The buzzer was recessed into the wall beside the door, a small brushed-metal panel with a single button and a speaker grille, and Elena pressed it and waited the four seconds it took for the lock to release. She'd learned the four seconds on her first visit — the pause between the buzz and the click that meant you could push. Before she learned the four seconds she'd pushed too early and the door hadn't moved and she'd stood there on the sidewalk holding the door handle while nothing happened, which was something you only did once.
The visitor log was just inside the entrance, a spiral-bound book on a lectern beside a cup of pens. She printed her name in the first column, the date in the second, the time in the third, and Martin Voss in the column marked RESIDENT. Her handwriting in the log was the same as her handwriting everywhere else: small, consistent, slightly too neat, the handwriting of someone who learned to label circuit board components at nine years old and never lost the habit of making things legible. The page had nine other signatures above hers. She didn't read them.
The corridor from the entrance to Martin's room was forty-one steps. She knew this because she'd counted on her third visit without meaning to, the way she counted anything with a consistent value. Fourteen rooms on each side, all with whiteboards mounted beside the doorframe at eye level. Most of the whiteboards had names and dates. Some had names and dates and drawings — a nurse had put a small sun in the corner of the whiteboard next to 304, a detail that had been there on her last two visits and was either the same drawing or a fresh drawing made to look the same, and she didn't know which. She noticed these things and cataloged them without effort — the visitor log format, the four-second door delay, the hand sanitizer dispensers every six rooms on alternating sides. She noticed them and did not do anything with the noticing. Martin's room was 309. His whiteboard said MARTIN VOSS in blue dry-erase marker, and below it the date, and below that a set of initials she recognized now as Marcus's — MR — written small in the bottom corner. Martin was in the recliner by the window, his window, looking out at the parking lot with the attention of a person who has found one view sufficient and has decided to be at peace with it. The three physics books were on the shelf. There was a vase on the windowsill, empty — Diane's vase, brought on her second or third visit and left there for the lilies she planned to bring. "There you are," he said.
Marcus came in ten minutes after Elena arrived, which she'd learned was his pattern — give visitors a few minutes, then check in. He was in his mid-forties, solidly built, with a deliberateness in his movements that Elena had come to associate with people who had learned to move carefully in small spaces around people who startled. He said hello to Elena like someone who had spoken with her before, which he had, briefly, in the hallway on two previous Sundays. Today he introduced himself properly, offered his hand, said his last name was Reid.
"Your aunt mentioned your dad used to do rocketry," he said. He said it to Martin, not to Elena — directing the conversation toward Martin, not around him. "Model rockets, she said."
Martin's face changed — the distracted look went out and something else came in. Attention, but focused, the attention of a teacher who has heard the question he was hoping someone would ask.
"Estes," Martin said. "The Estes kits to start with, because they were reliable. Then we started building from scratch — different propellant ratios, longer burn times. You have to understand the trajectory if you want to recover the vehicle. A lot of people forget about recovery. They're so interested in the launch."
"What's the trick to it?" Marcus asked. He leaned against the doorframe, unhurried. He had other rooms, other residents, an entire hallway of whiteboards — and he stood there like he had the afternoon.
"Center of pressure below center of gravity," Martin said. He was sitting straighter now, both hands on the armrests, the posture of a man at the front of a classroom. "By at least one caliber — that's one body diameter. If you don't observe that rule the rocket will tumble. It will not fly straight. Physics insists." He paused, and something moved across his face, a private pleasure. "I had a student who built a beautiful rocket. Terrible finish on it, you understand — the paint was terrible — but the calculations were perfect. We launched it in the soccer field. Two hundred and forty feet."
"How'd the recovery go?"
"Tree," Martin said, and smiled. "But the flight was perfect."
Marcus smiled at that. He glanced at Elena once, brief, a look that wasn't pity — closer to acknowledgment, two people in the same room who both understood what they were witnessing, a man lit up by a memory with no tree in it yet. "There was a girl who helped," Martin said then, his tone shifting slightly, not confused but reaching. "With the fins. The fin alignment is critical and she had steady hands. She was very good at it." Elena was looking at the parking lot. "She sounds like she knew what she was doing," Marcus said. "She did," Martin said, with satisfaction. "She really did."
Elena had not brought her laptop. This was the first time since the project started that she had come to visit Martin without it — without the pretext of showing him the code, the pattern-matching function, the audio analysis he liked to watch run. On every previous visit, even the bad ones, even the ones where he hadn't asked and hadn't been interested, she'd had it with her in her bag. The weight of it. The option of it.
She sat in the chair beside his recliner — a standard facility chair, padded arms, built for long sitting — and she had nothing in her hands. Her hands were in her lap. She felt their emptiness, the blankness of hands with nothing to do. She didn't reach for her phone. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the parking lot with Martin.
It was a gray day. Twelve cars visible from this angle, maybe more toward the far end of the lot that the window didn't quite reach. A woman in a green coat was loading groceries into the back of a silver sedan. Martin watched her. "That car," he said, pointing. The silver sedan. "That car looks like my first car." Elena had seen photographs of his first car: a 1978 Dodge Dart in a shade of copper that her mother had called "the color of a mistake." The silver sedan in the parking lot did not look like a 1978 Dodge Dart. It was the right rough shape, maybe — four doors, similar proportions — but that was all. "It does a little," she said.
