"What am I?" the girl asks aloud of herself, or of no one especially, as she picks amidst the gathering debris of cellophane and cigarette packages. No longer of any use or measure, the boxes rest in semi-permanence on her bedside table. Her window frames a chalky sky and slanting beaded snakes of rain that seem almost as obscuring as the quiet silver light of the midmorning, distinguishing and at the same time softening every inch of the unlit hotel room.

"What's that?" unmindfully from behind the powderroom door.

She does not answer. Nor does she remove herself from the littered tabletop until, through casual yet determined appraisal, her slender white fingers produce an equally slender white cigarette between her lips. Lighting this, she gathers up the tawny cotton sheets about her waist, slides back against the headboard, and relaxes into the pillows until her otherwise flat stomach becomes shapely with folds of bare skin. She exhales into the graded light. With hushed turquoise eyes, the girl traces the ionic molding around the window and around the top of the wall, arriving finally on the powderroom door. It cuts a thin fluorescence across the floor, drawing the carpet into sharp actuality. The girl inhales.

Presently the door is pulled open and his body appears, depthless and silhouetted before a backdrop of too-white porcelain and sterling fixtures. He fixes a knot in his tie.

"Did you say something?"

Bringing her cigaretted hand forwards to shield away the hard light, she squints like a child looking into the sun and searches for the eyes in his dark, featureless face. The frail smell of aftershave and the thick of dime cologne move with him as he trails across the floor.

"No. It was nothing. I was just talking. Would you turn out that light?" motioning with her free hand.

Ignoring her, he works his collar down while checking a wrist watch, with the swiftness and precision of a man accustomed to late entries and early exits. He pauses for a moment before the running window, hands on his hips and scrutiny on his face, regarding the morning.

"Goddamn ugly day it's turned out."

She can see his eyes now, severely brown and deeply set into the creases of his city-weathered features, which are pulled into the mask of a constant, deliberative scowl. His body, too, seemed as though submitting itself gradually to some unbending burden; age, perhaps.

"The light," she sighs impatiently.

"What's the matter now?"

"That light," indicating with a flash of her eyes the starkness of the powderroom. "Turn it off."

As he retrieves a grey four-and-four check jacket from the mahogany chair back he pauses for a moment with his arms crossed about the shoulders of the coat. Unfolding them, he twists the jacket over his sloping shoulders in a cape-like flurry of fabric, which sends his cologne wafting about, and he shuttles his arms through. The scent settles upon the bed and the girl like a pollen.

"The light? Right. And I'm sure you'd rather sit here all day in this fucking dark room just waiting for the sun to go down," he snaps very dryly, following up with a presumptuous half-smile half-sneer, bearing only his left teeth. "I have to run, the meeting's almost over."

With the aired noncommittence of which one might regard a pet, or disregard a young child, he makes his way towards the main door, smoothing his hair back as he goes.

"Stay good while I'm gone."

She waits until he reaches the door to reply.

"Wednesday morning's no good for me," she offers with mellow aloofness, splaying her legs out under the smooth cool sheet. The girl takes a deep drag. Smoke curls across her upper lip and twists through her jagged bangs.

The man turns back and, knitting his brow, looks down upon the girl.

"And why is that?"

"It's personal really," releasing a colorless swell. "I don't see that it's any of your concern."

She narrows her eyes through the smoke and watches as he reappears. For a moment nothing is said, and the sudden silence is filled with the light drumming of rain against the window and the small, mechanical whir of the powderroom fan.

Presently the man loosens his bushy black eyebrows, arching them to meet the unconcerned wrinkles building across his forehead.

"If you think so," he needles, opening the door. "You know, I really wish you wouldn't smoke. It sours you, and your mouth."

The door bangs shut behind him, its resonance dying quickly amidst the quiet of the room. The girl inhales again to feel the rise and fall of her chest, and for a time she searches unsuccessfully to measure the cadence of her heart. She sits this way until the cigarette in her hand trails down to the filter, and the long column of ash falls snow-like under its own weight across her lap, leaving a mark on the tawny cottons sheets not unlike the color of the chalky morning sky. Very soon she brushes the ash away into a smudge, places the cigarette butt upon her bedside table, and rises naked towards the mahogany chair. There she finds upon the satiny cushion a fold of bills, bathed in silver light and aftershave. She does not count them. Without mind, she moves silently towards the powderroom door, relinquishes the electric light, and returns to her chair before the window. She does not sit down. Instead, the girl stands with her hands pressed against the cold glass, hoping to feel the rhythm of the cloudbursts, and she searches the streets below until her breath turns to fog, and her eyes are the color of rain.

Consider a bird refusing to fly.

------ awoke from the shiftless trappings of a red and dreamless sleep on the back stoop of an apartment building with no recollection of his ever having been there before. He was greeted by the tinkling sounds of rainfall, collecting in asphalt sinkholes and playing in staccato rhythms off the tin lid of a garbage container nearby. As he lay with his shoulders slumped against the coarse ruddy brick, his lower half unprotected by the eave of the building, ------ found with some dismay that his shoes were sopping and his blue jeans were already dyed black. Drawing his legs in towards his chest, ------ sat up and began rubbing their tight goose-skinned flesh through the rust in his arms and the thickness in his cold fingers. Above him hung the cast iron skeleton of a fire escape: slatted platforms and ladders glossed with weather that, despite their intangible number of crisscrossing patterns and pathways, progressed a singular trail of water to the very place where ------'s head now rested. Shuffling his seat, ------ brushed off the water and squinted upwards.

The buildings around him rose nearly a dozen stories, affording from his vantage point in the alley only a thin swath of slate-colored sky. Its thick drooping clouds echoed in his mind with the low-hung canopy of some great four-poster bed in which he believed himself to have once slept, but that he could no longer place. In regarding the dull light coming through this grey weave, ------ marked the time of day somewhere between dawn and dusk, as when in the presence of a rain hours dissolve and wash away like clumps of sand.

While looking high upon the wall of the building across from where he sat, whose brick had been stained dark with phantom drapes where a gutter failed to hold back its carriage, ------ became aware of yet another sound mingling with the cascading rhythms of the rain. It was a sound that he knew by the same effortless recognition with which he could identify his own voice; he heard the papered fluttering of a bird's wing. Leaning his head out towards the sheeting barrier of the open alley, so close as to feel a steady mist, ------ peered around the faded luster of a percussive garbage container to where the trough of his backstreet became conjunct with a lazy avenue. There he saw, no more than twenty feet away, though safely recessed from the scrutinies of the main road, a grounded pigeon with wing raised and a child with eyes trained upon the pigeon.

The bird, with one wing outstretched, shook dew from its appendage and, trembling its small mass, agitated its many purple-oil feathers until they billowed to a double girth. The pigeon then folded the wing into its downy exterior and was still. The child, a boy of the age cresting upon adolescence, knelt a mere arm's length from where the bird stood and was equally as still while he studied the pigeon with curious, unflinching eyes. He was dressed mainly by the waxy blue cape of a rain slicker that crumpled its baggy length into dark folds around his body. Underneath this, ------ could see that the boy was wearing white pleated trousers and a pair of scuffed brown penny-loafers, minus the pennies. Considering this, and the appearance of a faded part yet maintaining itself in the child's soaking blonde hair, ------ wondered if it was not in fact Sunday.

Moved by a sort of awe and puzzlement at the boy, the bird, and their close communion, as well as his feeling of broken privacy, ------ thought it better to make his presence known than to conversely have his presence discovered.

"What've you got there, boy?"

The child did not move.

"Hello over there," he tried again. The boy raised his thin, tightly drawn face long enough to acknowledge ------'s location on the stoop, and then just as quickly lowered his attention once more to the pigeon.

"I said, what do you have over there?"

"Just some bird," the boy replied after pause, addressing not ------ but instead talking down his chest towards the ground. His hollow-set eyes maintained a cool, scientific watch over the pigeon, whose sleek head turned occasionally. "I came along and saw him sitting here."

"Well I can see that," ------ nodded. "But what do you want to stand in the rain staring at a pigeon for?"

"I don't know," consideration marking the child's voice. The pigeon raised now both of its wings and seized their delicate length in the liquid air. "I saw him and wanted to chase him off, but he wouldn't go. He walked a little ways and just stopped. And every now and then he does that."

