Périple

Périple A novel by Paul Kahn

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Copyright by Paul Kahn 2011 Sections of this book originally appeared in NEW Magazine and Big Bridge.

The author wishes to offer special thanks to James Koller for his close readings and always insightful comments.

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Part I: Him and Her

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1. The Face As she came into the cafeteria, her heart sank. He was sitting at a table opposite a woman younger than herself. The woman has long straight hair and a smooth face with small pleasant features. She knew this woman, the person in charge of the computer programs, and thought she was very bright. They were speaking intently, quickly. The woman was more fluent in English than she was herself.

She could barely make out what they were saying. As she sat down at the table, she noticed that no one looked up. They did not stop talking. He doesn’t even notice me, she thought. She was no longer trying to listen to the fragments of conversation she could make out. She was only thinking about how lost she felt.

She had arranged to meet him the night before. It was a dinner with people she knew, the people who had agreed to introduce her to him. They were all staying at a small hotel that he had suggested. The people were from another city and he was from another country. The hotel was on a small street that connected the main boulevard and a narrow street that ran parallel to the river. The little street ran along the side of a church hidden by the larger buildings on the boulevard.

The street was quiet and the rooms of the hotel were tiny but brightly furnished.

She only saw the lobby that evening, but he described it to her during dinner.

Later he told her that he had stayed here once before, when he had come to the city with his daughter to see the famous monuments, museums, and churches. It was a pleasant place to stay, within walking distance of the two biggest museums. She told him that she had never seen the hotel before, though it was only one block from the apartment in which she lived with her husband and two children for more than a decade. He was pleased to meet her, he said. He was happy that she spoke English so well. She looked down when he said this. She was not proud of the way she spoke. He had been traveling for several weeks, he said, and he was tired of the silence. You know, he said to her as they were walking back towards the hotel after the dinner, when you are traveling in a country where you don’t know the language, it’s like being in a cloak of silence.

You hear sounds but they have no meaning.

She must have nodded, she thought, or made some gesture to acknowledge this thought. They walked to a place where they could find a taxi. He got in it with his friends. Now he was at the library to see the exhibition. Everyone was busy and she had many things to attend to. The exhibition would be ready the next day, in time for a visit by the President. Then the new library would open to the public. She had less than twenty-four hours to make sure everything was completed in time. She sat at the table where unfinished deserts remained on the plates. In her mind she repeated items from a list. Perhaps you would like to see the computers, someone said to him. It was his friend, the man who had introduced them. If there is time, he said as they pushed their chairs away from the table. I will see you later, he said to her. It was a question. Yes, she said, looking at him. He was smiling at her, then he was walking off with the woman and his friends.

Sometime later she found him sitting on the floor of the final gallery. This was the room where his friends’ work was being shown, and people were moving around, connecting wires and testing sound on the earphones. Two men passed, carefully holding a glass exhibit case with plungers. Did you get a chance to see the exhibition, she asked him. He looked up. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with a black computer in his lap. He had been writing something. She was afraid for a moment that she had interrupted his writing.

Yes, he said. He described how he had wandered through the galleries, looking at the books and objects, playing with the other computer screens. Workmen were

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everywhere. At one point, a curator asked him why he was in the gallery. The cases were not yet locked. He was told to leave. He walked slowly back to the last gallery, looking at the objects. He had come back to look at these computers and write a description. His friends had asked him to write a report.

I was wondering, he said. Now he was standing next to her. She looked like she was about to leave again. She seemed to be balancing on her feet, about to move in another direction. Someone spoke to her and she turned around. Another man had come up behind her, a man he had not seen before. The man asked her a question and she replied quickly. She turned back towards him and introduced him to the man. They shook hands. Hello, he said. He didn’t register the man’s name. She turned away again and continued to speak with the man. Several people continued to pull wires from one of the computers. There seemed to be a problem with the sound.

I was wondering, he said once she had stopped talking with the other man, if you are free tomorrow. I have another day before I go back. She looked at him for a moment. She tried to read his face. Have you seen the other part of the exhibition, she asked. No, he said, what is it? She explained that there was another part of the exhibition which was at the old library building. Since it was in the old building, the President would not be visiting it tomorrow and it would not be closed. It would not be open to the public until the day he was leaving, but she could meet him and she could get permission for them to see it together. She described a café near a metro stop he knew, beside a theater. She could meet him there in the afternoon. She took a piece of paper from her notebook and wrote down a description of the location. She did not know the name of the café.

Thank you, he said. He was smiling now. She looked at him. The room was dark so that the glowing monitors would be easy to see. There was a spotlight illuminating the single case that held a Thirteenth-century bible. He had been admiring the way the pages were designed, the way the different levels of text and commentary were separated by white space and the size of the handwritten text. Another overhead light and revolving mirror sent white dots of light moving along the black drapes on the ceiling and walls of the gallery. She handed him the piece of paper. He shook her hand. I’ll see you tomorrow, he said. She put her notebook back into her case. He walked to where he had left his computer on the floor. When he turned towards where she had been standing, she was gone.

He sat down on the floor again, this time with his back against the wall of video monitors. Above his head the face of a white-haired man was speaking, the image repeated on all the monitors simultaneously. He listened to the sounds of the speech, though he did not understand what the man was saying. His friend had told him that this was a famous philosopher who had written a speech for the occasion. He made a note to ask them for a translation of the speech. He began to write again on the computer, his fingers moving over the keys in the semi-darkness. He looked up, gazing back across the room, and noticed that the image of the man’s face was being reflected in the glass of all the cases in the room. A dozen images of the face nodded and smiled, floating in the air.

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2. Double Portrait They construct their relationship through two forms of communication. She uses a telephone the way a painter may use a brush. The brush is used to lay down strokes of paint on the surface of paper or canvas, each stroke becoming part of a pattern that builds an image in the visual perception of the surface, creating an image made of memory, imagination, and the particular materials she chooses to manipulate. Speaking on a telephone she creates a similar effect. Each conversation is a renewal of the one before, each discussion reaffirms the connection between the speakers. On the telephone she acknowledges, she expresses, she engages him. She receives his voice, she draws his voice into her own consciousness and the other person’s voice speaks. She does not know what he will say but she knows that these words are from him, it is his voice in her ear and these words are meant for her to hear.

The telephone is a continuous form of communication, synchronous, establishing a link between two speakers in different locations, regardless of distance. Time, the hour of the day, the conditions or absence of light, the sound of wind or motor bikes outside on the street, are specific to a place, but a telephone connects any two places in a single moment, mouth to ear, whether the eyes are open or shut, whether the speaker is standing or prone. The telephone becomes a place and the person she associates with that place. The number may vary day to day as he moves to different locations, but each number is the key to continue the conversation, synchronize a sense of renewal, to relive through the medium of a voice his physical presence.

Added to this synchronous form of communication there are new layers of asynchronous transmission. She can speak to the answering machine, as a surrogate for the other person, who is not present at the place at the time she chooses to speak. The recording of her voice is captured and replayed by the machine, contained within an envelope of time and date, perhaps containing sounds of where she is calling from as well as the words and phrases she quickly chooses to leave as evidence of her intention to speak to him. And the message is a spontaneous expression of connection, an act of faith that he will listen to it, receive her voice into his consciousness and respond in kind. The levels of indirection multiply as the answering machine becomes a place where messages are exchanged from other phones in other places, this one place becoming visible from everywhere to the person who holds the code to reveal the voice. They each have such a machine to which they hold the key. Each machine captures the unrequited voice of the single person seeking to connect to the other speaker who is not present at that moment.

He prefers to write messages, constructing sentences and paragraphs in words.

The medium is visual and asynchronous, assuming that she is not present in the same place, as with a phone call, but also that she is not aware of the message as it is composed. The act of writing is the joining of memory, imagination, the manipulation of sounds and verbal association, choosing to record and recreate in words some event, experience, sensation that occurs within or without the writer’s mind, and recreate that sensation, that fragment of information in the mind of the intended reader. Writing is both more and less intimate than speech, which after all is present and then over in a moment, consisting of vibrations carried through the air and interpreted by the senses of the person listening in the moment when that energy disturbs the silence. Writing disturbs the silence forever. She can fold it up and place it in her bag, then unfold it on the train or place it on another desk and slowly decode it when her attention can sustain the effort. And while their speech can be recorded, is in fact recorded many times, and they both have grown familiar with all the acoustic difference of the sound

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of their own voice coming from some location outside themselves, still she does not speak to him with the expectation that the audio record will be played back, rewound, examined by the man she is speaking to. The messages he writes are meant to be read many times, positioned wherever they would have the most effect. Her message on the machine is a surrogate for the conversation, except for those cases when she anticipates that the call will not be answered and the record of her voice will be the channel of communication with the man she hopes to reach. And so in that case the record of her voice resembles the message that he writes, in so far as both are spontaneous expressions of the need to enter the mind of the other and can be repeated as often as the other wants to receive it.

But the written message, his or hers, is a more reflective medium than a moment of conversation or the recording on an answering machine, and one that leaves a series of traces from which the message can be reconstructed and examined in many places and at many times. His written message is directed to an audience, an audience of one, but with the awareness that the record of communication can be shared by an unintended audience as well, by the eyes of any person who shares access to the record and a common understanding of the written language that he uses. And so the message is written and reread, then revised by correction, omission, addition and reorganization.

The shaping of the written message is a combination of a field of time that can be passed through freely in any direction and a plastic medium of marks that record the words from which the message will appear. He can compose in many ways, having learned to write with a variety of pens, on papers of many sizes, contained in notebooks or on loose sheets, and often on the previously empty spaces of the books he is reading. Reading stimulates his writing, as if the fact of listening to a melody begets another melody in his head, and then that new melody must be placed somewhere before it disappears. There is the inspiration of competing with someone else’s writing, as well as the tendency to imitate, so devalued by the cult of the original and authentic that he senses all around him.

But then the message is often a conscious imitation of an event observed, a sensation remembered, a conversation overheard. If he wants her to know what he is thinking he cannot reproduce that act of thought, which does not consist of words anymore than it consists of speech or recorded voices on answering machines. If he wants her to know what he is thinking he can shape sentences into paragraphs that can be read by scanning marks on a variety of surfaces, and as those marks are reconstructed into words and words into sentences the meaning may be reproduced in the mind of his reader.

He can also write as easily by composing on a keyboard as with a pen, and the network to which the keyboard is connected stretches from his fingers to her eyes, shielded by the veil of asynchronous transmission. He can write with the sense, but not the assurance, that she may read the message in a moment, but still control the message until the moment it is sent, the moment that precedes the earliest moment she will see it. The conversation, then, is slower and more reflective than speaking on the phone, while still having an immediacy of impact, despite the physical distance and time zones that might separate them.

The series of messages that pass between them weave between response and addition. Each person can choose to ignore an element of the previous message or respond directly. Each person can add a reflection on the weather or report the feeling of the moment.

These two forms of communication are compatible and they are quite adept at using them both. Occasionally the two collide, as the composition of a written message is interrupted by a phone call. There is a moment of surprise on the part of the interrupted writer, whether it is the man interrupting the woman who is writing or the woman’s voice interrupting the writing man, a sense of

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convergence as the veil of one illusion penetrates the other, and a portion of the written message is verbally reproduced, though always in a different form. As the signal of the voice recedes and the telephone switched off, the written message is always completed, then sent to be received and read later on the same day.

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3. Double Portrait as Monsters They are two monsters who seek to devour the world. Each day they follow this desire, devouring as they pass unnoticed. The innocent inhabitants see them pass and don’t suspect. They conspire to share their tales of hunger. Eventually it is a night in winter, the restaurant or bar empties and the waiters stand, hoping to close the doors and return to their quiet homes. The hunger swells, encouraged by the wind blowing on the empty cobbled street. An unsuspecting couple is standing beside the bank machine as they pass by, and silently disappear. They are not yet satisfied by what they have absorbed.

The hunger continues to swell as they return to their small chamber. They turn to each other with open lips and hands and each begins to devour the other. An alchemical transformation of cell phones drawing power from the walls begins, drawing from the power of rushing water through turbines and plants compressed into coal, burning with a red flame. The chamber shrinks around them as they embrace and his fingers reach for her shoulders, finding the outlet in the wall, her feet pressing on the edge of the bed passing through the television tube to merge with the ion guns. His thoughts extend into the telephone lines as her mouth closes over his throat and he caresses every recorded voice he finds, searching through every message. The voices mix like fluids in the tiny space that remains between their bodies. Her thoughts rotate the video camera recording the scene as he swallows parts of her the innocent cannot conceive. Purple irises burst from her legs and he slices them off with his teeth. His fingers swim along currents of electric blood, the blood cells rush by grasping crystal messages, yellow and blue, messages they will not, they cannot release until, as the stars plow down into the ice, the rushing cells toss their messages carelessly. Each crystal bursts into an orange flame as it penetrates the walls, a rain of memories disappearing into the desert floor.

She puts an elastic in her hair and brings water forth from the shower head. The sound of trucks grows louder when he throws back the curtain and looks down at the narrow stone lane beside the stone church of St. Maurice. The city has been awake for hours and it is time to begin again.

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4. Television On the television Canal 5 is showing a summary of the films of Raoul Walsh. They begin with High Sierra. Bogart is writing a note proclaiming his girlfriend’s innocence as the police use her to trap him. He sees her dog and runs from his hiding place. Marie! Marie! The police sharpshooter sees him calling for the woman he loves. BLAM. Bogart falls down the rocks. The dog used to trap him follows down the mountain and sympathetically licks his hand. His body is discretely hidden behind a mesquite bush. Free, his girlfriend repeats, free! as the tears wash her mascara down her cheeks. The end.

But the knowing voice of the cinema critic cannot leave the illusion there. The critic introduces the final scene of another film by the same director. The title is Colorado Rockies, he thinks. He is not sure he caught the title, though immediately he recognizes the setting as a canyon with an Anasazi ruin that he remembers being in New Mexico. He remembers recent archeology theories concerning the reason why these cliff cities were abandoned. They were invaded by people from the South who terrorized the population, mutilating the symbols of their culture. The religion of the town dwellers collapsed, leaving evidence of apocalyptic visions on the rocks. His critical reflexes continue to criticize the critic’s commentary as he watches the same scene with different actors. The blond-haired girlfriend dressed in a Mexican blouse and Indian jewelry appears to be Swedish. She has stolen two horses, determined to save the hero, who is dressed entirely in black, his clothes contrasting brilliantly for the camera against the light canyon walls. A man dressed in black in the desert absorbs all the light. She calls him out of hiding, unaware of the sniper placed atop the canyon wall. The sniper fires and hits him with one shot. He falls down the rocks. She runs to him. He is still alive. The posse rides up and the lovers fire back, only to die in a blaze of gunfire, collapsing on the desert floor, clasping each other’s hands.

There is a rule about making love in a library, among the pages of the books one has collected throughout one’s life. There are boxes containing papers listing what friends of one’s youth could give to start a project that did not happen in the end. He learns that if he makes love in the library the words on the papers mix with his blood. The edges of the photographs balanced on the shelves begin to curl. Eventually the surface of the table he is working on cracks, a fissure running along the dark polished surface.

His eye runs along the shelf and focuses on a single volume. A copy of Le Ciel bound in black leather appears in his hand. The top of the black binding is worn to brown by the ghost of someone’s fingers pulling it from the shelf. As he opens the book he feels the volume contains infinite regret.

But why feel bad about such things that did not happen, he thinks. He recognizes the lesson he has learned. He lives with these books, these dreams, and these things he sees in front of him, these things he can touch. What he sees around him contain all the things that have passed, and memories return as dreams if they need to return at all.

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5. Italy I was standing on a cliff, she said. It was by the ocean and the cliff was above. I was standing on the edge looking down. I wasn’t sure if there was someone behind me, someone who wanted to kill me, who wanted to push me.

He could hear the ocean waves through the telephone. He was standing outside, in a courtyard. She had called the night before and he had heard the waves hitting the beach. She had called again while he was talking to someone else. His phone had made a beeping noise. She had left a message that consisted only of beeps and electronic sounds. He pressed several buttons with one finger as he held the phone in his hand. The rain had stopped and the cobblestones of the courtyard were still wet, puddles of water reflecting the clouds visible between the buildings. He had left her at the airport, on the sidewalk outside the terminal. She had walked into the terminal, through the glass walls, onto a plane, and then from the plane into a car. She put the key in the car and drove along the Mediterranean towards Italy. The road snaked through the mountains along the sea. The mountains were high above the sea, and she was driving through clouds, and then out into the blue sky and the sea below. She reported this to him on the phone, and he could see only scenes from To Catch A Thief, Cary Grant being driven far too fast by Grace Kelly along the mountain road into Monaco.

You drove through Monaco, he said. Yes, she replied, and then listed several other cities on the way to Italy.

She reported seeing people gliding above the sea on para-sails. You should try it, he said. No, she replied with a laugh. He thought she was describing the cliff she was standing on. It was only when she mentioned that she jumped that he realized she was telling him about a dream.

I slept incredibly this morning, until after 10 o’clock, she continued. I was standing on the cliff and I jumped. As I fell I was moving faster and faster and I thought I would strike the sea too hard. I found I could change this by holding on to the cliff. I moved towards the cliff and slowed myself with my hands. I fell slower and slower each time I touched the rocks and when I reached the sea, I was moving very slowly.

The dream ended when she entered the water.

The night before he had gone to see a movie about an idiot who was in love with a whore. Once he knew he was close to the point where he would leap into the air, the idiot, who did not resemble Cary Grant, ran from one end of the roof to the other, waving to the woman that he loved, gaining enough speed to dive off the roof and land on the pavement far below. The woman, who looked more like Jean Seberg than Grace Kelly, claimed to remember everything that ever happened. He would tell her about it tomorrow when she called, he thought, as he walked through a light rain over the two bridges that joined the island in the river, finally descending into the station to board a moving train.

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6. Looking For Signs She was always looking for signs. They came in many forms, a stone found on a beach, the flower on a plant that had belonged to her father, a book that would arrive in the mail on a particular day conjoining with a previous event. These signs were a form of dreaming, another sense, much like her acute sense smell.

She returned on an afternoon, after driving through the rain, finding the airport, leaving the car, taking the bus to the correct terminal, finding her car in the garage where she had left it the previous day. She arrived at home and opened the door with her key. Can you smell the sheep?, she asked him. She had been in a factory that morning, and the smell of the skins being processed, the ammonia in air, had entered her lungs and stayed there. I can still feel it, she said, gesturing toward her chest. No, you smell like yourself, he said. It is a lovely smell.

Later, as they were driving through heavy traffic on the boulevard, she told him about a conversation she had had the previous day. After I told him I would stay for meetings on Saturday, he asked me if I was married.

What did you say?, he asked. They both were laughing at the official who would ask such a personal question. At first she did not reply to his question, but he asked her again, now pretending to interview her by thrusting an imaginary microphone towards her face.

Are you married, madame? He knew just why the stranger had asked this question. Wasn’t there a family expecting you at home? What kind of woman is so independent that she can decide where to be on any day of the week, according to her discussions with officials from a project like this one? He wanted to hear the answer she had given.

She laughed again. She did not want to imagine she was being interviewed so she did not enter the play by speaking into the imaginary microphone. He put his hand down.

They were moving very slowly toward the intersection. People were walking between the cars. Cars were shifting across the lanes, trying to force their way into positions to make a turn. They forced their way through the intersection after several changes of the light, but the traffic continued to move very slowly.

African and Arab shoppers walked between the cars, carrying large bags. A van from the National Police began to move toward them in the opposite direction, blaring its siren. The cars in both directions tried to push away from the center, making a space for the police.

I told him I have grown children, she said. The phrase was difficult to translate at first, so they discussed the adjective she had used. He was satisfied that this was the best equivalent in English. She had told the man she had children, to inform him that she had, in fact, produced a family, but that today they were no longer young, to explain why they were not waiting for her that evening or expecting her to care for them at that particular time.

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7. Flying He remembered the first time he flew. It was with his grandmother, from New York to Boston. The plane was called a Super-G Constellation, the largest in the commercial fleet, a turbo-prop with four engines. He remembered getting on the plane, walking up the metal stairway, absorbing the sight and the sound of the engines. He did not remember the flight.

Years later, his parents had taken him, along with his brother and sister, on a vacation to the south. He remembered sitting on the front lawn of the house the day before, looking at the sky, imagining that tomorrow he would be flying. He would be in the sky looking down instead of on the ground looking up. The flight had been at night, in bad weather. For a very long time the plane bounced and shook, like his grandfather’s boat in heavy surf. The body of the plane slammed against invisible waves and the cabin bounced. People around him began to vomit into bags.

