I get the urge to see my old apartment. Not the old, old one, but the one I lived in not too long ago, but long enough. Just to check it out, to see if anything's changed. It looks the same--quiet, brick, pretty tall I guess--but it also seems so different. Moving is a strange thing, not a bad strange thing, just a different strange thing. I walk around the building and I see a man sitting in a chair, reading a book, and I'm surprised because I don't see too many people reading books on chairs outside. And around this man are two large dogs and the dogs are well-behaved and don't care that I'm looking at their owner, sitting in the chair, reading. I think this man is Curt. I mean, he is the one that's replaced me here, in this apartment building. I know, I can tell, for some reason, that he is the one that rented out my old apartment. I also know that his name is Curt. He just looks like a Curt. But maybe he spells it with a K or a Q, Quirt, or something like that, because he is obviously cooler than I was, am. He is younger than me, and his dogs seem so nice. He delivers papers, but he's much faster than I ever was. He has more hair and is reading a very big, difficult book on Einstein or trivia, just to be prepared for a trivia night on Einstein. A woman comes out and hands him a beer. Wow! This man has beer delivered to him! She sits down in a chair beside the man and starts reading an even bigger book! The man looks up from his book and I pretend to look at the bricks in the building, bringing my face real close to one in particular. It has a crack.
I hear the man say: Says here.
Where? the woman says.
I glance at them. The woman leans over the man's book and reads aloud: Small memories are not smaller than the memories of larger ones.
That proves it, the man says.
The woman closes her book.
That's when I leave.
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