Cracks on the leather cover of his notebook. Cream eddys in his cup of coffee. Tinny pop music from somewhere behind closed double doors. He picks out the individual moments but the rest is lost in time.

Time. The one thing you can’t spend more than you have. And you never have enough.

He rattles the spoon around as he empties three Dominos sugars into the cup. His mind races to the huge neon sign overlooking Baltimore’s harbor. It costs a hundred grand a year to power those lights, he thinks. Then he remembers he’s not in the Charm City.

He’s back in Hamilton. It always comes back to Hamilton.

No matter where he’s lived, and he’s lived all over, something pulls him back here. It holds him down, strangles and suffocates him. The city is like quicksand. The more he struggles to free himself, the faster he sinks. Wait long enough and you’ll either discover you’ve freed yourself somewhere along the way or you wake up choking, dying. The Glass City is like some massive constrictor snake. An embrace that turns into a death grip.

On the wall is a calendar. There’s some long-legged bird tiptoeing through marshland. Birds Unlimited poster or something. A heron, perhaps. Why that bird for this month, he wonders. He goes to take a sip and realizes the cup is empty. Where did that time go? The waitress is a woman with a round body and a pleasant Eastern European accent.

“More?” and he puts his hand over the cup.

“No, thank you. I’m heading out.”

She scribbles onto a pad, tears out a sheet and lays it upside-down on the table. “When you’re ready.” is all she says before heading back through the doors into the kitchen. There’s nobody else here.

Fingertips glance over the table, across a scattering of sugar that spilled out from the packets. He flips over the bill and rifles through his billfold for correct change. The number doesn’t come as quickly as it ought to. He rounds up to 20%. Twice the tax, move the decimal point. He leaves a five dollar bill and collects his things: a pen and the notebook. It’s filled with tiny print, precise like a machine typeset the pages. It’s filled with a hundred thousand facts, or pieces of facts. Not that he needs that book; everything he sees or hears is committed to memory. But writing it, being able to see it… well, that just seems to make it easier. Even if it’s just to jar loose a fragment of a thought.

But right now, all he wants to do is sleep.

That’s all he’s ever wanted. So for the first time in many, many years. He lays down his head on the table and shuts his eyes.