The phone rang at 2:17 AM. Frank answered on the third ring because answering it on the second made him sound eager and answering it on the fourth made him sound asleep, and he was neither eager nor asleep. He was just Frank.

"This is Frank."

"It's me. I need you."

The voice was young, male, shaking. Frank knew the voice—he had heard it before, in the same tone, from the same kind of person: someone who had made a mistake that couldn't be unmade and was calling the only number they had left.

"Where are you?" Frank asked.

"The old mill. Off Route 9. I'm here. I— I don't know what to do."

"Stay there. Don't move. Don't touch anything. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

Frank hung up, poured a glass of water from the tap, drank it standing over the sink, and put on his boots. The apartment was dark except for the streetlight bleeding through the blinds, painting horizontal lines across the floor like the bars of a cage he had stopped noticing years ago. He lived in this apartment because it was cheap and nobody asked questions and he never had visitors. It was the kind of place where a man could disappear if he wanted to, though Frank had never wanted to. Disappearing was for people who had something to run from, and Frank had run from everything he could think of and ended up right here, in the same town, in the same apartment, doing the same job: fixing things that were broken in ways that couldn't be fixed.

The mill was twenty minutes away in a town where twenty minutes felt like an hour because the roads were empty and the streetlights had been out for months and the silence between them was the kind of silence that pressed against your ears like water. Frank drove with the windows down because the cold kept him awake, and because cold was honest. It didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was: a temperature, a fact, something you felt and endured.

When he arrived, the kid was sitting on the hood of a car that didn't belong to him, knees pulled to his chest, hands wrapped around them like he was trying to hold himself together. Frank recognized him—Jimmy something, or maybe Jim—someone's son, everyone's son, the kind of kid who grew up in this town and inherited its decline the way you inherited your father's eyes.

"What happened?" Frank asked.

The kid looked at him with eyes that were too old for his face. "I went in to steal some copper. Just some copper. I didn't think— I didn't think anyone would be there."

"Who was there?"

"A guy. Sleeping in a chair. I hit him. I didn't mean to— he got in my way and I hit him and he didn't get up and I ran."

Frank closed his eyes. Not because he didn't want to see the kid's face. Because he did, and he had seen it before, in other kids, in other nights, in other towns that had been hollowed out by the same force that was hollowing this one out: the slow, patient erosion of purpose, the way a town could lose its reason for existing and keep going anyway, like a body that kept breathing after the brain had stopped sending the signal.

"Get in the car," Frank said.

"Where are we going?"

"Where we always go. I'm going to make a call. You're going to sit there and you're not going to say anything."

Frank called the number he always called when a kid had done something stupid and irreversible. The number belonged to a man who lived on the other side of the county, in a house that was bigger than Frank's apartment and quieter than Frank's life, and who answered calls at 2:30 in the morning the way other people answered calls at 2:30 in the afternoon: with the calm, practiced efficiency of a man who had done this before and knew that the next time he did it, it would feel exactly the same.

"It happened," Frank said when the man answered.

"I heard. I'm on my way."

The line went dead. Frank got back in his car and sat there for a moment, listening to the engine tick as it cooled, thinking about the kid on the hood and the man in the chair and the copper that was worth maybe two hundred dollars and had just cost something that couldn't be measured in dollars.

Twenty minutes later, the man arrived. He didn't get out of his car. He sat in the driver's seat and looked at the kid and nodded once, the way a doctor nods when he has to deliver news that isn't news but sounds like it: yes, this is what happened, yes, this is what it means, yes, you will have to live with it.

"Take him," the man said to Frank. "I'll handle it."

Frank nodded. He got in his car and drove home, and the silence between the streetlights was the same silence as before, except that it was heavier now, weighted by the knowledge that he had done this three times this month and probably fifty times this year and he couldn't remember a year in which it hadn't happened at least once.

The Loop wasn't a name he had given it. It was just what it was: a cycle of mistakes and fixes and mistakes again, a town that produced problems faster than they could be solved, a man whose entire existence was dedicated to solving problems that would be back before he had finished with them.

He poured another glass of water and sat at his kitchen table and waited for the phone to ring. It would ring. It always did. The town was big, the economy was small, and the distance between a mistake and its consequence was measured in minutes, not miles.

Frank Kowalski waited in the dark, and the town breathed around him, vast and indifferent, and the phone stayed silent for exactly seventeen minutes, which was exactly as long as it always did, before it rang again.