A Letter to Myself at the Shutter, With My Head Still Under the Bike

To you, who just pulled the shutter down,

The shutter hit the concrete with a bang, and I heard every bit of it from here. The strip light inside the shop is still on, and it leaks under the door in one long white stripe across the pavement. Your left hand is holding the rag. Your right is fishing for the padlock. And your head has not left the shop. It is still lying under Uncle Sau's geared bike, taking apart again the bolt on the clutch cover that cost you forty minutes this afternoon.

Twenty to ten on a Tuesday night.

Let me say one thing first: this letter promises nothing for tonight. It does not promise you will sleep or that your head will go quiet. If a letter promises that, don't believe it, even one you wrote yourself. The line further down is not a spell either, and I don't think it shuts your head the way a shutter shuts a shop. A shutter has a pull handle. Your head has none. I am only telling you about one thing you can do in about a minute, right here, before you go up.

You know how your night goes. Upstairs, shower, lie down. Within ten minutes the thumb and first finger of your right hand pinch together and turn. Turn the loosening way. Loosening, and never getting there. You lie looking at the ceiling, hand turning a bolt that isn't there, while Hanh sleeps beside you breathing evenly.

Last Friday Hanh heard you standing downstairs too long and called down from the top of the steps.

"Are you coming? I can still hear you down there."

"I'm checking that bolt."

"Which bolt?"

"Never mind, I'm coming up."

You couldn't answer, because you had finished that bolt at three in the afternoon. It was sitting in the little iron tin on the shelf. Your head just kept taking it off one more time.

Last month you did the opposite. At midnight you went down, rolled the shutter up, switched on the strip light and crawled under the bike to look at that bolt. It was already out, sitting in the tin. You looked at the tin for a while, then went to bed at one, more awake than you had been at nine. The shutter you pulled down the second time sounded exactly like the first, and the second time it had nothing to say to your hand.

So I think the trouble isn't the bolt. It's that you open the shop again to check.

Now the small thing. Small enough that you'll feel silly. Put your palm flat on the shutter you just pulled down. Iron, a little cold, a patch of flaking paint under the heel of your hand. Say one sentence out loud. I usually say: done for today, more tomorrow. Any sentence will do as long as it is short and sounds like you. Then go up, and don't turn back to see if it's shut. You just heard it shut.

The first night I did this, that one sentence didn't feel weighty enough, so I added another, and another, until I sounded like someone reciting a prayer at a shop door. Standing on the pavement, feeling like I was holding a ceremony. I dropped it. One sentence, in whatever words your mouth already knows.

The shutter is mine. I asked around, and everyone has some last thing they close in the day. Chi Thu, who sells sweet soup, puts the lid on her pot, and the tailor at the head of the alley hangs his measuring stick on its nail. Yours can be anything, as long as it is the last thing you close.

The first time, you'll feel a bit crazy. If the woman who sells bread rolls across the alley looks over, keep standing there and finish your sentence. For the first few nights your hand will still turn on the bed, and I'm telling you now so you don't decide the whole thing has failed. Some nights the hand turns a few times and stops, some nights it turns until you drift off. I don't know which kind of night you'll get more of after a week. Don't keep a ledger.

On a night so tired you can hardly stand, just put your hand on the shutter. Three seconds, no words.

Some people keep telling me to write tomorrow's jobs on paper before bed, like this piece about writing three lines before turning off the lights. I tried. By the second line I remembered a fourth job, then a fifth, and the paper became one more thing to watch over. For other people it probably goes differently, and I'm only telling my own story. And if what's in your head is one fellow who still has work talking to another who is tired, someone wrote that whole conversation out, on a bed.

Khai, my apprentice, lies down and sleeps. I asked him, and he laughed: "I don't think about anything, boss." Same shop, same smell of engine oil, and he is different from me. I don't know why, and I'm not going to guess. Some people say their ears keep waiting for the buzz, and yours is the hand. Everyone carries something different into the night.

There is one more thing that doesn't belong to the shutter. If nights like tonight go on for several weeks, or in the daytime you hold a wrench and your hand drifts, or Hanh says you snore at night and then go quiet for a while, go and see a doctor. Don't wait until you find a better sentence. The one at the shutter is only a place to stop. It doesn't replace a check-up.

There are two bikes due out early tomorrow, and I know you're counting them. Yes, there are. Tomorrow morning those two will still be right where you left them.

Lock up. I'll go first and turn on the stair light for you.

Phat, Tuesday night

P.S. The rag in your left hand: hang it on the windowsill. Don't take it upstairs.

This article was created with AI assistance.