I said I was walking the route again and I did, thats not a thing I say and dont do, ask anyone who has read this far, I keep my word to the record even when I dont keep it to people. Seven now. Same street, same time window, gave myself maybe twenty minutes either side because a fixed minute would be its own kind of tell and I am not making this easier for them than it already is. He was there. Coat, cadence, no face, the whole catalog you already have if youve read the other five, six, whatever were up to, the count keeps sliding and I keep correcting it and I am done apologizing for that, a man counting his own stalking under stress is going to lose a digit here and there, thats not a credibility problem, thats a symptom.

Except the turn was wrong. Thirty meters, every single time, I paced it, I told you I paced it. This time it was closer. Call it twenty, maybe less, I didnt pace this one because pacing means stopping and stopping means he sees you stop. He turned at twenty and I have been sitting with that number since and it does not sit well. A trained distance doesnt drift on its own. Someone adjusts a trained distance on purpose, when the old distance stops doing its job, when the subject -- me, I am the subject, I keep forgetting to just say that -- has gotten too comfortable with thirty. So they moved the number. Twenty meters means I had gotten used to thirty, means someone was watching me get used to it, means the getting-used-to was the thing being measured, not the walk. I have had a lot of hours to sit with that arithmetic.

My knee has been bad since March and I still walk this every day it doesnt rain, which the desert makes easy, and I want that on the record too, next to the twenty meters, because the two facts sit in the same sentence for me now and I dont know why except that my body keeps count of things my head is too busy to. The clipboard pages are still up if anyone needs the earlier props cataloged. The phone thread is still the strangest single piece of this, four minutes of a mouth that never once moved, and I think about that more than I think about the turn most nights.

Not the same gait as the alley man, before anyone writes in about that, heel first not toe, I have looked, I look every time now. Different men. Same twenty meters some week soon probably. I am walking it again tomorrow.

UPDATE 9/2:

Walked it four more times since the last one and nothing, which I know how that sounds after I made such a show of the twenty meters, nothing doesnt mean it stopped, nothing means he skipped a week or two, hes done that before, gaps dont break the pattern they are the pattern, ask anyone who tracks anything real, birds skip days too and nobody calls that a coincidence. Then Monday. or Sunday, the trash truck had already gone which usually means Monday but the truck ran early that week for some county reason nobody posts anywhere, so call it Monday and dont hold me to it, hes back at the corner and the turn was closer again, I didnt pace it, I am done pacing it, pacing tips them off worse than not pacing does at this point in the log, so I just watched and it looked like fifteen from where I was standing which could be twelve, could be eighteen, my eye for meters was never trained the way my eye for plates is.

So I went looking for a camera. Not mine, I dont have one on that block, a real one, a fixed one, the kind the county or the light company or whoever runs half the intersections around here keeps pointed at a corner for reasons nobody explains and everybody assumes are traffic. Found an index page for one two blocks off, same outfit that runs camera two fifty seven if the naming convention means what I think it means, and I pulled the archive for the window I needed, and got static. Not an error message, not a broken link, actual static, scan bars, the kind of dead channel you dont see anymore because nothing has a real channel anymore, everything streams, except this. My grandmothers television did this exact thing between four and five in the morning when the local station signed off, I used to watch it because I liked the sound, thats not related, Im putting it down anyway because it is.

Second time now a feed has gone dead on me at the exact hour I needed it and stayed clean the hour before and the hour after, second, I checked both sides myself this time before anyone tells me its routine maintenance, routine maintenance doesnt know which hour I need. I have the still. or I have a still, its not of him, its not of anything, its a photo of my own monitor showing the nothing the archive gave me back, no timestamp overlay in the corner where one should sit, not even a placeholder, just gone, and I am keeping it in the file next to the twenty meters because they belong in the same file even if I cant prove that to you yet. Eight if Monday counts. I think Monday counts.