The factory had been closed for eleven months. Bob Kowalski knew this because he walked past the gate every night on his way to the bus stop, and every night he counted the broken windows the same way other people counted sheep: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Fifteen broken windows on the south wall. The rest were boarded up with plywood that had warped and splintered and turned gray with rain.

He walked past the gate anyway. He did not know why. Maybe habit. Maybe the way your body keeps doing things even after your mind has stopped giving orders.

The apartment was a studio on the fourth floor of a building on East Ohio Street that smelled of boiled cabbage and someone else's cooking every time he took the elevator. The elevator worked sometimes. Most days it did not. Bob took the stairs. Four flights, seventeen steps each, sixty-eight steps total. He counted them the way he counted the broken windows. It was a habit. Habits were things you did when everything else had been taken away.

He unlocked his door and stepped inside and the room was exactly as he had left it: a bed against the far wall, a desk with a chair that had one leg shorter than the others, a mini-fridge in the corner that hummed at a frequency Bob had come to associate with the sound of wasting away. He opened the mini-fridge. Inside was a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a jar of pickles with a lid that had rusted shut, and a bottle of whiskey that was half empty and had been half empty for three weeks.

He took out a beer and a bottle of whiskey and sat on the bed and opened the beer with the bottle opener on his keychain, the one that had a tiny American flag on it, the one he had gotten at a VA event in 2004, the year he had stopped going to VA events because the other veterans looked at him the way you look at something you found in the bottom of a gas tank after a firefight: with a mixture of recognition and disgust.

He drank the beer standing up, because sitting down made him think about sitting down in a field hospital in Quang Tri Province, and he did not want to think about that. He drank it fast, the way you drink anything when you want the taste to be over, and then he opened the whiskey and poured a quarter into the beer bottle cap and drank that too.

The whiskey was cheap. It tasted like gasoline and regret. It was perfect.

He sat on the bed and closed his eyes and the jungle appeared behind his eyelids the way a movie appears behind your eyelids when you have seen it too many times: green and wet and alive with sounds you cannot identify and shapes that might be trees or might be something else. He had been twenty-two. He had been a medic. He had carried a medical kit and a rifle and a photograph of his mother in his breast pocket, and on the morning of the ambush, he had been walking behind Sergeant Murphy, who was six feet two inches tall and had a laugh that could be heard over the sound of artillery fire and a habit of humming country songs while he walked.

The ambush had come from the tree line. Murphy had shouted run and Bob had run and he had not looked back. He had not looked back because looking back would have meant seeing Murphy get hit, and seeing it would have meant knowing, and knowing would have meant carrying it, and Bob Kowalski was not built for carrying things that heavy.

He had run for twelve minutes before he collapsed in a rice paddy and vomited and cried and sat in the mud and waited for the sound of gunfire to stop. It stopped after twenty-three minutes. When it stopped, Bob was still alive. Murphy was not. None of the other four were.

That was fourteen years ago. Bob had not looked back since.

The phone rang at 11:47 PM. Bob was on the bed, whiskey in hand, eyes closed, the jungle behind his eyelids. The phone rang again. He let it ring. The third time, he picked it up.

"Hello?"

"Bob?" It was a woman's voice. Mary. Of course it was Mary. There were not many people who had this number, and of the people who had it, there was only one person who called at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday.

"Mary."

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You sound drunk."

"I'm always fine, Mary."

There was a silence on the other end of the line. It was not an uncomfortable silence. It was the kind of silence that existed between two people who had known each other long enough to understand that silence was a form of communication.

"I saw a man tonight," Mary said. "He looked like you. He was standing outside the pharmacy on East 9th, just staring at the window. He was holding a bottle."

"That sounds like me."

"I went to talk to him, but he was gone. By the time I got outside, he was gone."

Bob closed his eyes. He could picture her doing this: pulling on her coat, walking out of the hospital into the November cold, scanning the street for a face she knew, finding it empty. She had done this before. Not this exact scenario, but the same gesture: reaching for someone who did not want to be reached.

"Why do you do that?" Bob asked.

"Do what?"

"Look for me."

"I don't look for you, Bob. I just... sometimes I see someone who looks like you, and I think about you. That's all."

That was Mary's way of saying something important without saying it. Bob had learned this over the two years they had known each other, which was to say over the six times they had had conversations that lasted longer than three minutes. She was a nurse at St. Luke's Hospital, which meant she spent her days holding the hands of people who were dying and telling their families that everything was being done and knowing that everything was not being done and doing it anyway. She understood the difference between what people said and what they meant. Bob wished he understood it too.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

"For being the guy in the pharmacy window."

She laughed. It was a small laugh, the kind that comes from someone who laughs to keep from crying. "Don't be sorry. Just... be here. Next time I see someone who looks like you, I'll know you're somewhere, and that's enough."

The line went dead. Bob held the phone to his ear for a moment, listening to the dial tone, the way you listen to the last notes of a song you wish would not end. Then he set the phone down and picked up the whiskey and drank from the bottle.

The whiskey burned going down. It burned coming up. It burned everywhere.

He went to sleep at 2:13 AM and woke up at 2:17 AM and the dream was already starting: the jungle, the gunfire, Murphy's face turning toward him one last time with an expression that was not anger or accusation but something worse: understanding. Murphy understood why Bob had run. Murphy had understood it before Bob had understood it himself. That was the worst part.