The hotel was across the road from the beach. There was a restaurant under ground, with windows looking into the swimming pool. He could see people swimming on the surface. Each evening the restaurant was decorated according to a different theme. He remembered Pirate Night, when all the waitresses were wearing pirate hats and black eye patches. They stayed for eight days, and on the last night they brought out the decorations he had seen on the first night.

He was very disappointed. He had imagined that the various themes would go on forever. He realized they had stayed one day too long.

He spent many hours sitting in planes, crossing North America, crossing the Atlantic to Europe, crossing the Pacific to Asia. He learned to carefully read the geography out the window. He focused on the rivers and tried to read what he saw. The way people lived grew from the earth. The settlements grew as roads and rivers converged. He knew the shape of the Hudson valley, where the Mohawk entered from the west. He looked down at Niagara between the two large lakes. He learned to read Mono Lake and the eastern slope of the Sierra, knowing how many minutes it would be from the moment he saw the arid shore before the plane would begin to turn over the southern edge of San Francisco Bay. The shapes of the New England coast were transferred from maps to the shapes he saw out the window from his seat.

The first time he flew behind the controls a small plane he was over Cape Cod. He took the stick, which extended to handles for both his hands, and moved his eyes from the controls to the view over the windshield, back and forth, feeling how the movements of his hands controlled the pitch and direction of the plane.

The voice in the headphones announced an approaching aircraft, then a few seconds later he would see another plane pass below. Three dimensional driving, he thought, with a voice announcing the traffic.

As a passenger, he learned to feel the movements of the plane, how the huge commercial jet would lock into an approach pattern and slowly descend along a projected path. The moment of landing was the most intense, the most dangerous. Coming out of the sky, transforming from a flying machine to a rolling vehicle, was the moment of greatest vulnerability. Sometimes the entire machine would strike hard against the ground and the impact would send a shutter through the seat. Sometimes the motion was continuous, the angle perfect, the forward motion picked up by the wheels so that only the slight vibration of the tires would communicate the fact that the entire weight of the machine was no longer in the air.

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This morning he was standing next to a cart in the airport. The cart was filled with his luggage, several bags stuffed with clothes, books, tools, magnetic disks, kitchen utensils, pictures. An enormous cardboard box held the pieces of a bicycle, dismantled and secured with packing tape. A computer bag was balanced on a bulging suitcase. He leaned against the metal rail below the television monitors announcing arriving flights. The mechanical board outside the customs hall began to twirl, removing the number and origin of flights that had arrived from North America and Europe to make room for flights from Africa and Asia.

Vietnamese families emerged from the customs hall, holding each other by the hand. Japanese children passed by holding Mickey Mouse balloons, followed by their parents pushing luggage carts.

He wanted to stay on the ground. He had seen the shapes of rivers twisting through ravines in the Pyrenees. He had seen the ocean caressing the rocks. He imagined the feeling of solid ground, after rocking on a ship deck for several months, the sound of ropes pulling against wooden beams and water running over his shoes. The isle was lined with bank machines and news stands. The sun poured in violently through the glass walls, disturbing his vision. He had dark glasses, but they were buried in one of the bags. When he had left the ground the sky had been gray. It had been raining. The week he was away, the sky had remained gray or black. Now he arrived at the edge of a cloudless day. The sun hurt his eyes. He had slept only a few hours and his eyes hurt.

Most of the stores were hidden behind metal shutters. It was too early in the morning at this point on the earth for anyone to sell coffee.

He had told her not to come until an hour after the plane was scheduled to arrive. He had stood in line before dawn so many times. He had stood beside the baggage carousel and seen every bag pass by but his own. He had been trapped in long lines at passport control behind African families making hopeless gestures in front of impassive police. His plane had been blocked from entering the gate by other planes. Mechanical problems had caused hours of delay, as invisible technicians replaced instruments and completed paperwork.

But this morning the plane had arrived early. His bags were the first objects moving down the carousel. The box containing the bicycle had appeared, pushed by the person emerging from an elevator, the moment he turned to look for it.

Everything he brought with him balanced on the cart, as if it had been designed and manufactured to hold the very bags he had chosen to take. He emerged from the customs hall, into the blinding sunlight, a few minutes after the plane was scheduled to arrive.

He leaned against the metal rail and waited. He wanted to put the bags into a car, open them and distribute the contents onto shelves and closets, close the empty bags and place them out of sight. He wanted to arrive in one place and remain there, a place that was no stranger than any other, with just enough room for the things he had chosen to take with him.

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8. Dialogue He notices that the panhandlers are well dressed.

He thinks about distant friends.

He focuses his power to continue the conversation with distant friends.

Distant friends help his hand turn the key in the polished door.

He thinks the empty apartment looks beautiful.

He photographs the light on the wall in the empty room.

Be careful of insects, he says, gesturing toward the mark he left with his teeth.

Whenever she opens her mouth he hears her say I live in my dreams.

He selects a photograph and places it against the wall.

In this picture, her fingers extend through holes in the black wool gloves.

Sandpipers dance on the frozen sand.

She emerges from the night train.

She removes the clothes she slept in.

She scatters water on the floor as she showers.

She covers herself with a simple gray dress.

She imagines she is empty.

The light bleeds through the window on her wet blond hair.

He hears a telephone ringing.

I have always lived in my dreams, she says.

I speak with my body.

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9. The Night of Music They stood on the street outside the restaurant. The curb sloped upward and the street was also sloped down, to form a place where the water flowed during the day, when the green trucks came by to wash the street. He had stepped over the cool flowing water in many places around the city. He had been walking back and forth to the food shops, from the metro to various destinations, up the stairs that connected the streets. He often watched the water flow along the edge of the sidewalk. Dams of debris formed against the wheels of parked cars at times.

The water flowed around the dams, spilling into the street and curving back against the curb, rushing over the stones.

Tonight the street was dry. The sidewalk was crowded with people moving in small groups. The restaurant had set up tables on the sidewalk facing a band.

The musicians stood with their backs to the street among microphones, amplifiers, and speakers. The large African man with the guitar was leading the band. The electrical cables were covered by a black plastic strip taped to the sidewalk. This formed a line between the curb and the musicians.

They stood with their feet against the line, listening. He had walked past a gospel singer earlier that evening, as he emerged from the metro pulling a suitcase. He had held the suitcase on the crowded train. More people packed in at each stop as the train moved toward the center of the city, and then poured out as the train continued away from the center towards the east. By the time he reached the station near her apartment the train was quite empty.

I didn’t expect you to make a dinner, he said. She placed three plates of raw fish on a small table. The balcony was just wide enough for a chair. It was the evening of the summer solstice and the sun lingered on the horizon. He faced toward the traffic circle where crowds were gathered. He could hear several musical performances going on. She faced the other way. Look at the plane, she said. They could see light reflecting from the silver jet passing high over the street. It was on the approach to the airport in the south, he thought. Just above the houses there was the darker silhouette of gulls.

When they descended to the street and walked into the crowd, it was already dark. The table and the desk of the apartment were covered with piles of papers, bills and receipts, video cassettes and CDs in white envelopes. They piled the dishes in the sink. He ran some water and left them balanced there. He would wash them when they returned several days later.

Her son had not called her back and she was angry with him. I would like to join him, she said, but I don’t know where he is. He knew that she wanted to hear him sing. She wanted to go to the bar or the street where he was playing his guitar.

He knew this because he had seen how she loved to hear him play. She loved to listen to him sing.

He had received a phone call from his own son earlier that day. The symmetry of such events was common enough in their lives. He had not expected the call.

Good morning, he said, expecting his father to recognize the voice crackling through the speaker in the cell phone. He never identified himself when he called. It’s early in the morning on the other side of the ocean, he thought. He is lying in bed, surrounded by piles of clothes, CDs, and papers on the floor of his room, the room where he grew up, where he had kissed the boy goodnight, read him stories, sung songs for him when the boy was a child. That afternoon he was standing in a studio, looking through the glass doors at the workmen replacing stones on the floor of the seventeenth century courtyard. He moved from place

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to place, trying to avoid the noise of their drill, so he could hear his son’s voice in the tiny silver phone. What’s your plan for today? This was all he could think to ask his son. I might go to the beach, he replied.

When they reached the traffic circle, the crowd was gathered around a woman singing between a man with a drum and another man playing an electric keyboard. She sang a song in a language neither of them understood, a call and response, as everyone swayed to the rhythm. Many women sang with her, answering her, their dark faces turned toward her. The man in front of them held a child in his arms, and the child raised his hands and clapped to the rhythm of the song. They listened and swayed to the song. We can walk this way, he suggested. They moved around the traffic circle to another boulevard. They both knew that if they continued in this direction they would eventually come to an area where there were many clubs and cafés. They had no particular destination in mind. In the morning they were leaving and it hardly mattered where they spent the night.

But when they arrived in front of the restaurant they stopped. He could hear the guitar as they approached. He was very good, the African guitar player. His fingers moved lightly over the strings. The style was familiar, so similar to the music he had listened to most of his life. This musician was playing the music in his head. They stood there and pressed against each other. He was behind her.

For a while he watched the band through her curled and knotted hair. He could see almost nothing but her hair. A very tall thin man draped in a loose shirt asked a short woman to dance in the space between the tables and the band. The dancers became a focus for the crowd, as the tall man bobbed up and down, looming over his partner and then bending to her level, his loose shirt flapping around him, causing the woman to laugh.

The past is close behind. He could hear it, this group of words from a song. It was not the song the band was playing. There were many groups of words in his mind. They were triggered by the smallest association. He had closed his eyes, balancing against her body. It rhymed with she never did leave my mind and followed by like a bird that flew. Where did that come from? He was asking himself where he had been the last time this happened. He knew it had happened before, several years ago. He was with her in this city and it was the solstice. It was the night of music and people were playing instruments everywhere on the street. That night they were staying in a hotel. She said she wanted to go to the district where her family lived. She said he wanted to see her son play guitar. She was not supposed to be in the city. This woman is looking for trouble, he thought. He walked beside her and watched her profile.

She held her head up as she walked. She was looking for her children in the crowd. She had fire in her eyes that night.

When they reached the street where she thought he might be playing, there was barely room to move between the crowds of people. The street connected the main boulevard and the smaller alleys leading to the river. She disappeared into a bar and re-emerged a few minutes later. He could see she was still looking as he followed her. They pushed their way down the street. He saw her spot them.

She moved into a group of young men and women standing on the street. A band was set up at the intersection, playing electric music. He recognized the song, something by a new American band. His son had played him a CD with this song on it not long ago, when he was home. She greeted the standing group, kissing several of them. He stood off to one side. Then she introduced him to the men and women she had kissed. One of them was her son.

He kept his eyes closed for a long time. They wouldn’t go any farther, he thought. This is where they would spend the night. The band moved from familiar tunes into African songs he had not heard before. The space in front of

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them began to fill with people dancing. There were couples dancing and men and women dancing by themselves and in small groups. They balanced their feet between the curb and the rubber strip covering the electric cables.

Do you want a drink, he asked. He bought two beers from the bar set up on the sidewalk. They found two empty chairs by a table and sat down.

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10. Replacing Things He replaced things when he broke or lost them as quickly as possible. When he used a cup or a glass, he washed it and replaced it on the shelf. Occasionally he would drop a glass or a plate and it would break. When this happened he felt foolish. He remembered the motion of his hand, the motion that had caused him to loose his grip or push the glass in a way that caused it to fall to the hard tile floor.

He would pick up the broken pieces carefully. He did not want to also cut his hand on the glass. That would be doubly foolish, and require him to wipe up blood as well as broken glass. He would place the broken pieces carefully in the trash and begin to calculate where he would go the next day to buy a replacement.

He had a great desire to leave no trace, to leave no evidence that he had used these things.

If a plate broke in a way that could be repaired, he would carefully glue it back together. From that time onward, as he washed the plate his fingers found the crack. When his fingers touched the crack he was reminded of the motion of his hands that had caused the plate to fall to the floor.

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11. Tied to the Bed When she awoke, she realized she was tied to the bed. Her ankles were secured with ropes, anchored to the lower corners of the bed. When she moved her arms she could feel the cuffs around her wrists. The cuffs were a soft plastic material, the texture of skin. She turned her head away from the pillow and saw her reflection in the mirror. She could see her shoulders emerging from the sheet, but the rest of her body was not visible.

She could hear him in the next room. She heard what she thought was a coffee cup, the sound of lifting a hard object from a table, a pause and then a sound of the object being replaced. She could smell the scent of coffee above the scent of the sheets.

She felt wetness dripping from her arm. The room was hot. The windows and curtains were closed and the door was ajar, but the air was not moving. She felt a drop moving from her hairline, across her forehead towards her eyes. Without thinking she pressed her forehead against the bed and wiped away the moisture.

It was only then that she realized she was lying on her stomach. She closed her eyes tightly and pressed her face into the sheet covering the mattress. She inhaled the scent of her own sweat on the damp sheet.

When she opened her eyes her arms were under the pillow. There was nothing holding them. She moved her hands and lifted her weight onto her elbows, turning over onto her back. She turned her head and looked at her reflection in the mirror again. Her leg was above the sheet. She flexed her ankle and watched her foot move in the mirror.

Would you like some breakfast, he said. He came through the door carrying two cups. He bent over to kiss her on the brow. His lips slid slightly on the moisture and stopped at her eyebrow. She could smell the scent of coffee on his breath.

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12. Apricot The fruits of permission. The phrase occurred as he was reading a text, a group of poems translated from French into English. The poems had been written during a war, about eighty years before the day he was reading them.

He thought about the apricot he had eaten before going to bed. First he had divided it in half. The color on the inside was deeper than the color on the outside. The color on the inside was mixed with a hint of red that reminded him of blood. The pit clung to one side of the fruit. He took one hemisphere in his hand.

The lower part was soft, the upper part was firm. The lower part dissolved in his mouth. It tasted like wet sugar.

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13. First Steps Do you have time to talk?, he asked. She answered the phone on the third ring.

He had called her mobile number. Where are you?

In fact, I am at home all day, she answered. She described the problem that had occupied the day, the arrangements with people in another city, requests for a group of photos to be copied and sent to another location, various people refusing to help with the task that was too remote to accomplish directly. He described the park where he was sitting. He had just finished a meeting and the park was between the office where he had met someone and the metro station he had come from.

Of course, she said, and repeated the name of the park. My first steps, she said.

When I was very young my parents lived nearby and this is where I learned to walk.

He laughed. He had found another part of her history. I can see a three year old girl with her mother, or perhaps it is her grandmother, he said into the phone.

That must be you with your mother. She looks so young.

He had spent the previous day with her mother, sitting in her sister’s garden. He had looked at the wrinkles on the old woman’s skin between her neck and the line of her leopard-skin blouse. He had studied the lines of her white, wellgroomed hair. She did not resemble her mother. She had her father’s body and face, her father’s height and cheek bones. Her mother was small and round, like the woman he could see with the child on the grass in the park.

I look like my grandmother, she said.

Then it must be your mother I see with the child, he said into the phone. They continued to talk about meeting for dinner. The woman and child had their backs to him, so he did not have to resolve their faces. He kept his eyes on the memory as he talked.

When the conversation was over, he walked to the building beside the carousel.

There were many more children there, and he bought himself something cold to drink. It was a very hot day, and the children with ice cream cones left tiny puddles of cream and strawberry colors in the dust on the path.

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14. Sunlight She likes to watch the sunset. From her apartment there was a good view of the clouds above the city. The windows faced north and west. The sun at the end of the day was behind the buildings across the street, but the bending light was visible on the bottom of the clouds. The view of the sky was broad. Though the apartment was not at the top of the building, it was six floors off the street. The sky was always present. From the narrow balcony she could look north and see the colors changing in the clouds, red, pink, gray. She would stop and watch it whenever it occurred.

The bedroom was dark. She closed the blinds on the windows as well as the door leading to the room from which she watched the sunset before she went to sleep and the light did not enter the room in the morning. When there was no obligation to catch an early train or plane to arrive at a meeting in another city the next morning, she slept until she woke up in the semi-dark and looked at the time. She often worked into the morning hours, when the world was quiet, when neither the phone nor the possibility of going somewhere else would interrupt her work. When she felt that something was done at three or four o’clock in the morning, she was alone with the work, she had done what she wanted to do, and she would sleep.

He woke up in the hotel room before dawn. The sound of the waves on the beach below his window was the same as it had been in the dark when he had gone to sleep. The sound modulated but never stopped. Each wave was followed by another wave. The moving air made the curtain wave along the wall where he had left the window open.

The room faced east, and the sun rose over a peninsula that was separated from the beach by a large body of ocean. He rose from the bed and slid the window open further, standing in the cool wind that pushed through the opening. He felt the air stir the hair on his body. He waited for the sunlight to appear.

He was thinking about another room, in a house that faced a cove. This room had windows along the entire length of the eastern wall. All the windows were open and there were no shades. When they had arrived in the night they had sensed the cove below, but they could not see it in the dark. There were no waves and the only sound was the banging of ropes against sails from the boats moored nearby. It was early July, just past the solstice, and when the sun rose the next morning, it was perhaps five a.m. The yellow light poured through the wall onto their bed and flooded the room. He felt the heat on his face and he opened his eyes. He was looking east across a broad lawn, to a cove below bordered by forest and rocks beyond which the top of another forest was lit by the rising sun. He pulled back the covers and they lay there in the sunlight. She opened her eyes.

The same event occurred each morning for several days, until they returned to the city.

This morning he stood by the open door to the balcony of the hotel room and waited for the sun to come up. As it rose he felt the light first on his leg and then on the right side of his body. He stood there with the sliding glass door open, naked, facing the sea. He felt the gesture of the air and he tried to match it with some posture, some way of standing appropriate for the moment. His hands were at his sides and he rotated his wrists, turning his palms toward the sunlight.

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The two mornings were separated by time and distance. One was happening and the other was happening as he remembered it. The sun did not feel warm coming off this ocean, and he was alone in the room. The gestures he had made with his body day after day, morning after morning, were impossible to make alone. He moved back from the sliding door and stood back inside the room, still in the sunlight. He sat down in the chair. The book on the table beside the chair was a collection of poems by a poet who often wrote about the city he had come from, in the country he had left. He read the poems now to remember them, and to imagine the streets that were occasionally mentioned. His fingers flipped pages and passed over titles with small black dots he had made with a pen, to locate favorite poems. His eyes stopped on an unmarked poem, then stopped at the group of lines that ended the poem: Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.

His eyes returned to the capitalized word. He read the lines again and closed the book. He touched his leg with his fingers and then touched his chest with the same fingers. He returned to the bed. He turned on his side and pulled the white duvet over his shoulders and closed his eyes.

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15. The Light The light changed dramatically that morning. He had woken up at the usual hour with some light coming through the curtains. His bedroom faced west. The white curtain obscured the room from the terrace that faced the interior courtyards of several apartment buildings built along the hill. From the light he knew it was morning. He opened the curtains. The plants were growing beneath broken clouds, patches of blue sky visible among gray and black shapes.

He went to the shower, slowly following his sequence of morning actions, washing, putting on his eyeglasses, preparing a breakfast, locating cigarettes and glasses left from the night before, turning on the computer. He found the music he was thinking of and programmed the machine to play it. Bill Evans recorded forty years before, a recording he had just found yesterday while wandering on a large boulevard in this city he had come to live in. He consumed the breakfast and turned on the lamp. It grew dark in the rooms facing east. It began to rain lightly. He could tell it was raining by the darkening color of the pavement visible through the window.

Moments later the sun poured through the same window. The light filtered through the trees creating patterns on the bookshelves. The patterns moved with the leaves. The cream walls of the rooms reflected the light like a series of refracting mirrors. The lamp, which a few moments before had been a source of light in the darkness, was drown in the wash of sunshine. He switched it off and watched the light play against the wall and books.

Images of the city were everywhere. Terrible events had occurred in the previous days in the city where he was born, the city where Bill Evans was playing the music he listened to as he watched the light play on the walls. Images of the events had been transmitted to every surface his eyes had seen for days since the event. The covers of magazines lining the newsstands, the beam of televisions seen through shop windows and in the living rooms of friends, the covers of newspapers held by people in the metro.

He looked through a book he had been given the week before, a collection of photographs of another city covering a period of eighty years. The people were captured in black and white, printed in brown sepia tones. The eyes of a street vender, holding his wares on a tray suspended from his shoulder. The smiles of boys swimming in the canal during a festival.

He had been in the city described in the book just before the events of the previous week. The light had been brilliant the last morning of his visit. He had woken early and pulled back the curtain in his hotel room. The room faced a busy street, divided by an island covered with cars parked on every surface. On the opposite side of the busy street was the city prison. A glass tower was balanced on the wall. No one was visible in the tower. Beneath it, two doors faced the street, crowned with video cameras. Barriers defined the space between the doors and the sidewalk. Men and women with children were standing between the barriers, waiting for the closed doors to open.

