Dog Days - (Episode 2 of 4) - "An Honest Man"

The water came on for one hour a day and then it didn't come on at all.

That first week without the elevator, there was still an hour they'd announced it on the radio before the radio stopped meaning anything.

Two to three in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day, as if to make you choose between drinking and not fainting on the way to the tap.

I'd take my jugs down to the second floor and wait at the pipe with the other.

No, there were no others.

I keep doing that.

I keep remembering a line of people who weren't there.

It was only me, kneeling at a tap in the dark with a flashlight in my teeth, listening to the pressure die a little more each day.

A full jug, then a half, then a brown trickle that smelled like a penny.

Then, one afternoon, I knelt there and turned the handle, and the building gave me nothing at all, just the sound of a dry throat, which is a sound a building should not be able to make.

I want to tell you what the heat does to you, because you need to understand the state I was in for the rest of what I'm going to say.

It does something to your mind before it does anything to your body.

Or at the same time, I could never sort out which came first.

There's a headache that isn't in your head, it's behind your eyes, a band tightening by the hour.

There's the thing time does, where you set down a cup and pick it up, and it's two hours later, and the light has moved across the floor like a slow animal.

And there's what you start to see at the edges.

Not ghosts.

Nothing so kind as ghosts.

Just movement.

A shape that's only the curtain.

A person in the doorway, who is only the coat on the hook.

Your brain, starved and cooking, keeps offering you company, and you keep having to turn it down.

I gave Edith most of the water.

I want that on the record too.

Whatever else I tell you, hold on to that I drank less so she could drink more.