He woke up sweating and the apartment was hot even though it was November and the radiator had been broken since October and the landlord had said he would fix it in October and October had come and gone and the radiator was still broken. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his head between his knees and breathed the way Murphy had taught him to breathe: in for four counts, hold for four counts, out for four counts. Four, four, four. Four, four, four.

At 6:00 AM he got up and put on his work clothes: jeans, a flannel shirt, a jacket with a hole in the left pocket where he used to keep his keys but now kept nothing because he had stopped keeping track of things. He walked to the bus stop and took the bus to the industrial park on East 30th Street where he worked as a security guard at a warehouse that stored auto parts for a company that had moved its headquarters to Texas three years ago but still kept the warehouse because tearing it down would cost more than keeping it.

The warehouse was cold. The heating had been turned off in September. Bob sat in a booth at the entrance and read a paperback novel he had bought at a gas station for two dollars and had been reading for six weeks because he read slowly when he was trying to avoid thinking. The novel was a mystery set in Scotland. The detective was named MacLeod and he was solving a murder that had happened forty years ago and Bob found himself identifying with MacLeod in a way that made him uncomfortable: both of them were men who had been looking backward for most of their lives, trying to solve a crime that had already been solved, trying to find a truth that had already been found, trying to bring justice to people who were already dead.

At 3:00 PM on a Thursday, three weeks later, Bob was walking home from the bus stop when he saw three young men standing outside a bodega on East 9th and 23rd. They were maybe nineteen, maybe twenty. One of them had a knife. Bob saw it when the streetlight caught the blade: a six-inch blade, silver, the kind of knife you buy at a hardware store and tell yourself you will never use.

The three of them were surrounding an old man who was carrying a paper bag with groceries in it. The old man was small and gray and trembling, and he was saying please please please in a voice that sounded like a child's voice, which is the most terrifying sound in the world because it means the person who is supposed to protect you has stopped protecting you and you are alone.

Bob kept walking. He kept walking because that is what he did. He kept walking because the part of him that had learned to run in a jungle in 1990 was still running, and it was running faster than his legs, and it was pulling him forward, and he was a passenger in his own body, and he hated it, and he hated himself for hating it, and he hated the fact that he could not even hate himself properly because he was too tired, too drunk, too empty to hate anything with enough energy to make it matter.

He kept walking. He counted his steps: one, two, three, four, five. At step seven, he heard a sound that stopped him. It was not the sound of the knife. It was not the sound of the old man screaming. It was the sound of a woman's voice, sharp and clear, saying hey hey hey what do you think you're doing, and he turned and he saw Mary standing at the corner of the street, her hospital bag at her feet, her coat buttoned wrong because she had put it on in a hurry, and she was looking at the three young men with an expression that was not fear but anger, the kind of anger that comes from someone who has spent her life watching people suffer and has decided that suffering is not acceptable and will not be tolerated on her watch.

The three young men looked at Mary. They looked at the knife. They looked at each other. And then they ran. They ran the way young men run when they realize that the person they are robbing is not alone: fast, careless, without direction, leaving behind only the sound of their footsteps and the smell of cheap cologne and the certainty that they will do this again tomorrow to someone who does not have a nurse standing next to them.

The old man was shaking. Mary was kneeling beside him, checking his bag, checking his hands, checking his face for injuries. "Are you hurt?" she asked. "Can you walk? Do you need an ambulance?"

The old man shook his head. He was speaking in Polish, and Mary was listening in Polish, and Bob realized with a start that Mary spoke Polish, which meant she had grown up with Polish parents, which meant she knew what it was like to come from somewhere that was not here, which meant she understood something about displacement and survival and the particular kind of loneliness that comes from being between worlds.

Bob stood on the corner and watched Mary help the old man cross the street and disappear into the night, and he felt something move inside his chest. It was not guilt. It was not shame. It was something older and deeper and more difficult to name: it was the feeling of a door opening in a room you had forgotten existed, and the light from the other room was dim but it was there, and it was warm, and it was asking you to come through.

He did not come through. He went home. He opened the whiskey. He drank from the bottle. He went to sleep and the jungle was there and Murphy was there and the understanding on Murphy's face was there and it was the same as always and it would always be the same.

But something had changed. Something small, like a hairline fracture in glass. He could not name it. He could not identify it. But it was there, in the space between the gunshot and the running, in the space between the knife and the running away, in the space between Mary's voice and his own silence.

The space was wider now. It had always been narrow. Now it was wider.

He did not know what to do with the width. He did not know how to fill it. He only knew that it was there, and that it was new, and that it would not stay new for long.

The rain started at midnight. It was a cold rain, the kind that comes in November in Pittsburgh and feels less like water and more like needles. Bob lay in bed and listened to the rain against the window and he counted the drops the way he counted everything else: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

Twenty drops. Then more. Then more. Then the rain was just rain and the counting stopped and Bob Kowalski lay in the dark and waited for sleep and the sleep came and the jungle was there and Murphy was there and the understanding was there and for the first time in fourteen years, Bob did not wake up screaming.

He lay still. He breathed. Four, four, four. Four, four, four.

The rain fell on Pittsburgh. The rain fell on the broken windows of the factory. The rain fell on the street where Mary had stood and spoken in Polish and saved an old man from a knife and opened a door in a room Bob had forgotten existed.

The rain fell on everything. It did not discriminate. It did not choose. It simply fell, and fell, and fell, and covered everything in water, whether the things below wanted to be covered or not.