I.

The radio went first. It was a Zenith, cabinet made of dark wood, the kind of thing your father buys when he wants to feel like he's still got control of something. I bought it at a garage sale in Duluth three years ago for five dollars. It played WLOL on clear nights and static on the others. That was fine by me.

Then the coffee maker went. Black plastic, automatic, the kind that promises you'll wake up to fresh coffee if you just set the timer the night before. I set the timer. The coffee maker didn't show up.

I'm Bill. I'm forty years old and I run a secondhand store out of a building that was secondhand before I bought it. The building is on a street that used to have a hundred businesses and now has seventeen, and of those seventeen, nine are pawn shops. This is what happens when the factories close. You don't get a parade. You don't get a speech. You get pawn shops.

II.

My ex-wife Joan comes by sometimes. We've been divorced for two years. We don't talk about it. She has a life—shift work at the hospital, a small apartment, a cat she claims not to love. She comes by on Saturday mornings and helps me stock the shelves and we talk about nothing.

"This isn't the first time," she said on a Saturday in November. The sky was the color of dirty dishwater. The wind came off the lake and made the windows rattle.

"What isn't?"

"Things disappearing. You always lose things. It's one of the things you do. Along with drinking too much coffee and pretending you're not lonely."

I didn't answer. She was right about the coffee. I was drinking it cold and I didn't care.

We caught him on a Wednesday. He was in the back room, carrying a toaster out the back door. He was thin—too thin—wearing a coat that was two sizes too big and looked like it had been pulled from a donation bin. His face was blank. Not empty. Blank. Like a sheet of paper that someone had written on and then erased.

"Stop," I said. He stopped. "Who are you working for?"

He didn't answer.

"Who's your boss?"

Still nothing. Just those blank eyes and the coat and the toaster.

Joan took the toaster from his hands. She looked at him the way you look at a street sign—without feeling, without curiosity, just registering that it exists.

"What's his name?" she asked.

The boy—because he was a boy, though he looked older in the way that people who don't sleep look older—said, "The boss."

"That's not a name."

"He doesn't have one."

III.

I kept the boy in the back room for two days. He didn't eat. He didn't speak. He just sat on a crate and stared at the wall. On the third day, Joan came by and said, "Let me talk to him."

She sat on the floor in front of him and talked for an hour. I listened through the crack in the back room door. She didn't ask him questions. She told him about her life. About the hospital. About the cat. About the way the coffee at the hospital tastes like it's been boiling since 1974.

When she was done, the boy said, "The boss doesn't have a name because the boss isn't real."

Joan went very still. "What do you mean, the boss isn't real?"

"The boss is a place. An empty warehouse on the north side. I take things there. I leave them on the floor. The boss doesn't come. The boss doesn't take them. I leave them and I go home and I wait for the next list."

"Who gives you the list?"

He looked at her the way he looked at everything—blank, distant, like he was reading something written on a wall only he could see. "The door gives me the list."

"What door?"

He didn't answer. He just closed his eyes and sat there, and when Joan opened the back room door an hour later, he was gone. Not out the front. Not out the back. Gone. The door to the alley was locked. The front door was locked. And he was gone.

IV.

Joan left that afternoon. She didn't pack. She just stood up, looked at me, and said, "I'm sorry, Bill. But I can't stay here and watch you watch the door."

She walked out. I watched her go. I locked the front door. I sat behind the counter and drank cold coffee and waited for the door to open.

It didn't open that day. It didn't open the next day. It didn't open for a week.

Then it started snowing. Duluth snow—thick, wet, relentless. It piled up on the sidewalk until the door was buried and the windows were white and the whole world was reduced to the space between the counter and the front window.

The boy didn't come back. The boss didn't come back. The door stayed closed.

I kept the store open. I sold what I had left. A few radios. A coffee maker I bought at a thrift store. A toaster from a man who said he'd found it in his garage and didn't want it.

The coffee was always cold. I never set the timer.