One Thing Still Working

The light that morning was the wrong light for Karl Jenkins's bedroom. He had not closed the blinds when he had finished cleaning the floor at four in the morning, and the sun came in across the bed at the angle and found, on the edge of the mattress, a man who had not slept enough to be ready for it.

The sheets beneath him were stiff with the dried sweat of the small hours. The shirt he had slept in was twisted around his ribs from the way the body twists in the bed of a man who has spent the night being shown a thing. The taste in his mouth was the taste of bile and toothpaste and the failed paracetamol of three a.m., and the room around him smelled faintly of disinfectant from the hour of his life he had spent on his hands and knees beside the bed under the small dispassionate gaze of the German Shepherd who had not, in any of the hours since, left his side.

Jargus was at the foot of the bed in the same patient sentinel posture he had been holding since the heaving had stopped. He had not moved during the cleaning. He had not moved during the four a.m. shower. He had not moved during the two hours of failed sleep that had followed the shower, and he was not going to move now until Karl moved, because he had decided some time during the night that what was happening to his person was a thing that required watching and not interrupting.

What Karl found in the mirror across the room when he swung his legs out of bed was not, in any way that he could quite specify, his own face. It was the face of a man at the end of a slide whose beginning he had not been awake for. The eyes were red. The skin was the wrong colour. The line of the jaw was the line of a man who had been holding his teeth together against something for several hours and had not yet remembered to let them go. He looked away.

His hands refused him three times when he came to the buttons of his shirt. He clenched his fists against the tremor and tried again, and got the buttons into the right holes on the fourth attempt, and Jargus watched the whole transaction without comment.

The bathroom did not fix him. The cold water at the basin did not fix him. The third toothbrushing did not lift the taste at the back of his throat, and the coffee in the kitchen did not reach the cold place in his chest where the voice from the dream had been delivered the night before. He swallowed two paracetamol with a scalding mouthful and stood at the bench with his hands flat on the cool laminate and his head bowed over the sink, and the only living thing in the flat that was functioning the way it had been designed to function pressed its warm flank against his shin and waited.

Then the phone on the bench buzzed.

The message was from Charlie Claiborne, in the brief institutional shorthand of a sergeant who had moved on from the day before by the simple expedient of not having made room in his morning to acknowledge it. A new case. A woman named Sharon Pafistis. A husband missing for twenty-four hours. The name Adrian Pafistis arrived in Karl's chest with a small cold familiarity he could not, in his current state, source.

He tapped out a message to Sarah. The reply came back inside three seconds.

Already at the station. Meet me here.

He topped up the dog's water bowl. He left a treat on the blanket. He took his keys from the hook by the door, and at the door he turned, because Jargus had followed him and was now sitting in the front room in the patch of pale morning sun that came through the window with the alert posture of a creature who had decided it was his job to watch his person leave and to be in the same spot when his person came back.

Karl looked at him for a long second.

The only thing in his life that morning that was still working the way it was supposed to was lying in a patch of sun in the front room with its ears forward and its eyes on him, and he could not quite, in the small mute moment at the door, find anything in himself that was equal to it.