He did not wear his sunglasses when he went out on the street. He shielded his eyes with his hands. The path to the church was in the shadows as he walked north, and the air was cool. He stopped at a cafĂŠ opposite the main prison entrance to buy some cigarettes. The men drinking coffee were all in police uniforms.

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When he arrived at the church he looked at his watch. He was early. The appointment was in ten minutes. A few other people were standing beside the shuttered entrance to the refectory. He went into the church. Much of the interior had been recently restored. The woven patterns painted on the walls were clean, though the colors themselves were muted. He looked up at the series of vaulted ceilings separated by arches, defining the space of the church joined to the side chapels designed in the fifteenth century. Patterns of red descended from the central point of each ceiling. The red color began as radiating lines overdrawn with snaking waves. As they descended the vault, the lines broke up into fragments and bursts of snaking waves symmetrically arranged. He walked past a woman whispering into a confessional. Scaffolding filled the center of the church and shielded the arches and ceiling on the other side. Beyond the shrouded scaffolding he could hear the beginning of mass from a side chapel.

The shutters descended into the ground and the small group of tourists entered the room between the refectory and the street that had become the ticket office.

He exchanged his money for a ticket, gave his ticket to a woman at the glass door and stood there waiting. The glass doors opened mechanically. He stood in front of a second glass door. When the mechanism closed the first door, the second door swung open. He entered the refectory.

On his right was the famous painting. It covered the entire length of the wall from the ceiling to the top of the sealed doorway that once had opened beneath it on the north wall. The figures in the painting were standing or seated behind a long table. He approached the wall and stared at the paint. A decade of restoration had revealed how little of the painting remained on the wall after five hundred years.

He remembered staring at the exterior wall of the building in a town south of this city a few years before, gazing at the faded remains of a painting barely visible. The creator of that image was unknown to him, but the faded image was striking for what it seemed to remember. He recalled what this room had looked like when he had come with his friend on a cold November afternoon a decade before. Then the scaffolding and restoration workers had blocked much of the wall from view. Now the morning sun entered indirectly through the high windows on western wall. The one object that blocked a clear view of the wall was a large machine measuring the temperature and humidity of the air.

The most striking thing that remained on the wall were the human faces and hands. The subject of the painting was a religious story familiar to the inhabitants of the city and surrounding countries. Each of the thirteen men behind the table had a name and a part in a complex narrative. He knew the names of several of the characters from other contexts, but did not know the story well enough to recognize the characters from the faces and hands he examined. One man, whose two hands faced into and out of the picture plane, was the most striking. The painting of the man’s body was almost entirely disintegrated. The paint that had defined his clothes was a tan memory on the wall. But the painting of his skin above the line of his shirt or cloak was visible, and his face, open mouth and knitted brow separated by a sloping nose and glaring eyes, drew his attention away from the figure in the center of the composition. He could imagine hearing this astonished man speak. He could see his hands moving. The hair that framed his face was also largely a memory of the color that filled his short beard below his gaping mouth. He moved his eyes slowly from face to face across the wall.

Across the room the south wall was covered by another painting by a different artist. He had examined this painting before, as this was the most visible object during his last visit. It was another part of the complex narrative, three men hanging from crosses that towered above many figures on the ground below

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them. There had been a photograph of the church building on the wall during that visit. The photo was taken during a recent war, the day after bombs had destroyed the roof and one of the walls of the refectory. In the photograph he could see the two paintings on the remaining walls exposed to the sun. The print of that photograph was no longer in the room. This time he stood before the cross on the right side of the picture, close to the exit door. There was a group of men kneeling at the base of the cross, gathered around a yellow circular shield where three white dice lay. A man dressed in armor on the left of the group opened his hand over the shield. The man kneeling on the right extended his left hand to pick up the pieces. Behind this figure to the right of the shield he could see the outline of a kneeling woman. She was much smaller than the other figures, dressed in the costume of a later age, and the paint that once created her image had disintegrated from the wall plaster, leaving a white shadow with faint suggestions of the folds of her costume. He had only a minute to look at the wall before a mechanical voice announced the opening of the exit door. He was ushered out with the other tourists and the glass doors closed behind him.

Once outside, he walked slowly around the exterior of the church. The morning light was flooding down the street. Trolleys passed along metal tracks among the cars, bicycles, motorcycles and scooters. He held his hand up to shield his eyes and he looked up at the building where he had stayed with his friend. They had both had rooms on the upper floors. This gave them the opportunity to look down at the roof and dome of the church and admire the rhythm of its architecture. He turned the corner. An open doorway led into a cloister. He had remembered correctly. This is where they had entered the church. A man came out of the doorway. He was wearing a fashionable business suit. He mounted a polished scooter parked on the sidewalk, turned on the engine, and drove away.

He went through the doorway and entered the cloister. The sounds of traffic stopped and he heard water. In the center of the cloister was a fountain with four bronze frogs spouting water. He walked slowly under the arches and looked up at the church. He remembered a photograph he had taken of the church from this spot.

He walked through a door at the end of the cloister walkway and was back inside the church. The mass was still going on in the side chapel. He retraced his steps along the restored side of the church in the opposite direction, looking up at the heavenly fire painted on the ceiling. He returned to the cloister and turned into a second door that led to a shop where religious objects were for sale. The mass had concluded. The priest, dressed in a white robe, was behind the counter of the shop, speaking into a white telephone on the wall.

Now when he closed his eyes he saw cinders falling from the sky onto the memory of streets he had walked in the city where he was born. He saw images that were made from what he had seen on the televisions and what he had inside his own body. He had walked along these streets and looked up many times. The streets were buried now under rubble from collapsing buildings. He saw people raising their arms to shield themselves from the rain of cinders that occurred during the fires before the buildings collapsed.

The weather moved quickly over the hill. It had rained and cleared several times during the day, and now, at sunset, the sky was completely clear. The sunlight illuminated the sides of buildings that rose above the ones across the street from his window. He could see the bright walls through the leaves of the tree.

He had spent the day with friends, and then slowly wandered back through the city’s largest park. He heard the sound of a brass band and found people sitting around a bandstand, waiting for an orchestra in humorous costumes to resume playing. In a nearby pavilion there was an exhibition of an artist who made

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compositions of wood, complex sculptures and plaques of wood arranged in abstract designs. One had pieces protruding outward in asymmetrical patterns.

Beside it was a composition of thin black rectangles of different lengths. A boy was looking at the plaques with his parents. Look, he said, it’s the buildings falling down. He was smiling at his mother, proud that he could somehow relate the images he had seen on the television that week with the art the adults were looking at.

He walked around the enormous pool, passing couples and families strolling in the sunlight. Armed guards stood around the outside of the government building that faced the pool. He looked away from the building at the vista of the park, the lines of trees and the apartment buildings rising above the gates to the south. Beyond them, a single glass office building rose above the rest of the city.

At the opposite side of the government building was the orangerie. The enormous windows of the south facing wall were open and he could see the plants inside. A large tree was secured to the wall, its branches being trained to grow in symmetrical patterns. He emerged from the park at the gate beside the orangerie. A man on the sidewalk was yelling at his barking dog to be quiet. The man fumbled with a newspaper to strike the dog’s head.

He walked north. He had a metro stop in mind and wanted to return to his apartment. He was approaching the square in front of a large church. One tower of the church was covered with scaffolding and plastic, the other was uncovered.

Booths were set up around the fountain and people filled the square. People in the booths were selling crafts and food from another country. Folk music from that country played from speakers hanging from the trees behind the booths.

He went into the church through the door on the right side. He had been here before. He had asked her to take him to the church and she had driven there, parking the car beside the square on another Sunday when there were no booths and few people around the fountain. She told him about how she had passed this church thousands of times. Her husband’s parents had lived in an apartment overlooking the park. She had taken her children to play in the park opposite the orangerie every day for years. She had lived during those years in an apartment some blocks across the next large boulevard.

He had wanted to go to the church because he had seen a picture of a painting in one of the chapels. First he had seen it in a movie, then he had seen a picture of it in a guidebook.

He went directly to the chapel. It was the first chapel on the right when he entered through the right door. The painting covered the entire wall. It had started to rain lightly just before he came in. As he stood in front of the painting, the sun and clouds shifted. Some light came through the windows.

The painting had been completed one hundred and thirty years before. The colors and the figures were still as clear as the artist had intended them to be.

He knew the story that was depicted better than the subject of the famous painting in the refectory. The two main figures were Jacob wrestling with the angel. There were several other human figures in the lower right of the painting, but they had no names and played no part in the narrative as he remembered it.

He noted how these anonymous figures balanced the visual composition.

Jacob faced away from the plane of the picture. His head was forced into the breast of the angel. His face was obscured. The face of the angel was calm, his head bent slightly forward, his weight distributed between his right foot planted squarely forward and his left in the back balanced on the ball of his foot. By contrast, all of Jacob’s weight was thrust directly into the body of the angel, and

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his left leg was entirely off the ground. The angel’s right hand grasped Jacob’s left thigh, resting the raised leg against its body. Its right arm held Jacob’s left hand, suggesting the clasped hands of two dancers.

The two figures balanced on the wall above him. He thought the angel seemed to be accepting and absorbing the struggle he held in his arms. And when Jacob awoke from his dream, he thought, what did his body feel like? Did he remember the feeling of the angel’s hand grasping his leg? Did he long for the warmth of the angel’s breast against his forehead? Could he still feel the angel’s palm pressing against his hand?

He heard the ringing of his cell phone. He was sitting at his desk looking at the light from a window in the building that had been reflecting the sunset an hour before. The sound was coming from another room. He remembered that he had put the cell phone inside the pocket of his jacket.

She was calling from beside the ocean. The waves are very high, she said.

It rained and was sunny several times today, he replied.

She had been spending some days with her daughter. She had been discussing the work her daughter was doing for her university studies. It was a long and serious study of the Greek concepts of Art and Nature. They had been talking about the terrible events of the week.

There is a point in Greek tragedy, she said, when the divine in man is revealed.

Yes, he said, I remember studying about that.

It was dark outside. He went into the kitchen to make himself a meal.

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16. Learning to Read He was standing on the platform waiting for the train to arrive. He noticed that the woman standing next to him was looking in his direction. A few minutes before he had stopped to buy flowers. He thought it would be a nice gesture to bring flowers to her apartment. He suspected that the vase, which she usually placed on the table beside the half-wall separating two of the rooms in her apartment, was empty today.

There was a flower shop at the bottom of the stairs, just beside the entrance to the metro. He entered the shop and surveyed the containers on the floor. Each was filled with groups of cut flowers, bundled in clear plastic or tied into bunches. He looked at the colors and the small white signs indicating the price for each bundle. His eye moved across the groups. He saw a mixed bundle of white flowers and green leafy plants. When the shopkeeper greeted him, he responded.

Hello, he said, and pointed at the bundle that had caught his eye. Then he noticed there was no sign indicating the price for the bundle he had chosen.

As he took the bundle towards the counter, the shopkeeper asked him a question. He did not understand what the man said, but he knew from previous experiences buying flowers in other shops that he was being asked whether this was a gift. The answer would determine how the shopkeeper wrapped the bundle.

Yes, he replied.

As the shopkeeper began to wrap the bundle in plastic and paper, cutting ribbons to secure the arrangement, his eyes moved across the counter looking for the cash register. He wanted to position himself in the shop so he could see the price when the shopkeeper rung it up. It was only then that he noticed the old mechanical register. He realized that he would not see the price of the flowers displayed in green lights. He waited to hear what the shopkeeper would say next.

The man told him the price as he finished preparing the bundle. He tried to translate the words. He thought the man had said sixty followed by another number. As he spread the coins he had in his pocket across his palm he could see he had less than fifty. He hesitated, trying to add the coins and remember the sounds of the words the shopkeeper had pronounced. They both looked at the coins in his hand. The shopkeeper repeated the same phrase, then after looking him in the eyes, said sixty-five in English.

He put the coins back in pocket, feeling embarrassed and defeated. He knew he had no paper money in his wallet. One moment, he said, and left the shop. The flower bundle remained on the counter. The shopkeeper turned his attention to another customer that had been standing beside him.

He ran up the stone steps to the road above the metro station. In the twilight he was aware that the tables outside the cafĂŠ were filled with people having dinner on the sidewalk. He knew there was a bank machine on his right. He took a card from his wallet and put it into the machine. He put the card back in his wallet and pulled the small bundle of paper money from the machine. When he returned down the steps and into the flower shop, the shopkeeper was giving another man a tray of six violet plants. He waited while they talked about something. The shopkeeper looked at him, he handed the man a hundred note he had kept in his hand when he placed the other money in his wallet. He placed

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the flowers in the bag of food he had taken from his refrigerator. The white and green flowers protruded from the bag.

He was reviewing this in his mind as he waited for the train. He had understood the price when he heard it, but he was unsure of himself, of his own ability to understand. He usually was able to see the price on the register, and used his reading of the numbers to support his weak ability to translate what he heard. I should have trusted myself, he thought. He had been surprised by the price. He thought he had enough coins in his pocket when he entered the shop. He had seen thirty-five and forty-five on the signs of the other bundles.

He noticed the woman standing next to him when he first came down the stairs to the platform. She wore a green scarf, a black jacket over a dark turtleneck.

She carried a bag on her shoulder. The station was warm. They stood beside each other for several minutes, listening for the sound of an approaching train. He felt the perspiration forming on his neck, above the collar of his jacket. She as looking at him. She said something to him and he turned to look at her.

She said something about the pack he wore on his back. He realized that she was looking at his pack. He understood that she was asking him a question, did he know something about the pack, but he was unsure of the words he heard her say. The pack was a gift he had received the day before. She was gesturing toward the pack and repeating some of the same words. He thought she was asking him where he had bought the pack.

I don’t know, he said to her.

She looked at him with an expression that mixed indifference and pity, extended her hand and pulled up the open zipper on the side of the pack that faced her.

He realized immediately that she had asked him if he knew that his pack was open. He smiled at her as the train pulled up on the platform.

Thank you, he said. They both got onto the train.

The car was very crowded. He found a space between several people standing on the car, enough room for him to put down the bag with the protruding flowers and turn his back towards another standing passenger without hitting that person with his backpack. The woman who had spoken to him, who had nothing to carry but her handbag, inserted herself between two tall African men who continued to talk to each other around the metal pole.

They were separated in the car by several people. He couldn’t continue the conversation. He wanted to explain to her that he had not understood her question at first, that he did not speak the language really, but that she was very kind to notice that he had left one side of his new pack unzipped. She was very considerate to do this for a stranger. He tried to form complete phrases and sentences in his mind. He recalled how to say you are very kind but he was unsure if he was remembering kind or gentle. He wanted to say considerate but he had no idea what the word for this concept would be. He thought the car would empty soon, once they passed a few stations where people changed to other lines, and then he would have a chance to say something to her, if he could just compose something appropriate in his mind first. He glanced at her several times. She was looking out the window. Once she was looking towards him. The train was above ground now, running along elevated tracks that curved as they approached a station. It was now dark, and he watched the lights along the canal reflected in the windows of the train. He saw her reach into her handbag and bring out her cell phone. He saw an open seat and decided that he would move to the seat when the train stopped. As he arranged his bag on the

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floor and balanced himself leaning his backpack against the seat, he looked over his shoulder to see where she was. She was no longer on the train.

He was thinking about the time when he was a school teacher for very young children. This was thirty years ago, in a college town surrounded by wheat fields and grazing cattle. The train continued along the elevated tracks and then descended into the tunnel. He had been attending graduate school and working most of the day as a teacher. His students were five and six and seven years old, and he had spent most of his day teaching them how to read. He learned a great deal. He saw how different the children were, and observed that how well or poorly they could read had little to do with their age. Some of the children learned to read and others had learned that they did not know how to read. The ones that could not read seemed to use all their intelligence to hide this from the adults. They used their memory, the things they heard others say, and any context around them to survive in a world where they were supposed to understand the symbols that were placed in front of them. Some of them were very sad and frustrated by their condition, but others were defiant and clever.

He learned that they were all intelligent. They could have used the same intelligence to accomplish what the adults expected them to know, but somehow they couldn’t do it.

Do you remember when you learned how to read? he asked her. She had placed the flowers in the empty vase. The table was set. She had gone to look at the vegetables she was preparing. He thought he was late, because of the time he had spent buying the flowers, but her cooking of the food had matched his arrival.

What? she asked.

Do you remember when you started to read words? he repeated.

No. She was sitting next to him on the couch. She put his pack and his coat on the floor to make room for herself beside him.

When I studied Chinese I had to learn the sounds, which had four different tones. I had to learn the writing system. He drew a character on his palm with his index finger. There was a specific order to the strokes that made up each character. So you had to learn the number of strokes and the order to make each character. I understood that each character was a word and a sound, but they were all separate things. I had seen the characters for many years, in museums on stones and paintings, and on menus in restaurants. I heard the sounds. I learned to hear the tones. Then one day I was looking at some writing in a book and I heard the sound for each character and I understood what the word meant at the same time. I could read. I could see and hear the words. Everything changed.

She was looking at him. He took off his shoes. When I see them now I don’t remember what they mean anymore, but I will always remember how it felt, he said. Everything changed.

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17. Breakfast (1) There’s water in the basement. He woke up saying this to her, as he turned to put his arm over her body and hold her. She moved his arm so that his hand was over her breast. He had been fixing a mechanism, a door that lifted up from a bench-like structure built into the wall. Inside the bench was water and a rod locked into a hole below the waterline, supporting the door when it closed. He reached into the water to guide the rod into the hole. He had figured out it was easier to remove the rod from the door, secure it in the hole, and then close the door so that the rod fit into a slot on the inside of the door. It had taken some trial and error to discover this simple solution, rather than trying to close the door with the rod already in place, which is how he had begun. He took the rod in his hand and felt along the bottom for the place where it fit. The water was neither particularly cold nor dirty as he put his hand into it. But it made him think of the basement. He went to another door and looked down the stairwell.

There was water in the basement. Of course, he thought, he would have to clean that up also.

He described this to her as they sat on opposite sides of the table they used when eating meals at her apartment. The larger table was covered with papers arranged in piles that neither of them wanted to disturb. The table where they now ate was smaller and easy to move around. He was using a spoon to move the jam from a jar to the bread she had toasted. She had shown him how to do this.

She had a series of dreams, she said. In the last one she was in a group of people visiting an enormous castle. The tour was led by a woman from the family that owned the castle. She was an old woman, very narrow and dressed in a simple but elegant fashion. She carefully explained the history of the building and the objects in each room. She spoke very slowly. Later they learned that she had died. The entire staff and surrounding village became involved in organizing her elaborate funeral. The tour group was swept up in these preparations. Tables were being brought into the hallways, heavy cloth was draped over the tables, dishes were being placed on the cloth. They entered a room in which an enormous bier had been prepared to exhibit the old woman’s body. The structure was several stories high. As they approached it, they could see it was actually a complex machine with moving parts, like a huge locomotive.

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18. Vermont His apartment had a terrace. It was a large terrace, the size of a room, surrounded by walls of wooden lattice fastened to a low concrete wall. Concrete posts, painted white, rose from points of the wall, joined by black metal rods.

But this hard wall was largely hidden by the wooden lattice, and in front of the wood were plants. There were six large plants in large pots when he arrived.

Some of the pots were clay while others were plastic in the same shape and color as the clay. The plants were all alive, but neglected. They were shapeless and sparse with the exception of a pear tree trained to an iron rod. This small tree was carefully trimmed and shaped, though there were no flowers or fruit, only small leaves.

Because the buildings were on a steep hill, the terrace was even with the roofs of the buildings on the street across the courtyard. His own building rose five stories above his apartment. There were no other terraces visible, only windows with plant boxes, the stairwell of his own and other buildings. Below on one side of the terrace was a courtyard connecting part of the buildings, filled with green plants. On the other side was an alley between buildings, empty and unconnected to the street, as far as he could see.

He spent several days looking at the buildings and trying to understand what he was seeing in relation to the buildings he saw as he walked along the street. It took several weeks before he could understand how the buildings joined to form what he saw from the terrace. One day he was walking along the large street and recognized the scaffolding on one building that was being cleaned. When he saw the same scaffolding from the terrace that evening, it all fell into place. The red brick walls that rose over the roofs to the north were not the buildings he had thought they were, not the tops of the buildings that rose above a small cul de sac a few buildings up the hill from the front door of his building. They were the backs of buildings on another street. He had been fooled by the way the streets curved as they went up the hill. He had seen the pattern entirely wrong at first, but from that day he understood what he was looking at.

