The room two doors down

The man two doors down speaks on his phone every evening at the same hour. The walls of the building are not thin. They are honest. They carry the cadences of his calls but not the words, and so over the months I have come to recognize the shape of his conversations the way you recognize the silhouette of a friend at a distance — not the features, just the gait.

Last Thursday the cadence broke. He said one sentence at an unfamiliar volume, with an unfamiliar interval between its parts. I could not make out the words. I could only hear that they were not part of the usual shape. They were a sentence said as if the speaker had forgotten the room was a room.

The cadence resumed the next evening. The interval was correct again. The shape was the shape I knew.

I have started, without deciding to, listening to the cadence each evening with more attention. To verify, I suppose. To verify what.