Let me say this before I say anything else: I don't remember anything.

Well, I don't -- It's true. I don't lie. I really don't, which is why you can trust me. Well one time they gave me the wrong change back at the cafe. They thought I had given them ten, but I only gave --

Oh, yes, you're right. Except for that man. Of course I remember him. I remember him. Like, at least I remember the idea of him.

Ooh -- I remember he was tall. Yes, that I remember. I'm sure actually. He was as broad as a doorframe, as tall as my ceiling...

Wait. I'm not a hundred percent on that. I think I'm thinking of someone else. This man was medium sized, like me. And I'm not even that tall. Yea, I think he was like me, if not a little smaller. Lithe fellow. Agile. Middle aged. Normal.

Okay, okay, I really don't remember. I'm only trying to tell you why any of this happened in the first place. And why it happened is because of how he made me feel. I haven't forgotten any of that. His complete face escapes me, but I can picture pieces of it. He has eyes like two shiny copper slugs -- like bullet slugs -- and a smile like a theater light. I could feel it on my face when he smiled at me. I'm not exaggerating -- I felt it. It could have melted frozen butter, it was that warm. Seriously, I could!

I remember the first time we made eye contact. The elevator bell buzzed, and I craned my neck around just as he walked past my apartment door. He was looking in the doorway, wearing one of those broad, easy grins that could melt a stick of butter. My eyes held on to the afterimage of his smile. It was floating in the empty doorway like the Cheshire Cat.

I learned his name when I saw the front desk was changing the tag on his mailbox. He was called "William." I called him Bill. I didn't call him that personally, or to anyone else. Just to myself.

Bill lived down the hall from me in room 606, a suite on the sixth floor. One time a few of us rode the elevator there from the parking deck. He smiled the whole way up. Even with the two of us in there, when the elevator doors opened, it was like they opened for him, and only him.

As far as the rest of them -- the rest of the tenants, I mean -- I had them pretty much nailed down. I'm not nosey, but I have a career in software and know how to see patterns. [] It wasn't hard to figure out who was who. The electricians, the teachers, the startup guys. But Bill — despite feeling completely and utterly familiar to me — he could have been anything. He was like a cloud. Every time I saw him, it was like he was a different shape.

I wasn't even sure of how tall he was. In between sightings, I'd imagine him as big as the door frame, as big as the ceiling, as big as the room. But seeing him again, I'd remember how unremarkable he was, and maybe an inch taller than me at most.

Even on the rare occasions that my door was closed, I'd still be able to tell when he walked by. The elevator would ding, followed by his distinctive glide to this apartment door. I'd swivel around to watch the shadows pass by the gap under the door. My spine would straighten, my muscles would relax, and the top of my head would open up to let my mind float out. It would float out of my head, squish itself through the gap in the door, track behind the heels of his shoes, and stop just before it entered his apartment. Not even my mind was permitted to float into there.

I was getting impatient. I thought I ought to write Bill a letter and explain myself to him, let him know who I was, that I existed. I sat down with my keyboard and typed out a letter, then printed it out and put it in my jacket pocket. I thought I'd leave it taped to his mailbox, but then I heard the elevator bell ding, and those footsteps glided down the hallway and stopped right in front of my door. And then someone was knocking at my door.

I had decided I would write a letter to Bill. A friendly letter — nothing weird or anything. Something short, to the point. A date, a time, a place to get together. Perhaps with a question mark at the end? Or did it sound better without it, I wondered. Is this too forward? I went back and forth before I settled on what I wanted to say. @done

Bill was knocking at my door.

"Second," I called out. I tried to make myself to seem busy, as if I hadn't been waiting weeks for the knock. I felt around for something to do. I straightened some paperwork, then spread it out and made it messy again. I spun around a few times in my chair, then fiddled with the blinds, open them and closing them a few times. And just before I was afraid Bill might walk away, I called out, "Coming!"

But when I opened the door there was no one there. Bill was gone. There was just a note on my door, at head level. I opened it up and read it.

"I want to meet you, too," said the note, "Bill, 606."

