Mark ExTenant called in from his new home in Norfolk to give us his cell phone number. I thanked him and then reminded him that he'd left his gas oven roaring along wide open when he left, a condition we didn't discover until we came home two days after his departure. I'd been looking forward to Mark calling in so I could bring this topic up with him. l was actually enjoying it a little. "You could have killed a lot of people, Mark," I told him with significant gravity.

"Uh, yeah, I really apologize about that..."

You're forgiven. We're pulling up the carpeting you stained in a dozen accidental moments of your life over the last five years; we're using seething solvents to erase your midnight scuffs in the kitchen floor. I wadded up Scientology newspapers (delivered, over our repeated protestations of uninterest, by LRH's winners) and scrubbed the nicotine grime of your late nights from the insides of the windows. We're pulling out your nails and filling in the holes. Paint slides in pure curtains up the walls, light bulbs brighten, screws tighten themselves down. Your apartment is aging backwards without you.

We leave the doors and windows open to the light rain, exhaling the air from a stale age of chained cigarettes. As we work on the apartment we can see people stroll by and eye the unwanted belongings Mark stacked out on the sidewalk. I've made a little sign -- "Take Your Pick" -- an unnecessary touch since passersby in DC are connoisseurs of objects discovered on curbs. It's just that the quantity of things is so large that I'm afraid people will think it's an eviction and restrain their urge for pilfery.

I never see someone actually take something from the pile, by the stack steadily diminishes, as if years of accumulated possessions are eroding in a day's drizzle. A bedside table is gone when I haul a bag of trash to the sidewalk. Later, a small, ancient device that may have once been a compressor of some kind, and a mysteriously incomplete piece of exercise equipment have been adopted into stranger's lives. The four-cup coffee maker holds out for almost a day -- it's marred by the sludge of undrunk cups fused to the bottom of the carafe, the product of ample time and ceaseless heat, like coal. Eventually it too vanishes into the arms of someone whom we'll never know.

Caulk slithers into the gaps around a window sill. The smoke detector, found disconnected atop the refrigerator, wakes up and resumes duty. Everything returns to zero, everything resumes as if you were not here, and everything is forgiven.