drawer, where the change accumulated from Fernando's pockets, sat three crumpled singles and two fives. Teo pulled them out and counted.

Seventeen dollars.

A grown man's pocket change. He stood there with the bills in his hand and looked at the drawer — broken screwdriver, expired menus, seventeen dollars. That was what they had in the junk drawer. That was what they were.

Of course.

He made himself look at the badge behind the menus. Fernando in the photo, smiling because someone had told him to smile and he had. Five years ago, pre-injury, pre-the-disability-fight-that-took-three-years, pre-the-lawyer-who-took-most-of-what-came-out-of-it. Hunts Point Market printed in the corner of the frame.

Teo looked away faster than he wanted to.

Behind the badge: two expired coupons for a Shop Rite that had closed the spring before last.

Of fucking course.

He put the seventeen back. He closed the drawer. It stuck on the right side, and he pushed it past the catch harder than he meant to. Not a slam. He was not a slammer. But the push had something in it.

From the living room the laugh track on the TV went off at something and then settled. Fernando made a noise. Might have been a laugh and might have been a throat clearing. The refrigerator hummed.

He went to his bedroom.

Two steps and his shoulders could touch both walls if he tried. Bed, chair with a jacket across the arm, milk crate in the corner with a folded hoodie and his other work shoes. His good jacket on the hook behind the door. The window faced west and the sun had cleared it by this hour. The wall that fronted the alley still held the day in it.

He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress springs settled under his weight.

Outside the painted-shut window the block was doing what it did at 5:30. A car went by slow, not in a hurry. The woman from the building across the street called a name out the window, two syllables, not angry yet but loading. The bodega on the corner had its yellow awning out, the plantain rack chained to the wall. The gray cat on the crate by the door and moving for nobody. For four years he had bought coffee there every morning he could afford it. Two dollars now, up from a dollar. His hand didn't stop going.

From the north the elevated 6 was building. He heard it before it arrived. The pitch rose, wheels clattering on the track, getting louder. The maximum noise pressed through the painted glass like a hand flat against it. It held. Then it diminished south, toward Third Avenue and the Bronx River and wherever the train went when it left this block behind.

He had lived in this room for four years and had never counted it.

He counted it tonight. Twenty-two seconds from maximum noise to quiet enough to hear the block again.

He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the water stain in the corner of the ceiling near the window, a brown ring from a leak two years ago that had been patched and forgotten. His delivery shirt had a salt line at the collar from sweat drying in the afternoon heat. Dark enough that it didn't show at distance. Three-for-ten on Fordham.

He crouched and dragged the shoebox out from under the bed.

Inside: the folding knife, black handle, blade three and a half inches when open. Since fourteen he had carried it because the block had taught him to carry something. The blade had never had to do anything that mattered. He set it aside.

Under the knife was the rubber band around the bills. He counted. Twenty, two tens, three fives, two ones.

Forty-seven dollars.

Same number.

The count in his hand matched the count he'd been keeping in his head all day — like checking a pocket for keys he knew weren't there, and they still weren't there, and he checked anyway. He folded the bills back under the rubber band before the number could sit too long in his palm.

Under the rubber band was the Hostos flyer.

He unfolded it halfway and stopped. The crease had gone soft along a line he hadn't creased on purpose. He had opened and closed it enough times that the paper had decided on its own.

$800 for the semester fee. Accounting class. Back in May he had gone to the open house. With $800 he could cover the class and still keep ConEd paid and still give Fernando enough for groceries about half the time, which was the half Fernando asked. Since January he had been working toward $800.

He was at $47.

Not that.

He folded the flyer back and put the knife on top of it. The shoebox went under the bed.

---

In March he had run into his cousin Dariel on Third Avenue. New phone, new chain. The chain was the kind you held back from touching, and Teo had wanted to touch it — that want had gone into his chest and sat there, and he had buried it before he even knew he was burying it. Three minutes on the corner, Dariel asked how Fernando was, Teo said fine, Dariel got a call and walked away. They were not close. Dariel was his mother's sister's son, and his mother had been gone since he was eleven, so that connection had thinned to the occasional birthday text and one Easter two years ago at his grandmother's in Hunts Point where they had barely spoken.

