Saturday arrived the way weekends do when there is nothing particular to mark them. The alarm did not go off. Lucian woke anyway at the same time, looked at the ceiling for a moment, and then stayed in bed longer than usual simply because he could.
By eight he was downstairs.
His grandmother was not cooking yet, which was unusual. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the kind of stillness that suggested she had been there for some time already. She looked at him when he came in and said nothing, which was its own kind of greeting. He put the kettle on and made himself tea and sat across from her.
They sat together for a while without talking. Outside the kitchen window the morning was grey and unhurried. A sparrow landed on the garden wall, considered something, and left.
His grandfather's radio started up in the back room. Same station. Same low murmur of voices.
"You want eggs," his grandmother said. Not a question exactly.
"I'll make them," Lucian said.
She watched him do it without commenting. He cracked two eggs into the pan his father had used for twenty years before leaving it behind when they moved. The sound of it was familiar in a way that had nothing to do with this kitchen.
He ate standing at the counter.
After breakfast he put on his jacket and told his grandmother he was going out. She told him to take the umbrella by the door. He took it.
The bookshop was four blocks from the house, wedged between a pharmacy and a shop that sold curtain fabric. It had no real signage, just a painted board above the door that had faded to the point where you had to already know what it said to read it. Inside it smelled of paper and the particular damp warmth of a room that had too many things in it. The owner was a man in his sixties who sat behind a counter stacked with towers of books that had no obvious organizational logic.
He looked up when Lucian came in and looked back down.
Lucian walked the shelves slowly. This was something he had learned to do without rushing. There was no list. He did not come in looking for a specific title. He came in and walked until something stopped him.
Today it was a thin paperback on the second shelf from the bottom in the back corner. The Art of Thinking Clearly by someone he had not heard of. He read the back, read the first page standing there, and put it under his arm.
Further along he found a used copy of a book on social behaviour patterns in institutional environments. The spine was cracked and someone had underlined passages in pencil throughout the first fifty pages and then apparently stopped. He added it to the first.
At the counter the owner looked at both books without expression and told him the total. Lucian paid in cash. He always paid in cash. He did not think about why anymore. It had become automatic.
Outside he put both books in his jacket pocket, the thin one fitting easily, the thicker one not quite but close enough. He walked home without opening the umbrella. It did not rain.
The afternoons on weekends had a different texture to them than the evenings. Longer, less defined. Lucian had not found a particular way to fill them yet. He read for a while, lying on his bed with the thicker of the two new books open on his chest. The underlining from the previous owner stopped at page forty seven mid paragraph and he found himself wondering briefly what had made them put the book down. Then he kept reading.
His brick phone sat on the desk beside the lamp. It received two messages on Saturday. One from his mother asking if he wanted her to bring anything back from the market. One a wrong number that said simply still on for tonight and did not respond when he replied that they had the wrong number.
He did not miss having a smartphone in any active way. There was nothing on a smartphone he currently needed. The thought arrived occasionally, a mild observation rather than a complaint, and passed without much weight.
In the late afternoon he heard his grandparents talking quietly in the room below his. The specific words did not reach him, only the rhythm of it, the back and forth of two people who had been talking to each other for so long that conversation had become something like breathing. Continuous, unconsidered, necessary.
He listened to it for a while without meaning to.
Sunday passed in largely the same shape. Books. Tea. A walk in the afternoon that had no destination and ended when he felt like turning back. Dinner with the family where his mother talked about a neighbour and his father talked about something at work and his grandfather said three things total and his grandmother said more but in shorter sentences than anyone else.
Lucian ate and listened and responded when the table required it.
After dinner his father sat in the living room watching something on television. Lucian sat with him for a while, not particularly watching, just present in the room. At one point his father laughed at something on screen and glanced over to see if Lucian had caught it. Lucian smiled. His father looked back at the screen.
Upstairs he sat on the bed with the psychology book he had nearly finished. A chapter on behavioural conditioning, on the way repeated environments shape response patterns below the level of conscious decision. He read a paragraph twice.
He put the book down and looked at the wall.
He was doing it. He could see that now, not as a dramatic realisation but as a plain observation. The waking at the same time. The same seat at the kitchen table. The way he had already begun to anticipate the turns in the corridor at Greybridge before he reached them. The way he ordered his thoughts before speaking, even in casual conversation, so that nothing came out unmanaged.
His mind had built a structure and his body had moved into it the way water finds its level.
He did not know yet whether this was recovery or just a different kind of enclosure.
The thought that followed was the other one. The familiar one. The sequence of things that had gone the way they went. He felt it begin to assemble itself the way it always did, the specific texture of it, the version of himself that had sat in front of a screen and made a particular decision on a particular night and not fully understood the weight of what he was setting in motion.
He did not follow it.
"Idiot," he said quietly to no one.
He picked the book back up. Read another page. Put it down again. Lay back and looked at the ceiling until his eyes grew heavy and the room settled around him into something close to peace.
Monday came without announcement.
He dressed. Ate. Got into his father's car. Twenty three minutes. The fruit vendor on the corner. The building at the end of the long road.
Julian stopped at the front. "Five."
Lucian got out.
Inside, the guard waved him through. He walked to the elevator and pressed fifty six. The elevator rose in its usual way, its mechanical sound consistent and dull.
The doors opened.
He stepped out and turned right from habit.
The corridor was different.
Not dramatically. The carpet was the same neutral colour, the lighting the same even overhead white. But the layout was wrong. The main office floor was not where it should have been. The corridor ran longer than it should have before branching. The doors along it were spaced differently. A sign on the wall to his left read something he processed a half second too late as he was already moving.
He stopped.
He stood in the corridor and looked at it properly. No one was passing. The floor was quieter than fifty six. The air had the same recycled quality but something in the arrangement of it, the specific silence, felt different. More contained.
He looked back at the elevator. The number above the doors read fifty seven.
He had pressed fifty six. He was certain of it.
He stood still for a moment longer than he needed to. Not reading the doors, not trying to see anything. Just standing in a floor that was not his and noticing that it felt like a floor that did not want to be noticed.
Then he turned, pressed the elevator button, and waited.
The doors opened. He got in. Pressed fifty six.
The doors opened onto the correct corridor. He turned right. Passed the main floor. Turned at the shorter corridor.
Sat down in cabin four.
Logged in.
Waited for the system to load.
He did not write anything in his notebook about the floor above.
He opened his files and began.
~to be continued