The Fourth Wall of the Laundromat

The red door has been standing for two nights now. Tonight it gets a neighbor. 12:07. The street coughs, the way it always does — a small hitch, like a throat clearing before a lie. This one comes up out of the laundromat's back wall, which is a problem, because the laundromat's back wall is where Ozzie keeps his folding table, and Ozzie is standing at it when the door pushes through the plaster like a tooth through a gum. I'm across the street when I see it. I'm inside before I decide to run. *12th night. 12:07. Interior door, laundromat, north wall. Yellow. Handle low, child-height.* I write it crouched on the linoleum with the dryers ticking down around me, and Ozzie stands over the whole thing not looking at the door at all. He's looking at the photo. "It's got a mouth now," he says. He turns it toward me and he's right, it does — a mouth caught mid-word, the gray peeling back another quarter-inch to show a shape I don't want to name. I've seen that jaw. I've seen that suggestion of an ear. Not on any sister. On the smudge on page thirty-one, which has the same soft-gray weather to it, the same refusal, the same slow patient arrival. The blur isn't becoming Ozzie's sister. It's becoming an address. It's becoming a *place*, wearing a face so I'll look at it the way you look at a person and not a door. I don't tell him. I'm getting good at not telling him. "Ozzie," I say. "Whose photo is it, really. Who gave it to you." He frowns down at it like the question's in a language he half-remembers. "You did," he says. "Years back. You said — keep this, and don't let anyone talk you out of her." His hands find the blue shirt on the table, start folding on their own. "You said I'd know when the face came in." I have no memory of this. I have eleven years of nights and every door in ink, and I do not have this. The floor tilts the way it does at page thirty-one. The yellow door has a low handle, child-height, worn shiny like a thousand small hands. I put my ear to the keyhole. It doesn't breathe. It *waits* — which is worse, because breathing is a thing bodies do without wanting, and waiting is a choice. There's a note folded in the crack. White against yellow. My hand, my ink, my un-closed *o*'s. *This one's Ozzie's. Let him open it and he gets her back — or the thing the smudge is turning into. You can't be sure which. You never could tell them apart. That was always the trouble. — You.* Ozzie's reaching for the low handle before I've finished reading. His face is doing something I recognize from my own mirror — the look of a man who's spent so long half-glad to forget that the chance to remember feels like being asked to lift a car. I catch his wrist. His pulse is going like a fist on a door. "If you open it," I say, "it seals behind you. Once. And I can't promise what's inside is her." "You promised," he says, "that I'd know." The dryers stop, all at once, into a silence with a shape to it. I don't let go of his wrist. I don't pull him back, either. I stand there between Ozzie and a door I wrote a note for and can't remember writing, holding a man's arm on the edge of the only choice that might undo him, and I understand, finally, why I leave the red ones for last. It isn't wisdom. It's that I already know whose hand is on the other side of the low handle, reaching back. "Wait," I tell him. "Give me till the next 12:07. Let me read page thirty-one first." The photo warms in his other hand. The mouth on it moves. I don't watch to see what it says.