When the boy finished, he reached a hand out to touch the dragging tailfeathers of the bird, which wicked moisture from a tiny reservoir in the asphalt. When his fingertips acquired their aim, the pigeon's tremorous wings batted at the impetus and the bird began to stagger away. The boy withdrew his hand. While the bird moved, its head danced left and right and its red eyes wildly searched the degrees of the alley, seeking out their tormentor or their path of escape. The pigeon skittered in short leftward inching sidesteps, pivoting around its back end, until by attempting to move away the bird had returned through a full revolution to the position where it had begun. The boy looked on intently and frustrated as the pigeon turned around once more.

"See," the boy said, looking accusatively at ------. "It doesn't go anywhere."

"Oh," was all that ------ could think to say.

Presently, upon completing the greater part of a third revolution, the pigeon's failed deliverance came to a pause. Therein the bird proceeded once more through the motions of shaking out and fluffing up its fallen plumage. After this was finished the bird then stooped and curled its head into the downy cove under its left wing. ------ watched this, and he watched the child watching this. The bird watched neither of them.

As ------ considered whether to chasten the boy for his mistreatment of the pigeon or to simply lend this behavior to the passive involvement of a child's curiosity, a man appeared at the opening of the alley. Cloaked in the distance by rain and the black awning of an albatrossian umbrella, the man's long profile opened up as he paused and turned in ------'s direction, his dark form framed against the bright colorless wash of the open avenue. Through the masked shade of the umbrella, ------ was able to catch a dingy reflection of the man's face as it seemed to unfold with a blend of frustration and relief. He stood patiently at the opening and waited for the boy to notice his presence. When the child did not, he cleared his throat. Noticing then ------'s occupancy of the stoop, the man passed upon him a look of stern indifference, at which ------ recessed against the brick of the building, hugging his arms to his chest.

"Come along Simon," he stiffly commanded.

"In a minute," the boy whined, keeping his small eyes on the pigeon.

"Now," the man asserted in a rather flattening tone.

At this the boy let out a faint groan. As he rose to his feet, the child shook loose his matted blonde hair and a pointed spray of water was released and then dissolved amidst the falling rain. The pigeon did not move. Before joining the man on the sidewalk the boy made a short search of the alley, eventually settling his hands upon the damp grey heft of a cinderblock. His forceless body strained under his blue coat as he manipulated the block and shuffled towards the place in the alley where the pigeon rested. Attributing to the weight all the height that he could muster, the child candidly held the cinderblock above the silent pigeon, and for a brief moment he stood poised as one presenting a collection plate at the altar. Then at once he relinquished the mass to gravity. The shadow of the cinderblock briefly encompassed the small bird before rejoining its architect, as the distance between the block and the asphalt zeroed, and the pigeon was cobbled into the ground with a dull thud.

The child then turned towards ------.

"That bird wasn't going to fly," he stated with eyes of absolution.

Then the dark man and the child were gone.

. . . slolely and flowing. The bengender, she plies and pours and poles the walksiding, sliding unto one two tree and fifty meters. Lays capit cis, blooding and bludging. No audimony in replis or division or lectorums gone come or came but went, whooring off imbibed and driving diving strivations of. Con. The pubs down for dawn, pups done for Dante, and morticules full o fur confused bludgening bender renders Dante in the dawn. Yells and ports, screechingly offofoff the road and contemporaniations blind up slugish consciens or bind around morseless taughthoughts, retracting out in ought oneself or in nondescript egress. Automotion peels and reels and steels and the fends til the brutest layman peaks palecrat and the old familialar claphumclaphumclaphumhsss. End or the empty necraway with sun gone, stands ejected in the disperring window margin. Wayaway. Moving drags trace spot tops and bottoms smot a fur and bludging and dentationing increment over the fender. Long along and a long when he ports and passes porter and the commodius gastrocracy pungesex and places head under wing over mind over dripbowl ruminations. Dripslip and dropsendrip. Decomporreness a pang twinges hyperolial, rolls up, runs in, rowdening out, and sends senses or sinkings and a tongue glossing til angled angeled murk comes. Crosses the Is and the mes and the thees with the theys and the trees, where he passes into dreams. Macronics shakes many mindings in the Melahanepolis, shrunking or small or falling and dissolving. Fallssolving. And drifts discharging rifts arc and growing and build on black to give way or draw back. Al di fuori and dawn cracks on unpremedicipitations in hyaloid line a highway. Him down down down, bumstumbling rightleftright . Stop. Foot. rightrightleft or leftleftleft. Felt feebling go opening and sedening and torsioned with negscopitable thinkenings to going. For dry fur lips licks whettedly, steps on pulls out slugishly, and going and pulling out or peeling and feeling no sun sound swounds. Knowing lessonless not a messages til bends round and round and alooking down. And aloofing. Thumpbump. High saltsatising goes wheel sends fleel goes flailing with a yelp. Thumpbump. Thumpbump. Magneyes shake to wake beholdence at them or they, nod alevving not awalking node athunking, just sailednees and a rolling sees the woman up and a head. Catacollisioning is she nonsachant mirrorsing with unleashed and brimless flooding comeing out and . . .

She comes into the green room at one in the afternoon balancing a tray in her left hand stacked with two china saucers and two china teacups and one small blue china teapot and she sets the tray down in the middle of the room before drawing the shade.

"Why do that?" the blonde-haired child asks as he pokes around the soil of a large, low-hanging rhododendron pot with a branch he has broken from the same dwarf tree. "The sun is so very white and long."

"Because, Simon, this room is green," she says as she pours out the steaming tea. "These plants would brown and wilt if I left them out in the sunlight for too long a time."

"No, that's not right."

"Actually," she sips carefully, "The sun can hurt these plants as much as it helps them."

"But then how did these plants live before you came along to draw down the shade for them?"

"Well."

"They had to be outside."

"Well, they're from another part of the world. A part where the sun doesn't shine so very white and long."

"Oh," the child says and he snaps the twig between his pale hands. "May I have some tea?"

"Sugar?"

"Five spoons."

She sifts out five spoons.

"That's too much for a boy your age."

"No. It isn't," Simon says as he drags the old mauve armchair around to face the shaded window. Its varnished wooden feet moan against the varnished wooden floor.

"You know, when I was young, we weren't allowed more than two," handing him his saucer. "Usually we took one or none. That's how our parents drank it. Strong black tea is more rich and better for the body."

"It's not the body that concerns me."

"Well, it stimulates the mind as well."

Simon looks down through the slant blinds on the window and out into the yard across the street where the grass is clipped and brown and the trees are tall and brown and the house is grey and still.

"It's not right of you to keep these plants in here," he says. "They're shrinking at the roots and they'll never grow up."

"But they'd die if I didn't."

"So what," he says and pauses to consider.

"It's better to live and die tall and brown than to hide and be small and green."

Mrs. Basu thinks about this for a time and sips her tea and Simon looks away through the window. The tilted shadows from the blinds and the sun spill in across the green walls and across the middle of the room where they settle upon her bare forearms and lap. The white light lingers long over her skin and it feels very sharp. Mrs. Basu tries to rub the heat away but stops and quietly decides then that Simon is absolutely right, but that she would never tell him this. Her plants are healthy, perfectly healthy.

The old man sits in an obdurate leather armchair. His skin is grey, his beard is grey, the hair atop his unblemished head is white. Feverishly, he writes through the pages of a book, crossing and correcting until the nib of his pen becomes vulgar and dull, ephemerally satisfied. High behind him, an inaccessible casement window casts its attenuated glare upon his desktop, and soon lamplight replaces dusk. Somewhere in the steep hours of the night, the old man trains his limpid eyes on a passage in the text: and there came, during that irascible misadventure, no cause for recoil. He produces a fresh nib from the drawer and impresses the same line, retracing it over and again in varied and impassioned script, until nothing of meaning or consequence can be lifted from the ink. Somewhere in the small hours of the morning, the old man slips briefly into a dark and troubled sleep, only to awaken with the lingering twilight; the pen, already in his hand.

