The Park Avenue One

The recognition is what keeps eating at me. Not the threat — I'll get to the threat — but the bodega. The owner has seen me twenty times. I buy the same thing. He nods. Today he called me out across the store to a stranger like I was a fish on a hook. This is the one I told you about, the Park Avenue one. And the man in the black coat turned and just looked at me. Nine seconds. I counted. He did not take out his phone. That was worse. A photo I could have stolen back, broken, denied. Nine seconds of his eyes is a thing I carry now in a pocket I cannot unzip.

I am visible. That is what I wanted. I built the book, I went to Park Avenue, I let the work be seen. But visible means I am a story other men tell each other in bodegas, and the story has a shape I did not write.

Then the text. 2 PM. A number I have never seen. If you walk into that apartment again I will make the lobby guard look like a gentleman. I know who wrote it. I do not need to write his name here. I screenshotted it. Then I deleted it from the prepaid, which is the part I cannot explain to myself cleanly — I wanted proof, I wanted it gone, I wanted both at the same time, so I did both. I photographed the screen with my real phone and sent it to Jolene from the prepaid. One word. Same?

I am asking her what kind of trouble this is. The husband's comment at the door last week. The wife who said, not to me, that I seemed tired. And now a warning through a phone I do not put my name on.