The first job Nolan Briggs tried for after his release was with a construction crew building apartments on the edge of Brookhaven. The foreman looked at his application, looked at his face, and looked at his phone, and the whole interview was over before Briggs had finished explaining that he could lift, that he could climb, that he was willing to start at the bottom. The foreman said the crew was full, and Briggs knew the crew was not full, and the foreman knew that Briggs knew, and they parted with a handshake that felt like a door closing. He walked back to the bus stop, and he thought about how many doors he had closed on other people with that same easy politeness.
Searching his own name became a ritual he could not stop. He would sit in the library, where the computers were free and the chairs were hard, and type his name into the search bar, and watch the same results arrange themselves in the same order. The punch came first, frozen at the worst moment, his fist buried in a stomach, a face twisted in pain. Then the audio, transcribed in articles that quoted his words back at him with a coldness he had never heard in his own voice. Then the town hall arrest, the agents in navy windbreakers, the cuffs, the cameras. Then the slow motion clip, stretched out so that every second of his disgrace lasted longer than the disgrace itself. He closed the browser, and walked out into the street, and felt the whole city looking at him even when no one was.
By winter he was living in a damp studio above a pawnshop in Southside. The room smelled of old carpet and other people's cooking, and the radiator clanked all night, and the window looked out on a neon sign that buzzed and flickered. He ate instant noodles straight from the pot, standing at the small counter, because sitting down to a meal felt like a luxury he had not earned. The noodles were salty and soft, and they filled his stomach without filling anything else, and he ate them twice a day, sometimes three times, while the money he had left from prison grew thinner and thinner.
Debt calls came in the afternoon, always in the afternoon, as if the collectors knew when he would be home. He stopped answering the phone, and then he stopped charging the phone, and then he carried it dead in his pocket like a habit he could not break. The calls left messages he did not listen to, voices asking for money he did not have, for payments on a life that no longer existed. He thought about the pension he had lost, the house he had lost, the car he had sold, and the future he had once assumed would arrive on schedule, and he felt a hollow place open inside him that no amount of noodles could fill.
One morning he found a pink eviction notice taped to his door. The paper was bright and official, and it flapped in the draft from the hallway, and it gave him a date that was much too soon. He read it standing in the corridor in his socks, and he did not tear it down right away, because tearing it down would not change the date, and he had learned that pretending a paper did not exist was the oldest trick he knew. He left it there all day, and when he came back that night it was still there, pink and patient, and he finally peeled it off and folded it into his pocket, where it stayed, growing soft at the creases.
He walked the streets of Southside in the evenings, past closed shops and bus stops and murals that were already fading, and he thought about the man he had been before the park. That man had believed that protect and serve meant making others afraid, that a loud voice and a hard hand were the same thing as authority, that a report written clean could make a dirty act clean. The man walking now, in a thin coat, with empty pockets, understood that he had been wrong about all of it, and understanding it did not fix anything, and did not feed him, and did not get him a job, but it sat inside him like a small true thing, and he held on to it because it was the only true thing he had left.
Winter deepened, and the light went early, and the studio grew colder, and Briggs began to understand that he was running out of choices. He could keep walking from door to door, collecting refusals, until the money ran out and the pink notice became a lock on his door. He could leave Brookhaven and start again somewhere no one knew his face, although his face was now everywhere, and starting again would mean carrying the same name to a new place. Or he could open the letters he had been ignoring, the official letters with city seals, the ones that offered something he had once mocked and now could not afford to mock any longer. He sat at the small table in the studio, with the radiator clanking and the neon sign buzzing outside, and he stared at the stack of unopened mail, and he knew that the next decision he made would matter more than any decision he had made since the morning in the park.
Chapter Forty Three
The Letter He Nearly Tore In Half