I was sitting on Bill's sofa while he served me coffee, trying to avoid getting stuck in his limpid eyes.

"Since you asked, I'm a software engineer," I said. "Sometimes use my powers for good. Not always."

"Not always?" asked Bill, "how's that?" He was sitting in front of his coffee, letting it get cold.

"Sometimes I like to snoop around on the people in the building, find out things about them that I can, unusual things."

He put his hand on my shoulder. "Shame is the glue that keeps friends together," he said, smiling, "So?"

"So?" I said.

"What did you find out?"

"Affair, I think. Not a hundred percent sure."

"Oh?" Bill wondered, putting his finger on his chin, "fifth floor?"

It took him two weeks to see what I saw in two years.

"How did you know?"

"Same as you, I imagine. Observing," he said, with a grin, "Got a knack for it."

"Have you been observing me?"

"Of course," said Bill, "everyone."

"You know, it's funny," I said to Bill, "As much as I wanted to, I never found anything out about you. It was like there was a bubble around you. And even stranger, well, when I'm here, around you, I feel completely vulnerable, like you can see right through me."

Bill didn't say anything. He just sat there, warmly, watching me, and shrugged.

"Maybe you can tell me something about you."

"Sure."

"Like, what you do for a living, maybe."

And then for some reason I don't know, I asked something else.

"And why, I guess, why you're here."

Bill straightened up and chuckled a little bit. He started to talk.

But I couldn't entirely hear what he said. It was if I was underwater and his voice was coming from just above the surface, only passing through part way. His eyes were like the water, crystalline blue, transparent, beautiful and transfixing like the patterns of little waves on a windy pond.

He was bypassing me somehow. Speaking directly to the stem of my brain. Programming me from the inside out.

"So, parking lot, tomorrow?"

I still hadn't come back online. Did I say that, or did he?

"Sure," I found myself replying, "that would be cool."

The next day Bill and I met in the parking lot. He was standing next to a candy-apple red Mustang convertible. We got in together. I felt like I was supposed to get in.

We drove around the city together. Or, I should say, the city was getting dragged under the moving wheels of the Mustang. Him and me were stationary. Fixed. The world moved around us as if on a blue screen.

I learned a little more about Bill. He seemed to know a lot about architecture. He was talking about how office buildings were constructed, from the ground up.

"They have te"

Buildings, houses, real estate, law, the whole deal.

"I didn't know you were such a historian," I said to Bill.

"I'm not," he said, above the sound of the wind.

"Sure you are," I said, "and if not, how did you know that that style of house was from the 1820s? Not everyone knows that kind of stuff."

"Renovations," he said, "you have to get a permit to do renovations on a house that old. Public record."

"You read the public records?"

"Sometimes, yea."

"Why?"

Bill told me the answer, but over the sounds of the wind and the road I wasn't sure that I could hear him. I filled in the gaps myself. I think he said something about real estate, or mortgages. That must be his line of work, now that I think about it.

"Sounds like you must work a lot," I said, "You know, to afford a car like this, an apartment like that. Even I work a lot and I can't afford all that."

Bill looked at me and smiled. "No, not really," he said. I don't remember what he said after that. I only remember the silence inside my mind as we whizzed through the city streets. He seemed to be talking still, but I couldn't process anymore. His words passed straight through the defenses of my conscious mind. When he looked at me and smiled, I smiled right back.

We arrived back at home. I couldn't believe we were back already, as it felt like we had driven hours and hours away.

I stepped out the car and went to get the keys to my apartment, but Bill had managed to get to the door first. "After you," he said to me, and waved me in. Bill had that effortless charm that made him so easy to be around.

I felt Bill's footsteps behind me as I walked towards my apartment door. I got excited, emotional. I wondered if he would —

"Do you need help with something?" said Bill.

Help with what? I wondered. Not wanting to seem too desperate, I tried calculating my words.

"Please!" I said. That wasn't what I meant to say, I thought to myself, "Maybe you can help me with this," I said, as I opened the door. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the letter and gave it to him, with all the instructions written on it, and passed it to him.