The book in which he writes has no formal name. That is to say, the text is not conscribed by any one title or term. Some have called the book Longing, others have known it as L' appetito, still others, Forbearance. The old man believes in part to have once referred to the text fondly as Home, and later more bitterly as Aerugo; though, he cannot be certain of either, because many conceivable, cureless names preceded their delivery, and many more persisted, and still persist, after their realization. He can only be certain that the text has had a name, and that by some brevitous discovery it will have one again. There are X pages in the book. The number of pages keeps with the number of years in the old man's mind, of which he has never taken count. Were he to tally them all, the summation of his efforts would be a number irreducible by division, both continuous and naught, for each page turns into the next, and when one page rescinds yet another page unfolds, and with it the records of him continue. Paradoxically, he is both conscious of and eluded by the unenduring devices at work in the book. He has charmed them into being. He has forgotten their spell. By his hand alone, the letters and lines have been lifted from the soil, carved and regarded with devout ambition, then buried once more beneath fathoms of similarly designed passages. Like fragments from a heatless fire, the lines of the text have been fortuitously recovered and recommitted by the old man, his attention never failing to impress upon them something foreign of the present. Thus at any moment even the smallest word may bear no semblance to its antecedent self. At one time, the old man believed there to be a linearity to the progression of the book, but as the text has been transcribed and rewritten, lapsed and remembered, performed, its meaning and direction have changed, its point of revolution, reversed. The aggregate of the pages is now a dim and porous cage of the old man's construction, for which there is no sliding latch to open, nor an interstice wide enough to permit his reentry or even his rediscovery of what has been bound up inside.

Through diligence, the old man has come to witness a great many realities live and die within the pages of the book. With his pen, he has been the rector of silent victories and sentient awakenings. He has stood amid the ribbed vaults of a rayonnant cathedral, hung upside down over green waters from the branches of a kapok tree. He has swept dust from checkered floors and felt the breeze of winter breath suddenly in July. He has heard singing in the night, reached out and held only the darkness. He has fallen infinitely through the vestibules of time and space, dragging his heels in the air and whistling. He has smelled weeds and the deracinated roots of hyacinths, dined in the company of strangers. On his back, he has conquered the highest plateaus of the sky, sustained himself on rainwater, and known himself to be a god. He has applied himself to the study of the natural sciences and realized the impetus of creation. He has fired a rifle into the air and pulled the defeated slug from a hole in the ground. He has known the tenor of the long arc of friendship and the brief perfidious arc of passion. He has swallowed loss, gazed upon ruined frescoed walls, and known the infinitesimal consequence of his misfortune, the value of his suffering. He has consumed corners of the world to which he has never been, climbed apogeal heights he has never seen, and held fast to a myriad of memories and self-truths that have never existed. The old man has known all of these things. He has known them to be the fantastic shadows of his irrecoverable past. They are the vestiges of his life, the rust of copper, and he has directed each one of them into being.

The realities of the book, like those of the old man, are axiomatic; their practice, based in a universal truth. Namely that the myth and the word are indivisible. The old man's history has given rise to the book, and in turn the book has initiated his history. It is by this truth that he has been able to permit the evolution of the text, and with it the dissemination of his past. Over time, the innumerable symbols of his memory have transubstantiated below the stoke of his pen. They have suffered the muted crimes of his mind. They have been corroded. Through his reimaginings, the old man has come to lose the features of an unalloyed past. People and places, moments, have spread out across the enclaves of the book. They have lost touch with each other and evolved in seclusion. Every attempt he has made to recapture some recess of the text has served only to corrupt it further. Unwittingly, he has altered the material and spiritual realities of his life beyond repair. Nothing remains that is real. He has suffered an infinite loss.

However, the old man has not been unaware of this fact. In small breaths he has come to know something of his great failing. He has come to witness the realities of the corporeal world and the realities of the text as stark and incongruous. He has come to forget the walls of his room and the names of the birds in his window. He has lost sight of the moon, the ever-present smell of juniper, the cool sensation of his knees against the plain of his desk. He has become ignorant of the grey dust growing thick around the base of his lamp. He has forgotten the anatomy and function of his own tongue, the expulsion of breath from his deflated chest. He has become alien to the dull, rolling pains of hunger. He cannot remember the word for pen, nor the word for change or time. He cannot label his desire, the anger that he feels against what has been taken from him. He cannot define his privation of self. Though it is not that the old man fails to perceive these things. Quite the opposite. In the pit of his being, he is able to sense the void of a life lost. He is able to roll the pen in his hand, recognize the desk at his elbows, and the walls crowded in around him, experience the movement of his heart. He knows that he is aging, but he cannot articulate this concept. He cannot pronounce these perceptions because they are no longer represented within the pages of the book. They are gone. In these times of realization and fear, the old man has scoured the text for an outline to his immediate experience, a codification of his reality. Yet all he has been able to arrive at is a cyclical network of episodic impressions, wholly dissimilar and removed from those that he believes to be real. He has come to doubt the truth of the book. He has come to question the validity of its many corrugated and fantastic realities. He has come into the habit of removing page after page of his past, crossing and countermanding that which he does not remember, that which he does not believe. He has come to lose both his true history and the history expounded upon within the text. He has come to know everything and nothing. He has come to a pristine reduction. He has come to what he believes is the first line of the book: I was born. He has come to doubt even that.

There are two rail lines that go through Brockford, only one of them doesn't go anymore. The track of the one that doesn't go is buried in the street. It only pushes up through the asphalt in places where the road was hurried and lain unevenly, but even there it has been smoothed down by cars that pass over it often, like rain water over limestone. Most people don't notice that it's there and none of them who do can name it. The other track, the one that does go, runs between the hills to the north. It only goes late at night, on its way from Albany to Pittsburgh. If you stand outside when it does, you can hear the train from anywhere in town. Sometimes you can hear it through the window. Most nights, though, no one is awake to hear, and if someone does he will soon forget it. He will forget even if he tries to remember.

Neither Charlotte nor Nick is waiting for the train to pass. Though not because they do not know that it will. Rather, one is waiting for the other to answer, while the other pretends to be asleep.

"It's funny, isn't it?"

A thick summer heat sits in the upstairs bedroom, penned in by the screen on the window.

"I mean it's nice."

Both Charlotte and Nick lay above the covers. Because the room and bed are unfamiliar, they lay fully clothed. One of them stares up into the ineffective turning of a ceiling fan while the other pretends to be asleep.

"It's nice, don't you think?"

One of them pretends to be asleep.

"Charlotte."

"Hmm?"

"Don't you think it's nice?"

"What?"

He leans into her.

"This."

She rolls over to face him but keeps her eyes closed.

"Yes," she breathes long. "I do."

"Yeah," he takes her hand. "It is nice, isn't it?"

Nick runs the tips of her fingers across his lips and watches her chest rise and fall slowly, and he listens to the low warble of conversation below.

"I mean, I don't think. Well, I don't think I've ever felt like this. I mean, I feel like I can be myself."

"Mm."

"You know?"

"Mm-hmm."

Charlotte did not know. Rather, she did not care to know and was trying desperately not to hear. There were things about Nick that she cared for, things she liked. She cared for his broad shoulders. She liked that he came from a working family and had to struggle. She liked the way he looked at her in the evening. She liked to be on his arm. She cared for the thought of him. However, she had trouble remembering these things, and after several drinks wanted nothing more than to fall asleep.

"Whenever I'm with you, I feel---well, happy. Good."

He brushes the hair away from her face.

"It's so long since it's been good."

Through the floor, the sound of breaking glass rises sharply, followed by shouting and laughter. Then footsteps drum heavily up the stairwell and rumble across the boards in the hall, and a light comes on slanting beneath the bedroom door. Nick leans up and looks around until he remembers that the door is locked. He looks around until he sees a portrait of the thorned Jesus, whose eyes are far away. He sees moonlight on the foot of the bed, and some hanging on the wall.

"You want to hear something?"

He looks down at her.

"I want to tell you something."

The light under the door flips off, and someone walks away to the living room.

"Charlotte."

He waits.

"Charlotte."

She breathes slowly, heavily.

"Charlotte, I want to tell you something."

The sound of drink and conversation returns, seeping up from another room. It worms its way across the floor, rolling beneath the heat. Once in a while someone goes loud, and then everyone goes quiet. Nick watches Charlotte for a while before lying back down. When he does, he can smell the close warmth of her hair like bottled lilac, like something not quite real. He holds his breath to see if she is holding hers. Then he stops and rolls onto his back. The ceiling fan is there again, and at some point before the sun rises he lets go of her hand. Even if he tries to, he will not remember how it feels.

