in horror, because I had just said it out loud.

“Is he going to make it?” The words hung in the cold air. In summer they might have vanished quickly, but in the cold they lingered, fed on each other, grew like a wave that swells until it swallows the sky.

Or maybe I didn’t really say the words; maybe it was just that my lips moved. “Is he going to make it?” Even if it’s just your lips moving over that question, it booms around the room. Loud enough to rattle the windows, and paint itself on the walls so that anyone who comes in a week later will see it.

He. Him.

With a slight lifting of the eyebrows, say “him”—no one had any doubt that you meant the new leader, still mourning his father as the rest of us drifted. We all knew that we were drifting, and we knew where. A nation of shriveled leaves floating on a doomed river toward the falls. A winter of endless sorrow.

The horror on Pak’s face dissolved again into weariness. I knew his body was soaked in fatigue, functioning on momentum, getting up each morning with regret that morning had come at all, not knowing why each new day arrived, unbidden. Each night he fell asleep while he posted the signs on the four corners of the darkness, “Tomorrow is canceled, please, no more. No more.” But dawn ignored the pleas, dawn brought nothing, no hope, no light, nothing but a selfish insistence that it would inflict itself, empty-handed, the burden of new hours grinding down even the strongest until they imagined death itself had abandoned them, taking friends and family but leaving them.

I lived alone, but loneliness was no burden, not like people sometimes imagined. It was a matter of indifference to me if a new day came. Dawn brought nothing, but I didn’t care. If the new light of day had ever meant anything, I had forgotten what it was.

“How is your mother?” I asked Pak. Once, that was a simple question, a question from normal times, when the answer was normal, in a normal conversation. It wasn’t simple now, but if I didn’t ask it, it would mean there was nothing left for us to hold from before. It used to be a simple question because the answer was simple. No more.

Now, Pak might tell me to mind my business. If he was as weary as he looked at this moment, he might simply walk out the door, down the stairs, and never come back. I waited, and the waiting spoke to how far from normal we had drifted. He sat and didn’t answer, not with words, not with a gesture, not with his posture. That void told me what he didn’t have the will to say. No, he wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t leave, though there were people we both knew who had done that, leaving family, leaving everything, walking into the cold and disappearing. A query would come down from the Ministry once a month—“Where is so-and-so? Anyone with information about so-and-so should report immediately to the chief of personnel,” which was almost funny because the chief of personnel had disappeared. Someone had been assigned his job but not given the title lest that person disappear, too, and the job have to be filled again.

“She rarely eats.” If he was going to stay, he had to speak. He knew it. He had to talk to other people and read his files and draw one breath after another. “She says her food should go for the boy. We’ve argued until I can’t say the words anymore.”

“I have more than I can use.”

“No, Inspector, you don’t. I need you healthy.”

“Just let me know.” He nodded. That meant the subject was closed, and it was time to move things back to business. If you had to breathe, you might as well get back to business. “That background report may be delayed a little more,” I said. “Some of the people I have to interview in order to finish it aren’t around.”

There it was again. I didn’t say where they had gone. I didn’t have to. Pak knew what I meant. I could see in his eyes what he was thinking. He was imagining what he would never do, being one of the gone. Leaving everything, avoiding tomorrow.

6

After a session like that with Pak, I wasn’t going to my office and stare at the walls. A long walk would do me good. If it