Dog Days - (Episode 3 0f 4) - "Keeping Company"

This is the part I have been trying to get to, and trying not to get to, since I started talking to you.

You may already know what I'm going to say.

I think you've known for a while.

You're kinder than I was, you let yourself understand things faster.

I'm going to tell it the way it happened anyway, in the order I lived it, because if I skip ahead to the end, you'll think I always knew, and the whole point, the whole horror of it, is that I didn't.

Or I did, and I unknew it.

Every hour, on purpose, with great care.

That takes work.

You have no idea how much work it takes to keep from knowing a thing that's in the same room as you.

The water was gone.

I need you to hold that, because it's the engine of everything else.

There was no water in the building and none coming, and no one to bring it.

And the human body in that heat needs more than you'd believe.

I found what I could.

There's water in the tank behind a toilet.

Did you know that? Clean enough if you're past caring, and there was a little in the pipes if you opened them at the lowest point in the apartment and let the building bleed.

I drank things I won't describe, and what I found that was cleanest, that didn't smell, I poured into a glass and I set it by Edith's chair, because she needed it more than I did.

She was older.

She was frail.

I told you at the start, I gave her the better share.

I went on giving it.

The glass was always full.

I'd come back to it, and it would be full to the line I'd poured.

The surface gone still and dusty, the way standing water goes, and I'd think, she hasn't had any, she must not be thirsty, she's resting.

And I'd not let myself think the next thought, the obvious one.