Smoke, the thick, gray, particle-y sort, creeps—or well doesn’t just creep—no, hovers, no, billows, no, invades, cascading its way through the backdoor to the kitchen, from the back- backdoor, where the bakery connects to the other restaurant spot and to the garbage room that both these spots share with the hotel on the corner overlooking the river, though what is at this point in October just short of being called, plainly, a riverbed and potentially resulting in, in the near future, the renaming of the whole location the more apt Napa Riverbedfront. None of these details are what actually go through your head this day. The boss says to close the door, declares that it be closed, or at least her arms seem to be saying that. She can be heard from inside the walk-in only as a muffle but the smoke has already started to fill even the little window in which her face now appears and she is neither asking nor telling but is simply letting you know about the new door situation which yes she is aware the Sysco delivery man left open because she had made it a rule because she was tired of hearing the door open and close but still, from now on, don’t let that happen again. Same to Nancy with the bandages in the molds room, to the new hires at the stove who have been burning chorizo anxiously all morning, to that one guy’s sister barely awake at the register, to your brother the day before he quits, to that other dude a few weeks before he gets too high and falls asleep with the mixer running and “quits,” meaning, is forced to, since benefits claim, etc. And neither are these details from your perspective but they have passed through it and they have overtaken you and they begin to emerge entangled in you and you in them, only ever as the relations of a totality figured in traces. After her rounds have been made, the boss returns to her office, scoots a chair over to the monitor that surveils the kitchen, then remembers to close this door. This door being fifteen feet from the backdoor, as in the workspace next to the thing, so the ladies mock her, later, after she leaves for an emergency, probably pet-related as always, they suspect, in between the whisperings of their now daily walk-in huddle, which today circulates a worried but not quite panicked reading and re-reading of a screen continuing to be passed around in the hope that maybe the news of ICE being spotted in town will change/prove false given the not uncomplicated reason that they were planning to send back to family in Mexico City extra earthquake funds, euphemism cash to buy food, clothes, a place to sleep, and had been and need to keep doing so, except, the tamales they were going to sell to folks in Sonoma have nowhere to go, with Sonoma, as it is, in flames at present and with, clumping as shit tends to, their own health struggling to not fuck up, euphemism money is tight and their doctors are, how do you say, nonexistent or whatever. And, right, yes, right around here, in a kind of pasteurized stream-of-consciousness triggering, of memory, of desire, or both, the collection of details might be translated by an overlaying symbolic patterning and the smoke trails the boss = capital and the personal strife of others incites empathy = revelation but the door has been shut and the smoke is still there and your back is hurting way too much for a revelation and the egg cartons aren’t even done getting stacked and you have, what, at least another twenty- five to go and all that milk to put in the stupid crates and organize, all before the rosary at three. But the intimate is not a private space and the death is not a private death and just because this semi-unrelated story of a rosary is of a family member it does not follow that you can claim that story as your own even as, in an hour or so, you will sit there at the funeral home and listen to the priest list the supposed sins and weaknesses and moral failings of your uncle and imply but not outright claim that addiction and homelessness and unemployment and whatever else were his personal fault and so too then was his death, against, say, that it was hot and he had no insurance and was pushing sixty working construction and that it was the exhaustion of work and heat and years of work and heat but also the years of nonwork and faltering health and all those timelines combined which led to the seizures which led to the aneurysm which led to his death, even as, in four months, an article in the Napa Register will report on recent data from a census about the growing homeless population in town, laden with pictures of the police interacting benignly with folks alongside a photo of a makeshift memorial someone built for your uncle but your family saved for a year to get him a spot at the cemetery, even as, in six months, those spaces next to the river, just outside of downtown, where people set up their encampments, will be cleared for more housing construction, even as, in no time, really, all the homeless will be there and not and all the smoke will be there and not and it be will as though there is nothing there at all when it is a world in its own absence that lives there, in the plastic tent and the rusted Bronco with the windows long gone, in the refurbished and no, not stolen, bikes, in the mismatched toolkits and faded backpacks and random unfinished projects, a world missing itself and itself missing.