It was late in the afternoon and all around him the world was turning to glass. Shadows from the forest had begun to grow long and fan out across the landscape, reclaiming, if only for a brief while, their dominance over the fields in which they once stood. The taut shafts of light that clung to the tips of the ash trees were close to collapse, and before long they would snap and fall back to the sun; already there were great clefts in the corners of the sky. Gradually, the air began to crack. Mr. Lehman allowed this to happen. The last fine rays of daylight, he believed, were nature's best tool for whetting the mind. Clarifying, he thought. Crystal, he thought. But that was all, nothing more. These were his only thoughts. Neither the black branches that swayed above him; nor the cold, climbing through his coat; nor the echoed yelping of the dog who sniffed anxiously about the base of a sycamore; nor the tang of duff and dead leaves; nor the sound of his own tired pulse, pushing languidly across his eardrums: only crystal, only clear. How empty Mr. Lehman would have felt, had he been aware of this. But for a time he was not. And so Mr. Lehman sat vacantly, meditating on nothing at all, and drifted out above the commons, where everything was crystal and clear.

However, one cannot escape the wanderings of the mind indefinitely: a knee will jerk, a voice will call out, a thought will crest the quiet surface. Mr. Lehman knew this of course, yet the return of his senses came nonetheless as disturbing and inelegant, and he found that he had been staring off into space rather dully. As he clenched his teeth and shifted his seat in an effort of self-appraisal, Mr. Lehman felt apparent. This awareness was redoubled when he noticed that the space into which he had been staring was occupied by three small children, and that these children, though now contentedly playing beside a rutted swing set, had probably seen him stare.

The idea of his leering made Mr. Lehman shift once more. If he had bothered them, he thought, they showed little sign of it.

In fact, the children showed little sign of anything. Physically, they were quite ambiguous. Freckle-cheeked, with bright shocks of coarse-cut red hair. Only after much consideration did Mr. Lehman place them as girls, though their overalls were faded around the knee and their tartan-fringed jackets mudded along the sleeve. From where this deterioration came he did not know, for their play, if it could be called that, was of complete imagination. Since he had been watching them, the girls had scarcely moved. They sat on the grass in a lazy semicircle, their lower halves splayed haphazardly as if each one of them had been dropped suddenly to the ground. In an occasional and hushed manner, they exchanged looks and low voices. What was said, Mr. Lehman imagined to keep with boys and cakes and rings, but even these things could not hold their attention very long, and abruptly the girls would descend into silence. Only the rise and fall of the breeze, which carried airward the fine tendrils of their hair, gave the continued impression of subsistence to the three children. It appeared to Mr. Lehman as though they belonged to noone.

But this could not be, he thought, such peaceable youth. They were too unconfined. Serene, he thought. Surreal. It made Mr. Lehman feel heavy, knowing that at any moment the children might suddenly become active and shake away their calm, and that when this happened he would remain pacified, and his own stillness would sit untouched. That for some reason beyond his control they could be moved but he could not.

These were cold realizations. So cold indeed that when Mr. Lehman pulled them back into himself they made distant the inner workings of his chest. His blood slowed, his lungs became short. As he worked these thoughts down, wore them to slim shavings of ice, he saw that one of the children was now completely aware of him. The smallest of the three girls. She lifted her face to Mr. Lehman and fanned a quiet smile in his direction. Her eyes were thin and calm, he thought, and at such a distance as to seem familiar. Something about the child put Mr. Lehman at ease. The two other girls craned their long necks to follow the gaze of the smaller one. These faces, unlike the first, were white and inexpressive. Empty. Though, there was nothing of calculation to their blankness, nothing of indignity. Rather, they looked on Mr. Lehman frankly, as though their minds had no preformed response for dealing with strange men in parks. It was with this same frankness then that the two girls turned from him, gathered up their knapsacks, and walked away to the sidewalk that abutted the commons. Only the smaller girl remained seated on the ground, smiling and squinting in the late-afternoon sun, her eyes thin and familiar.

Mr. Lehman watched the two hollow-faced girls as they went, twittering mouth to ear like a pair of wrens. When they reached the walk, the girls began leaping around on the concrete. Great off-balance leaps that jarred their bodies and ruffled their red heads. From his bench, Mr. Lehman could not tell from what and to where they jumped, only that they put great measure and calculation into each movement. Every so often one of the girls would squeal and then crumple to the ground, laying in mock arrest until the other squealed and repeated her motion. The two would then lie lifeless for a few moments, seemingly expired, before rising and beginning their game anew. This went on unbroken for some time, one following the next, until eventually the girls began to add vocalizations to their periods of moratorium. One would collapse and cry out, Oh my leg. Then the other would roll around saying to the first, My neck, Margie, my neck. Then the first would fall yelling, Another, oh no, Jess, I've got another. Then the second would drop, Help, oh help. And so on they played, laughing around bouts of feigned distress. The game made Mr. Lehman uncomfortable, to see children draw amusement from such behavior.

Very soon, the two girls abandoned physical ailments entirely, favoring instead the name Adeline.

Adeline! one yelled from the cement. Adeline!

Adeline! the other joined in, huffing on the ground.

Adeline! together now, at once both frenzied and nonchalant, as though they did not call to be answered, but rather to hear their own shrill voices.

Adeline! Adeline!

They were staring over in Mr. Lehman's direction, their calls piercing through the chilled air, rankling his calm. Adeline, he thought. Adeline. He turned in time to see the smaller girl shunt her smile toward the ground, her thin eyes growing in depth as they searched for nothing, anything in front of where she sat. She began digging self-consciously through the dry grass.

Excuse me, Mr. Lehman said.

The girl pulled a tuft of yellow from the ground.

But I think your friends are calling you.

Those are my sisters, she piled the dead grass between her legs, They aren't my friends.

How do you mean that?

Adeline!

I mean they're mean. They're not my friends, she said, sprinkling some yellow across her lap.

You shouldn't say that about family, Mr. Lehman said, though he could not remember if this was true. He tried to imagine himself as a younger brother, as a lapidated and stifled youth. And while he could not level the circumstance in his mind, the feeling of resignation struck him as familiar.

Adeline! Adeline!

The girl began fluffing her pile of dead grass, teasing out the strands of yellow.

What are they yelling about? Mr Lehman asked.

They're playing Step on a Crack.

Oh.

Yeah, she said, shaping the grass into an unruly bowl, If you step on one you die or break your bones or anything. They play it every time it's time to go home, on the way.

Adeline!

She's talking to that man.

Adeline!

Sounds like they want you to go play with them, he said.

Yeah. I know.

She tugged up a few quick handfuls of duff and weighed them casually before tossing them into the careful breeze, filling the air around her with twirling yellow. Then she stood up and brushed free the sheaths that clung to her overalls.

Adeline!

Adeline!

I have to go, she smiled again and lifted up her knapsack.

Be careful where you walk, Mr. Lehman said.

It's not real, she replied as she started off across the commons. It's just a game.

Oh yes, it isn't, Mr. Lehman said without much thought.

He watched the girl go. She walked with an airy confidence, a self-assuredness that needed no dignification other than to be itself. When she arrived upon the sidewalk her airy quality seemed only to strengthen, and she passed across the cement without ever looking down. She waded past her sisters where they lay upon the ground calling, Adeline! Adeline! and nipping at her ankles as she went. She stepped around them, stepped through them, and continued down the walk. Her two sisters rose and began leaping after her, but soon one fell to the ground squealing, and then the next. Mr. Lehman wondered if she might not ever look down and see the cracks she trampled so willfully. They were there, he thought. Certainly they were there. Before long she gained the road at the mouth of the park, turned north and was gone with the distance, her small body eclipsed by a row of ash.

Adeline! one of the girls yelled. Adeline!

Mr. Lehman rubbed the warmth back into his legs and walked over to the sidewalk. As he passed the two girls, where they lay calling Adeline! Adeline! Mr. Lehman stepped lightly and wondered what she had meant by that: It's not real. He avoided the sidewalk all together: It's just a game. Dusk was beginning to drown the last light of day, but the little that remained was more than enough for his eyes. Without stooping, Mr. Lehman could see that the cement was indeed crumbling, cracked apart over the years by so many unyielding blades of grass.

