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: : : —HI, MELISSA— JAKOB SAYS INTO the phone, —it's Jakob. I was just calling to let you know that I moved—I sent out an e-mail with my new address and phone number, but just in case you don't have it it's—
Once he's done reciting it he kind of goes blank for a second. —So give me a call when you get a chance, he says. —It'd be good to, uh, catch up. A lot has happened here.
He hangs up, smiles a thin smile, and lets the phone drop into his lap. It's about 7:30. He's still wearing his tie. He listens through the windowpane to the hiss of traffic. He listens to kids taking slapshots in the lot next to his building. His new apartment is quiet enough for him to hear the exact rhythm of their cant. He'd put on some music but he doesn't have a stereo—Freya had a good one, and so when he moved in with her he tossed his. He was well aware, at the time, that he might not live with Freya forever, and as he pitched his shitty speakers into the dumpster, he dimly imagined a future where he'd be on his own again, needing to buy a stereo. He tries for a minute, now that he's inhabiting that future, to figure out whether he regrets not having kept the thing in storage, and he decides he doesn't, not really.
He's sick of the things that constitute him; sick of seeing them. The books lined up on the shelf, which he moved here two-and-a-half weeks ago—he looks at them, the ones he's moved from apartment to apartment, a half-dozen times over the last decade, they should feel familiar, comforting, but instead they seem oppressive, a monument to wasted time and effort, reminding him of ambitions that he no longer holds.
He gets a sudden sense of what he must look like, sitting here, sunk deep in self-pity, and he rails contemptuously at himself: you're always saying how you don't have time to do the things you want to do, he says. Now you've got time. You should get your ass up and do something. The weather's beautiful this week. You should go out while it's still light, take a walk or something. There's a park maybe ten minutes away, when he chose this apartment he had this thought that he'd spend a lot of time there after work, that before he'd go home in the evenings he'd spend some time sitting out on a bench among the trees, unwinding, maybe reading. But he hasn't been there even once yet. And the idea of getting up and going seems exhausting.
He sits there for a bit longer, picks up the phone and listens to the dial tone, and then wanders into the kitchen. He opens up the cabinet and looks at the row of cans, eventually picking out some steak soup. The murky slop inside gets poured into a pot and he starts it heating. He shakes in some pepper, just to add a touch of something, just to get it to begin to feel like some human being has been involved, somewhere, with the process of making these raw materials into a meal. The blue flames roar beneath the pot and he stares at them, transfixed.
He glances at the clock just as the hour changes to eight. Freya's home, he thinks, you could call her.
The soup's boiling. He carries the pot to the table and eats without using a bowl.
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