Two Alarms for Flatbush

He's at my stoop. Not Tribeca's lobby, not Penn's platform. My stoop. Black SUV, windows down, same beard behind the wheel, and he held the phone up like a man showing a friend a picture at a bar and tapped it once. That is the part I cannot stop playing back in the dark. One tap. Like it was his whole sentence.

He knows where I sleep.

I have three photographs of this man now. Yesterday it was two side by side, me and the man at Penn, a Rorschach I could stare at without deciding anything. Today I have him holding my face on his screen outside my own front door. I am supposed to feel calm. The little bar across my mood grid says calm. The bar is a liar, or I am, or both of us have learned to misreport and that is a sentence I do not want to think about at midnight.

I paid Mr. Pereira three hundred in cash from the dignity fund. First cash I have handed a person who isn't a cashier in three months. He said something when I called. I don't remember what he said. I remember my hand was steady and the bills were folded in my pocket like the ones my mother used to slip in an envelope. Twenty dollars from Atlanta, postmarked, Robin carried it across a state line for me to hold. Three hundred from me to Pereira in the same week. Money moving in both directions across the same city I thought was mine.

The envelope is back behind the jackets. I held it flat against my chest for an hour and I did not open it and I did not press send and I would like a medal, or a drink, whichever is easier to source at this hour.