The child from Unit 1978 finds the dead goose by following its smell from his balcony, but he stops when he sees the man standing over the corpse. The dusk swims with heat but the man’s gray jacket looks thick and heavy and hangs down over his knees. His long back faces the compound’s only exit road, and the child can’t see his hands under their sleeves.

“Is that the gross smell?” the child asks, and the man whirls at his voice.

The child flinches, retreating a step into the road. The man wears black glasses and a metal surgical mask over his nose and mouth, and his featurelessness frightens the child for this first second. But the child knows masks well, since lots of people in the compound still wear them. He asks, more loudly, “Is that the smell?”

The man steps aside so the child can see the splayed goose. Its black neck is slender and soft-looking, and its beak parts a little, like the goose had wanted to smile. Its fractured rib cage had cut through the caramel plumage and left its pulpy entrails, squirming with tiny specks, open to the humid air of insects. One leg had snapped and left the scissor-like bones jutting free, and lots of the goose’s gray plumage below the wound had been scattered around the naked, pinkish body.

The child covers his nose and backs farther away. His throat is gritty with retch, but he keeps it down. The child asks, “Why’s it dead?” It feels like a question an adult would ask.

When the man answers, the child can’t catch the choked words through the mask.  The man repeats himself, with unpracticed, halting words: “It was crossing the street, at night. And in a group. A white car hit it three days ago. It moved too slowly.”

“There are lots of white cars here,” says the child. Its mind is twittering with activity, the man sees. As the child thinks, the man returns the scalpel and the non-shine medical gloves he was holding into his pockets.

“We should find who did this,” says the child. “It’s wrong to kill a goose, unfair to just leave it here.” This man is a stranger without a face he can see. He stops speaking, but too late.

“You want my help,” says the man.

“I don’t think so,” says the child. His voice wavers for the first time. “I don’t know.” The man inclines his head towards the child, silently. This movement makes the child think the man might be smiling. “You said ‘we,’” says the man. “I will help you. I work for leasing, and I have cameras that see things in this compound. I’ve done it before.”

“Who’s leasing?” asks the child. It lives the beauty of innocence, the man realizes.

“Leasing owns these units,” he says. “They have me watch the compound for your safety. I can see this road every hour of every day, front and back, everything.”

“So you know who hit the goose?” the child asks.

“Not yet. But I can show you now,” says the man. The child watches him eye-to-eye despite his black lenses. “I have the camera’s streams stored for review in my office to review. It’s a net benefit for leasing. Also reporting.”

“I want to find the white car first,” says the child. “Then I’ll tell you, and you’ll tell me. Deal.” This last word is not a question. “What’s your name?”

The man is very still. Often, the child sees masked people fiddle with their straps or mouthguard, but not this man. Underfoot, the baked concrete steams, and the child is sweating through his shirt and hair. “My name is Syng,” says the man.

“That’s a weird name,” says the child. Then he apologizes for being rude, since he should. Syng says nothing in reply. Unnerved for trying to be friendly, the child smears his forehead trying to dry it and then leaves Syng with the dead goose.

It must want to go inside and feel comfortable and unobserved, Syng thinks. He watches the child pick its way through the pockmarked road and reach the walkway overgrown by kudzu and edge past the stagnant puddles like moats ringing every building of units. It is a small figure of thin limbs for miniature propulsion and delicate movements. And the child mourns the goose, like an innocent. Syng hadn’t thought an unspoiled being could still exist here. A spotless hyacinth floating in a canal.

Alone again he removes his scalpel and non-shine gloves. A glob of rotted flesh half-coated with feathers has gotten onto the toe of his boot. Syng takes an antiseptic wipe from his coat and kneels to scrub the flesh violently and silently from the boot. His antiseptic wipes the black color from the leather along with the flesh.

From Unit 1978, the child spends the next three days watching cars leave and return to the baked lot. There are only three white cars, all scuffed and dirty. One leaves each morning with a fat man and woman inside it, one leaves each afternoon with a hunched old man smoking inside it, and the other doesn’t move at all. He records these clues in a green notebook, and he writes happily, making excited mistakes. The damp-stained notebook had once been a gift from either his mother or stepfather. Neither had claimed the gift, they’d just left it on his plastic comforter one day while he wasn’t watching.