Submitted by Hal — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 44. For nine years I caught the 71C at the corner of Marlowe and Fifth, the 7:14, downtown to the firm where I do payroll. And for nine years there was a man at that stop before me, every single morning, sitting on the left end of the bench with a folded newspaper in his lap. Older guy. Brown canvas coat, a cap when it got cold. In nine years I never saw him open that paper, and I never saw him get on a bus. I want to be honest about how normal this was, because you would not have noticed him either. The first winter I figured he was waiting on a different route — the 61 stops there too — and the second winter I figured he was retired and just liked being out in the morning, and after that I stopped figuring anything at all. He was part of the corner, like the mailbox. The drivers nodded at him and he nodded back. The high school kids said hey to him. He was there in the snow with the paper in a plastic sleeve, and he was there in August with sweat coming through the band of his cap, and one morning when the app swore the bus was on time and it wasn't, he said, "she's running behind," to nobody in particular, and he was right. That is the most I ever heard him say. The paper was always folded the same way, in thirds, the masthead showing. I must have looked at it a thousand times. That's the part I keep going back to. It was never hidden. It sat in his lap in the open, under the shelter light, in front of every commuter in that neighborhood, five days a week, for at least the nine years I can swear to, and I never looked at it once. Not really. Last spring he stopped coming. No buildup. There on a Friday, gone on a Monday. For a couple of weeks the bench looked wrong to me and I could not have told you why, and then, the way things go, it stopped looking wrong. In June the city put up notices saying the shelter was being replaced. The morning before the crew came, I dropped my badge, and when I knelt down for it I saw the plastic sleeve wedged up under the bench, between the slats and the frame, dry as anything. I knew what it was before I touched it. The same paper. I would have known that fold anywhere — soft as cloth at the crease, gray where his hands had been. I slid it out and stood there holding it, and my hands were not entirely steady, which was strange, because it was just a newspaper. Except it wasn't, quite. The date under the masthead was April 9, 2007. One issue. He had been holding the same day's paper the whole time, from long before I ever started riding, going by the wear of it. And it had never been opened. The fold was still tight, the inside pages still squared, the way a paper is before anybody reads it. The only thing on it that had not come from the press was pencil. Tally marks. Rows and rows of them, tiny and careful, running down the white margin of the front page and wrapping onto the back, thousands of them, in groups of five. No words. No names. Just the counting. The front page itself was nothing. A school levy. A ribbon cutting at a rec center. Weather. I put it back where I found it. I don't entirely know why. It seemed like that was where it went. The crew tore out the shelter two days later, and the new bench is blue, and the sleeve was gone, in a landfill or in somebody's hands, I could not tell you which. He never came back. The other regulars remember him the way you remember weather — "oh, the guy with the paper" — and then they run out of sentence. I looked up the date once. Nothing happened in this city on April 9, 2007. Nothing that made the news, anyway. The 71C still comes at 7:14, most days. I still take it. Somewhere there is a man who sat on that bench every morning for years, holding one unopened day, counting something, and either he finished, or he didn't. That is everything I know.