Chapter 4: Ninety-Four Years of Leaving Cleanly

The winter Callum was turned, Chicago was loud with it.

He remembers this precisely: the noise. The stockyards carrying south on the wind, the elevated rail, the particular shriek of wheels against frozen track at two in the morning when a man had no business being near the river but was there anyway because he was twenty-six and had been paid and had not thought carefully enough about the man who hired him or the neighborhood he was walking into or the sound — brief, and then not brief at all — of something changing in the architecture of the world.

He does not often think about that night in its particulars. He has found, across a century of practice, that the details most worth suppressing are the ones the mind has encoded most cleanly — the smell of the water, the specific temperature of the air against his throat, the man's face which was not cruel, only indifferent, which was somehow worse. These are the details that have not blurred in a hundred years. He has learned not to be surprised by this. Memory, he understands now, is not about importance. It is about intensity of impression, and some moments burn their negative into you with a permanence that has nothing to do with what they meant.