One day on the broad white sands of the western Mexican coast there is a man. He is stoop-shouldered but sturdy, and perched buzzard-like on the overturned hull of a dugout canoe. His face is limed from the steady beating of the salt air and the thundering of the waves that have pulsed always in his thoughts and on the horizon of his dreams. Mostly he is still. But his leather hands move regularly and all of his eyes are on them as they repair the broken meshing of a cast net, which has been without fish for one day and already one day too long. He is the man from Teacapan.

Now a second man approaches from the mangrove forest up shore. He is the traveler. Carrying a tin box with one hand and a fishing pole in the other, he comes out of the shadow-leaf canopy and onto the sand. The box he carries swings like a dull hunk of lead at his side. His pole pierces the milk-glass sky like a stalk of goldenrod and sends the sunlight sprinting across its length with each jostling step. The man walks with a heaviness that defies his lean frame, as though his shoes are full of mud and his legs logged with saltwater. Though even such a clumsy gait is absorbed by the dunes and the break, and his passage takes on the quality of a ghost or a whirlwind moving slowly across the sand. The man whistles as he comes, and in his bone-khaki clothing and red bandana he looks like something washed up from the Iberian coast. But as he draws nearer, the illusion of his cloth escapes into the air above his sunburned features, ushered off by the decidedly American melody blowing across his thin lips.

Unabashedly, the traveler walks up to the canoe, shedding the hunk of lead and leaning against his fishing pole like a winded and colorful frontiersman. All of the man from Teacapan's eyes roll over to the man in white and then slide back to the cast net like two obsidian marbles.

"Have you got any water, friend?" the traveler says, surveying the rim of sea foam.

The man from Teacapan stitches the net with his eyes.

"Good damn, it's hot. The sun's liable to bake this whole ocean to a crisp and all the fish with it," he says with his hand on his hip. "But that wouldn't be so bad. Make catching them a whole of a lot easier. Know what I mean?"

The man from Teacapan works the net.

"How about that water, friend?" he says, waving laggardly at the man on the canoe. "Hello?" he says. "Hola. Water?"

The man on the canoe looks up, then reaches into the shadow beyond the gunwale and produces a swollen brown bladder. He unscrews the neck and passes it to the man in white, who accepts it eagerly and looses a fat trail of droplets to the hot sand before settling the stale water to his lips. The spill is gone before he has a chance to notice. The man on the canoe watches the spots dry out.

"Thank you much," the traveler says, handing the water back. "Been a while since I had a drop. Good damn, it is warm," he says while stooping to open his tin box. He pulls out a bundle of bandana and unfolds the ragged cloth to a fillet of dry red meat. It flakes apart as he picks through it, and he holds the red fish out in the palm of his hand like a tiny dinner tray.

"Have a bite," he chews. "It's snapper, and damn good too."

The man from Teacapan shakes his head, all of his eyes on the net, stitching.

"Yes" he says. "Come on and have some. It's the last of it."

The man from Teacapan lets the net droop between his bowed legs. Accepting, then, the situation, he pulls off a petal of red fish and pockets it against his gum. The man in white seems to be smiling as he squints across the sun-bleached sand, first down shore, then at the man on the canoe, then out onto the water. In the shimmering distance, a pair of grassy discs buoy with the tide, their navigation unclear and arrested against the staid horizon. Closer, a pair of discs track southward. Beneath them, the deep brown length of a boat creeps like a wooden shadow. The traveler finishes the snapper and looks down shore, and the man from Teacapan studies the patching of his net with serious hands and expression. His lips purse in thought. The waves break four or three times.

"Where you from, friend? Down south?" the traveler stands and brushes his knees. "There hasn't been a single sign nor spirit since I left Escinapas about six days ago. Thought I'd fished myself over and beyond the edge of civilization."

"Si," the man from Teacapan says. "From the south. Yes."

"Far?"

"Yes."

"Figure could I make it in the day?" he says, rattling his fishing pole. "I set against something heavy a while back and snapped my line."

"By night, I think," the man on the canoe says. "But then you do not want to go. Dark."

"No," he says. "I guess not."

For a time nothing is said and the damp echoing of a seabird dips like mercury out of the trees and dies fast against the pillows of quiet sand. Somewhere in the canopy, invisible wings whip up a torrent of leaves. The traveler sucks his cheeks. Then nothing.

"That's a serious piece of meshing you've got there, friend. I don't imagine you would have an extra length or two of line, would you?" searching his pockets. "Not for nothing of course. I'd pay you for it," he says, and he produces a gold clip of bills. Fanning it out, he pulls two green notes and then pockets the rest. "This ought to be more than generous."

The man on the canoe stares dully at the man in white.

"No," he says, waving a slow hand. "No money."

He reaches around in the shadow and pulls out a loosely raveled weed of clear line.

"Here," he motions. "Here. No money."

"Are you sure?" the traveler says. "It's nothing really."

"No. Is okay." He spools off a length and cuts it free. "Is okay. No money."

"Thank you much, friend."

"Si."

The traveler threads the line through the eyes of his rod and winds the reel. The pickup ticks and spins slowly like the neck of a wobbling steel top, and he watches the thread feed. Out on the water, a staggered school of dark bodies roll up in the spun-glass curl of a wave and then vanish below the mounting crest. Closer in the wave leans and crashes white. Then again, the shifting, shapeless dark appears in the depths, twirling for a moment just below the surface, then diving like a child beneath the swell of the tide. Again the wave breaks, and the traveler catches his line just before it slips through the last eye. With a quick knot, he affixes a pounded-tin minnow at the end of the rod. The lure dangles for a moment and twists in the breeze like the ball of a wind-chime, the sunlight throwing off of it in tiny racing arcs.

"There," the man in white says with a tired satisfaction. "Better."

Beneath the break, the dark swells up and sinks back. The traveler looks in time to see the green-black shapes go under.

"Good damn," he says, as the man from Teacapan spreads his net out on the ground. "Did you see those fish?"

The man on the ground squints up at the traveler and the sun, then out at the ocean. The dark rises and falls.

"Dead Man's Fingers," the man from Teacapan says.

"What?"

"Sea grass," wiping a backhand across his brow. "Is called Dead Man's Fingers."

He sits up.

"In the storm, the tall waves, these boats take on water," he says, tapping on the hull of his canoe. "Not so good. Just solid, you know. Can pull down pretty fast beneath the wave. Drift too. Sometimes the boats, they no come back up," he buoys his hand. "Here is bad, you know. Out there. Very bad."

"By those boats?"

"Closer," he points. "Reefs come up beneath, you know. Is good for fish but bad for fishermen."

"Right," the traveler says, watching the dark of the waves.

"Si."

The man in white rubs his neck.

"But couldn't you," he pauses, "I mean, if you wanted to, couldn't you just fish this side of the reef? Avoid the thing all together?"

"No." The man from Teacapan gathers up his net. "No. Is bad water."

The traveler watches the green-black fingers roll up and suck down.

"But don't fish live in the---"

"No," he says. The man on the beach rises. "No fish here. Bad water, you know?" pointing. He rights his canoe. "Very bad water."

The man with the net then leans heavy and starts working his boat toward the edge of the receding tide. With protracted movements he inches across the broad shore. His feet kick and slip on the loose white sand, and he hunches indifferently to his knees, stopping to catch up his lungs. He labors for a moment, though mostly he is still. Then with his head always up and his face toward the glaring horizon, he rises again and forces himself against the back of the intractable wooden canoe, whose hull sits foundered across the spine of a sandbar. The traveler watches. The dark rises and falls.

"Let me help you there," the traveler says, as he lets his pole drop.

He comes up alongside the man from Teacapan. Together they push and huff until the air above them evaporates the sweat from their backs, and the bow of the canoe begins to split the crawling surf. Soon the wide wooden hull forgets its weight and comes to buoy and drift with the back-and-forth water like perpetuous flotsam. The traveler straightens up. The man from Teacapan reaches into the belly of the canoe and lifts out a stocky paddle. As he does, he upsets the neck of his water pouch. The bladder empties along the bottom of the parched hull. For a moment, a glint of concern rolls up across his deep eyes, but it sinks back as readily as the pool of lost water settles into the wood. He breathes long and slow.