Bill took a look at the letter. His eyes grew wide, gigantic, like cabbages. They didn't have that clearness that they had before.

"Okay," Bill said, "here is everything I can give you."

He reached into his pockets and pulled out a lot of money. Hundreds of dollars, stacks of bills.

"The rest?" I said to him.

"That's everything," he said to me.

But something was beginning to come over me. I felt, now, with Bill's money in my hands, somehow ashamed of myself. I saw that he had the letter in his hands, and how he had put it aside, not even really reading it, only stopping at the first instruction.

I said to him, "I think I'm going to go now."

"Okay," Bill said to me.

And I began to walk away from him. I walked backwards out of my apartment and I left him standing there in the door, with the door wide open. As I watched him he began to change.

Bill wasn't Bill anymore. Bill was now a blonde woman, holding a note that I myself had written. She was dressed in a suit, looking sharp, and I was somehow holding her money. I looked around and found that the corridors of my apartment had somehow expanded. They were far enough apart that someone could fit a house between them. Or,

a bank.

I looked out the window of Bank of America and saw Bill again. He was in his convertible, smiling at me, waiting for me. I quickly regained my composure and started walking towards to door. I could feel the eyes of the teller on my back.

I tried to open the door, nothing. They had locked me in.

I pulled at the door a little more. I pushed. I jiggled it side to side. The door would not open.

Bill looked at me. It was as if he could see right through the dark glass, if it weren't there at all. He tapped his finger on his shirt pocket.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out two things. The first was a key. The second was the letter that I never gave him. I twisted the key into the lock and the doors clicked open.

"Wait! Stop!" I heard a shrill voice call from behind me, "Stop! Stop!" But Bill and I had already left, and I was sitting in the convertible of his, holding tens of thousands of dollars in my lap and the letter that I had written him.

My eyes met the letter once more.

"Dear Bill, I "

Leftovers

"I feel like I know everyone's job but yours."

I walked up to the door and opened it for Bill, and for a moment, I wasn't sure where I was even looking. I only knew I was staring into his eyes. But the trance broke when Bill pulled out a little device from his pocket. It was a USB stick. He had had a little glitch on his computer and thought that I might be able to recover the data off of it.

So, someone must have told him about me. "I can try," I said.

I plugged his drive into my computer, furrowed my brow and ran some programs that didn't do anything but spin the fan of my laptop. The data was already there, he had just hadn't formatted the drive correctly.

Bill patiently watched the meaningless data on the computer screen. His eyes were clear and beautiful like crystalline water.

"Any luck?" he said, "Don't melt your laptop over this, it's just some pictures of my niece."

"Well, laptops can be replaced, but pictures can't," I said, trying to sound friendly. Then, I pivoted into the conversation I desperately wanted to have with him.

"By the way — Bill, is it? — I know it's kind of a boring question, but what do you do? I feel like I know everyone's job but yours."

Bill responded, said something about finance, or banks, I think, but for some reason, I couldn't pay attention, I was focused only on his limpid eyes, and I had lost all interest in his career.

"Interesting career," I said, after he had finished talking. I look a look at the progress bar on the computer, the timer I had set myself. It was patiently counting backwards from ten minutes.

"And what about this place? You like living here?"

"Yea," said Bill, "I like it a lot." He smiled at me. I fell into his smile. I wanted to lie, I wanted to keep him here with me, but I felt that I was as transparent to him as his eyes were to me. He wasn't trying to make conversation with me. He was just simply there, taking up space, more and more space with every moment, until —

beep.

"Oh, there we go. Must have just finished," I said. But then I found more words falling out of my mouth, leaking.

"Yea, I just — actually, it didn't take any time at all, I just set some programs on my computer to &mdash"

What in the world are you saying? I thought to myself. You nearly admitted to him...

"Oh, wonderful," said Bill, "that really took no time at all! You're a pretty handy guy to have around, huh?" And he gripped my trapezius muscle in his hand and gave it a warm shake. I nearly fell to pieces.

"Listen, I have to run, but maybe you and me can catch up sometime?" bv =-=`1234cvbnm/