He could see a large part of the sky facing west. It was both dramatic and simple, a large view of the sky within the city. The roofs of the buildings blocked out any view of the city below them. He could see the upper windows of the buildings beyond the roofs, on the north side of the main street, but the expanse of the city flowing down the hill to the north, filling the basin out to the banks of the river, the train yards, the elevated highway that separated the city from the suburbs lined with tall office buildings, all this was blocked from view.

The first evenings he was fascinated by the clouds at sunset. The afternoon clouds gave way to bright sun as the summer day ended. There was often a break in the clouds near the horizon. The sunlight would pour into the bedroom through the large window that also served as the door between the bedroom and the terrace. If she was in the apartment she would say something about the sunset, and he would hear her walk out onto the terrace. He would come out after putting down whatever he was doing and find her staring at the sky. The clouds would be moving, usually towards the east and south. The clouds would catch the sunlight and change from gray to colors of yellow, red, or blue, never pure colors, never clearly one color or another, always mixtures of these colors he could name. They were the colors of clouds at sunset.

He took a photograph one evening at sunset. He was alone in the apartment in the evening. They had bought more plants, spreading them along the edge of the wooden lattice, training them to grow up into the gaps on the wood. Still, it was

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sparse and the brown color of the wood was much stronger than the color of the green leaves. It was late summer before they bought the plants and there were few flowers on them. The photograph of the sky was dark and undramatic, he thought when he saw it printed. The silhouette of the roofs was visible and the glow of the clouds.

It was autumn now, but the evenings were often warm enough to allow him to sit on the terrace without a jacket or sweater. He sat on the terrace in the evening and listened. Most of the sounds were cars and motorcycles coming up and down the hill. He could hear the clinking of plates from kitchens, the sound of running water from a sink. There was a low hum in the silence between the sounds.

When he looked up he could see several stars. There was a path traced by planes leaving or approaching the airport to the north. These were blinking lights drifting out of view. There was one bright star always visible on clear nights, nearly overhead. Vega, he thought, though he did not know for certain. Several other faint stars reminded him of a part of the Big Dipper.

When he had lived in the Green Mountains, he became aware of the sound of water flowing. The small camp where he spent the winter and spring was near the end of a road that led to the parking area of a trail head. It was several hours by foot from the trail head to the summit of the mountain. The road ran along a creek, crossing back and forth as it rose from the river that ran between the mountains. To return home each day, he drove his car first along the river road and then along a smaller road that followed the creek up the mountain, over bridges and culverts that guided the water from smaller creeks into the large one. The culverts prevented the flowing water from undermining and washing out the road.

When he stopped his car and opened the door, there was silence. There were only a few houses on the road where people lived out the winter, and these were out of sight from the camp. The nearest town was many miles away and below him, where a highway crossed the river. The silence soon became the sound of water flowing over rocks. On a still night the sound of the water on the rocks was very loud. It was loudest from the direction of the creek, but he became aware of softer sounds coming from other directions. It was a sound of constant motion, unlike the sound of waves along the shore or the ebb and flow of wind through the trees that surrounded the camp. He would close his eyes and try to see the lines that represented the creeks on the topographic map he kept pinned to the wall of the camp. He tried to associate the sounds with the lines. There were dozens of lines, then hundreds, then thousands of lines of flowing water tracing the contours of the mountain. The image began to form into a mass of red lines diverging from a point at the crest, spreading outward.

The sounds of moving cars had a rhythm, a rise toward a pitch that would crest, then descend suddenly and die away. It was a sound that moved against the gravity of the hill. The opening of windows, the closing of shutters, the plates striking each other in a sink were random.

He tried to imagine the sound of a carriage being pulled by a horse over the cobblestones on the street.

This morning he had trouble waking up. The alarm had gone off gently and he had turned it off, stumbled out of the bedroom, through the hallway and into the bathroom to relieve himself. Then he had walked back into the bedroom, guiding himself by holding his hands against the walls, and lay down again. His body was still tired. He moved his hand over to touch the side of her body. He lay very still on his back. In a short time he was dreaming.

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He was moving from place to place. The series of actions led to a trip that required crossing a bridge. The elevator to the bridge entrance was full, so he walked up to the entrance. There was a long line of people waiting to cross, so he took his place in line, waiting patiently. Beside the line he saw a baby carriage, a folding stroller. There was a bag hanging from one handle. He looked at it. There was no one beside the stroller. He heard a small voice, a child singing, like the soundtrack of a cartoon. Help me, help me, help me please. He went to examine the bag. He heard the song again, and then a small blond head came out of the bag. Help me, help me, help me please. We’re from Vermont! It was a small child and bag was filled with fish. Trout, he thought. How many children are in the bag, he thought. He seemed to see another head emerge and then disappear among the fish heads and tails. He called over a police woman who was standing by the line of people. She looked at the bag and the stroller.

He had done the right thing, he was thinking, the police would find the mother who had left her children in the bag. They were from the place where he had lived in the Green Mountains. He heard the song again. Help me, help me, help me please. We’re from Vermont! He had a sudden feeling of compassion. He wanted to take care of the children. There was really nothing more important that he had to do. The police woman had been talking to someone on a cell phone as she pushed the stroller with the bag away from the line of people. He had seen her go off in that direction. He stepped out of line and wandered away in the same direction. She and the stroller were nowhere in sight.

As they walked down the street toward the metro station, he held his arm against his body to create a space for her to place her arm. He liked to feel the warmth of her arm, but it was difficult to walk down the street this way. People passed on the narrow sidewalk walking in the opposite direction and they separated, allowing the people to pass them. As they approached the intersection of the metro stop, they crossed in the middle of the street, between the moving cars. They stepped over the water that flowed along the gutters on both sides of the street. The water flowed out of the places on the curb and quietly moved down the street, flushing the leaves and trash in the gutter. On the sidewalk he felt her hand holding his hand again. Her hand was large and warm, the same size as his hand, and slightly moist. They continued to walk briskly. They moved to the right to avoid a woman who was standing on the sidewalk, facing a store window. She was holding a stroller. There were two blond children standing beside the stroller, looking at the things in the window. The two children were the same height, dressed in similar clothing. As he passed them he could hear them talking excitedly about the objects in the window.

He looked back over his shoulder after passing them. They were still standing there, talking and looking at the window.

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19. Breakfast (2) He looked through the restaurant window. His breakfast was arranged on the plate: a fried egg, a large strip of bacon, a fried sausage, a slice of brown pudding, a stewed tomato, cooked mushroom caps. Each item was hot, placed beside another item. Outside the window a fine rain was blowing against the glass. With his fork he pushed the wet yoke across the egg white. He took his knife in his other hand and began to slice the sausage into small sections.

Buses went by outside the window. Each bus had the name of a place on the front, written in green lights on a white panel. He watched as -fords, -stocks, monts, greens, and -hams went by. They were going from the train station to the neighborhoods and nearby towns. He opened the slice of butter, carefully unwrapping the foil, trying not to get butter on his fingers. He spread the butter on the piece of toasted bread, then wiped his fingers on the paper napkin resting on his lap.

He remembered the sunlight yesterday when he arrived on the train. This place was so lovely when the sun shown on the stone walls. There were so many buildings made from stone. In the rain the stone was cold and dark. It is the same stone, he thought. It is the same street. It is the same town, in the daylight or in the night, in the rain or in the sunlight.

What happens in the mind, he thought, when you see a place and it makes you feel something. Where does the feeling come from, where is it stored. Do the eyes absorb some energy. There must be a pattern, he thought.

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20. Movies Good evening.

And how are you?

Fine. I’m fine. It took me a few minutes to get up from the chair and remember where I left the phone.

Were you sleeping? I’m sorry if I woke you up.

No, no. I was listening to some music with my eyes closed. I was sitting in the green chair. I’m not tired. I had a nice day.

What did you do?

I went out. I’ll tell you about it when you come back. I went to see a movie this evening. Something happened at the end of the movie. It was the kind of film that makes no sense but parts of it were very real. There were scenes in a garden apartment complex, the kind of two-story apartments where you walk into the courtyard and all the apartments have a door that open from the courtyard. I had been in the same courtyard once, visiting my brother. Parts of the movie were from my past. There was a lot of lip syncing, songs with people pretending to sing them.

What?

When I was a kid there would be concerts, top 40 music concerts, run by local radio stations. The people who made the music we listened to on the radio would perform their hit songs. But there was no band. The music on the radio was played by studio musicians, they weren’t played by the groups that performed. Most of the groups were only singers. So they would stand on the stage and sing along with the record. They would play the record through the sound system in the gym or the auditorium.

What made you think of that tonight?

This movie. Movies are the greatest art form. They take over your mind, they transport you. When I walked back from the theater it was dark. The things I saw and heard were part of the movie. There was a man sitting in his car at the traffic light. He was studying a map. The light was on inside his car. There was a dog standing in the middle of the art gallery. All the lights were on in the gallery. The dog was barking. As I walked by it kept barking. It didn’t move at all as I walked by. It seemed to be staring at the white truck parked on the curb outside the gallery. There were two people, a man and a woman, standing behind the counter of the food shop next to the gallery. They were standing there dressed in white aprons, staring at the glass door. There was no one in the place, the tables were all empty, there were no customers. They were smiling, both of them, staring at the door. I couldn’t tell if they saw me or not. I passed the fruit and vegetable store.

The owner was there. He was starting to take the boxes of fruit inside. He was lifting the first box as I came up the sidewalk. I said good evening to him. He said good evening to me and asked if I was alright. Good, I said. The movie is over.

What did you see?

I’ll tell you about it when you come back. Have you ever been in a movie?

No.

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Do you remember that time you left me in your apartment?

Yes. That time I stayed in your apartment for days. I thought you would come back.

When you didn’t come back, I watched all the films you had, all the videotapes of the documentaries piled up behind the VCR in the cabinet.

What did you think of them?

They were okay. I didn’t understand the narration, but it wasn’t a problem. I knew what they were about. There was a scene with the woman who restores the medieval tapestries. I remember you telling me about asking her questions, so I watched that film several times. I knew you were there. But I couldn’t see you. So I slowed it down and watched the woman’s glasses. I thought I might see you reflected in her glasses.

Did you see me?

No. Why are you telling me this?

I was remembering what it’s like to be an actor in a movie. It’s horrible.

When were you in a movie?

One time. Just once. A film student asked me to be in one of his films. I was the father of the hero. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. They had all this equipment, all these lights and cables, microphones on booms, cameras and stands and cans of film. Light meters. This guy walked around with a light meter around his neck. They would take an hour to put everything in the right place. They kept moving the lights and putting colored cellophane over the lights with clothespins.

They did this for an hour and then they told me to do the scene. I was supposed to fight with this kid, the hero. It took a few minutes. We got all worked up, we yelled and shoved each other. I had to say a few lines and shove him. Then we had to wait while they moved the lights around again. It was the most unreal thing I have ever done. You have no idea what the camera sees. Everything is chopped up into little scenes, little cuts. It feels like you are cut up into little pieces. Sorry. I was just thinking about it. I didn’t mean to be difficult. How is the party?

Fine. It’s a very nice place. We’re in the country. I’ll call you tomorrow.

Have a good night.

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21. The Winter Coat He put out the cigarette by rubbing the glowing end against the impression of a green sea turtle at the bottom of the ashtray. She was on the other end of the phone. She was asking him if he wanted to return to the city he’d come from to spend the holiday. They could fly there together. They could leave next week.

Why, he was thinking, why is she asking me this question? What is she trying to do now?

The air was cold and clear. The weather had changed. After many days of clouds, light rain and fog, the temperature had dropped. The soapy water spilled from a bucket by the woman who cleaned the apartment building had turned to ice on the sidewalk. A few days before the leaves had fallen from the trees in great piles. Men worked all day to sweep the leaves and gather them in bags loaded onto trucks. Then the air became clear.

He woke up at six a.m. He was alone in the bed. He put on the clothes he had been wearing the night before and went down to the street. There was no sign of dawn at this hour. The winter solstice was approaching and the sky was a clear dark black color. He walked down the cul de sac he looked at from his window, leading to stairs connecting to another street. A woman was putting a bag into the trash bin on the sidewalk. There were lights on in two apartments. He began to walk up the steps, toward the top of the hill. A taxi passed on the narrow street. He could hear the sound of coughing and labored breathing. The air was still and very quiet. Nothing was moving. There were no cars moving on the street and he realized the coughing was coming from someone behind him. A man ran by him, moving very slowly.

He reached the top and stood on the road in front of the cathedral, looking down the steps that led down the other side of the hill. There was a man sweeping the area in front of the cathedral. His truck sat parked nearby, the engine idling.

He looked down at the city. It was dark. Overhead he could see a crescent moon, and two bright stars. He turned to walk through the plaza. There were no chairs for diners in the center. There was no one walking between the restaurants. A man got into a delivery truck and drove away. He could see a man in one restaurant moving chairs. He was returning to his apartment by a different route, tracing a circle around the top of the hill. As he passed a nearby apartment building, he noticed a light. All the rooms facing the street were lit on the second floor. The windows were thrown open in one room. A man dressed in a business suit was visible for a moment, moving across the room. As he came closer to his own apartment he saw the light coming from a window. This was his apartment. It was the only light in the building. The street was completely silent.

She had put on her winter coat that morning, the red parka with the synthetic fur around the hood. This was the coat she had worn when she came to visit him in the winter several years before. He had warned her that it was very cold during the holiday week. It was usually the coldest time of the year.

She wanted to go away. She wanted to escape from this world. She wanted to discover another place, the place he came from, with him. When she took off her coat, she called him. What do you think, she asked him.

He had noticed the sunlight appear beyond the buildings on the cul de sac about an hour after he returned to the apartment. He was already working, his weight

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fixed in the chair, reading and writing. He had been in this position for some hours by the time she called him.

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22. His Body He had reached the point where he could sense many of the feelings in her body.

He could not feel the sensations themselves, but he could feel their effects. He concentrated on the sensations and this gave him a kind of power, a control that he had always wanted. What he could control was himself, his own body, the way he moved, the way his muscles tensed and relaxed, the strength he could raise in his arms and legs, the variations of pressure he could apply with his hands, moving and pressing individual fingers, the tops of his fingers, or using them in combinations, then as groups and as extensions of his arm, palm, and wrists. He used his arms to balance the weight of his torso, raise his chest, rise up into the air. He discovered new ways to use his hands and his pelvis to distribute his weight.

By thinking about her feelings through his contact with her body, he could forget about himself in a way that pleased him. He was there in relation to her, and the thoughts and images that flowed through his mind were a problem he could solve by concentrating on his physical presence. The images would appear as thoughts, memories, and the feelings that came with the thoughts were difficult to control when he was alone. When he didn’t know what she was doing, his mind would generate endless sequences of memories. He would remember all the times she had been with someone else. He would experience intense feelings of jealousy.

When he was alone he would start by lying on his side and curling his arms and legs towards his torso. He would raise the covers over his shoulders and force his face into the pillow. This position would last for some moments, as the heat of his body would transfer to the bed and the covers. His limbs would become warm and he would stretch his body out into the empty bed, feeling the chill on the sheets. He would begin to roll away from the direction he had begun to curl in slow movements. His body would settle with gravity in each position, and then some impulse would make him roll again, shifting his weight. This would stop when he reached a position on his stomach and he would sleep.

He would usually wake up in a different position. He moved in his sleep.

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23. The Pasture from the Train She opened the door and stood on the wooden porch. As she got out of the bed she had pulled on heavy woolen socks and a white cotton slip. He had gotten up first, opening the door of the bedroom, pushing back the shutters from the doorway to the porch, letting in the first light. He had announced the presence of the horses in the field. Then he had returned to the bedroom to put on his clothes.

They had stopped in a bar to have a drink, a glass of beer, and a sandwich.

Though there was one group of people finishing a meal, it was too late to have a proper lunch. The kitchen had already closed. They were driving along small roads between the villages, crossing the railroad tracks from west to east and back to the west. She was looking for a lake, and a building with a tower. He would pause the car at the crossroads, and she would gesture as she looked back and forth between the landscape outside the windshield and the map she cradled on her lap.

When they left the bar, she placed all the slips of paper and the map on her lap and put on her glasses so she could read the phone numbers. If she didn’t choose a place it would be dark again. He was reminding her, but she knew the time.

She pressed the numbers on the phone with one hand while she balanced the map with the other hand. She reached an agent, who listed off the names of three places. She drew circles with a pencil around each village on the map. She pointed out a narrow road towards the south on the map, and he turned the car towards the intersection, then down the road towards the next destination. Their next destination was an industrial town where she had gone to work when she was still a university student. She had told him about it many times.

It was dark when she reached the agent on the phone again, and received instructions on how to find the place they would stay. They were coming out of the chateau where she had worked thirty years before. They had entered one of the two conical structures inside the entrance gate that frames the entry to the great house as the guide unlocked the doors and switched on the electric lights.

These buildings had originally been furnaces which accounts for their exterior shape, the guide explained, but when they became obsolete this one was converted into an ornate theatre with orchestra pit, mechanical walls and wings for moving sets. He moved his hands over the velvet seats as the guide pointed out the central box where the family viewed the performances. They descended below the level of the seats, into a space lined with dressing rooms for the performers. Only wall mirrors and benches remained. Another door led to a tunnel where the tram tracks remained in the floor. These tunnels were where the servants and other workers entered and exited the chateau. The view of the woodlands to the north had not changed. The windows of the bedrooms, displaying portraits of the family that had created the factories, faced the wooded hills, as bucolic that rainy afternoon as the days in previous centuries when the valley on the other side of the chateau filled with smoke from the forges. On the ground floor, one room was filled with a large mechanical model, raised on a platform and enclosed in glass. When he pressed a button, an electrical motor began to turn a shaft connected to a series of belts beneath the floor of the model. The arms and heads of figures beside the machines began to move. Hammers raised and lowered and wheels began to turn. At one bench, the arm of a figure rested on an anvil, the figure’s head tipped back, long disconnected from the mechanism which rose and fell as a belt turned a wheel beneath the floor.

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They walked to a butcher that was about to close. The butcher cut off slices of meat from the pieces behind the counter. He stood beside the cutting block, fingering the fat on a slab of meat while the woman totaled the purchase and explained how to drive to a market that would still be open. They walked back through the square where they had parked their car and drove to the market.

She went into the kitchen and found the carrots in a bag of vegetables, pushed into the drawer of the small refrigerator. She held the carrots in both hands as she looked around the dark room for her coat. She found it, a large sheepskin coat with fur on the collar and the arms. She had been walking past a clothing store a few weeks before, returning from a meeting, when she saw it on a rack through the window. She wanted a new coat for the winter. Now it was covering a chair by the door. She managed to throw it over her shoulders and then put her arms through the sleeves without putting down the carrots, pushing them through the sleeves. When her hands came out of the sleeves, she pushed two carrots inside the pockets while she located her black shoes. As she forced her socks into the shoes, she opened the door and stood on the wooden porch.

It was still raining. When they had arrived the night before, the rain was falling and everything was dark. They had found the cabin at the end of the dirt road.

The light was on and the door was open. The woman from the farm had apologized on the phone that it was too late to bring them a desert. She explained that it was their custom to bring a desert to guests on the first night.

The midwinter light was a pale gray. A misty rain was blowing through the air.

She could see it moving in waves, like blowing snow, but transparent so that the view of the fields was almost clear. In front of her the pasture fell away towards a small pond. The pasture was separated into curving sections by low trimmed hedges and wire fences. It fell away from the porch, and rose again, continuing towards the line of trees, and then continued in rolling motions towards other hedge rows and tree lines towards the horizon of rain. At the crest of the last visible rise in the pasture she could see the shapes of hills mixing with the clouds.

Sometime in the morning, the train had stopped in the middle of pastures. There was light snow on the fields and a glaze of ice hanging from the tree branches.

The slowing of the train had brought her back from a shallow sleep, and now the sudden absence of any motion created a profound silence. Everything had stopped and she opened her eyes. She looked out the window of the train and saw a small lake surrounded by pastures that rolled up and down in curves that made her think of human bodies lying on the earth. She stared out the window.

She wanted to get out of the train. She wanted to pass through the window and move over the fields, flying and drifting, resting in the branches of a tree beside the pond. A voice announced that the train had stopped because of ice on the tracks, but it would resume shortly. The voice apologized for the delay. She reached into her bag and took out the phone. She wanted to tell him what she saw out the window.

As she stood on the wooden porch, she scanned the places where the pasture fell, looking for evidence of the train tracks. Then she saw the horses. One was white and the other was brown. They moved closer towards the fence that separated the pasture from the dirt road. The white horse tried to bite the neck of the brown one, and they snorted at each other. She could see the patches of mud caked into their coats. She pulled the hood of the coat over her hair and stepped down from the porch into the mist, walking briskly to the fence. The horses approached slowly. She took a carrot from the pocket of her coat, snapped it into pieces and held her hands over the fence.

