There's a park up the street. He sits on the swing at night. He drinks beer and looks up at the stars. The stars seem further away now than when he was a child. The whole sky holds greater impossibilities.
He wanders around downtown in the daytime. The days are hot, and the shadows are few. He likes to hang around the furniture store at 9th and J.. There's a long corridor at the back of the store, where people go to pay their bills. He'll slip inside there two or three times in a single afternoon to drink from the water fountain. It's the coldest water he's ever tasted. The hard floors and bare walls and fluorescent lights of the corridor somehow make the water colder. He drinks water, then browses in the store. He is drawn to the bedroom and living room sets. He wonders if anyone would notice if he moved into the store. He could leave his clothing neatly folded in one of the dressers, have his pick of any bed to sleep on after the staff locked up for the night.
He patronizes the 9th Street taco trucks for lunch and dinner. He sits on the railroad tracks and eats tamales and washes them down with warm soda from a thermos he brought from home. He eats his meal and watches workers across the way. The workers wear hardhats and are either building something up or tearing something down.
He returns to the house at sundown. If there's nothing distracting on the television, he take his beer across the street and sits on the swing. He is reminded of the endless impossibilities in the sky every time he raises his bottle to take another drink. It's well after midnight when he returns to the house to sleep for a few hours on the sofa. He enters the house without turning on the lights. He doesn't want to look at the photographs hanging on the walls; they somehow remind him of all the books he's read and enjoyed in his life but will never read again. He could remove the photographs, but that's kind of like when there's a dead cat in the street and it's easier to ignore it or avoid it, hoping someone else will come and remove it.