I reached for the bag because refusing felt ruder than dying. My fingers closed on nothing heavier than paper, and yet my shoulder sagged. I took the weight the way we take a stranger’s sob. Inside the bag there was only the shape of bread, the imprint mercy leaves.

“Where is the bus?” I asked.

“It comes when the bakery opens,” she said.

“When does the bakery open?”

“Depends on who’s hungry,” she said.

“Why do people come here?” I asked, because questions were my last good coin.

“They don’t,” she said. “It comes to them. Streets are the part of a city that get tired last. When everything else is done being a city, the streets walk for a while by themselves.”

I carried her bag to 114 because numbers are prayer. Bram was at the counter counting washers. He looked up at the bag and nodded like a man seeing a familiar storm.

“Set it on the counter,” he said. He kept counting. “…twenty-six, twenty-seven—”

“Do you sell exit signs to zero?” I asked.

He smiled sideways. “Zero doesn’t exit,” he said. “It returns. You can put a sign on that if you like.”

“Who keeps this street?” I asked.

Bram shrugged. “You do while you’re on it. Then someone else does. That’s how streets work.”

I left the bag with him. My phone vibrated—three soft pulses, like a small creature asking to be let out. A text from an unknown number: PHOTO RECEIVED. THANK YOU. Under it, a thumbnail of me standing in zero, leg lifted mid-step, mouth in the shape of a word I couldn’t have said because there isn’t a word for that color in your head when you think you won’t return.

I walked toward Tenebre. The sign said NADELAGURAM ST. The next sign did too. And the next. The light changed without moving. The sound of my boots edited itself. I had the strong, sudden sense that if I ran I would arrive nowhere faster and merely be out of breath. So I walked. I did what cities ask: I pretended this was normal.

At 102—the first even—I stopped. The crack in the brick had widened upward, the smile grown, as if brick learned comedy. I put my fingertips against it. The mortar was colder than metal. I leaned my ear to the wall. On the other side someone was sighing. It took me a second to understand the sigh was timed to my breathing.

I said my name. The wall said my name, one syllable late.

“I’m leaving,” I told the wall. “I have a car and a job and a client who pays late. I have a friend who keeps a key in my kitchen for Wednesday nights when we’re both too tired to pretend we do not need each other. I have a dentist who tells me I grind my teeth. I have a plant that probably needs water.”

The wall listened, which is a cruelty walls do.

“People will come looking,” I said.

“They always do,” said the old woman behind me. She was closer again. The paper bag was back in her hands, folded now, thin as a confession. “At first they come for you. Later they come for the story about coming for you.”

“Is the bus part of the story?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “The bus is the part where you can leave if you remember the line.”

“What line?”

She blinked. “You know it,” she said. “You said it when you first arrived. Most people do. You gave it to me.”

I tried to remember my first words here. What bus? I’m looking for Nadelaguram Street Hardware. Do you live here? Do you know if the bus began again. “Began,” I said.

Her smile went as far as it could without leaving her face. “Yes,” she said. “That one.”

“Began again,” I said. The phrase felt like catching your sleeve on a nail you can’t see. “If the bus began again.”

We stood. The street changed the way a breath changes a room—slightly, and then irreversibly. The air warmed along my palms. The barber pole turned a degree. In the distance, a sound like someone replacing a lid softly on the world.

Headlights rolled into view, too slow and then just right. The bus was a model the city phased out two administrations ago, the kind with marbleized plastic seats and an ad space that still promised landline long-distance at twelve cents a minute. The route number window said BEGAN. The driver wore a cap with a short, undecided brim. He looked at me with the non-need of someone who has done this before.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Tenebre,” I said, because saying LATIMER felt like begging, and saying HOME felt like error.

The old woman put a hand on my arm. Her skin was paper that taught you something about fire. “Be careful,” she said, “about what you take with you. Streets don’t like to share.”

The doors hissed. I climbed the two steps and fumbled in my pocket for change I didn’t have to pay for a ride that didn’t happen on a schedule that wasn’t written. The driver waved me past, eyes on the middle distance only drivers have.

