# epilogue i said this story was not about me, and i meant it. but every story has a hand-off, and this is where the record gets handed to you. the posts were public. that's how i found them — the weird shit board's archive was swept up years ago, the way things get swept up when a server dies and someone with a shoebox of floppies cares enough to save them. raymond's prime tables are still out there, in an archive of fifty-eight thousand text files, the numbers marching across a plain text file the way they marched across his graph paper. you can read his first post and his last one. the one about the clock. the record was private. that should have been the end of it — a password-protected board on a BBS with fourteen users, and raymond's own last message typed into the dark, "to a number that was still his own board and might never be read by anyone." but jim was someone. jim — the sysop, the man in the oakland basement who had looked at the connection logs once and stopped looking — kept the rust belt running for eight more years. long past the point where it made sense. past the point where the phone bills were anything but a kind of penance for curiosity he could never quite put down. and when he finally turned the machine off for the last time, in 1996, he did what sysops do when they can't bear to delete: he copied everything. the public boards, the classifieds, the arguments about baud rates. and the private board, whose password he had set himself and therefore knew. the tape sat in a shoebox for a long time. tapes migrate the way records do — closet to closet, garage to estate sale to archive — and what they carry gets copied or it gets lost. this one got copied. which is how i read the record, part eight, on a laptop in a back flat on park street, while the beacon blinked through the window: steady, every four seconds, no primes, no ascii, just a light. --- the tower is still there. it is the tallest thing in the neighborhood and the only thing in hayward that has never once changed its mind. the cannery buildings got subdivided the way raymond said — artist lofts, an auto body shop, a church in the can-labeling room — and the water tower above them still blinks every four seconds, and the kids still count the blinks instead of sheep, and none of them have ever once noticed anything wrong with it, because nothing has been wrong with it since february of 1988. i've checked. not with a stopwatch — the kind of checking that gets you laughed at in hayward — but in the ordinary way, from the window, at two in the morning, the way raymond did. the interval is steady. it has been steady for thirty-eight years. and here is the thing i want to tell you, the thing raymond never got to tell anyone except saint_elmo: a four-second blink is not empty. it is a count of one, repeated. the simplest sequence there is. you can read it as nothing — a tower that finished its long count and now just blinks — or you can read it as the thing that was left when everything else was said. i have gone back and forth for years. i don't expect to stop. some nights, when the fog is in, i think the blink is a little warmer. i know how that sounds. i know what raymond would have said: the marine layer does things to light, the way it does things to sound. i know the difference between evidence and wanting, and i know which one this is. but i also know the story raymond told himself about the porch light, and i have decided it was not a story, because some lights are load-bearing, and this is one of them. --- the house on park street still has the bulb. the one his father hung in 1972, in the wire cage by the back door. someone replaced the fixture at some point — the cage is rusted at the hinge — but the bulb is still an old soft yellow, and it is on every night. whoever lives there leaves it on. i have lived in this neighborhood long enough to know that some things are kept without anyone deciding to keep them. the light is like that now. it doesn't belong to anyone. it just stays on, the way the tower just blinks, the way the water under the cannery still runs through pipes that no longer have any reason to be there. the record ends with raymond's last message. it does not say where he went after. i looked — the way he looked, in the county records and the old directories — and found about as much as he found in the historical society: nothing. the house was warm. the bills were paid. the light was on. after that, the ordinary quiet of a man who had kept the word and then had nothing left to keep it from. i leave the light on too. it costs about four dollars a month. i pay it the way a man pays for anything that keeps someone else from being alone in the dark. and at night, when the fog comes in off the bay and the tower's beacon cuts through it — steady, four seconds, four seconds, four seconds — i count along sometimes, the way people count sheep, the way raymond counted primes. one, and one, and one. if anything was ever counting back, it kept its appointment. whatever happened in those four seconds at midnight, in the rain, at the base of the tower — it happened, and then it was over, and the light stayed on. it's still on. --- *park street · present day · written at 3:12am, the same hour as every record that mattered*