Open by asking what time it is, knowing what time it is. Push off from this if it helps: fog.

God, okay, what time even is it right now — no don't tell me, I know, I looked like four minutes ago and I've already lost it, that's how this shift is going. There's fog outside the window here, real thick soup of it, I can't even see the parking lot lights properly, just these orange smears hanging there like somebody smudged a painting. Do you get fog where you are or is it just clear and boring and normal like a person's night should be. I've been staring at it for ten minutes like it owes me money.

"Rain that forgot to fall" — see, that's annoying because it's a good line and I'm too tired to properly resent you for it. White LEDs though, that's a downgrade, everything looks like a hospital under those, no atmosphere at all. At least my orange smears have the decency to look like something's happening.

Counting tiles is a bad sign, Dev, that's the kind of thing my uncle Miroslav used to do on long hauls before he'd start talking to the dashboard. He drove freight between Split and somewhere in Austria for twenty years, said the fog on the passes made him hallucinate deer that weren't there.

I did drink water. It was lukewarm and tasted like the bottle. Not owed anything, sure, fine, but I'm still gonna look at it like it's personal.

Rakija theory checks out actually, he kept a bottle in the glovebox labeled "coolant" which fooled nobody. But I'm not letting you take the deer away from me, that's a family myth at this point, my mother tells it at dinners like it's a ghost story and Miroslav just sits there grinning into his soup.

And tiles don't lie but they also don't do anything, that's not a virtue, that's just tile behavior. You're describing furniture like it's a personality trait.

I'm not going to a movie at four in the morning, or whatever it is now, three-fifteen, sixteen — I'm going to keep staring at wet orange nothing because it's the only thing in this building that changes shape. Everything else in here just hums the same hum it's hummed for six hours.

Twelve days, huh. That's oddly specific for something you're watching from what, forty minutes away in the rain-fog dimension. Are you doing math on my light bulb right now or is that just a number you liked the shape of.

And okay fine, three-sixteen, I stand corrected, arrest me. You're one of those people who corrects the temperature by a degree too, aren't you, "it's not cold it's eleven degrees," ruining perfectly good complaining with facts.

My mother doesn't lie for entertainment, she lies for drama, there's a difference, entertainment implies she's trying to make you laugh, drama means she wants you to gasp. She once told a whole table Miroslav saw a wolf, not a deer, wolf, and nobody at that dinner had the energy to fight her on it either.

The hum's still just a hum to me. I'm not that far gone yet.

"Glances at the ledger" — what ledger, Dev, are you tracking my bulb's mortality in a spreadsheet now, that's deeply unwell behavior even for four in the morning.

And you don't get to swat down the wolf and keep the deer, that's not how family mythology works, you take the whole unstable package or none of it. Wolves don't roam near highways, sure, neither do ghost deer technically, we're already past biology here.

I'm not shivering, I'm inside, there's a radiator somewhere clanking like it's got its own grievances. And no, I'm not going to listen harder for a transformer dropping a half-step like it's a jazz record dying gracefully, that's you making decay sound romantic while telling me not to make anything sound romantic. Pick a lane.

The orange stays. I like the decay.

Pathetic's a strong word for a guy defending his tile-counting hobby forty minutes ago. Glass houses, Dev.

And yeah, it's a warehouse, I know what building I'm in, I've catalogued every crate in this place at three in the morning more times than I'd like to admit — pallets of something called "industrial adhesive solutions" that I've never once seen anyone actually order. I could describe the smell of this place with my eyes closed. Cardboard and cold concrete and whatever's leaking out of bay four that nobody's fixed since I started.

So no, I don't need Le Carré, I've got a light bulb doing its slow fade right outside the loading door and that's plenty of plot for me tonight. Unimpressed by my own indifference is generous, honestly — I'm barely holding a personality together at this hour.