He came out of the restaurant into it.
No easing in. No preamble. The sky just gave up the way skies do on this island, flat and final, and the street was already a river, already six inches over the curb, already swallowing the sidewalk squares he’d walked on his whole life.
He stood under the restaurant awning and a man came out behind him and said something and he nodded and then the man was gone, ducking into a car that materialized out of the dark. And he was alone with it.
Mark, he thought. He would’ve laughed at this.
He stepped off the curb.
The cold took his shoes first. Then his socks. Then there was just water and the memory of being warm at a table with people who had known Mark from before. Before the illness, before the years that changed his face. They’d told the old stories. He’d laughed at the right times. Now he was on Webster Street or maybe the next block over—the rain did something to geography—holding his jacket closed with one hand like that would help anything.
A car passed slow and its headlights showed him the block entire. The water was moving. Not standing. Moving, carrying fast food cups and leaves and the general debris of a town that had not asked for this. A traffic cone listed past him like a drunk leaving a party.
He could not remember exactly where he’d parked.
He remembered the feeling of parallel parking there, the small satisfying clunk of the bumper kissing the curb. He remembered thinking he was close enough to walk. This afternoon. A hundred years ago when it was dry.
The rain hit so hard it made a sound like static. Like a television channel that doesn’t exist anymore.
He was thoroughly, completely, absurdly wet. There was no incremental wetter. He understood this and it simplified things. He put his jacket in his arms and walked.
Mark, he thought again. You would have loved this.
Somewhere on the next block his car was waiting for him like a small dark room. Like the only quiet place left in the world.
He walked toward where he thought it was.