Already in his office, Adam took a seat in front of his desk and remained motionless. Minutes passed, his heartbeat normalized, and his leg muscles stopped hurting after the stairs. He fell silent, and in a second, the emptiness that had been devouring his mind lately took hold of him again.

“And what did you expect?”

A delicious aroma of coffee entered his nostrils. He looked down, found a half-drunk cup of coffee on his desk, and someone told him, “—And the freighter finally disembarked this morning with the spare parts. All in order!”

He looked up, and there was Rita, wearing a radiant green jumpsuit and a matching green beret, all decked out in sparkling costume jewelry. At what point had she entered? When had she left the coffee there? Had he been drinking it? Apparently so, his mouth tasted like coffee.

“I warned you,” said a young man with glasses. “It’s too early for you to come back.”

With tiredness on his face and a slight tremor in his legs—still suffering from the exercise on the stairs, perhaps—Adam looked at his always neat friend Trevor Homam in the office doorway. At what point had Trevor told him it was too early to come back? Had they spoken about it on the phone?

Wait! When did Rita leave? He looked for the coffee. The cup was not there anymore.

Trevor raised his eyebrows behind the thin frames of his glasses.

“Anything wrong with you besides being in another galaxy? Please, go home.”

“It’s just—I haven’t been here in almost two weeks and work’s piling up,” Adam replied.

“Two weeks? What are you talking about?” Trevor was puzzled. “You were here yesterday; don’t you remember?”

Adam looked at him doubtfully.

“Adam, we talked about Morris & Co., and you told me there’s a new Cyclops model that flies with an antigravity system,” Trevor said, and noticing that Adam didn’t remember it, he continued. “You asked me for the list of corporations that were military contractors in the last thirty years.” Adam’s expression was still blank. “Hey—You really don’t remember, do you?”

Adam let out a giggle; he didn’t know whether to lie and say yes, or be honest and say no, or ask Trevor about that list of corporations they allegedly talked about. Or was it that he had seen it himself, only he didn’t remember it?

“We spent the entire afternoon going through the companies we’ve worked with and the names of the scientific and military projects we’ve been involved with,” Trevor added. Answer granted. “When we finished, you said you just wasted your time. You didn’t apologize for making me waste mine, by the way. Then you walked home.”

Adam’s face was still an empty tapestry.

“Adam, why don’t you talk to Sarah? You are obviously not well.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I don’t wanna bother her.”

“Adam, have some rest, please.”

Giving up, Adam shut down his computer with the manual command—he didn’t even realize he had done it that way, without the precaution of using the small wooden rod he carried in his pocket—and left.

It was a couple of hours before evening turned to night, and the sun was still there, stretching its long nails between the skyscrapers, scratching Adam’s eyes. Bad time to have forgotten his dark glasses.

He walked along the avenue, staying under the shade of the buildings. He bumped his shoulder into someone, ignored the rebuke, continued on, and almost crossed the street before the pedestrian traffic light gave him the right of way. A horn forced him to snap out. He apologized to no one in particular and moved on. His phone chimed. Was it Rita calling to let him know he had forgotten something? The car keys, maybe? No, he hadn’t come by car, he’d come walking. And Rita? He had seen her today?

“What?” he reluctantly answered the call.

“Adam, Adam!” he heard someone say on the other side.

Adam recognized the voice. He took a deep breath and greeted him in a gentler tone. “Lisandro. Hi.”

“I’m finishing my karate lessons. I’m going to B-Crush tonight. See you there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Great, it will be tomorrow then!” Lisandro Carinae decreed. “The boys and I wanna give you a welcome party to the world of the living. There will be a parade in lingerie; it’ll be fun.”

“Good, good. I’ll be there,” Adam said, knowing in advance he wouldn’t go; he didn’t want anything to do with anyone, much less with that spoiled little brat and his ass-kissing group. Then he excused himself and clicked off.

And, as he walked, memories of him sitting in front of a monitor, Trevor at his side, slowly came to mind, looking at endless records of contracts and financial transactions, along with photographs of artifacts and facilities built during that period.

Damn! So that had happened!

He sighed, and again, he didn’t know what to feel, whether disappointment at not having found anything to help him clarify the panorama of his situation, or terror because he could no longer trust his own memory.

----------------------------------------

Ruben, the building’s doorman, was smoking outside at the entrance when he saw Adam walking up.

“Hey, princess, you’ve just recovered from your visit to the hospital,” the old man told him. “Why don’t you take a taxi back next time you go out instead of abusing your body like this? You look weird walking around so stiffened; you look like one of those goddamn androids.”

But Adam didn’t answer him, didn’t even seem to realize he had just spoken; he walked past him, greeted him almost automatically, entered the building, and continued down the hall to the elevators. No. Not the elevators. He went up the stairs, up the freaking stairs.

“Finding and losing your brother on the same night...” Rubén said to himself and took a drag on his cigarette. “Poor kid.”

Adam thought he heard Ruben say something. Wait! It was Ruben? Or it was the other doorman, the obnoxious chubby guy? Which one of them was on duty that day? Okay, it didn’t matter. He was already climbing the stairs and going through the second floor; he wouldn’t go back just to check if someone had spoken to him or if he had imagined it.

Supporting himself with one hand on the railing, he used the other to rub his face. The rough stubble was still there. Had he not shaved that morning? Or was his beard growing amazingly fast?

He finally arrived on the twelfth floor with a hardening in his legs that was beginning to be worrying. His options were to leave his house as little as possible or give up and use the elevators once and for all and wait for nothing to go wrong. There would be no legs to resist if not.

Using the small wooden rod, he inserted the code into the electronic lock and entered his loft. In the dark, he took off his jacket and threw it on a chair, undoing the first few buttons of his shirt.

A muffled thump. Someone was knocking on the door. Who the hell—? His neighbor, Mr. Quintana, perhaps? In the years he’d been living there, Mr. Quintana had knocked on the door only once, and it had been to ask him to turn down the music.

He looked through the peephole, and the shock of the unexpected threw him back.