They watched the woman close the trunk and get in and drive away. Martin's gaze moved to where the car had been, and then to a blue pickup truck parked near the exit.
They sat. She didn't know what to do with her hands, so she stopped trying to do anything with them. She put her left hand on the armrest and her right hand in her lap and she watched the parking lot with her father for thirty minutes — a short time and a long time both, depending on what you're used to filling it with.
"I'll be back Sunday," she said, when she stood up. "Of course," Martin said. His tone was gracious and certain, the tone of a man who has no reason to doubt that she will come, who has perhaps always known she would come, who does not quite remember having had this conversation a dozen times before but has arrived, through some route she couldn't follow, at the same conclusion he always arrives at. That she will be back. That of course she will. She gathered her jacket from the back of the chair; her hands had something to do now.
Diane came in when Elena was still standing, jacket in hand. She was carrying a bunch of yellow lilies, stems wrapped in the paper the florist uses, the kind you undo from the bottom when you're arranging them. She had her regular coat on and her regular bag over one shoulder and the lilies in her other arm, and she came in as she always came in — not exactly prepared, not exactly not.
"You're still here," she said to Elena, not unkindly. A statement, not a question.
She went to the windowsill and put the lilies down and began unwrapping the paper. The vase was there — she'd brought it on her second or third visit, rinsed it out weekly, kept it on the windowsill so it would be waiting. She filled it from the small bathroom sink and came back and arranged the lilies: straight, considered, no ceremony about it, just a woman putting flowers in water so they'd last. "Yellow ones," Martin said — he was watching her. "From the market on Burnside," Diane said. "They had pink ones too but you like yellow." "I do like yellow," he agreed.
Elena sat back down. The three of them were in the room — Martin in his recliner, Diane at the windowsill with the lilies, Elena in the chair — and it was the smallest space they'd been in together in months, and nobody mentioned the house, and nobody mentioned what was happening with the house, and nobody mentioned ProjectOrpheus or the fall or the whiteboard with his name on it or any of the things that had gotten them to this room.
"It's going to rain more Thursday," Diane said, coming to sit on the edge of the bed, the paper from the lilies folded in her lap. "They're saying Thursday and probably into the weekend." "More rain," Martin said. "More rain," Diane said.
"The soup here is good," Martin offered, after a moment. "They do a chicken soup on Tuesdays. It has orzo." "That does sound good," Elena said.
"I'll bring the cornbread," Diane said. "The kind from the recipe. Not the box kind." Martin looked pleased. "The recipe," he said. "With the green onions." "With the green onions."
The roses in the garden outside were not visible from this window, which faced the parking lot, but Diane asked about them anyway — whether they'd come in yet, whether the garden was blooming. Martin said he didn't know, he hadn't been out this week, it had been too cold for the garden. He said there was a bench out there but the bench was cold in the mornings. Diane said she'd bring a blanket for next time, a blanket for the bench, and Martin said that would be good, that it was a nice garden when the weather allowed for it.
Elena listened to this and did not add much and did not feel the silence she contributed as wrong. The talk about roses and the bench and the weather and the cornbread was filling the room in the way weather fills a room — not because anyone needed to talk about weather, but because weather was what the room held right now, weather was what could be held. She was not outside the conversation. She was in it. Sitting in it, present in a way that didn't require her to build anything. The lilies were yellow on the windowsill, the parking lot was gray, and Martin said the orzo soup was good and they believed him.
At work that week, she did her job. This was not difficult — she was still good at her job, the professional machinery still intact, the code she wrote in the daytime still clean and purposeful and correctly commented. She reported her tickets at standup. She said no blockers. She made a reasonable estimate on the feature she was halfway through and then delivered three days early, her pattern for three years, and no one remarked on it because her pattern was reliable enough to be invisible. She went home.
The apartment was the same apartment: the kitchen table, the rack of dishes from the morning, the window that looked at the building across the alley. The laptop was on the table where she'd left it, closed. It was not hidden. It was not in another room. It was on the kitchen table where she always put it when she came home, and she looked at it and looked away and made dinner — rice, some vegetables, nothing complicated — and she did the dishes from dinner and from breakfast, and she went to bed at a time that was neither early nor late, a time that was correct for the number of hours she would need to function tomorrow.
She did not open the laptop for ProjectOrpheus.
The apartment was quiet after the dishes. She stood at the kitchen counter with a glass of water and the laptop was three feet away, closed, its charging light a steady amber. She drank the water. She put the glass in the rack with the others. The building across the alley had two lit windows. She watched them until one went dark, and then she brushed her teeth and went to bed.
She had not opened it since November. In November she had pushed a commit that said I don't know and the build had failed and she had closed the laptop and not opened it again — still true in December, still true in January, still true in the beginning of February. She did not decide this. She did not make a declaration or a resolution. The laptop was on the table and she went to bed.
On GitHub, the contribution graph was turning gray the way a garden turns gray in winter — not dead, not removed, just not producing anything. Green squares for months and then nothing, a clean edge where the activity stopped, the date visible to anyone who looked. She was the only one looking. She checked it once, on a Tuesday night in January, and saw the gray squares accumulating and did not feel anything she could name cleanly, and then she closed the browser and did not check again.
The dishes were in the rack. The bed was at the correct hour. Martin's whiteboard, forty-one steps from the entrance and fourteen rooms down on the left, said MARTIN VOSS in blue dry-erase marker, rewritten that morning, ready for tomorrow.