"Doesn't that beat all?" the traveler says.

The man with the net crawls up into the boat. Lowering a wilted straw hat over his brow, he calms the rolling of the canoe and sets his paddle to the tide.

"Let me give you a push, friend," the traveler says, wading up to the gunwale.

With his hands on the lip, the traveler glances into the front of the canoe, where beneath the seat lays a clump of seaweed interwoven with gray shore vines and various pale pink cream-colored shells.

"What's that?"

The man in the canoe shoves off.

"My son's," he says over the dying of a wave. "It meant he was to be the greatest fisherman his age in all of Teacapan."

"Oh," says the man in white.

The man in the canoe paddles out slowly beyond the break.

"So does he have his own boat now?"

The waves crash. The man on the water continues out, moving in a staggered determinate line toward the pair of grassy discs that sit arrested against the milk-glass horizon. He pushes gently into the rolling swells and diving troughs, which pull him this way and that on the surface, the rocks and the reef below. After a while, the sunlight radiating off the water swallows the man from Teacapan entirely with the distance, and the man on the shore can only squint and see the clear spotted refraction of his own eyes, the occasional tawny speck along the bottom of the southern sky. And then the traveller is alone, the water not so cold, not so warm, and licking at his thighs. The dark is there, and it rises and falls.

Before wading back, he stands in the surf and watches the blue-black-green shapes buoy up beneath the surface of the spun-glass ocean. In the perfect halcyon water, they rise weightless like dead men's fingers, slowly grasping for the air that never comes. Then they sink back. Back and away from the world of men, forever down and back. Silent, like a small child beneath the undertow.

The waves lean and crash white.

Mostly he is still.

Let me tell you about, um, and he stops, elbow on the edge of the bar, hand raised as if he is about to punctuate some necessary thought.

Let me tell you about nothing, I think.

I'm looking at him like I could care less about what he has to say, and he's looking at me like I should care more, and then I stop looking at him and probably he shrugs it off. Rather I'm looking past him at the small blue stage in the corner where thin grey smoke curls from thin white cigarettes and thin white mouths, waiting for the next number to go. Nicole is discussing something with the pianist and settling into her high black dress that looks plum beneath the lights, and the pianist trills slowly on a note, and then Nicole smiles at him. Her teeth are blue. I don't know why but the smile seems perverted by the smoke and the lights and the length of it, or maybe it's something else. The note is E or Fb. The song is Whatever Lola Wants. I order another gimlet, and before it sits down on my tongue Nicole is putting on hard and sauntering across the tiny stage with the microphone cord wrapped around her forearm like some hungry rubber serpent. She looks out at me and she looks good. The man who had been talking to me seems to thinks so as well because he more or less has stopped trying.

Let me tell you about actresses.

I am hopelessly attracted to women of the stage, and it's a vanity resting entirely on their looks. I've tried to dig deeper but there's simply nothing else there. Even on the shallowest of probing and the briefest of conversations, I find them to be the most insubstantial sort of people. Everything exists for them on the veneered surface of their bodies, their mirror eyes and flashbulb smiles. Every time one of them speaks I am amazed as to the seat of her light voice because she clearly has no lungs, nor a stomach, nor a brain, nor anything of the sort; nothing beyond what can be seen or touched. That's not a problem though, one, because I'm not interested in much else and, two, because all of those other things can be faked. All of them can be faked well.

Nicole is an actress but tonight she is a singer, which is the other thing that she does. You can't fake singing because it comes from somewhere else, only I don't think anyone has ever told her that, or if they did she wasn't paying attention.

She's an actress, you know, I say to the man at the bar.

That right? he says, but more to himself than to me.

I know he's thinking about fucking her. He's thinking about tearing down the front of that black dress that looks plum. I don't blame him. But how he's looking at her now makes my mouth feel sharp, quietly drooling over her in that way of dogs and vagrants in the window of a deli. It's sad, truly sad.

Pathetic.

I lean back against the bar and watch Nicole finish the song without really listening, and it's just like watching a beautiful blue film with the sound turned all the way off.

-----

Texas, eh? I lean in. You know what they say about Texans don't you?

One of the girls looks at me smiling vacantly with a lot of gums and the other girl whispers something to her mother who, like her two daughters, wears the polish of an ex-beauty queen.

Everything's bigger in Texas! says the one with the most mascara, who obviously misheard me.

See no good, hear no good, speak no good, do no good, I say and then laugh.

The house music is up and they all three smile at me politely. I sit back in my chair, matching their smiles with one of my own, and finger the lip of my drink.

Where about in Texas?

Dallas, says the other girl with a lot of gums whose eyes catch the blue light like an empty glass.

Beautiful place, I say.

You've been?

Oh yeah, I nod, even though I've never traveled further south than the Ohio River. Extended family in the suburbs down there, north of the city.

Denton? one of them says.

Carrollton?

No.

No.

Plano?

What an awful place to know so much about.

That's the one, I say.

Beautiful.

I'm sitting toward the back of the room now, away from the stage because Nicole is between sets and she's working the crowd at the bar for drinks and I don't want her to see me. It's better that she doesn't, not tonight; she has enough faces to deal with, enough shoulders to touch. She's very popular.

Chicago's a long way from Texas.

We're here to celebrate! says the one with the most mascara as she throws her arms up in the air like a cheerleader. When she brings them down on the table all the glasses shake. The candle's flame dances too and pulls shadows from their noses and makeup. Her mother looks at me and it seems like there is something desperate swimming beneath the alcohol that's draped over her eyes, or maybe she just needs a cigarette.

It's my birthday, she says with her hands folded properly, and Jessi here just graduated from Texas Tech.

Woo! hoots the one with the most mascara in that half-committed, artificial way of a party favor, so put on.

So familiar.

Well, I begin, and I watch Nicole walk around to the far end of the bar where her dress turns black in the shadows. The man with nothing to say is leering at her again and my mouth starts to feel sharp like I could cut bone or bend steel. He's a bastard, with his thick drunkard's face and his flushed ears and his stumpy little legs and his overcoat like some shrewd out-of-work mathematician: a real son of a bitch. Nicole is close enough to him that she doesn't notice when he reaches into his pocket. The pianist is between them anyways, the sleeve of his finely pressed shirt resting across the small of her back. He really shouldn't do that; it's bad for business.

Well? The other girl with a lot of gums stares at me, pushing dark hair back from her too-tan face. Well what?

Well, makeup doesn't sit well on a too-tan face, I don't know. That son of a bitch is going to make a mess of things if he keeps it up.

Well, I quickly put my hands back on the table. You can't celebrate without the right drink. Or the right amount of drink, I should say.

I shake the ice in my glass.

And if this is a celebration you'll have to let me buy the next round.

You mean the next two! the girl with the most mascara says too loudly as she leans over and puts her hand on my arm. I try not to be repulsed by the way her eyes have lost focus, how they wander after nothing; it's only polite.

Sure, I laugh but not really, because you're the graduate.

I am graduate, she says, knocking her knuckles on the table at each word, and her sister smiles vacantly and her mother tries to look as proud and young as her two daughters.

I don't know when it happened, but the little man with the red face and ordinary jacket is gone from his stool. Nicole and the pianist are gone too, back up around the stage, and as I walk along the back wall and gather myself up at the bar I can't help but notice that she's smiling at him again. The way she smiles, long and naked, her teeth blue, I know that she's sleeping with him, that they've been sleeping together probably for a long time. Nicole's looking at him with something hazy in her eyes that maybe he'll mistake for love, and maybe she's hoping he will. Still, she's not here for him tonight. She's not here at all. As I wait at the bar, I wonder if she knows that her teeth are blue. Then I wonder about the nature of smoke, where it goes, and where that little son of a bitch with nothing to say has gone as I carry three purple drinks and a gimlet back to the table.

Nowhere and everywhere, I think.

Dinner's served, I say and pass the drinks around. The mother smiles like it was a joke.

Oh yay!

Thanks hun.

None for me, says the girl who hasn't graduated yet, I already had enough for the next week at least.

Karen! says the one who has. Get loose, honey, the man just bought you a Cosmo. Don't be such a shit!

That's fine now, girls.