As the bus pulled away, the windows became mirrors, and the street laid itself over my face again. I saw Bram at the corner with his hat in his hands as if listening for rain. I saw the florist vases now holding stems, each one leafless and yet, somehow, full. I saw the plaque at 150 cycling through shapes, O to 0 to nothing. I saw—only for a second, the way a good story shows itself once—the bakery: lighted counters, a woman in a white coat behind glass, bread in a heap like newly mown sleep. The sign on the door said OPEN. A small bell rung itself when the driver’s elbow flicked the turn signal.

The bus rounded a corner that should have been Latimer but was not. The city changed back to my version. The sky let the bruise go. I got off at Tenebre and stood with my hands empty, as if I’d set something down without seeing where. My car was where I’d left it, the windshield a scroll of delicate ice. In the coffee shop window, the blackboard now read: try the orange-cardamom latte—back by demand.

At home, my plant had died the kind of death that is really a rehearsal. On my kitchen table lay the receipt Bram had made—impossible, because I had left it on his counter. The stamp at the bottom had bled a little, as if it had been pressed while the ink was still considering itself. I turned it over. On the back, in my handwriting that is not the one I use when I sign checks, a line: IF THE BUS BEGAN AGAIN.

I called my client. He answered on the first ring. “We’re squared,” he said. “We’ll wire you in the morning. By the way, did you happen to see the bakery on that block? We’re looking for a tenant.”

“There’s no bakery,” I said, and hung up, and dreamed of bread all night, crusts like small doors, crumbs like a city’s plan laid out and then eaten.

Days after, I went back with a co-worker who thinks ghosts are old air. We walked Tenebre to Latimer twice. There was no Nadelaguram Street. There was a gap where a street could have been if it had wanted to be a street. The pole where I had seen the sign was a pole that had never worn a sign. A barber pole in a different neighborhood spun like an alibi. When I opened the maps app, the pencil line was gone.

I still get calls from numbers that do not exist. They thank me for photographs I do not remember taking. Occasionally, on the bus, which I ride more now, I see a route number that is a word, not a number, and I ring the bell and do not get off when the doors open. The city keeps its scars where I can’t see them until I can. The plant on my table is alive again in a way only I believe. Twice, a paper bag appeared by my door. It was light as nothing and heavier than guilt. I threw both away and listened to them land as if I were dropping ideas into a well.

If you’re from here, you already know someone who tried to find the street and couldn’t. If you’re not, you will. It will be the same story told differently, the way buildings tell the same story through brick and then through glass and then through absence. Someone will say the name wrong, and someone will correct them, and neither will be right. You will check your phone for the map, and the compass will point at your chest. You will count numbers until zero arrives like an unfunny punchline. A woman will ask you to carry what isn’t there. A man in a hat will give you proof you cannot keep.

If the bus begins again, do not be grateful. Do not be afraid. Sit where you can see yourself in the window, and if you catch your reflection lagging as if it were deciding something about you, look away. The street is tired. It wants to rest where it always has: in the part of the city where the city stops, in the thought that the city has about you when you are not thinking about it.

I tell you this because I had to tell someone somewhere, and streets gossip through us. Tomorrow I’ll wake and the receipt will be gone or it will have multiplied and be under everything, making every surface an invoice for my leaving. Tomorrow the plant will be alive or it will not. Tomorrow, at the stop at Tenebre and Latimer, there will be a schedule behind the glass, and it will be blank.

We learn cities by their scars. We learn ourselves by the streets that refuse to end. If you hear footsteps that are yours but a fraction late, if you see a bakery where there is none, if you find a door with an address that is a letter or a hole, take the bus if it begins. If it does not, count backward. When you reach zero, remember that some things only end later, and some end sooner, and some make an end of other things. If you have bread, carry it. If you have nothing, carry that.

My name is not important. I have a key in my kitchen for Wednesday nights. I tell myself that matters. I tell myself if the bus begins again, I will not get on. I tell myself I will walk to the end of Nadelaguram Street, even if it does not end, and stand where the numbers stop and the O opens, and I will watch myself arrive and not arrive, and I will listen for the bell and not hear it.

And if you ever receive a photo of yourself from a number you do not know, looking down a corridor of you, all of you raising your hands at once, be kind. Take it as a receipt. It only proves that you exist where you thought you didn’t, and that somewhere, a street is doing what streets do best when no one is watching: continuing.