Night Off

Last night I wasn't on. On the October schedule, Monday the 20th is blank, no name, and I spent all of last week looking at it the way you look at a holiday on a school calendar. A whole night to myself. I was going to sleep like a person, eleven to seven, and wake up with the sun on the right side of the window.

I went to bed at eleven sharp. Turned everything off, put my earplugs in out of habit, curled up facing the wall. By eleven twenty my eyes were wide open. By midnight I was counting the slivers of light sneaking in around the edge of the blackout curtain, the one I taped up with electrical tape and that has never closed properly. At twelve thirty I gave up. My body has spent six years believing that at that hour I'm taking vitals in bay four, and it wasn't about to change its mind because a spreadsheet said otherwise.

The kitchen at one

If I could run, I would have gone running, maybe not at one in the morning, but I'd have come up with something. But my knee is still grounded and Dr. Ruelas has spies everywhere, starting with Pao. So I cleaned.

I don't know why one in the morning is such a good time to clean. I emptied the whole pantry and found three open bags of rice, a can of chiles that had started to bulge a little, and a jar of cinnamon sticks that used to be my mom's, with her handwriting on the label: "good cinnamon." I have no idea when she gave it to me. I put it at the front, where I can see it.

I scrubbed the stove with an old toothbrush. I washed the range hood filter, which I had never washed and which came out a color I won't describe. By two the kitchen was cleaner than the day I moved in, and Doña Chela's note on the fridge was looking at me like, "and now what?" I drank a glass of water, just in case.

The three o'clock train

At ten to three the train went by. It doesn't come through my neighborhood, it runs far off, on the other side of Bernardo Quintana, but at that hour the city is so quiet you can hear the horn as if it were on the corner: two long, one short, and then a deep rumble that goes on and on, like someone dragging a very heavy piece of furniture across all of Querétaro.

At the hospital I never hear it. Six years awake at this hour and I had never heard the train. It gave me a strange feeling, like finding out the neighbor you've known your whole life has a twin.

I grabbed the blanket off the couch, made a coffee, because by then what did it matter, and went up to the roof.

The rooftop

My building has four floors and a rooftop with six black water tanks, a wire clothesline and a broken plastic chair nobody has ever carried down. The woman in 302 had left some flowered sheets hanging, and in the breeze they puffed up and went slack again, slowly, as if they were breathing. I sat on the ledge of the little utility room with the blanket around my shoulders and my leg stretched out, like the doctor told me.

From up there you can see the Cimatario hill, which at night is just a patch darker than the sky, and below it all the little lights of the city, yellow and white, and one red one blinking on an antenna. Dogs were answering each other far away. A motorcycle. A man walking down the street whistling, hands in his pockets, on his way back from somewhere, or on his way to it.

At three thirty Pao texted me from the nurses' station: "why are you online if you're off tonight?" I sent her a photo of the sheets from 302. She wrote back: "you're not okay." And then: "it's quiet here, you're not missing anything." I did miss it. A little. I didn't tell her that.

What struck me most was that all of it, the train, the dogs, the whistling man, the antenna, happens every night without me. I always thought the night was mine, that I knew it better than anyone. Turns out I only know the inside one, the one with white light. The outside one has a life of its own and had never invited me.

The first bread rolls

At a quarter past five a light came on at the corner. It's Señora Toñita's bakery, the one with the metal shutter painted blue and a "Hot Bread" sign that's been up since before I was born. I always walk past at eight in the morning on my way back from the hospital, when there's already a line and no bolillos left. I didn't know they started so early.

I went down in sweatpants, still wrapped in the blanket, and knocked on the half-raised shutter. A boy with flour up to his eyebrows opened it. He said nothing was ready yet. I stood there watching them slide the trays into the oven, and ten minutes later he sold me six rolls so hot I had to switch the bag from hand to hand every half block.

I ate one walking up the stairs, plain, tearing it open with my fingers. The steam came out like from a cup.

At six thirty it started getting light and the first bus went by. I got into bed with my earplugs in, the curtain badly closed and my stomach full, right as all of Querétaro was getting up. I fell asleep in five minutes. Like always. As if nothing had happened.