CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The dinner was chicken, roasted simply with salt and a little olive oil, with rice and a green salad from ingredients he had bought that morning.
He cooked the same way he did most things in his life: without waste, without excess, and attending to each step in its proper order.
The kitchen was small and clean—to the point of being bland.
He knew this, and he was fine with it. He had lived in the apartment for three years and it still looked as though he had moved in recently…
not because he lacked permanence but because he had long ago stopped accumulating things he didn't need.
He ate at the small table by the window with the television off.
Outside, people lived their lives and soaked in the sun and complained and watched the news.
The same old song and dance as the world kept spinning, oblivious to just how gross and annoying the little specks on its surface could be.
He watched it go by through his window without particular interest. He had always found it useful to observe the rhythms of a neighborhood, the patterns people fell into without knowing they had fallen into them. It made them easy to predict.
And sometimes, it was entertaining. But tonight he was simply watching because the alternative was silence. And silence, after a certain number of years living alone, stopped being uncomfortable. It became expected and warm. It became the only real thing to look forward to anymore.
He was not a man who drew attention. He was aware of this and had cultivated it deliberately for so long that it was no longer cultivation but fact.
He was average in height, average in build, and had a face that people looked at and immediately began to forget.
He had worked in proximity to people who projected big personalities.
People who filled rooms and left impressions.
And people with those big personalities always fizzled out.
The very traits that made them stand out usually resulted in pain and suffering in some form or another.
He finished eating and sat for a moment with his water glass, looking out at the street. A delivery driver was jogging from his truck to a porch across the way. A couple walking a dog strolled along, hand in hand around the corner.
He had been careful for a long time. That was the correct word for it, he thought: careful.
Not cautious, because caution implied fear and he didn’t operate from fear.
He operated from an understanding that the work required a specific kind of discipline, and that the discipline was not difficult to maintain if you respected what happened when you let it slip.
He had seen what happened when people let it slip.
He had, on two occasions, been responsible for what happened, and in both cases the problem had resolved cleanly and without consequence. Because he was not ruled by fear. Because he had moved quickly and without emotion once the situation became clear.
The only real danger, he had decided years ago, was impatience.
Impatience made people sloppy. It made them act before the conditions were right, before the timing made sense, before they had accounted for every variable.
He had never been an impatient man. It was possibly his most useful quality.
And he supposed it was why he enjoyed silence so much.
Despite his craving for silence, he also enjoyed chaos.
But it was the quiet, orderly chaos—a chaos that he could control and set in motion when it pleased him.
And though he had caused quite a bit of chaos over the years, no one was looking for him.
He had been thorough and he had been quiet, giving no one a reason to look in his direction.
The years had passed in an orderly way, each one much like the last, and he had gone unnoticed.
He carried his plate and glass to the sink and washed them, dried them, and put them away.
He wiped down the counter and the stovetop and folded the dish towel over the oven handle.
The kitchen looked exactly as it had before he had cooked anything.
He turned off the kitchen light and stood for a moment in the dark of the small hallway, not thinking about anything in particular, just letting the day finish itself.
There was a new project taking shape. He had been allowing it to develop at its own pace for several weeks now, watching and gathering and making no moves.
He knew the broad shape of it already and some of the finer details.
The only other thing left to observe was the work of patience: letting the right moment arrive rather than trying to force it.
Ah, but he was good at that. He had always been good at that.
It would require long days once it truly started.
Early mornings, late nights, and the kind of sustained attention that left him tired in the best, most satisfying way possible.
He didn't mind that. He had found, over the years, that he functioned well under that kind of pressure, that something in him settled and sharpened when the work was actually underway.
It was then that all the ambient noise of daily life dropped away until there was only silence…
and then the next step and the step after that.
But that was still ahead of him. Tonight there was nothing to do.
He went to bed at ten o'clock, as he usually did.
He lay in the dark with his eyes open for a few minutes, listening to the street outside wind down toward quiet.
He thought briefly about the work to come—not in great detail, just its general outline.
He smiled thinly when he realized it was the same sort of planning one might put toward a trip they were looking forward to.
Then he stopped thinking about it and closed his eyes. He knew he’d need the rest.
Soon, his days of resting would be over.