I do my best to look casual while they sip down their drinks, and then Nicole starts up again and I can stop trying.

She's an actress, you know, but they've stopped listening to me.

Pretty soon it's like I'm not even there.

I'm going to the restroom, I say as I get up, and with their backs toward me and their too-tan mascaraed faces toward the blue-lit stage like moths to a dusty blue bulb, I relieve myself from the three Texans and leave my full drink sweating on the cold waxy table. On my way out I almost wave to Nicole, but I catch myself because I know it's not right. Then I walk down the piss and beer stained corridor past the bathroom and out the heavy steel door where the busboys sometimes smoke their cigarettes and where the butcher makes his deliveries in the mid-afternoon.

-----

Across the city there's a riot going on. I can't know this for sure because Chicago is a big city and it's impossible to look at the whole thing at once, but probably somewhere before Wisconsin to the north or outside some gutted factory in Gary it's happening. Some place where the earth is raw and full of mercury or where concrete four feet thick slides on day after day getting thicker. There won't be any more broken windows or stolen cars and no more people will have died or been born or been killed because of it in the morning. The traffic will still blow and the wind will still squeal and people will still stand there half-listening and won't hear it or see it, because it's happening quietly. I'm trying to find it through my windshield like anyone else would, but I can only see so far without hitting a building or a bend in the road. That should be far enough but it's not because it's never right in front of your face. Keep driving and you're bound to sneak up on it, I think. Keep driving past the black jackets and blank white faces, the high menacing doors bolted three times over, the streetlights hung below more streetlights with nothing above them but more buildings and streetlights. Keep driving.

When I pull onto the waterfront, I lean forward and look up and the sky is empty. There used to be something there, I remember something being there, and for a while I can't think what but then decide it's not important. I'm convinced that the halo of light glowing on the horizon, behind the buildings and bends in the road, is from the fires they've set. They're always setting fires, burning everything that came before them; that's how it starts. I pull over between two tall silver trucks when I'm sure that I've gotten too close and then watch the flames from the city hang quiet like a ghost at the bottom of the empty sky. When I close my eyes I can smell smoke, but probably it's only the engine or the air conditioner. I think about how big it is, and for a long time I sit there with my hands on the wheel waiting for the flames to consume me, waiting to hear glass crack and buildings crumble, but it never does and they never do. I open my eyes and stare into the mirror and adjust the collar of my overcoat and everything is still there. Traffic blows past me sometimes, tugging my car toward the road like it wants me to follow. Where do we go now? I wonder, and before long I'm driving again.

-----

She's an actress, you know.

Let me tell you about actresses.

I already knew. You told me before.

I can smell smoke.

I know all of this already.

I'm hopelessly attracted to women of the stage.

Shut up.

It's a vanity resting entirely on their looks.

Christ. Shut the fuck up.

I've tried to dig deeper.

You should have waved to her,

Deeper.

You should have flipped her off, told her you love her, he says.

You should have thrown a bottle at her head. Beaten the both of them with the microphone stand.

He's smiling with his tight red face and his soggy eyes, probably reclining with his feet up over the dash.

They would have applauded. They would have thanked you.

But there's simply nothing else there.

They would have laughed.

She's not really a person, he says.

It would have been nothing.

She's not really anything. She's like smoke.

I find them to be the most insubstantial sort of people.

All the black soot-caked nowhere fires that burn in the clubs and the office buildings and the homes and the streets, the fires that stain the earth and choke out the sky.

Even on the shallowest probing and the briefest conversations.

She's just like smoke.

Christ. I get it.

No.

I can smell smoke.

You don't.

And then I can hear it too. It's loud and it sounds like wide rough hands cupped over your ears. It whirls, spinning around you like the city flames in the empty sky, like the ghost of something you forgot was there.

Like the nose on your face.

I crack a window and let it all in.

I can smell smoke.

Everything around us is gray.

I know, he says, and the car is parked when I wake up. I can smell it too.

-----

On my way back from nowhere Nicole cuts me off only she doesn't know it, and I wonder what she's still doing out. Her head's leaned back above the seat and it looks like she's drumming slowly on the wheel and probably whistling. I can see her red, red hair, her eyes squinting against my headlights, which she doesn't seem to mind. She's driving like she's on air and everything is fluid, coasting across the center of the road and then coasting back, wavering side to side. Something like windshield wipers out of sink, side to side. You can tell about a person by the way she drives alone, the way she handles it. Nicole isn't; not really, which is how she handles most things. She banks out wide around a turn and then again, only it doesn't matter because there's nobody else on the road this time of night, morning.

I follow her for a while and wonder if she's heading home. If anyone is waiting for her when she arrives there. If she lives in one room of a quiet empty house, somewhere above the stairs, or in a studio apartment somewhere uptown. There's really only one way to be sure. I look at my tired face in the mirror and my mouth starts to feel sharp.

Turn the car around, I think. The sun is almost up. Turn the car around, and maybe I do.

There's no reason for me to still be awake, I know, but I'm driving with the air conditioner on high, pumping hot plastic air up my nose and through my lungs, and I don't want to know what will happen when all of this stops. I imagine, as I adjust the vents up toward my tight red face and roll my window shut, that it will all be cold. That everything will be very, very cold.

Walter Beverage was not long buried before the debating began again. They had only taken time enough to order up a priest, Presbyterian, brush off a suitable coat and accompanying pair of slacks from the old man's abstemious collection of two, and open up and then reseal the mudded March earth with him inside of it before lending their differing voices and opinions to the subject. And even this they had done with such farsighted haste that were it not for their own footprints stamped across the broad interminable cemetery clay, through the still-frosted shade of hemlock to the place where his unmarked headstone waited, they would not have been able to carve his epitaph against the granite even if they could reach an agreement as to what that inscription should read.

So now they were pulled in from the cold settling bite of Appalachian dusk, behind a heavy oak door the old man had long ago fashioned himself, wondering what should be done; the nephew and the niece, who were as close to children as the old man ever had, and even then were nothing more than a nephew and a niece, speaking on matters of the ultimate candidly and contrarily as others would on sport or politics. And the others, neighbors from decades past, the priest, acquaintances from the church, those who knew the old man well, what few of them there were, generally refusing to speak. Most of them, unable to shake the peculiar feeling of being guests uninvited by any will of the host himself, sat before the flued-up fireplace as though waiting for a bus and listened to the nephew and the niece and the wind sucking at the windows.

Time, said the niece, clucking her tongue and posturing at profundity. Something about time: the fragility of it. That would be nice. Or the war.

Nice? Liz, you weren't here when he died.

And you were?

She had her head pitched back, eyes both focused at him and not, as though despite their sharing the same relative cast, both generously proportioned and thick, and despite sharing identically carpentered chairs, she believed herself to be looking down on him in a judgment somehow unbefitting her own estranged relation to the old man.

Well, to be fair, I was a whole hell of a lot closer than you were, he said, and then excused his language with a solemn gesture to the few other people in the room. Standing then, he fiddled with the switch on a stained-glass lamp chained above them and then squinted with grim and genuine surprise as the bulb and its housing flashed suddenly on, casting an amorphous mosaic of autumnal golds and browns and reds against the wall and ceiling like a pale banded fire.

What difference does it make? he said, reclaiming his seat. The point is he was killed.

He was old.

He was killed.

He was old, Mike; old people die, the niece said, and then excused her language to the few other people in the room.

You don't know the kind of dosage he was going on at the end. I do. I've seen the bills. It's a crime the way these doctors write people off, boiling and decanting them down like the empty pills they prescribe. They give about as much afterthought to people like Walter as they do the money that affords the pills and balances their own accounts, less even.

That's horrible, Liz said, gingerly raising a hand to her cheek as though testing its warmth. What a horrible thing to say.

And why shouldn't it be?

His look was not uncold. Nor did it bare any symptom of cruelty. But rather his generally fair-going and quiet eyes were burdened in that instant with a pessimism, a world weariness punctuated upon the steely glint of his iris by the stained-glass lamplight of which the others, his sister included, had hardly ever seen, and which he himself on occasion forgot was there; a weariness that stacks up quietly and unevenly over time until slumping suddenly and without warning beneath moments such as these.

It is horrible. It's goddamned horrible, he said. But it's true.

