Mehdi's Notebook

The red-covered notebook was a site notebook, the kind you buy in a hardware shop, with squared paper and an elastic band. Mehdi was on his fourth. The three previous ones were at his home, in a drawer.

— I write down three things, he said. What breaks, what repeats itself, and what seems odd to me. You'll see, the third category is almost always nothing.

He opened it at a tab marked with a piece of sticky tape.

— First year. The seventeenth of November. I've just arrived, I'm shadowing Pascal, the old night man. At five forty, the boss comes down.