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24. Bamboo As they came out of the doorway of the apartment building they both noticed the pavement was wet. It was dark, but the light across the street reflected off the pavement. He felt the drops on his face. Do you want to get the umbrella, she asked. He looked at the ground. He felt drops in the air. A warm breeze blew some drops in his face.

No, he said. He reached over and put the hood of her coat over her head. He had to tuck the strands of her hair into the hood. What about you, she said. I’m fine, he said, and began to walk up the street. This coat is fine. She reached for his collar. Do you have a hood, she asked.

I don’t know, he replied. You do, she said and she began to pull a zipper she had found on the collar. She began to take out the strings and thin cloth of the hood.

It’s okay, he said. He had stopped to let her pull on the collar. I’ll take it out if I need it. If it really starts to rain. She pulled the zipper back to shut the collar. A reflex caused him to pat the side of his coat, feeling for his wallet. He kept it in a pocket on the inside of the jacket.

I forgot my wallet, he said. I’ll run upstairs and get it. He turned and disappeared into the doorway they had just passed through.

She stood still on the sidewalk and felt the wind on her face. The street was quiet. She felt something moving. She stepped into the street. The sound was coming from across the street. She followed the sound.

She was standing on the sidewalk, facing the white concrete wall of the corner building. She tipped her head backwards. She had looked at the building from the apartment window many times. Above the wall a railing was lined with a woven fence made from sticks so that it was not possible to see the terrace of the building. Behind that terrace was another white wall with a window, and above that a smaller terrace, also concealed by a railing blocked by a fence of sticks. The sound was coming from the plants that arched over the railing. It was a breathing sound. She looked up and all she could see was the branches swaying as the wind moved down the street.

All she could see as she looked up were the branches moving against the sky.

Though it was night, the cloudy sky was a dark gray, reflecting the light of the city below. The green of the branches was illuminated by the streetlight, silhouetted against the night sky. The branches were bending together but each moved in a different way, swaying as the wind passed over her face. The branches swayed and bent and then sprang back to point towards the sky, each with its own rhythm. The earth they were growing from was concealed by the fence. There seemed to be countless branches.

When he came out of the apartment doorway, the sidewalk was empty. A car was double parked across the street with blinkers flashing. He scanned the street and saw her standing in front of the wall. He didn’t speak. He had to walk past several cars parked tightly together before he could find an opening to reach the sidewalk. He stood beside her for a moment. She was looking up. He followed her gaze, looking for the object she was focused on.

They are like animals, she said without moving her head.

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What are you looking at, he asked.

The bamboo, she said.

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25. Blues on the radio He could hear a song coming from the radio in another room of the apartment.

I’ve got a sweet little angel I love the way she spreads her wings I’ve got a sweet little angel I love the way she spreads her wings When she spreads her wings around me I get joy and everything The world is a clock, he thought, a subtle and complex clock. Cosmic objects move in relation to each other, and he was watching this from the surface of a dial. The moon was visible in the west from the terrace. The sunlight glowed behind the apartment building to the east.

It must be morning and these directions are the movements of the sun.

He understood this through pictures he drew. He drew a circle, a trajectory, and marked an angle of view.

He inferred what he could not see. He projected shapes that occurred in his imagination. His imagination grew from the mixture of what he saw and what he felt. He saw a flat cushion, a wheel, a cross, a human figure wearing a hood. He saw a window illuminated across the alley from the window in his kitchen. He composed a person framed in the window from moving elements reflecting the light.

I’ve got a I love the way she When she spreads her wings I get joy and

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sweet spreads around everything

little angel her wings me

Périple

26. The Key She put the key in the small round ceramic dish. The night before it had been used for the wine bottle. They had finished the wine, and he had put the empty bottle on the floor, next to the pantry in the kitchen. She put the breakfast dishes in the sink, and when she returned to the table, she put the key in the dish. This is for you, she said.

A few months ago, some of her mail had disappeared, then reappeared weeks later. She thought someone had been trying to pick the lock on her door. When she had changed the lock on the door of her apartment she had not given him a key. He still had the key to the door on the ground floor, and he would often come up without ringing the buzzer in the lobby, then knock with his knuckles against the door. Sometimes it took several knocks before she heard him.

For me? he said.

It’s my only spare key, she said.

She had to leave early this morning, to take her car to be repaired. He looked at the key. He had noticed it several times, lying in a dish on the counter by the front door of her apartment.

Thank you, he said.

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27. Getting Out of Bed She didn’t like to get out of bed in the morning without making love. It reminded her too much of life with her husband, how it had been each morning for so many years. To simply exit from the tent of sheets without engaging in sex was pointless. It was a defeat she would not support without a fight and he understood her need for something he felt to be a mutual affirmation. He would surprise her or himself with a mixture of surrender and aggression, placing his hand on her back to remind himself where he was and who he was with. He was with her, after all, each time he woke to feel her beside him in a bed, even when he rose before she noticed. He would return because he understood this was a way to act. He had experienced many solitary mornings and seen the sun rise alone. This was a ritual of being singular, but when he was with her he was alone only for some moments that appeared like flashes of sunlight passing through the window of a train car, flashing a composition on his nerves that he composed alone and would not transform into a conversation. He would place a hand against her body and he would be at the edge of his fingers, entering her through the space they made together. He would disappear and re-emerge a force composed of limbs and trunk and sex stretched out and singing like a wire in the wind.

There were days when her body seemed to fail her. Her face would collapse, as if a clear shape had slipped off the edge of her skin and she didn’t know where to place her appearance. Anger would fold her mouth and her eyes would look down at some object on the ground, meant to be elsewhere but suddenly noticed where it had hidden for days or perhaps for years behind a plant or a book leaning against another book she’d read during those years when she’d lay in bed and had time for everything but what she’d wanted. What she wanted then was to be on a ship, sailing along the coast. She would be part of the crew of friends, and together they would enter another port and she would toss the line to the man on the quay and then leap across to take the line herself and secure it to the iron post set in the stone.

He looked down at the iron post set in the granite dock. It’s a beautiful boat, she said, that one make of wood and fiberglass. He nodded, remembering the story as he smelled the mixture of seaweed and oil floating between the docks. When he woke at dawn the sky was clear blue. The storm of the night before had blown out and the receding tide was lit by a bright cold light rising over the buildings.

It was a low winter light, the sun coming up late, but the blue color made the clouds of shore birds sparkle as they shifted in the wind from rock to rock. He sensed this would be the best part of the day, and after the breakfast of bread and coffee they walked along the shore. He liked to listen to the sound of rocks, shells and sand beneath his boots. He liked to feel the shells breaking as he stepped onto the mass left by the receding tide.

The wind convinced them to return to the car and drive to the harbor. By then the sky was dark and the rain began to blow over them as they walked along the quay examining the menus posted outside the restaurants. Here comes the rainbow, he said as he jammed his hands into the outer pockets of his coat.

Though it was almost noon, the low sun slanted across the rain and lit an arch that stretched from the side of the harbor to their left, across the bay, then setting on the shoreline visible to the north. They both stopped. The arches of color deepened and brightened. The bottom arc was violent purple blending into the dark gray of the rain.

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28. The Dream of Europe She had mentioned to him that she had a complicated dream. It was sometime during the night. It was warm. The comforter was heavy and he moved it off his body, thrust his leg out and rolled the comforter back, placing his leg on top of it, exposed to the air. He pulled himself up and walked to the window facing the street. He opened the window by turning the brass handle. This lifted the rod at the bottom of the window and lowered the rod at the top. He swung the right side of the window towards him, leaving the left side against the frame. He reached for a folding chair he kept nearby, placing it against the open window to prevent it from closing. He smelled the fresh night air and felt it cool against his skin. Through the leaves of the tree that rose from the sidewalk, he could see a couple emerging from a taxi. The taxi turned around on the quiet street. As he withdrew into the darkened room, he could hear a man speaking to his companion on the street.

His throat was dry. He turned and felt his way into the kitchen. He read the time on the microwave beside the refrigerator before he removed the bottle of water.

The clock said 3:38.

They had been listening to a recording of guitars before going to bed. It was not the music of this place where they lived. It was the music of the south. The song was in the language of a country to the south, and the rhythms were lively, syncopated, rocking from beat to beat. But the singer was not from the country where the language had originated. He was from an island across the ocean. He drank the cold water and returned to the bed.

He offered her a drink. She lifted herself with her arms, carefully took the bottle from his hands, drank from it, and placed it on the floor beside the bed.

He reached his legs away from her body, searching for a place for them to rest. I will tell you about the dream in the morning, she said. His head was quite empty.

There were no images. He remembered jumping slightly and wanting to float, wanting to rise up into the air without the reminder that gravity would return him immediately to the floor.

The morning was lovely. Sun illuminated the room, passing through the light green curtains. The sound of cars came in with the light breeze. We were going to a party, she began. He had put some cheese on the toast. He was starting to eat.

His head was empty except for the music from the night before. He could still hear the music. He realized she was going to tell him about her dream.

We were all given costumes to wear. We each had to choose a dress. They were very elaborate. She moved her hands to suggest the shape of the flowing skirts and collars rising from the neck. There were brilliant colors, greens and blues. Very bright. And the jewels, she held a finger from her left hand between the fingers of her right, everything was very big. I found my ring, she stretched her thumb and her forefinger over the ring finger of her left hand to show how it extended from the area where the finger joined the hand to cover the knuckle. It was enormous. Everyone was dressed like this. He began to imagine these flowing gowns. He had no idea who the other figures were, what their faces looked like or what they were saying to each other.

This woman came in and she was dressed very differently. She didn’t put on one of the costumes. She wore a very plain dress. It was made from this material, she was holding the cloth napkin that lined the bread basket on the table between them, very plain and not at all colorful in that way. It was a simple brown with black

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trim. She was very tall and slim. I like to photograph the silhouettes of the people, she said to me. We were standing there looking at the crowd and she could see the shapes of their bodies through the dresses. She explained that she sculpted assemblages from these silhouettes that she made with the photographs. I was to work with her on this project. She looked at him, quite amazed by her own story.

What do you think? she asked him.

He was listening to her, but he was thinking about something else. He was thinking about the concept that one religion, one tradition of how to act, one definition of the meaning and purpose of everything, is superior to all others.

The idea that one religion must dominate and destroy or displace all other systems of belief. He was thinking about a phrase from a book.

In the Heavens there are many great lights.

In the Heavens there are the sun and the moon.

But on earth there can be only one King.

The costumes were a form of culture, an extension of the body’s appearance.

They were related to a system of belief, a definition of beauty. It occurred to him that the contrast between the women clothed in the flowing gowns with high collars and the thin woman in the plain cotton shift was the perfect expression of the poles of her culture. The one could see through the other to the common body underneath. Then this woman artist would transform it into art. It’s an interesting dream, he said. It might be interesting to be a sculpture’s assistant.

She used the spoon to take jam from the jar and place it on the toast. He learned how to do this, separating the implements used to spread the butter, a knife, from the one used to move the jelly or jam from the jar. He always set the table with a knife and a spoon now. He realized when he first saw her do this that it was the proper way to keep the two kinds of food from mixing and becoming unclean.

Did you ever kill an animal to eat the meat? he asked. They were standing in the courtyard of the castle, facing the portico of an ancient door to the cathedral inside the castle walls. This doorway was probably opened only on ceremonial occasions. The mosaics above the door had been recently restored and though the sunlight was not shining on them, they glistened. Between where they stood and the ancient doors was a metal gate from the last century, sealing off the entrance at the stairs that rose from the interior courtyard of the castle. The metal gate was black and carefully decorated with twelve metal sculptures, each one representing the activities of a month. They had walked up the steps to examine them closely. Earlier in the day he had looked closely at the huge dial of the astronomical clock in the center of the town. The huge lower dial turned once each day, and there was something inscribed on the spoke that marked each day. But now he was looking at the images for the months. The one he stood before presented a butcher at work. A pig was hanging upside down behind the portly figure of the butcher, a slit visible on the entire length of the animal’s belly. The butcher was holding the tools of his trade in both hands.

No, she said. She had never slaughtered an animal.

I’ve killed rabbits and chickens, he said. I felt bad about the rabbits, but I felt better when I ate them. He paused and ran his fingers over the belly of the pig.

Pigs are curious animals. You never see them in the fields.

They keep them in covered pens, she said.

Most of the rules have to do with how the blood is handled, and what you say before you kill the animal. The Muslims and the Jews each have their way to do it.

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They each have a prayer. People who hunted in America always thanked the animal before they killed it. My favorite is the way Mongols slaughter sheep. They choose the animal, lift it up and bind its feet together. The man doing the killing takes a very sharp knife and makes an incision here, he pressed his fingers against his own chest, while he talks to the animal. He reaches his entire hand into the incision and grabs the heart in his fist until it stops beating. Then he closes the eyes of the sheep. I saw it once. It was very quiet and very fast. One minute the sheep is jumping around and the next minute they are removing the skin. The blood stays in the muscles that way.

This is a useful thing to know, she said. I don’t think it would work with a pig.

A pig you should dress up in a uniform and then cut its throat, he said.

Really, she said. They began to walk into the courtyard. Banners were flapping in the wind, hanging over the entrance to a nearby building.

I want to see the paintings, she said.

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29. The House on the River They left the town by the same road they had entered late in the afternoon, a road that passed between the river bank and the cliffs on the north side of the valley. The river was wide and shallow. The road passed above it, separated by trees that held to the banks. He had driven directly into the afternoon sunlight, broken by the overhanging trees. He had not been able to look at the river, shading his eyes from the sun. Then there was a wooded island with buildings, and a bridge entering the old town. He saw a sign for parking and crossed the bridge to the island, turning down a small street. The building behind the parking place below the bridge seemed empty on the ground floor, but had a restaurant on the first and second floors facing the town. The sign on the corner said Tannery Street. As he emerged from the car, he could hear the water flowing around the pillars of the bridge. As the fresh air hit his face, he imagined the stench of curing leather and the waste water that once had poured into the river nearby. He locked the car with the key on the driver’s side and he heard the other locks click shut.

I miss my remote, he said, as she took his arm. They began to walk towards the steps leading up to the bridge. He held his hand out towards the car and gestured with his fingers, pressing his thumb onto his curled forefinger. He remembered the sound of the car locks and the blinking of the car’s lights. It is one of the greatest inventions of the Twentieth century.

What are you talking about?

Nothing, he said. He released her arm and walked towards an arch leading under the bridge. He wanted to empty the trash he had accumulated in his pocket during the drive into a receptacle he spotted attached to a pillar. From under the archway, he saw a couple emerge. They walked slowly across the road in the opposite direction and disappeared towards the river.

When they reached the top of the road that crossed the bridge, they were facing the castle. It was built on the cliff, above the town. The walls sloped up from the river bank. From the top of the walls, a stone building rose up with a delicate carved façade. As they approached the town she told him this had been the favorite residence of the king when the stone building had been created five hundred years ago.

Across the road he saw the couple that had appeared and then disappeared under the arch. The woman was covered in a black coat which hung like a tent over her obese frame. Her legs were enormous fleshy trunks tapering to small feet that shuffled slowly along the sidewalk. The man beside her was much smaller. He wore a cloth cap. Beneath his jacket he wore shorts made of a bright printed cloth. His exposed legs were pale and flabby.

The wind along the river was cold enough to make him close his jacket. They walked slowly over the bridge, focusing on the view of the castle. They paused to listen to the river flowing under the pillars. The enormous woman and the small man in shorts reached the opposite bank before them. The small man had been staring at the ground as he slowly moved his feet. As the couple reached the curb at the opposite bank, the man looked up. His face became alert, transformed from the passive expression of an animal being led into a pen. He looked at the traffic coming up the ramp entering the bridge. The couple stood on the sidewalk, waiting for an opportunity to cross.

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It was too late in the day to visit the castle. Tourists sat in the cafes, speaking to each other in various languages. Restaurants were empty, as waiters set the tables for the evening meal. As they walked by, tourists finished their drinks and the café waiters began to stack the chairs and move the tables inside for the night.

They moved along the street, beneath the shadow of the cliff-like castle wall that rose from the opposite sidewalk. At first he felt he was moving aimlessly down the street, but then he realized she was following a memory. As they reached the end of the tourist shops and restaurants, the street became a narrow passage between ancient buildings. The sidewalk was so narrow they had to walk single file when a car would pass. As they walked, he looked up the alleyways between the houses on his left. They led towards the cliff and he could see the doorways and windows of houses cut into the stone. People were living inside the cliff. He could hear the sound of chickens coming from one alley. Across the street the sound of pop music was flowing from an open window.

She continued to walk down the street, which became so narrow that the sidewalk disappeared on one side. He was behind her now and he watched her as she looked up at the sides of the buildings. There were no storefronts or signs now, only small houses, some with exposed wooden frames, two or three stories high, crowded against the street, blocking the view on either side. Sunset was approaching and the sky overhead was blue. The sun was bright against the cliff on their left, reflecting off the exposed limestone. They came to a place where the houses on the left ended and the road was against the cliff. Holes in the rock were filled with brick and cement, marking windows and doors of former homes.

The stone had collapses in places and the troglodytes had been abandoned.

What are you looking for, he asked.

It was this way, I think. She mentioned the name of the chateau where the famous painter and military engineer had spent his last years as a guest of the king. There were plans to build a new exhibition there and she wanted to see the building again.

If it’s this way there should be a sign, he said. They had come to a corner where a small road joined from the right. He looked up and saw the sign with the name of the chateau, pointing in the direction they were walking. She continued walking now down the center of the street. He turned around to look back towards the center of the town, to see if any cars were approaching. The road was silent and neither cars nor people were visible.

They arrived at the place where the narrow street split. To the left, the road rose towards a Nineteenth century house surrounded by a large iron fence. To the right, it fell towards a stone wall. Behind the stone wall they could see the spires of the small chateau. The road continued in a downward slope past the stone wall into a lane of overhanging trees.

Two young men were standing by the door in the wall, beside a small white van.

They were joking with each other and trading remarks with someone standing inside the doorway. Another young man was sitting on a motor bike in the middle of the road some distance down the slope. As they approached the wall, the man on the motor bike gunned the engine and raced up the road, making a tremendous noise.

It’s closed, he said. He looked at the plaques on the wall, stating the hours when the building was open to visitors. A worn stone sign announced the nature of the monument. The famous painter had died here in 1519. He gazed up at the

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delicate carved stonework around the windows of the building visible above the wall.

She was standing in front of the closed blue wooden door. She pushed it open.

Now she was facing a man who held the door with one hand. He was standing below her, at the bottom of the stone steps on the other side of the wall. He could see that the man was chewing something as she spoke to him. He could see a white seed stuck to the lower corner of the man’s mouth. She was asking if they could just come into the yard for a few moments. He was saying that the building was closed, she could come tomorrow, he was about to lock the gate.

She was explaining that she was working on the new exhibition and would not be here tomorrow, that she simply wanted to stand in the yard for a few moments and see the exterior of the building and the garden. The man held the door with one hand and looked at her as she spoke. When he replied his voice had a grating animal sound. His mouth continued to move in a chewing motion as he stepped backwards into the yard, still holding onto the large wooden door with one hand. She gestured towards him and they stepped through the wall into a yard.

Now it was night and they were driving out of the town. They had seen the sunset as they walked back along the narrow road, the few clouds turning pink and red above the roofs of the crowded houses on the side away from the cliff.

They drove along the road between the cliff and the river. He had seen a sign for the highway as they had approached the town and decided to head back in that direction. He turned at the sign and the car mounted another bridge across the river. As they crossed the river again, away from the lights of the town, she looked out the window.

Look at the stars, she said.

I’ll find a place to pull off the road, he said. Through the windshield he could see that the sky was remarkably clear. There was no moon. They were in an area of farms with few buildings near the road. He missed several places where he might have turned. Finally he pulled off on the grass shoulder of the two-lane road as they came to the crest of a small hill. He pressed the switch for the emergency lights to make their car visible. There were no buildings in sight, but cars and motorcycles were passing along the road.

They stood on the grass away from the car. The stars covered the sky. He could see the blinking lights of many airplanes mixed with the starlight. The blinking lights were drifting in several directions.

When was the last time you were here? There were an enormous number of lights in the black sky. He found the usual markers from the constellations he had learned to recognize, the Dippers, the W of Cassiopeia. They were difficult to see in the crowded sky. As cars sped past, their headlights momentarily obscured the view. He wished he had turned off the road and found a place to stop away from the traffic.

The last time I was here I was with my father. She calculated the year backwards from the year when he died. There was a meeting, a group he belonged to, in a town nearby. I drove him to the meeting and then we decided to spend the night.