And then he sat further back against the once-plush, now oily and aged pea-green easy chair, bringing his leg up across his knee and settling into the fabric as Walter himself might have, as though in executing that casual motion he felt he had claimed some overhand in the situation, and the room and its circumstance became to him more palatable. And Liz, with her head pitched back and a hand at her cheek once more, sitting stiffly in the easy chair where the woman who widowered her uncle had years ago ceased to rest, closed her thin eyes in what appeared to be consideration but was actually a sort of yawning, and then looked from her brother to the few others who peopled the room. Of those she could recall knowing, the priest aside, none of them appeared the slightest bit moved, and their occupation of seeing the deceased to his ultimate resolve seemed to her now a perfunctory gesture. The priest alone carried any look of acerbity, though this too was merely routine; the constant sober carriage of a man of the church. His sobriety, and the stillness of the others, brought the walls of the dead man's living room alive by contrast, and all around the quiet funeral party dull picture frames, flintlocks, and stenciled silver mirrors caught up and held fast to the soft brazen glow of the lamplight like a puddle or pond holds onto the moon; and it was with such a weight of permanence that they did, that Liz, and perhaps her brother too, could see them hanging there in exactly the same attitude twenty or thirty years past, and wondered then what else they had sown up into the earth that day with the old cancer-choked steel worker and his best and only blue suit; what else would be carried off with the now-silent mouth and blind empty body.

So, what then? she said. Here lies Walter Beverage, Cut down in his prime by the ravening hand of his doctor?

Why not? said the nephew, pulling a cigarette from his coat pocket.

Why not? I was being sarcastic, Mike. My god.

I don't see why we shouldn't, he said, and without pause to consider his statement or its impression on the room struck a light against the raw underside of the gateleg table between them.

I don't know, maybe because it's wrong, she said, as though genuinely offended. Maybe because it's wrong to defame a man just because you think, you suspect---but I won't believe it: it's simply not true.

Liz, he set his free hand out upon the tabletop and considered its place for a moment before speaking again. There's nothing more true either of us could say about the old man, about the both of them, for that matter. The one we knew like the name of a stranger carved into anyone of those other headstones, and the other we knew, I know, is a bastard and a crook. Maybe someone here thinks or knows otherwise, but it's not to them to say.

It's just too horrible. This is how he will be remembered, Mike. He was an earnest and generous man, a husband, a veteran.

There's no place for flattery in death, he said, looking crosswise at the ember he held carefully above a hardbound book resting near the center of the table. Maybe he was generous, to leave us this house. And maybe he was earnest, and stubborn, and simple, for having lived in it sick and alone for so long. But a few words either way won't help that. It won't change the fact that we didn't know him, and it won't erase the fact that he overdosed on morphine, and that that son of a bitch doctor practically handfed it to him in the end. It won't matter that he flew over Germany or Russia or wherever it was, and it won't matter that he killed or didn't kill, loved or didn't love, or anything that might fall between the two. But it will matter, it does matter that in this life and in this world now, without him, that people like that fucking doctor be exposed and uprooted, he gestured with his cigarette, his chest tightened, speaking now with a broad razored tongue, as though something he did not fully understand and had never truly owned or could have called his own was disappearing before him---not disappearing, but being taken away---and reflected in his face was the fear confusion and rage of a small child frenzied into throwing his first punch, and exposed, and made to suffer, by whatever means, in reputation or business or whatever else they find valuable, even if that means only a few scratches on a rock and one dent in the ground to prove it: it's something!

But there's no truth to it.

It's something.

You're serious, Liz said, as though in speaking it the idea might better register itself in her mind.

Why not?

He looked at her, the weariness returning for a time and quenching the steam and smoke of his determination to replace the entirety of one man's life with the single, unproven error of another's. Then he cast his attention once more to the light of his cigarette.

And so it was that they sat for the next hour or more, the niece looking at the nephew and the nephew looking at no one; the two of them, generally refusing to speak as the rest of the funeral party did, until one by one, and occasionally in pairs, the others rose, giving Walter's living room one final, cursory glance in the process, and saw themselves out into the cold, brooding darkness of night; each of them again saying how sorry he was for the loss, in a manner that they themselves could not even have believed as they spoke the condolence, and then the nephew and niece were alone once more.

So because it was not in their habits to spend unduly---even if it were, there would not have been a roof within twenty miles to accommodate them---and because she was senior and a woman, it was decided that Liz would spend the night in the dead man's bed and Mike would sleep in the living room by the heavy oak door. Though it was not that Liz championed her seniority or sex in the bedding arrangement so much as that someone would have to sleep on the hard musty couch and some other would have to sleep on the slightly less hard and musty bed, and she, like anyone acting on behalf of the tired, demanding flesh and not the mind, chose a slight degree of physical comfort over many degrees of mental unrest before her brother could prefer it otherwise. For as she soon discovered, crabbed beneath Walter's bedclothes, yellowed photographs of he and his wife, portraits with tinny eyes and cracked wooden smiles that she could not even begin to recognize staring out at her through the muted decades of the past from atop his bureau, sleep would not come quietly that night. And so she found herself lying there with the blanket scratching at her neck trying both to ignore and absorb those many inscrutable faces, and through them construct or abolish an image of her uncle in life, as there was nothing to be taken away from the image she had of him in death.

No easier was it, then, for the nephew to find sleep. Rolled up against the back of the stiff rust-colored couch in an attitude he thought might fool his body into slumber, he more than once found himself startled awake by the wind playing at the flue, droning steadily, then rising sharply, then steadily again, as though calling for a fire, though none would be made. And in those moments, where the thin curtain of rest was torn violently away, he found himself staring out the window at the unmoving and uncaring midnight sky, wondering now and again about the old man's legacy and the value of the slumping farmhouse, until, as the night wore slowly on, the question of money became such a blight on the front of his mind that he found himself overturning cushions and digging through coffee cans, searching with the methodical and indiscriminative hands of an alcoholic for whatever he might be able to drink, or in this case pocket, before forcing himself back to the couch as dawn began to pale; and with nothing to show for his worry but a few coins, some small bills, and so many years of dust, he was able to find at least an hour of sleep.

Then it was morning. And with the morning, the two found themselves walking down the unpainted road toward the church, because it was not so far, one leading and then the other, side by side only in passing, and neither of them in any kind of conversational spirit. It was only after following their own markings across the bottom of the cemetery and up through the still-frosted shade of hemlock to the place where the unmarked headstone waited, its polished face reflecting uncleanly the waxy dark trees and bronze of the rising sun, that either of them thought to speak.

It's not so bad here, said the niece. He would have liked it.

She had her head pitched back, leading with the nose, glancing from one name to the next of the adjacent grave markers, which spread without number toward the treeline and the road, as though looking for one she might recognize whose company would validate what she had just thought and felt.

What do you know about it? said the nephew, tucking his neck between his shoulders and watching his breath.

Nothing. It's just, this is where he lived; it's right that this is where he'll stay.

Well, he threw his hands into his pockets and felt then the small pieces of silver, warmed by the heat of his body like stones by a fire, and the soft soiled paper, so folded with the soot from years of sweat and determination and above all hope that it no longer resembled paper to the touch but felt more of an oiled cloth, and that cloth brittle even and on the verge of falling apart between his fingers, and all of this sitting there weighing no more than a few ounces, and none of it to him worth more than a few dollars and change, that's not why we're here. That's why we were here yesterday, but that's not why we're here now.

And why are we here then?

She looked over at him and he looked off across the cemetery, squinting as the sun spilled over and through the hemlock to where the frost still lay thick upon the ground, cast in pale frozen forms that stretched out in rows of perfectly angled teeth beneath the disappearing shade of the headstones. And so the two of them stood for a time, the nephew and the niece, on the raw patch of earth where the body of the man who had been their uncle was interred, and to whom they were as close to children as the old man ever had, and even then were nothing more than a nephew and a niece, and even that role they filled only hollowly and by no design of their own, watching the hillside thaw and the ground beneath them soften. And then, as if perhaps preparing to speak, or rather preparing himself to walk through the door of his or some other's home that he valued as much as his own, the nephew lifted his black shoes and scraped their soles against the plinth of a neighboring headstone until the clay imbedded in them came off clinging to the peppered granite.

The engraver is coming at two, he said, and then walked back down the hillside to the road.