RETRIEVING DOCUMENT
They put out a number this week. Official. A man in a clean jacket read it off a card, and somebody printed it, and now it's the number. It is lower than the one I have written on the back of a guest check, folded in my apron.
I'm not a numbers man. I make pizza. But counting is most of what I do all day — slices out, dollars in, the regulars who come through the door and, lately, the ones who don't anymore. So I want to be careful here, because being careful is the only thing I've got that those people in the clean jackets don't.
I am not going to argue their whole total. I don't know what happened four blocks over, or under the parking structure on Adams, or inside the two buildings that came down all at once with a sound I felt in my teeth. I only know my corner. I was here. And on my corner, their number is short by at least one.
His name was Mr. Okafor. He ran the dry cleaner two doors down. He pressed my shirts for nine years and never once got the collars wrong, and he had a way of handing them back over the counter like he was returning something that mattered. The day they fought over Wabash, his shop was open. Tuesday, a little after the lunch rush. He'd have been at the press.
He was not in the first count. The crews that came through — the quiet ones, unmarked vans, people who don't tell you their names and don't answer when you ask — they came through fast and they were not looking for the dead. They were looking for something specific that was not us. I watched them step over what they weren't there for. By the time anybody found Mr. Okafor it was the next day, and by the next day the count was, as one of them told me, 'closed.' Closed. Like a register at the end of a shift.
So he got found late, and being found late, near as I can tell, means you don't make it onto the card the man in the jacket reads from. There is a number for people who died on time and a different, unwritten one for people who were inconvenient about it. Mr. Okafor was inconvenient. He is on my guest check. He is not on theirs.
Maria's back at the register, if you're wondering. Eleven stitches over the eye and she was here the next morning tying her apron with the same hands, telling me to stop hovering. She counted Mr. Okafor too. We don't talk about it much. We just both know the real number is one higher than the news.
They've started the rebuild, if you want to call it that. A crew came and put up plywood where the glass used to be and painted it a gray that's supposed to look like it isn't plywood. They swept. Somebody took a photo. It looks, from across the street, like progress. Up close it's a wall you can't see through, in front of a shop that isn't going to open again, with a man's name nobody official wrote down.
The kid still comes by. Still asks me when the ones who fly are coming back. I gave him a slice and didn't answer, because the honest answer is that the ones who fly only come back to fight, and the ones with the clipboards only come back to count, and neither of them comes back to ask Mr. Okafor's wife how she's doing. I make pizza. That's the whole of what I can do for this block. So I'll keep doing it, and I'll keep the count on the apron, and when they ask me later why the numbers don't match, I'll tell them: yours closed. Mine didn't.