He was watching the blinking lights of an airplane. He had located the North Star by following the line of stars in the Big Dipper and was calculating the direction the airplane was drifting. We decided to try to find the house where he was born. I knew it from a photograph. In the photo he was a little boy with curly hair standing in front of the house. So in the morning we drove along the river. He remembered that the house was near the river.

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He was remembering a photograph he had seen in a book. The photograph was taken from a telescope in space circling the Earth. In the photograph the fields of stars did no appear to be white dots of varying size and intensity. Against the black background of the page, the image of each star had a different color and shape. Many stars were spiral shaped, and each spiral was oriented on a different plane. There seemed to be no pattern. It reminded him of a swarm of insects around a light. The sky above him looked hard and flat. He could not distinguish the colors in the white points of light.

We found the house. It was near the road before we reached the town where he thought he had been born. We stopped to look at it, but no one was home. So we just walked around the yard.

It’s always much smaller, he said, turning his head to look at her. She was also looking up at the sky. When you return to a place you remember from childhood.

It makes sense, I suppose. Your sense of scale is different. And then?

And then we drove back to the city.

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30. The Woman on the Moon I was dreaming I had gone to the Moon. She had spent the day driving to the factory where the engines were manufactured for the rockets that hurled satellites into space. She had told him about the tour of the assembly plant followed by the testing stands surrounded by forests. The two old men had sat in the back of the car, arguing about the plans for their project while she drove the car.

What color is the Moon, he asked. He could feel it was morning, but the light was very faint. He kept his eyes closed and moved his arms around her. He placed his head behind her head on the pillow, so that his mouth was beside her left ear.

Everything is gray, she said. The shadows are green. The shadows come from the light of the oceans overhead. She was lying quietly beside him. He could feel the heat of her body on his arms. There is no life on the Moon. Nothing is moving.

Then I came into a crater and it was filled with light. The light was so strong that it burned my eyes.

I’ll tell you the story of the woman who went to the Moon, he said. He was speaking directly into her ear. The woman was walking through a crater and the ground was covered with the rocks. There are two kinds of creatures that live on the Moon. There are silver octopus that lives in the cracks in the rocks and overhead are brightly colored parrots.

Whenever she stopped walking she could feel the arms of the octopus gently moving around her legs. It reminded her of the sand shrimp when she walked along the beach. If she stopped walking in the shallow water, the shrimp would move between her toes. When she stopped, the fingers of the octopus came up from the ground and circled her ankles, then moved up her calf towards her knees. The parrots would land on her head and spread their wings over her hair. She would rest for a moment and when she began to move, the arms would fall away like seaweed. The parrots would rise up and join the others flying in the air.

There is life on the moon, she said, and there is a king. She was looking for the king, the Man in the Moon. He is a giant with very long legs. His face is at the very top, very far away.

She was going to find the Man in the Moon, he said. There was no other sound in the bedroom. He had chosen a clock for the night table that did not tick. The clock had no light to illuminate the numbers marking the time. The Man on the Moon is very tall. She could see him from far away. As she approached, she could see him standing like an enormous tree in the middle of an open field. When she stopped walking she was standing in front of him. She could feel the octopus moving around her feet, coming from several directions. There were many different arms touching her now, and each one wrapped a finger around one of her feet and began to move slowly up her legs. The parrots nestled in her hair and began to remove their feathers. She could feel that her hair was covered in bright colored feathers and the parrots were flying away. Other parrots would land on the shoulders of the Man and then rise up into the air and circle overhead. The only thing covering her body now was the silver tentacles woven around her legs and the covering of feathers in her hair. The Man was looking at her, standing in front of her.

I’ve come from very far away to see you, she said to the Man. She was looking up at his face. His skin was a mixture of silver and gray. His skin was as bright as the color of his eyes.

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He bent down towards her face. As his body bent forward, she could see that he was flat. He looked like a card bending over from the sky.

You have a choice, said the Man. You can return to where you came from now. You can return to your husband, to your children and your family. You can open your eyes and you will be back where you came from in a moment. Or you can decide to stay on the Moon.

He could feel her hair against the lids of his eyes. How does the story end, he asked.

I want to stay on the Moon, she said to him.

As soon as she spoke, the Man reached out his hands and grasped her ribs. His thumbs were under her breasts and his fingers covered the skin on her back. She could feel the moisture on her skin sinking into his hands. He lifted her into the air. She felt the tentacles sliding off her legs and the feathers falling from her hair as she rose up into the air. He lifted her up to his face and looked into her open eyes.

Do you want to live alone, the Man asked her, or do you want me to swallow you?

I would like you to swallow me, she answered, so I can stay with you.

And then he swallowed her whole, she said.

Then she was floating. She began to move her arms as if she were swimming and she was flying inside his chest. The front of his chest was made of glass and she could look through the glass at the surface of the Moon. Reflected in the glass she could see the image of a little doll with the tail of a fish.

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31. Naked She was dressed in shades of wine and plum.

She was emptying the bags they had used to gather food at the market. One bag was made from woven plastic strips. It was green, made in the texture and shape of ribbons woven into the same pattern as baskets made from vegetable fibers.

The other basket was made from some kind of plant fibers, though he had no idea what kind of plant had been used. The bags were full of meat, cheese, vegetables, and wine. The pieces of meat and cheese were wrapped in white paper with a waxy finish inside. The vegetables were placed in bags of thin plastic. Some were wrapped in brown paper, the ends twisted to hold the paper fast against the contents. He had seen the man serving them in the booth wrap the orange flesh of the squash in this way, twisting the ends, and then placing the paper inside a plastic bag. The same man had made a funnel shape with the brown paper and filled it with red potatoes.

She had taken off her black leather shoes after untying the laces and unfastening the metal buckle. She was moving across the tiles of the kitchen in plum tights. He was looking at her feet and remembering how cold the tiles were against his feet when he walked on them in socks.

He needed to use two hands to open the bottle of port. The cork was tight and required some force to lift it from the bottle. She placed two wine glasses on the small folding table. He had taken off his coat, but kept the red scarf around his neck. She had bought him the scarf at a booth next to the vegetable stand. The label said it was made of lamb’s wool. He was enjoying the sensation of the wool against his neck. He could feel the heat of his own skin against the fibers of wool. The heat came from his skin. He knew this. The wool only captured and reflected it back against his skin. But he enjoyed the sensation that the wool was warm.

I was dreaming, she said to him before they had gotten out of bed earlier that morning, that I was traveling. I was carrying nothing with me, no suitcase or bag or papers. I was buying clothes as I needed them, and leaving behind the things I didn’t wear.

His first thought was that she was moving from one lover to another, each man in a different apartment in a different neighborhood in a different city, connected by a network of roads and planes and rail lines. She was a sailor moving from port to port. He remembered a dream he had that morning of the ocean rising in huge waves. He was perched on the rocks, looking at the awesome power of the ocean, heaving with the motion of the wind and the differences of temperature, several layers of cold beneath the waves and the heat of the sun blowing hot winds through the air. The waves were so loud he couldn’t hear the birds calling overhead. The men beside him had small boats, sea kayaks big enough to hold and extend a single body, allowing each man to move and roll with the swells of the water. The men stood poised on the rocks, discussing where and when to lower themselves into the water. He looked at the waves and saw someone moving across the rolling surface, moving a paddle in a circular motion as he moved. He thought they were insane, these men who went into the ocean in such a state.

He wasn’t sure if he had this dream before she told him she was a sailor. He didn’t notice the time when he had woken up, finally, and gone into the shower.

He hadn’t told her about his dream. She brought out a plate. It contained four tomatoes. Each was smooth and round and a brilliant red. He lifted a tomato

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with his fork and began to cut it into small pieces with a knife. It’s dangerous to stay in bed in the morning, he said. He could see the door to the bedroom from the corner of his eye, the shape and color of the red duvet piled against the end of the bed. I have many short dreams that stay in my mind.

You don’t like to dream, she asked him. He dragged the metal scrapper across the piece of hard cheese they had just unwrapped. He placed several slices on her plate. Thank you, she said. She was cutting the edge of fat off a slice of ham.

Oh, I like to dream at night, when I’m asleep. But in the morning I drift in and out and the dreams come and go quickly. This morning I had a dream like that. I was carrying you on my back. Not on my shoulders, he raised his hands as if to grasp the feet of a child balancing on his neck. I was carrying you on my back, here, reaching his hand behind him, and you were naked. We were walking in a town, walking down the street of a city. It was just a normal street in a city neighborhood.

Oh, she said, smiling at him.

You were naked, and it was time for a meal. I asked you if you wanted to buy some clothes first, or stop and have a meal. I asked you to make the choice. Either one was possible. I thought we were near a store. I thought they probably had a restaurant. He mentioned a large department store in the city. But you said you didn’t want to go shopping there. You didn’t like their clothes. I imagined what it would be like to go into a restaurant and put you down on the chair, naked. He put some food into his mouth and began to chew. She looked at him. He realized she was waiting for him to continue the story. That’s it, he said, finally. It didn’t last very long. But I still remember thinking – it didn’t bother you, so why should it bother me?

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32. The Skin Beneath Her Eyes He ran his fingers along the skin beneath her eyes. As his fingertips pressed against her skin, the lines began to disappear. The skin became smooth. He repeated the stroking motion, brushing the area beneath both eyes.

She was nervous. The obligations, the uncertainties, the meetings to be scheduled, the requests to be responded to. These things were pulsing in her nerves, passing from her shoulders to her stomach, striking against her kneecaps and pouring into the back of her skull. She kissed him. Only her mouth touched his mouth. His arms were hanging at his side now.

We could go there next weekend, she said. We could take a train and rent a car. Or we could put the car on the train. She could feel things running past her. There was a constant motion, like a wind, flowing over her body. The phone would ring. She felt it was attached to her ear. There were papers she had misplaced somewhere, perhaps on the table or on the desk. She would locate them when he was gone and put them into the correct folder or box. She needed to be alone to face her work.

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33. The Ghost Dance The people say that the new earth, with all the resurrected dead from the beginning, and with the buffalo, the elk, and other game upon it, will come from the west and slide over the surface of the present earth, as the right hand might slide over the left.

Some weeks later, he woke up feeling that he didn’t need her anymore. It was a feeling of lightness that seemed to resonate from the outline of the buildings he could see from the eastern window. The sky was clear at dawn. After weeks of darkness following the solstice, he could see the sharp outlines of the buildings against the sky as the light began to rise. The edges of the buildings made him feel even lighter. He moved from one room to the next, placing bits of food onto a wooden board, pouring coffee, moving a knife and spoon from the dish drain to the placemat.

He could hear the solitude of the rooms, the absence of any sound that did not come from his own movements.

He had told her about a dream. That morning he had woken up in the dark. He had been holding a large stone, a bit higher than his waist. The top of the stone had a name carved in it. The letters were carved in reverse, the negative space removed so that the letter forms extended from the rock. The shapes of the letters were very thin and the carved space was deep, so that he thought it might be fragile. He tried not to touch the letters. It was curious, he thought, but the carving had been done by someone very carefully. The letters were H A N A H. When he told the story, he was not certain if there were two N’s or only one, but he remembered the symmetry of the name. The word meant nothing to him personally, but he knew the word carved in the stone was the name of a Jewish woman. Who it referred to was not his business. He was struggling with two pieces of glass. Placed together side by side, the glass was approximately as wide as the stone. He was seated on the ground, pressing the glass against the lower part of the stone which was not entirely smooth. Parts of the glass were chipped and there was already a crack along one edge at the top. The glass was brittle and smooth. The stone was hard and rough. His problem was to fasten the glass to the stone. He was looking at the chipped and cracking edge of the glass.

He wasn’t sure if he was responsible for the way it had broken. He was puzzled by the material his hand was pressing against the stone. He was trying to understand how it was intended to fit together.

This is what he was able to recall and repeat to her later in the morning when they were both awake.

They had been walking through a cave, not the first cave with the paintings which they had entered with a large group of couples and families with children, but the second cave they had entered with the guide and another young man and woman. The guide had met them in a small house built against the cliff. The house was divided into two rooms, an office with a door and the entrance room with a counter for displaying books, posters, and post cards. Photographs of the rock carvings were placed under a sheet of glass that covered the counter. The guide began by gesturing towards a poster on the wall that represented the extent of the cave. He explained that there were three entrances which led to the network of tunnels, each connecting to the others deep inside the hill behind the house. He held a small black cylinder in his right hand. When he moved the hand holding the cylinder, a red dot would move across the map of the cave. Colors on the map distinguished the areas open for public visits from the areas only open to research staff. As the guide spoke and gestured towards

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the wall, his body rested against the counter, pushing the glass that covered the post cards. When he stopped speaking he straightened himself, preparing to leave the house and begin the tour. He was about to fix the glass when he saw the guide notice it was out of place. He watched as the guide pulled the glass forward on the counter to cover the images of animals carved into the rocks. He realized the glass was wider than the counter top. It was not possible to align it with both the inside and the outside edge.

The entrance to the cave was surrounded by an iron fence that reached from the top of the opening in the rocks to the dirt and gravel below. The guide opened the door in the iron fence with a large metal key. Within the opening in the rocks, two of the three entrances to the cave were sealed with metal doors. The third opening was much higher on the cliff. The guide opened the doorway on the left that led to the public area. He gestured towards the entrance. The floor was covered with a metal mesh. He explained how the entrance had been cleared by local farmers digging into the rock, to deepen the passage. The original opening was here, he said, gesturing to the level just above his waist.

The people who had carved the walls of the cave had crawled into the rock. They must have held an oil lamp in their hand as they crawled. No one should touch the walls of the cave as they walk, the guide instructed. An iron bar ran along each side just at the point where the cave had been deepened to allow a person to walk with the head bent forward. The bar provided something to touch. The guide pushed a switch. As he followed into the cave, he realized that lamps hung from the iron bar, connected by thick vinyl cords to plugs along the floor above the wire mesh. The cage lamps were the kind he had seen mechanics use when examining the engine of a car with the hood raised. They walked into the cave until the guide stopped and grasped a lamp, lifting it off the iron bar.

The guide was showing them something on the wall, holding the lamp in front of his body and directed the light against the rock. He could see lines scratched in the rock. The guide was describing animals. He moved the lamp to change the direction of the light. As he moved the hand containing the cylinder, a small red spot traced the scratches. He began to see the animals as the guide continued to talk, describing each figure as the red spot moved through the scratches made visible by the shadow cast by the lamp in his other hand. The head of one animal became the hind quarters of another animal. The eyes of the animals were ovals inside of ovals.

He began to run his fingers along the wall, feeling the lines against his fingertips. The side of the cave was cold and hard. He closed his eyes and felt the animals in the rock.

The whirlwind!

The whirlwind!

The snow earth comes gliding, The snow earth comes gliding.

He was walking across the open field. It stretched in each of the four directions.

The plants that had grown there were cut to stubble that rose above his ankles.

He could hear the crunching sound as his feet came down on the frozen ground, cracking the plant matter between the stubble. He held out his arms to balance himself in the empty space. He moved towards the horizon but no matter how long he walked it seemed far away. He felt panic rising in his stomach. The open field stretched in all four directions. The sky above him was very large. He kept his eye on the horizon in front of him. He knew he would reach an area of trees at the edge of the field. He had a destination in his mind. He had been there once with his friend. They had come through a path in the woods and he had seen the far edge of this field. There was a place where the ground began to fall

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and the path led down to a creek at the far side of the ridge. The earth was not always as flat as this open field. There had been a large tree with branches that hung over the creek. He would make a camp and sleep there.

He saw the end of the field and looked for the opening. He saw mud between the trees. The ground was wet. He followed the mud to the place where the rocks were wet. There was water coming from the rocks, seeping through cracks. He moved his hands over the rocks. Flakes came off against his palms.

He found a place below the spring where the rocks were loose. It was a mixture of sandstone, churt and flint. The sandstone was a mixture of red and gray. He gathered several pieces and held them on his open palm. He could see small white discs, gray curls of shell shapes, long stems. These were the crinoid stems.

This was the floor of the ocean he was standing on.

The rocks had been moved to a box that he kept in a dresser beside his bed. For many years they had been in a dish on the surface of the dresser, beside the things he had found washed up in the sand beside the ocean. The rocks had become covered with a fine white dust.

One day he felt he might never see her again. This feeling made him want to give her something precious. He put the fossils into a cloth pouch. When he gave her the pouch, he explained where he had found them.

He no longer remembered what she said when he gave her the gift. She accepted it. The pouch was on the surface of a bookshelf beside her bed, among items of jewelry and small sculpted clay figures created by her daughter.

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34. Omission He found a green wooden bench where no one was sitting. He saw it as he walked along the canal among the people strolling and coasting on bicycles. It was a holiday and so the people seemed to move with no destination drawing them along. The pace was uniformly slow, one foot and then another, moving along the grid of stones that defined the border of the canal. If I sit here long enough, he thought, I will see the same people walking in the opposite direction.

The water opened into a basin ending at a lock where boats were lowered under the street to pass into the city. The sound in his ears was a mixture of wind in the leaves of the linden trees and cars moving on the street beside the narrow park. Among these rushing sounds he could distinguish the sound of a piano. He moved his head back and forth, scanning the basin in front of him, searching for the origin of the sound. It seemed too irregular and clear to be a recording.

There were barges tied to the opposite side of the basin. There’s someone nearby playing a piano. Perhaps there’s a piano on one of the boats, he thought. He could see a café on the street facing the other side of the basin. He would have to cross the bridge and look around to find the musician. As the wind died down, the sun emerged from behind a cloud and the music became more distinct from the other sounds. People were sitting on the benches to his left and right. He closed his eyes, feeling the sun on his face.

She had been explaining her life to one of his friends who’d arrived the previous morning for a short visit. This friend had met her several times before, in different circumstance, but had never had a reason to know what she did for a living. He watched as she told the story. I was a student of art history, she began, and she told how she and two friends had found a large collection of posters in the storage area of a museum. This had led to a research project and an exhibition. Their research had led to a new understanding of the printing technique involved, a form of lithography new at the time when the posters were produced. Over the years the commercial process had changed, and the original technique was nearly forgotten. Their investigation located one man old enough to remember how the printing had been done. Each detail led to another association which produced another event in time. A person she met at one point would reappear and ask her years later to do something else.

He knew these details because he had heard the stories at different times. He knew many other stories she did not select. For his friend, she told a story that was less a series of causes and effects than a series of chances that produced projects leading to further chances leading to people and events in her life.

When he first heard the stories, he put his attention into fitting them together into a sequence that felt emotionally coherent. He would ask her to tell him how this had happened, and what she had done between this event and another one she had mentioned. He isolated the gaps that remained and invited her to fill them in. He was, after all, a person who had not lived through the events, and he relied on her to provide him with the information he needed. His absence from her past irritated him and, being the opposite of disinterested, he sought to insert himself in the only way he could imagine, by reconstructing it.

This was an activity she seemed to encourage. She described the urban landscape and surrounding countryside in ways that always included her interactions. Near the end of a day visiting a nearby town she would point out the balcony where a picture had been taken, a photo she’d shown him months before during a conversation about a friend. During an intermission at the theater she would describe a project she had done and point out the part of the building in which

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she’d worked. Towards the end of a holiday week, he turned the car off the main road at her direction and continued towards the river until they reached a small house. It was twilight and he could barely see the house in the gray light. She described sitting in the yard behind the house on a summer afternoon as the children slept inside, wondering what she would be doing the following year. In the darkness, he turned the car around, careful to avoid the soft mud, and returned to the main road.

Hello, hello! He turned his head at the sound of the voice and opened his eyes.

Hello! He looked over his shoulder from his position on the bench, then up along the side of the apartment building. A woman was leaning over the railing of the small terrace beside a bay window of an apartment on the second floor. She was waving at the street. A person on the sidewalk raised a hand to acknowledge her, and the woman withdrew into the apartment. As he turned his head back towards to water, he heard the piano music again.

Early in their relationship he had done similar things. At first he felt a sense of urgency to take her to places where he’d lived or worked, an overwhelming need to compress into a few days a presentation of the decades of his life in which she’d had no part. He was not sure each time he saw her if he would ever see her again, and this lent a sense of intensity and desperation to each moment, each choice he made to walk down this street or enter this particular store on the single day they had in a particular town.

Gradually he let go of his fear of losing her. When they traveled for a week along the western coast, he felt the sensation change. They moved between the homes of his friends and members of his family, stopping in towns where he had visited but never lived. He remembered the existence of these places on the coast road, but when he stopped each place looked different than it had the last time he had driven through. The disintegration of memory and the different elements of attraction he could sense in her view of the architecture and the landscape altered the place. Everything was free of personal history. Even what he thought of as the tasteless mixture of styles in the city where his brother lived became populated with jewels, audaciously placed on the brown hillsides or along the omnipresent freeways. The commonest store they entered was an exotic collection of goods from foreign lands selected for the taste of the local consumers.

