Marty crumpled up the summons. He’d tried to understand the words that were written out so neatly in nice, orderly rows, but he couldn’t make out their meaning—they got jumbled up in his head every time he looked at them. The “appear by” date was the only thing on the summons that he’d managed to decipher, a date in the near future that he burned into his brain.

     He looked around the dirty apartment, trying to think of what to do next. He could watch some TV, but the shows that he would wind up watching were just like the junk food that he fed himself morning, noon, and night—they always left a bad taste in his mouth when he was finished with them. Thinking this, he suddenly felt the need to get out, to be around other people. The bar he usually went to wasn’t open yet, but he had some beer in the fridge, and there were always people standing on the corner outside his building, by the stoplight. He put the cold beer, a six pack, in a paper sack and ran downstairs with the sack nestled against his chest.

     A middle-aged man in a collared shirt was standing on the corner, waiting for the light to change. He had a little black notebook in one hand and a pen in the other, and he was writing something down when Marty walked up to him and cleared his throat.

     “How about a beer? Selling these for a dollar apiece—you want one?”

     The man smiled and shook his head without looking up from what he was writing. Marty shifted the weight of the sack to his hip and extended his hand.

     “Tell you what, you can have the first one for a handshake. How’s that?”

     The man looked at Marty with blank, expressionless eyes, whispered “No thank you,” and walked across the street.

     Marty went back upstairs.

​

*

​

     The bar was full of people Marty didn’t know, so he left early, with barely a buzz coiled between his ears. He noticed a woman his age writing in a little black notebook when he stepped outside. Light from a store display illuminated the notebook’s pages, and Marty was tempted to look over her shoulder but didn’t. He walked on, and when he reached the corner, he saw another woman, a much older woman than the first, sitting on a crooked stoop with a little black notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. She was writing in her notebook as well; she ignored Marty as he passed by.

     Quite a coincidence, he thought, and he almost laughed out loud until he saw a third notebook, this time in the palm of a gangly teenaged boy leaning against a lamppost.

     Marty’s throat closed in on itself. Maybe someone put something in my drink, he thought as he hurried home.

​

​

*

​

     A little spooked, he didn’t leave his apartment the next day. He finished off the six pack he’d tried to give away while the date printed on the summons flashed like a neon sign in his mind, needling him like a test he’d forgotten to prepare for. He slept badly that night and woke in the morning with a horrible headache, as if the numbers attached to the date on the summons had drilled through his skull. Unable to stomach any more TV, he lumbered out of his building at noon, intent on cashing the unemployment check that had just come in the mail.

     Everyone he saw on the street was either writing in a little black notebook or carrying one of the little black notebooks in their fists. Thinking he was part of some elaborate practical joke, he tried calling attention to the notebooks that were all around him and even stopped an attractive woman with long blond hair to ask her what she was writing. She laughed, but Marty couldn’t tell if she was laughing at him or if she thought the question itself was funny.

     He felt increasingly uneasy, and when he got to the bank and saw all of the people standing in line with little black notebooks in their hands, he told himself that they were taking part in some contest he hadn’t heard of—maybe they had to write a slogan that would sell more beer or hamburgers, he thought.

     His pulse pounded in his ears while he waited in line, surrounded by notetakers. When he reached the front of the line, the teller behind the window raised her blank, glossy eyes to stare at him. He passed her the unemployment check; she stamped it and filed it away, and Marty said thank you. Looking down at the little black notebook next to the basket of checks, she smiled, but she seemed to be smiling at herself, not at Marty.

     “Next,” she said.

​

*

​

     Dark and ugly thoughts swam through Marty’s head as he left the bank. He got on a bus that was headed downtown and wasn’t at all surprised by the little black notebooks in the laps of the passengers. Even the bus driver had one.

     Skyscrapers blocked off the sky when he arrived downtown. He got off the bus; the men and women in suits and slacks carried little black notebooks with them as they walked from one building to the next. Marty got back on the bus and went home.

​

*

​

     He stayed in his apartment for the next three days. Whenever his panic eased, he went to stand by his window and looked down at the street. Every pedestrian had a black notebook in his or her hand.

     Marty decided to take action on the morning of the fourth day. Dressing himself in sweatpants and an old pair of sneakers, he went downstairs and did some peremptory stretching beside his building. Then he started jogging; he pretended not to be interested in the people writing in their little black notebooks even though he was looking for a notetaker who was walking alone, apart from everyone else.

     He found his target as he approached the next stoplight, a middle-aged man who reminded him of the fellow he’d tried to share a beer with the week before. With his arms loose, Marty came up on the man’s right side, snatched the black notebook away from him, and sprinted off, running so fast that he thought his lungs would explode. After he circled the block, he looked to the left and the right to make sure he hadn’t been followed and went upstairs to his apartment.

     Wheezing, his chest heaving, Marty threw himself on the old battered sofa and leafed through the notebook, staring at each and every page.

     He didn’t recognize the words the middle-aged man had written down; he wasn’t even sure if they were words. When he stared at them, the letters lost their shape, almost as if they were melting, and when he tried to scan the middle-aged man’s scribblings to see if anything would stick in his head, the words that were not quite words became jumbled in much the same way that the lines of text on the summons had rearranged themselves. Frustrated, Marty tore out several pages, crumpled them up, and launched them out the window. Then he leaned out over the sill and screamed, “You think I care what you’re writing in those notebooks? Because I don’t! I don’t give a damn!”

     He slammed the window shut. That afternoon, he went back down to the corner and stole another little black notebook. When he compared the two, the markings in both looked similar even though they weren’t the same. He couldn’t decipher either one.

Grabbing a pencil stowed in a kitchen drawer, he started writing in the empty pages of the second notebook. None of what he wrote was legible or made any sense, but that was reassuring in a strange and unsettling way.

​

*

​

     Marty slept in his apartment at night but couldn’t bear to stay inside during the day. When the weather was decent, he went down to the corner deli to get something to eat and returned to his spot on the corner, where he stood next to his building and wrote in one of the little black notebooks. When he finished with one notebook, someone passing by would tap him on the shoulder and slip another one into his hand, and he would write some more. He never knew what happened to the notebooks that he filled up; they simply disappeared.

     The date printed on the summons came and went. His joints ached and he developed a stoop from standing hunched over the notebooks, but he kept writing. The words he wrote weren’t really words, but that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered were the notebooks and how quickly they could be filled.

     He cried tears of joy when the police finally came to take him away.