OCT 14 THIS RUNS OUT. SAME BENCH. 10 A.M.
YOU BRING THE BOOK. I'LL BRING THE DONUTS.
— PAPÁ
Lloyd read it once. He did not understand it. He read it again, and the second time he understood it, all of it at once, the way you understand a car crash in the half second before the sound reaches you, and he became aware that he was standing very still in the middle of a gravel path in Tollis Square with his mouth slightly open and a twelve-year-old girl looking up at him, and that his hand holding the paper had begun, very slightly, to shake, and that he could not make it stop.
For my little scholar.
He had said that. He had said it two minutes ago, with a smirk in it. Little Scholar. He had thought he had invented it. He had thought it was a thing his own mouth had made up out of his own old bitterness, out of a bathroom on Calhoun Street and his father's voice through the door, and he understood now, standing there, that it had not been invented at all. It had been lying in him for a year, the way a splinter lies in the meat of your hand after you've stopped feeling it, and this morning, seeing this girl on this bench, it had worked its way up to the surface.
Because he remembered. Not all at once and not clearly, but he remembered.
It had been cold that morning. Not winter cold, but the first real cold of the fall, the kind that catches people out, and there had been frost on the slats of the benches and on the grass, white and fine as salt. He had come in from the Holloway corner at six, the way he did on sweep weeks, with a flashlight, and on the second bench from the corner on the west path there had been a long shape under a gray wool blanket and a canvas tote bag on the gravel beside it. He had shone the light on the shape and said Sir, park's closed, sir, I need you to sit up, and the shape had sat up, and it had been a man in his forties with a short gray beard and wire-rimmed glasses that he had put on before he did anything else, before he even pushed the blanket off, as if he did not want to be awake in the world without being able to see it properly.
The man had not argued. That was what Lloyd remembered most clearly, now that it was coming back: that he had not argued, and that Lloyd had been ready for him to argue, had been braced for it, because most of them did, and that the absence of the argument had annoyed him somehow, had made him write faster. The man had folded the blanket while Lloyd wrote. He had folded it very precisely, in halves and then in thirds, and put it in the tote, and Lloyd had seen that the tote was full of library books, with the plastic jackets and the barcodes on the spines.
Name? Arturo Mercado. Date of birth? Address? The man had said, the mission, sometimes, when there's a bed. And then, while Lloyd was filling in the narrative: Officer, how long is the exclusion?
A year.
All the parks?