Above the ocean beach, walking along the sidewalk at the top of the cliff, he gave up his search for the place he had to find in order to reveal his past. He had chosen a hotel where he had stayed once long before. They crossed the street in front of the hotel. He didn’t remember the group of homeless men gathered on the sidewalk overlooking the beach. They reached the steps that led to the pier extending out into the ocean. They walked the length of the pier. Several men were fishing off the end next to a small building decorated with photographs of the pier since its creation, showing its state of construction and destruction after ballrooms, fires, amusement parks and ocean storms. He realized it was like watching a movie, experiencing these images that appeared before his eyes as he moved. What he saw was familiar, the pier looked like a pier, the Ferris wheel like a Ferris wheel. It was an unfolding chain of chance events woven together into pans, tracking shots, and finally close-ups. He found himself looking at her face as she gazed at the photographs and back at the ocean, wondering what the scene looked like through her eyes, trying to guess which details entered her memory.

The very fact of perceiving, of paying attention, is selective; all attention, all focusing of our consciousness, involves a deliberate omission of what is not interesting. When he read this, he recognized that the act of assembly was a form

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of omission, or that the focus of omission was the act of assembling a narrative from the memories and dreams that reached the form of speech.

As he listened to her tell this version of her story to his friend, he heard her emphasize the role of chance in her life. If she had bought the work of this artist when she had the chance, or if she and her husband had chosen to use this money to buy a house in the country instead of starting a company to import animated films, things would have been different. But other chances had attracted her and these had led to other things.

It’s a rare event, he said, when you meet someone you feel you can communicate with. He remembered saying this to her the first evening they had spent together. As time goes on, he lifted up the glass of wine she’d poured for him when he went to put some dirty dishes in the kitchen, you start to understand how rare it is. He took a drink of the wine. And then you have to make a choice.

He put the glass down on the table. If you don’t choose to do something, it disappears.

What disappears? she asked.

He decided not to cross the bridge to look for the source of the piano music. He rose from the bench and retraced his steps along the basin, moving in the general direction of his apartment. Their birth dates were days apart in the same year. The births of their respective children were separated by weeks and months. The material of their lives was similar.

It occurred to him that he experienced his own life quite differently from the way she described her own. His life was a series of escapes from worlds that closed around him. He could feel the web closing around his arms and legs. He could feel the wires passing through his stomach and the straps holding up his armpits the way a corpse was mounted for dissection in the sixteenth century engravings she kept on the shelf beside her desk.

She had not mentioned in this version of her story that they had met by chance.

Their chance had been a conjunction of opportunity and disappointment with others in each of their lives.

He remembered lying beside her on the bed. He had turned off the light when he entered the bedroom. They had been making love for some time in the darkness.

He had been focusing all his attention on the sensations he could feel emanating from her body.

I’m sorry, he said.

Her hand was holding the back of his head against her breast. What are you sorry about, she said.

I am sorry about all the decades when I didn’t make love to you. He felt some relief when he said this.

She didn’t speak as she worked her fingers into the knots of hair on the back of his head. He felt his chest and stomach relax.

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35. The Mind She had read his mind again, he thought. They were changing trains, hoping to get to the cinema in time for a film she wanted to see. A few days before, he had seen posters for a new performance by a contemporary dance troupe. It was a photograph. A woman was standing with an expression of great energy and bravado, her cheeks sucked in and her mouth pursed. Where his eye resolved her shoulders and arms was the muscular frame of a body shaped by straining against weights. These massive shoulders loomed behind the woman’s slender torso. He had stopped several times to look at it, as the crowd in the tunnel moved around him. He could see how the woman was holding her arms pinned behind her back and the stark black and white composition of the photograph resolved her foreground position in front of a man, joining the two, creating the recognition of a male and female body in the mind where one or the other should exist, but not both.

This is what made the image so attractive, of course, the combination of impossibility and photographic truth, and he thought about it now as he moved with the train from station to station. It was crowded, as was often the case in the early evening. Groups of people moved towards the center of the city where hundreds of amusements were ready to embrace them, seat them, feed them, assault their eyes and ears, give them something to smell, to drink, to smoke, to chew and taste with the muscular movement of jaws and tongues.

They stood away from the door near the center of the car as people pushed on and off at each station. He looked at his watch. He was not sure how long it would take to get to the cinema. They would have to change trains to get to the nearest station, and even when they arrived it was clear that, while she knew the district where they were going, she did not know exactly how to walk to the cinema.

There’s a new poster, he said to her as they left the train. They both scanned the platform for a sign identifying the corridor that led to the next train. Perhaps we’ll pass it. I’ll show you.

I was a lot like you, he said to her. He had offered to pour her another drink. She had finished the scotch he had poured for her.

No, she said, thanks a lot. She smiled when she said this. He felt how genuine the smile was, even as it flashed for a moment on her face as part of the expression of politeness. She had been sleeping in the afternoon sun when he arrived, but she was standing by the sink in the kitchen, dressed in a green slip, drinking from a bottle of water and eating a piece of chocolate.

As he unlocked the door of her apartment, he saw her standing by the sink.

You’ve been sleeping, he said.

How did you know?

I can see it on your face, he said.

I was a lot like you, he said to her. He had offered to buy another round of drinks. She had ordered a Black Russian when they arrived at the bar.

Okay, she said. They were talking and in no hurry to be anywhere after seeing the film. The film had been about broken marriages and children.

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Why don’t you have a White Russian, he said, and she accepted the offer. He had the same drink a second time. He liked the taste of the salt and lime on his tongue.

I was a lot like you, he said to her. He was wondering how often she could read his mind. He had pointed out the poster to her as they walked quickly down the corridor. They heard the train pull up to the platform and could see the doors still open, so they accelerated down the steps. He spotted an open door where there was some space remaining between the people and they inserted themselves in the crowd. One stop, he said. It is actually two dancers, he said, after the doors closed.

You told me that, she replied.

No, I didn’t. Really. I didn’t say that. You must have read my mind.

The film was about crazy people and their children. Each person was unable to manage their relationship with the other people in their family by marriage and by blood. He often wondered if he knew what he really wanted to do next at any given moment or whether he relied entirely on his sense of responsibility to others to make these decisions. This was too extreme a contrast, he thought, correcting himself. It is not a matter of either/or but what, really, do we want from one another. I know just what you need, the woman in the film had said to the man, and went off to find two miniature horses, a goat, a chicken, a duck with several ducklings, and a dog. The relationship of the man and the woman in the film had been established by a moment of dialog after a long period of ambiguity. They were brother and sister. In reality, he thought, they had been man and wife for many years. This was a fact she had told him before the film began and he wondered if he could see this in the way they acted or if this fact, revealed before the illusion of the cinema began, undermined the mystery of who they really were. Did she really need to get these animals for him, or was it something more complex?

He had been away for several weeks. He had been traveling alone and had visited his daughter, his son, his sister, his mother, and several men who had been close friends over the past decades. People were moving, changing homes, jobs, retiring, losing their children to marriage and the end of their dependent life as students. Everyone was in a good mood, he reported. Tell me something about your life, she said to him.

The subject was remembering and describing the past. He decided to tell her the story of why he had chosen to go to a college far from the city where he grew up. I wanted to be a poet, he said to her. They had paid for the drinks and they were walking. I had a friend, not a close friend, really, and he told me about this college that had a literary reputation. He wanted me to apply there so he wouldn’t have to go there by himself. We both applied, but he was accepted at a better school, so I went alone.

It was very strange at first, he said. He remembered driving in a car for many hours. He crossed rivers on the highway as he left the city where he was born.

He passed through forests. He crossed fields. The highway went through tunnels under small mountains. Near the end of the journey the highway traversed a small city. It was already dark when his car emerged at high speed from a tunnel onto an overpass above the center of the city and then crossed an iron bridge that spanned the river border between two states. The country music station from the small city was playing softly on the radio. He saw a shadow on the road ahead of him. For a second he recognized that a person was running across the lanes of the highway bridge. He saw his car narrowly miss the shadow as it ran in

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front of him. In a moment he was on the other side. There was no one else in the car with him.

It was late at night when he reached the exit on the highway. He had been driving due west for nine hours. He exited from the highway and went north on small roads that traversed farm towns. He could see the shadows of barns along the road and houses set back from the path illuminated by the headlights of his car. After an hour of staring at the spot of light in front of his car, he reached the town closest to the college. The houses along the streets were dark. The traffic light in the center of town was red. He stopped. When it turned green, he continued on the streets to the road that led to the college. The road crossed a ridge and followed a small river separated by cornfields from the path illuminated by his headlights. He opened the window and could hear the wind moving through the corn plants. The road ascended a hill. He saw the buildings of the college. Porch lights illuminated the inn on the town road. The paths between the buildings were empty. He parked his car along side the large stone building. In daylight, it appeared to be a replica of a medieval English university hall. The two-story stained glass windows were illustrations of the achievements of great English writers. The stones were carved into shapes created by English masons. Now he remembered it this way, having seen the building in it was modeled on many years later.

It was late at night. He switched off the lights and then the engine of the car.

He opened the trunk and took out his bags. He could hear the wind blowing across the leaves in the trees. He entered the door beside the small parking area.

The door was not locked. He walked up the stone stairs to the third floor of the tower above the large dining hall. He put his bags down on the stone hallway floor. He took a key out of his pocket and opened the door to his room.

I went to study literature, he said. There was a large spreading tree between the Anglican Church and the town road. In the autumn, dew would turn to frost on the grass during the night. At dawn the grass was white and then it would melt to green as the sunlight reached the crest of the hill. There would be a white circle of frost when he came out of the dining hall after breakfast in the shadow cast by the tree. He didn’t tell her about the frost shadow.

We are so biologically similar, he read, that we construct similar neural patterns of the same things. We shouldn’t be surprised when similar images arise out of these similar neural patterns. We accept without protest the conventional idea that each of us has formed in our minds the reflected picture of some particular external thing. In reality we did not.

I studied philosophy, he told her, and I had a vision. They were approaching the river. I saw a person. It was Heraclites or Aristotle or Plato. This man was standing in space. They were on the bridge. A tour boat was approaching along the river, its floodlights illuminating the stone walls and pathways, throwing dramatic shadows of the tree branches against the surrounding buildings. The space was defined by a set of rectangular planes forming a box. He held his arms out away from his body. The planes of the box were oriented to the shape of the man’s body, the shorter planes below his feet and above his head, the longer planes in front, behind and to his right and left. The man was creating shapes from geometric patterns and projecting them into the space. The patterns extended the shapes that defined the walls of the box. Each pattern was a law. The laws fit into each other and extended the space the man was standing in.

They stood next to each other on the bridge as the boat passed beneath them, followed by the sudden darkness created by the absence of lights. She was thinking about another night when they had walked across the river on another bridge. They had stopped on the bridge and looked into the river. She had placed

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her head on his shoulder and he had kissed her. Just before he kissed her that evening, he had been thinking about a painting seen earlier in the day representing the lights of a city reflected in a river, spreading into lines that shimmered on the moving surface of the water.

He was holding onto the wall of the bridge with both hands. He looked down at the dark river moving below them. He did not turn to face her when he spoke.

And after I saw the philosopher, I thought to myself – He’s looking for the edge. Or perhaps there is no edge and he’s simply trying to fill the space that surrounds him.

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36. Crossing the Border He woke up feeling the train moving. He had been standing with the other passengers on the platform for many hours. It was early evening when they had unloaded from the cars at the border. The train, now empty of passengers, had rolled away and they had stood on the platform, waiting, walking in small patterns in front of the shallow station as the sun set and the air became cold.

They could not see where the train had gone. He had leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. He could hear groups of people speaking in different languages, mixed with popular music coming from speakers attached to thin pillars along the platform. At some point during the night, the train had returned to the platform and they had all re-entered the car. Two new passengers were in the compartment. They had each taken a bed. He had checked the number over the compartment door against his ticket to be sure he was in the right place. He had carefully placed the ticket and his other documents in the inside pocket of his jacket as he pulled himself up onto his bed.

The train moved a short distance and stopped. Men and women in uniforms entered the train. He could hear them opening the compartment doors nearby.

He sat on his bed, fighting against the desire to lie down and close his eyes. A man and a woman in olive uniforms opened the compartment door and gestured for them to stand. The man lifted up the beds, reaching his hand behind the mattresses while the woman watched them. As the officials left the compartment, he lifted himself back onto the bed and put his head against the small coarse pillow.

The train was continuously moving forward. The bed was rocking gently and the sounds were a mixture of air rushing by the window and the thumping of wheels against the rails. It was dark. He could feel they were moving through the country. He knew the place from books he read, he had seen many pictures of it, he knew the name of the landscape, the types of plants, the animals. He shifted his weight and lowered himself to the floor without touching the bed below. He could hear the sounds of the other men breathing heavily beneath their blankets. He opened the compartment door and stood in the hallway, facing the windows. The train was traveling north, he thought, so this window faces east.

He pulled the window down. The air was dry and stung his cheeks. He could see enormous lights in the distance. The illumination would flash, moving from top to bottom. He thought he could make out bulbous shapes and then quickly everything was black. Chain lightning, he thought. He watched the distance, trying to envision the land he was passing over. All day the air had been hot but now the dry cold air outside the window scraped and cut across his face.

In the morning, he returned to the window and looked at the dry still grassland.

Flocks of birds standing close to the rails flashed by quickly, the image of their long legs and curved beaks flickering against his eyes. As he moved his focus toward the horizon, small groups of animals visible at a great distance passed slowly across his line of vision. He turned from the window, looking down the corridor. The train conductor, who had been dressed casually the day before and seemed short and jovial when he had entered the train, had put on an olive uniform with a high buttoned collar. The uniformed man was in his own country now, standing at the end of the corridor lighting the fire under a samovar.

He returned to the compartment. The narrow space had been transformed into padded seats, the beds latched into the walls. The two men who had joined at the border were sitting in their places, looking out the window. Each man wore a soft felt hat. He sat on the padded seat. They all stared out the window as large earth-covered hangers with enormous metal doors drifting by.

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At midday, the train began to reduce its speed. He saw people riding horses and motorcycles along brown dirt paths. The people were moving between settlements below low grass hills. He could see mixtures of small wooden houses and round white tents. The train entered a long curve beside a shallow river. He returned to the corridor and gazed out the window as the engine of the train appeared, leading the cars around the long curve, trailing black smoke. As the curve reversed, the city appeared. He saw paved roads. Beyond the round tents along the tracks he saw the rectangles of apartment blocks. The train stopped at the platform. The other passengers began to pull their luggage from the racks overhead. People were dragging bags along the corridor, then lowering them onto the platform. He smelled the odor of mutton grease drifting through the open windows.

Do you know what its like to enter a place for the first time, he asked her, after you have been there for many years in your mind? You remember things that you haven’t seen before. They had arrived late for the appointment, phoned ahead to the office to explain, and been told to continue to the village where the park rangers would meet them. To visit the site, they had to be driven into the valley by a guide and each car held only seven passengers and the driver. They parked their car at the entrance to the village. The houses built along the edge of the hill were made of stone. As he emerged from the car, he saw a ring of stone walls at the top of a mound, the remains of a border fortress. She noticed a sign, a single arrow, and they walked along the empty street into the village. It was just after noon. The air was very hot. Everyone was inside away from the sun.

She parted a bead curtain shielding the door of a cafĂŠ. Where is the park office, she asked a woman standing by the bar. The woman gestured with her hand to continue down the empty street. They entered the dark building at the end of the street. Another woman was standing behind a bar covered with bags of almonds. Bottles of water were stacked in a refrigerator behind her. He apologized to the man behind the computer as he paid for their tickets. The roads twisting up and down the hills had been surprising and had taken longer than they expected, he said. The man was annoyed. They sat down and waited for the car that would take them into the valley.

I spent years looking at photographs and maps, learning the names of the rivers, the kinds of animals, the men depicted in the statues. Then I was walking through the streets seeing it for the first time, as if I remembered where I was. On the afternoon of the third day, I went to the temple. There had been a thousand temples once, and this was the only one that had not been closed or destroyed. As I entered the main building there was a service going on. The monks were sitting on benches facing each other, the men in the front rows with hand drums, behind them men with long reed instruments, and in the back rows were other men holding the long silver horns. Each monk had the text of the service resting on his lap, two piles of long rectangular pages. As they chanted the service they turned the pages of the first pile over and placed them face down on the second pile. Then they began to play the instruments, first the drums followed by the reeds and finally the horns. In the center was a large raised chair. It was empty. I followed the people around the room, moving to the right along the walls covered with shelves. The shelves were lined with candles and sculptures made from butter. The sculptures were yellow, blue and red.

The car descended slowly along the rough path cut into the side of the valley.

Almond trees were set along the hillside. He could see the hard brown nut cases hanging from the branches. Each tree was surrounded by a small pile of stones fashioned into a platform. The car bucked over the rock path cut into the hillside. They could see the river below and the narrow edge of green plants growing along the water.

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The guide stood beside the rock and gestured toward the carving, explaining first the kind of animal depicted and then the mixture of techniques used to make the image. He already knew the three techniques that were used, having listened to an explanation by another guide the day before. Some lines were made by punching. These were broad and rough. The individual dots of each punch were visible at close inspection. Some lines were cut into the rock by drawing a stone tool across the rock with great pressure. These were finer continuous lines. Some lines were scratched along the surface of the rock, leaving a trace that was almost invisible to the unaided eye after tens of thousands of years.

He looked directly at the surface of the rock. He saw the curve of a horn rising from an animal’s head. He was looking at one line scratched onto the surface of a rock. The line appeared to be a gentle and sensuous curve, recording a shape that he thought was beautiful. The air was incredibly hot. Everyone around him was drinking from their water bottles. He gazed at the line, squatting on the dirt now worn and packed by hundreds of passing feet before the rock. He was looking at a line scratched into a rock. He was constructing the image of an animal he had never seen from memory.

He was looking at the colors and shapes of the landscape. The road was curving back and forth, turning first left and then right. The road was connecting towns that had formed in the creases of the land, where the moisture gathered at the base of the dry hills. They had crossed a dam, and then continued from village to village, heading south. As they came into the village, they saw people sitting at tables in front of the bar, while other people walked along the road towards their houses. The people sitting in front of the bar were looking up at the sky. They kept moving along the single road. This road entered from the north, turned in front of the bar at the center of each village, and then exited on the south. The hills would rise and fall. To the south, the direction they were moving, the sky was black. He could see flashes of lightning descend in jagged streaks from the black air onto the far side of the hills. As they approached the hills, he saw bushes along the slope aligned in patterns, as though the scrub had been plowed or planted into rows. The road moved back and forth as they rose along the side of the hill towards the lightning. He saw the man at the gas station write a list of villages on the back of an envelope. Which village are we looking for next, he asked her. As soon as he heard her pronounce the name, he forgot the sounds.

Lightning was flashing on both sides of the road. Here we go, he said, as they crossed the crest of the hill and began to descend.

They entered the village whose name was the last on the list. The name also appeared on the map she held on her lap. The windshield wipers moved back and forth as they came to a stop. An unpaved road continued down the slope between a line of stone buildings to the right. He continued driving slowly between the buildings. There was just enough room for the car to pass. When he saw a young woman standing in front of a beaded doorway, he stopped the car and rolled down the window. We must be near the border. Ask her how to get to the main road, he said, pointing at the red line on the map she held in her lap.

Excuse me, she said leaning across him, reaching her head towards the open window. Could you help us? She repeated the name of the town printed next to the dot on the red line. The young woman looked at her and moved slightly, rattling the beads that hung around her shoulders, blocking the doorway. Rain was falling in the space between the doorway and the open window of the car.

He could see an old man moving behind her towards the door. The man stood inside the doorway, shielded from the rain that continued to fall. She leaned farther towards the window and pronounced the name of the country where they were going.

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The old man pointed at the dirt road ahead of the car. Three kilometers, cross two bridges, he said.

Thank you, she said. They crossed the first bridge and turned right. There were large ruts filled with water on the road. He was unsure, imagining what it would be like if the car wheels began to sink into the mud. He saw another car in front of them and felt reassured. Following this car, they crossed a second bridge. The road skirted a creek. The car ahead of them pulled off the dirt road, stopping between the road and the water. Perhaps they were going fishing, he thought.

He continued on alone, confident now. The rain had stopped. In a few minutes the dirt road rose to a junction with a paved highway. Several cars passed quickly on the paved highway. He listened to the musical sound of their tires on the wet pavement. He looked at the license plates of the passing cars, hoping this would tell him if he had crossed the border.