Dariel was not the comparison. The arithmetic was.

There was a name in his phone. Luis Guzmán, called Machete, who moved through this block low and specific. Two years ago a corner man had looked at Teo's hands while Teo was moving a box, said a name and a phone number, and Teo had taken the number and told himself it was insurance. The contact had sat under L since February. His thumb had never pressed it.

Fernando had a situation and let it become a life sentence. The kid from 2C whose bicycle was still in the stairwell was two years into a robbery charge at Rikers and nobody had moved it. At eighteen, Teo was quick. Look at a room and he could tell in four seconds where the weight was sitting, whether a conversation was going one way or another. Waiting he was good at. That was worth something inside a system that rewarded reading and patience. The question was which system.

He lay down on top of the covers without taking his shoes off and looked at the ceiling stain. His shoulder ached from the delivery bag. He rotated it against the mattress, felt the muscle catch and release. Outside, the car alarm on the white Accord at the end of the block went off again. Twelve-minute cycle, somebody brushing it and walking away. Six days he had been tracking the cycle without deciding to track it.

He tracked things.

The ConEd bill: $214.17. Seventeen days. Fernando's partial disability check came the first of the month, eleven days away, covered rent and maybe $40 past rent. Even if the next two weeks of deliveries went well — and this week was not going well — they were going to come up short between $60 and $100 before the service interruption window. His knuckles worked the numbers on his thigh, knuckle by knuckle, and the answer was the same.

For twenty-two days he had been telling himself he was not going to call Machete. The argument had run on the walk from the subway to the first delivery, in the elevator of the restaurant building, at the bodega in the morning with his two-dollar coffee, in this room at night with the 6 train marking the time. The argument was complete. The bill did not change.

---

The TV went quiet, then came back, then quiet again. Fernando cycling through channels in the absent way of a man who is not looking for anything but cannot stop looking.

Then the refrigerator door opened. A bottle came down on the counter with a particular weight, glass on Formica, unhurried.

So it had not been put away after all.

Of course. The word sat in his chest like a stone he had been carrying a long time.

He stayed still. The ceiling stayed where it was.

"Teo." Fernando's voice from the kitchen. He was not calling him, exactly. He was saying the name into the apartment to see if the apartment would answer.

"Yeah."

"You ate?"

"Yeah."

A pause held. Fernando moved in the kitchen, opened something, closed it. "There's more rice if you want."

"I'm good."

Fernando settled back into the couch, the frame creaking under him, the remote going quiet against the cushion. The TV came back on lower. The sounds closed in: the refrigerator, the television, the neighbor above with his hard shoes pacing the length of his apartment and back. Seven to nine, every evening. The 6 was building from the north again, the familiar approach, the maximum press of it against the window glass, and Teo let it come.

Twenty-two seconds.

---

He sat up. The jacket was on the hook. The milk crate sat in its corner. His phone lay on the mattress beside him, screen dark.

He picked it up, opened the contacts, scrolled to L.

Just L. The initial only.

His thumb hovered over the contact.

From the north the 6 was already building again, the approach coming through the glass. The maximum noise arrived and pressed through the room and his thumb stayed where it was. His eyes moved between the water stain on the ceiling, the painted-shut window, the name on the screen.

The train diminished south.

His other hand had gone flat and still on his knee. He had not put it there. It had gone there on its own, and that was the information, and his hand knew it before he did.

He was going to give himself one more night of not yet. Tomorrow was Saturday and Saturday deliveries ran $22 on a good day. He already knew $22 was not going to change anything. He knew that. He was giving himself one more night anyway.

A siren went on Third Avenue, close enough to hear, far enough away that nobody in the building would move because of it.

He counted twenty-two seconds.

His thumb was still over the contact.

---

End of Chapter 1