The store was bigger than the town he’d grown up in.
He took a cart because everyone took a cart and moved through the light which was the same at every hour because there were no hours here. No windows. The ceiling a kind of sky that had never known weather.
The apples were from Chile. The grapes from Peru. He stood and looked at them. Fruit that had crossed oceans to sit under this light waiting for no one in particular.
A woman passed him with a child in the cart’s seat. The child held a phone. Four years old at most. Already fluent in a language he was still learning to hear.
West put apples in a bag.
The store in 1900 smelled of sawdust and salt pork and the particular sweetness of things kept in barrels. The man behind the counter knew his father’s name. The wood of the floor had been walked soft. Everything in it had come from somewhere close enough to touch.
He asked for flour and the man scooped it from a bin and the dust of it hung in the air between them like a small shared weather.
How’s your father, the man said.
He said what there was to say.
Back in the bright store he stood in an aisle of things he could not name. Forty kinds of the same thing. He put his hand on a can and felt nothing and understood that was the point.
He paid a machine. It thanked him in a voice designed to sound like it meant it.
Outside the sun was a shock. Real light. Unregulated. He stood in it a moment longer than he needed to.
He had been in that other store too. He remembered the flour dust. The man who knew his father’s name.
He picked up his bags and walked to his car and the door of it opened when he touched it and he sat inside the silence of it and did not start it for a while.