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Part II: Kiki

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37. The First Interview Mr. Abramov will see you now. The large man standing by the door had not moved from the time he had entered the office and taken a seat in the waiting room. There were four chairs placed around a low glass table. On the table were several magazines and newspapers. The reading material had been precisely arranged, so that the title of each publication overlapped just enough to be visible. He had thought about taking the copy of The Economist from the pile, and then decided against it. He did not want to disturb the arrangement on the table.

The woman behind the desk had taken the letter he brought and told him to sit down. The large man was standing beside the door behind her desk. He did not move when he entered the room. It was difficult to see the large man’s eyes behind the tinted glasses he wore. He stood with his hands behind his back. He thought he could see a wire behind the large man’s ear, but nothing was clearly visible from where he sat. The woman at the desk was typing while reading from a paper on the desk. Her attention shifted from the paper to the screen on her desk. Twice she had taken her left hand off the keyboard and brushed the hair back from her left ear. He could see the letter he had brought resting on her desk, unopened.

Thank you, he said as he rose from the chair. He rose from the chair with his back straight, balanced on his feet, and brushed the pleats of his pants before stepping forward. As he approached the door, the large man moved his hands from his back and turned towards him. He was holding a card in his right hand, which he slid into a slot above the door knob. He removed the card and passed it into his left hand, pushing the door open with his right. He could hear the large man breathing as he walked through the door. He heard the door click shut behind him.

Mr. Koenig, please come in. The man sitting at the table gestured towards him with a broad open palm. There was a grin on the man’s face, and the graceful arching gesture of his arm seemed to be an expression of his sense of pleasure.

Sit down, over here, he said, and now he gestured towards the chair at the table opposite where he sat.

Forgive me for not getting up, but my health is not what it used to be. I have problems, his hand was now gesturing towards himself, with my hips. So I try not to get up too often.

Thank you for seeing me on such short notice. He pulled back the chair and settled himself at the table. Between them were two objects. One was a tray with glasses and decanters, and the other a square black box.

Well, it was a surprise, but there are times when surprises are welcome. Can I offer you a drink? Port, vodka, mineral water?

Water, thank you. Abramov took the top off one decanter and poured the liquid into a glass. He placed the glass in front of him on the table. Do you recognize this device? he asked. Now he was gesturing towards the square black box with the same hand he had used to pass him the glass.

No, sir.

You can call me Max, he said. The smile had not left his face. You are a friend of a friend. Please, he was gesturing towards the box again, open it.

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He looked at the box. He ran his hand along the top surface. It appeared to be smooth, but one of his fingers detected a depression. He pressed the depression and the lid of the box rose on a hinge. Inside the box he could see a thin rectangular slot beside a clear glass plate. The glass had a shallow depression the size of a finger.

This is an identifier. I thought you might have seen one like it in your previous work. He had tipped his head slightly to one side to indicate that this statement was a question.

No, sir, I haven’t seen this kind of device before. I haven’t been working for several years. The machines we used were much larger.

Please, Mr. Koenig, you can call me Max. The smile was beginning to irritate him.

It seemed to be floating on the man’s broad round face, suspended between them like a mask. If you will place your card in the reader and your finger on the scanner, we can begin the interview.

He unfastened the two top button of his shirt with his left hand and reached with two fingers under the cloth. He unsnapped the card and held it between his fingers. He looked at Abramov. Why don’t you open the letter I brought?

I am not interested in the contents of the letter, Mr. Koenig. I was told you are a friend of a friend and you are looking for work. First, I am interested in knowing your identity. Please. Abramov did not move his hands this time.

He put the card into the slot and placed the first finger of his right hand on the depression on the glass plate. Only then did he perceive the screen between them. It was so transparent that he hadn’t noticed it when he entered the room, but now he could see that a projector was illuminating on the opposite wall.

Abramov was reviewing his history on the screen, manipulating a control he kept in his right hand.

Why did you join the agency?

I was recruited. One of my teachers worked for the agency and he arranged for a recruiter to contact me. It was my last year of school. There was a war going on. I did not want to be drafted into the army.

You were good at languages?

Yes, Arabic and Chinese.

That is a remarkable combination for someone from the eastern part of America.

They were interesting orthographies. I enjoyed reading the poetry in the original languages.

Poetry. Abramov was moving his eyes back and forth between the screen and his face. And you received an assignment based on your knowledge of Arabic?

Yes, I did not get high grades in Chinese.

Do you still speak Mandarin?

No, sir. I’ve forgotten most of it.

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Please, Mr. Koenig, Max. He gestured towards himself with his right hand, cupping the control in his palm. Which of these names do you prefer, at this point in your life?

Kiki. People call me Kiki. He was holding his own hands on the table in front of him, one hand folded over the other. He reached for the glass of mineral water and took a sip. He felt the bubbles against his upper lip.

You worked for Wilson in Libya for several years.

Yes. I was his chief of operations.

When did you leave Libya?

He did not reply to the question. He put the glass back on the tray and folded his hands. The two fingers he had used to remove the card from beneath his shirt grasped the ring on the third finger of his left hand. He began to rotate the ring.

There doesn’t seem to be any information available on that topic. It only says that you were well paid. Wilson supplied weapons for several operations in Germany.

Were you involved in those transactions?

I was not aware of the transactions at the time.

But you were shown the report. Is it accurate or is it something the agency fabricated after they captured Wilson?

I’ve seen the report. I don’t know if it’s accurate. I was not involved in the transactions. I didn’t contribute to the report.

But you were his chief of operations at the time?

He moved his hands off the table and placed them on his lap. Wilson was quite capable of running operations without involving me.

And then you moved to London. Did you enjoy working for the bank? He tried to imagine what Abramov was reading at this point, what detail he would focus on next. He looked at the back of Abramov’s left hand. He could see a small blue line. At first he thought it was a vein, but then he recognized the tattoo.

The work at the bank was interesting. It allowed me to travel.

Yes, you did travel. But now you are here and you are looking for work. And you are here because … This was also a question, as Abramov tilted his head again, this time in the opposite direction. As he returned the gaze from the smiling face opposite him, he felt a light on his eyelids. He closed his eyes.

He woke up. He was lying on his side, facing the window. He could sense immediately that the sun was blocked by clouds. A light, filtered by the white curtains, diffuses through the room. The sky was clouded over, he thought. He could not hear rain falling. The air was still. His open eyes searched for the clock. It was exactly eight o’clock. He could see the second hand sweeping over the twelve as his eyes moved from the transparent white curtains to the clock on the table beside the bed.

He had been dreaming about things breaking. The shoelaces of his worn shoes pulled apart in his hands as he tried to tie them. A breakfast plate he had once broken by dropping something on it, then glued, had

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broken into multiple pieces as he carried it from the kitchen to the table.

His grandfather was visiting him and intended to share his bed. There was also a woman he knew who lived in the house. She was standing in the hallway. He was uncomfortable about the fact that she liked him, even admired him. She had just asked him to find out what the weather would be like tomorrow. He did not want to think about it.

Instead he was thinking a funeral sculpture had to be made for the hat to be worn. It would be serious and formal sculpture. It would resemble an Eskimo mask, made from any materials that washed ashore. Consider this image, he wanted to say to his grandfather, before you come into this room. But the old man, now grown wonderfully tall, smiled, waved his enormous hands around the room, and retired to the bed.

A big man of trees, standing by the sea, he sang.

Nothing washes ashore here. He was hundreds of kilometers from the coast. He had spent most of his previous life within a short distance of the shore, an evening walk, a short drive in a car. Now the immigrant experience was in effect. The simplest thing was complex. The largest hospital room was filled by common animals. Art, the sight of national symbols, sent the audience into convulsions. Clean it up, they shouted.

Close your eyes, they screamed.

I’m sorry, what is the question? He was unsure how long he had been sitting with his eyes closed. Abramov’s face looked puzzled. The smile was melting on the corners of his mouth, revealing a dimple on his cheeks as he lifted his eyebrows.

Is there a reason you have for being in Paris at this point in your life, Mr. Koenig?

I believe that is what I asked you.

No. I live here now. I am looking for work. He lifted his right hand from his lap and rubbed the tendon on his neck. It was sore and he pushed it back and forth with his fingers.

You are offering me your services, then, and I will evaluate your offer.

May I remove the card? He stopped rubbing his neck and returned his hands to the table. He could feel the muscles in his shoulders stiffen.

Of course. You’ve given me everything I need. Abramov’s left hand retreated along the surface of the table and disappeared. It re-emerged holding a small device. It looked like a small black tape player. Please take this with you. Cecil will show you how to use it before you leave.

He took the device from Abramov’s hand and closed his fingers around it. The surface was the same temperature as his skin, neither warm nor cold.

Keep it with you and I will contact you when we have a task for someone of your talents. Abramov shifted his body back in the chair and was now leaning away from the table.

Fifty percent up front, he said.

Those have been your terms in the past, Mr. Koenig. Abramov’s mouth was now neutral. Without the grin his face looked thoughtful. I’m sure we can work with that. When I call you, he was shifting in the chair, turning his body to the right,

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replacing the control in his right hand into a repository beneath the table out of his line of sight, we will agree on the terms, he heard the click of the door behind him and sensed that it was open, and the motivation, Mr. Koenig. Abramov paused and folded his hands on the table. Enjoy the rest of your day.

I’ll try. He rose from the chair and extended his right hand across the table towards Abramov. He could sense the large man standing behind him in the open doorway.

My pleasure, Mr. Koenig. Abramov turned in the chair again and extended his right hand. They exchanged a firm handshake. Abramov’s hand was dry and warm.

As he turned around he was facing the large man, who was now standing behind the chair where he had been sitting. His arms were at his sides.

Mr. Koenig? He turned around toward the sound of Abramov’s voice. The grin had returned to his mouth. Call me Max. He lifted his right hand and ran the back of his thumb over the lid of his right eye.

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38. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain He woke up and did not feel like eating. When he opened the curtain he saw the damage the wind had done the day before. Several plants were tipped over. A wooden lattice was ripped from its base, thrown against the metal railing.

He dressed and put on shoes. Gray and black clouds were still moving overhead, but there were breaks in the fast moving clouds. It was possible that the storm was passing. He opened the doors to the terrace. It was no colder than it had been the night before.

He tipped the plants upright in their pots. He pulled the lattice off the metal railing and replaced the rope that was meant to hold it in place. He scraped the dirt and leaves away from the drain in the floor. The plants had not been seriously damaged. He calculated how he could arrange things to prevent the wind from doing this again. He put things back exactly where they had been before the storm had disrupted them. The sun came through a break in the moving clouds.

He was thinking about his grandfather, the one whose name he carried. He had never seen a photograph of the man, yet he could imagine what his face looked like. The faces of the men in his father’s family were very similar. Everyone had come from the same region, from the same stock. There was no great variation in size or shape or color, only height. The face was round. The cheeks were smooth.

The hair was dark and the eyes were brown. He did not have to imagine the transformation of old age, since his grandfather had never attained it. He ran a dry goods store in a small city surrounded by coal mines. Men had come from the same region to work in the mines, so they needed someone to supply them.

He had no idea whether his grandfather had left home to change the rules or simply to do what others expected him to do. Perhaps there were things about the rules he did not want to accept. There were opportunities available elsewhere. He had moved from one family-related opportunity to the next, as it became available. Eventually he came to own the store he had been invited to manage by the widow who had inherited it when her husband died. He requested a wife, and the family sent him a distant cousin. She sent for her younger sisters and introduced them to local men whose families had come from the same region. The men all wore fedoras. They went to the park on Sunday, where the city had proudly established a zoo. They watched the bears pace around the rocks. After a picnic they went rowing in a hired boat on the lake.

His grandfather had three male children. In the year of the great stock market crash, he died of a kidney illness. There was a grave in the cemetery he had visited with his father once. There were no images. No one, neither his widow nor his children, preserved a photograph of his image. There was a logic to this he had never understood. This was the only version of the story he knew.

Where do you want to be in the end?

They were sitting at a long table on benches, facing each other. A couple sat on his right and to his left there was a group of three women. They all were eating dinner in the restaurant of the contemporary art gallery. The communal tables were part of the design, along with the menu scrawled on brown paper taped to the wall.

What do you mean? He had met this man only twice before, briefly each time, They had been speaking about their travels, where they had gone in previous

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years, before they both came to live in this city. His acquaintance had recently married a woman from another country, and a month before his wife had given birth to their son. She had traveled back to her parents’ home in a distant country to give birth. She and the child would arrive to see their new home in some weeks. The man had shown him a photograph of the infant the day before.

I mean when you retire, what place do you want to be? He began to understand the question. All this traveling and living in foreign places must have an end.

There must be a purpose. Perhaps these movements are steps in a process, a building towards something. There was a logic in that, he thought.

He paused, not able to answer the question in the expected rhythm of the conversation. His gaze drifted to the woman sitting next to his acquaintance. He had exchanged some words in English with the woman when she first sat down, in the spirit of the communal table. She had made a joke about the plastic bread basket they all shared. I thought it was art, she’d joked and recounted how a guard had lectured her when she touched a similar plastic basket in one of the complex performance pieces in the gallery. At this moment she was looking at her friends who were speaking in another language. He couldn’t tell if she was trying to understand their conversation or was simply listening politely and waiting for one of them to speak to her in a language she would understand.

He thought about a place he’d lived, a small peninsula separated from the mainland by a tidal river. There was a large arching bridge that connected the town to a highway on the mainland. The bridge was high enough for sailing boats to pass beneath it. A lower rail bridge passed over the salt marsh, carrying the trains that shuttled back and forth to the city. The harbor itself was joined to the mainland by a small road, which had served as the point of connection since the receding glacier had exposed the harbor it had gouged from the granite shelf that met the ocean. In the seventeenth century, the new settlers had cut a canal with picks and shovels, joining the tidal river to the harbor on the ocean.

There was a drawbridge at this point on the old main road, which periodically lifted and blocked the traffic of people and cars to allow the sailing and power boats to pass back and forth from the busy harbor.

I don’t think about it, he finally answered. I am here now.

Really? I would like to be in … The man pronounced the name of the town where he had been born in the original language. He tore some bread from the basket and covered it with soft white cheese from the plate between them. I would like my son to live there some day.

After some coffee, they split the bill for the meal. The man had another engagement. They shook hands. They agreed to see each other later in the week.

He had no further appointments that night. There was no reason to leave. He returned to a gallery they had seen earlier.

Three enormous screens were filled by video, projected from two machines mounted high on the walls and one suspended from the ceiling. The floor of the room was a raised platform with small circles cut in it. Each circle was covered in glass, hiding an electric light. He could walk across the platform and stand wherever he chose. Overhead a group of concave silver domes were suspended from the ceiling. Along one wall there was a stack of video machines. On top of the stack was a computer monitor, a keyboard and mouse. Small numbers displayed on the screen were constantly changing and a small light blinked on each machine. The computer was controlling the machines and the lights in the floor. Communicating this was the intention of exposing the machines. The lights created patterns which were reflected in the silver domes. Sometimes the

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lights created patterns that made him think of plants. He enjoyed looking up at the domes to see the patterns reflected from the floor.

The images on the screens were taken from a plane flying over a small island.

This island was created by a volcano that had erupted from the ocean floor forty years before the images were made. He knew this because he had read it in the program. The land was covered in white snow where the wind had not scoured it from the black pumice. One edge of the island was a black cliff pounded by white foaming waves of ocean water. From the air he could see how the cliff ended in a narrow ridge, falling into the crater of the dormant volcano. On another screen he could see a view of the village that had grown up on the plain below the crater. He could make out the pattern of civilization, the regular grid pattern of the streets between the low buildings. He kept his gaze on a screen as the focus of the camera passed the edge of the island and began to record the surface of the ocean. Random white shapes appeared as the water mixed with the windblown air.

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39. Silvio Goes to Work Kiki! No one in the bar reacted when he called out the name. The men with one elbow on the bar continued to talk while several men at the small tables did not move their eyes from the television mounted on the wall. He moved his head back and forth, scanning the visible spaces for some face that responded to the name, Kiki! He brushed the hair off the shoulder of his jacket. He held his helmet in the other hand.

Over here, you nigger asshole.

The voice was to his right. He turned and saw a hand on a table. A pillar blocked his view of the person connected to the hand. He swung his body around and stepped around the pillar. There was a man sitting alone at the table. His back was against a wall.

Put your gear down, the man said. He reached over with his free hand and grasped the back of the man’s neck, pulling his face towards his own. He placed a kiss on the skin exposed above the beard, first on the left and then on the right cheek. We’re not in the south, you know. In the south they kiss three times.

Put down your gear, he said. You’re late.

And you’re ugly. When did you stop coloring your beard?

I never color my beard, asshole. You must be remembering someone else. Put down your gear down and have a drink. There was an open bottle of fresh wine, a clear bottle with no label. The man poured wine into small glasses.

In the south we drink pastis.

Like you said, we’re not in the south.

So, are we working?

I called you, didn’t I? You said you’re playing tonight?

Yeah, I get to sit in with a gypsy. He plays all night in this place near Les Halles.

It’s loose. How long is the job?

The man looked at his watch. His fingers pulled on the hairs of his moustache.

We have less time now that you’re late.

Okay, okay. I had trouble getting out of bed. Cecil can be difficult in the morning, you know?

It isn’t morning.

Give me a break, man. You know what its like with Cecil.

Yeah. I know real well. We have to check a shipment. Iron and plastic heading south.

Who are we working for?

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The man lifted the glass of wine and gestured with it towards the other glass. He picked up his glass and touched the edge to the man’s drink, then they both swallowed the wine. It was young wine, light and tart.

Today we work for Max. No heat. They know who we are. Here’s your piece. He reached into the pocket of his coat, draped over an empty chair. He appeared to have a black tape player in his hand. Put the cord in your ear. Max is watching.

He took the tape player and hooked it to his belt. He placed the earphone in his ear and arranged the cord in the collar of his shirt. Where to? he said.

Quai L’Ourcq in Pantin. The voice was in his ear. He noticed that the man also had a thin gray cord coming from his shirt collar to his left ear.

Leave the bike here, the man at the table said to him, I’ve got some equipment in the car we’ll use. You can drive.

I didn’t get paid for the last job, he said as Kiki rose from his chair. He could now see that Kiki was dressed in a gray suit over a gray sweater. You’ve been paid. It was the voice in his ear.

I’ve already paid the bill. Kiki was tying a scarf around his neck. Let’s go.

Okay, okay. He picked his helmet up from the floor and followed the man to the door.

Goodnight, gentlemen, the barman shouted as they approached the door.

Kiki turned towards the barman. Thank you. Have a good night, he replied.

The car was parked across the street, close to the intersection. The man put his key into the driver’s door and he could hear the locks open. Here’s the key. The man tossed it in the air and he caught it with his free hand. The car was a small dark sedan. The exterior was noticeably scratched and dented on the driver’s side. It looked no different from the other cars parked near the intersection.

He sat down in the driver seat and adjusted it backwards to make room for his legs. He noticed the small screen below the dashboard. The man sat beside him.

As he turned on the car, the man touched the screen. A map appeared. The streets were white lines on a black background. A blue dot at the center of the screen began to blink. Sixty-four. Fourteen. The voice in his ear was different now. It was a woman’s voice. The man beside him began to turn a dial below the screen. He could see numbers below the dial, sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixtythree, sixty-four. The man pushed the dial, then rotated it in the opposite direction. Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen. He pressed it again. A red line appeared from the blue dot and traced a path through the maze of white lines. That’s the route, he said and then turned his head to face the windshield. Now he seemed to be speaking to the air in front of him. We’re moving.

He put the car in gear. What’s the job? he said.

I’ll tell you when you need to do something, the man replied. Just drive.

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40. Inventing a Camera Sheldon could not get himself to point a camera at anyone. All his photos were of stationary things – walls, doors, roofs, balconies, facades – or of landscapes.

Occasionally he could focus on an animal if it did not move quickly. A person might appear within the frame, even a group of people with their backs turned, or passers-by reflecting light for a moment against a wall. But if people appeared their faces were vague. He could not focus on a face and was never able to record the expressions he saw. The human face, he knew, was a rich and complex set of communication signals. None of the literature he reviewed could explain why we recognize a face, what attributes of shape, color, or proportion is recorded in the memory so that, among a million images of faces he might experience, a single pattern will match some bit of information stored in his brain. He often recognized a person’s face but could not remember their name.

He was sitting on the metro, leaning against the window on the left side of the train. As it pulled into the station, another train was already stopped, traveling in the opposite direction. He looked through the window into the other train.

There was a young woman sitting in a position similar, against the interior window, facing the back of the train. He focused on her. He guessed she was in her twenties. She had straight blond hair. She was wearing a red sweater and holding a closed book in her hand. He could not read the title of the book. She was staring towards the empty seat in front of her. Then she was returning his gaze, looking at him illuminated in the opposite car. He registered that she was aware of him and he looked down, then back at her. He could tell from the expression on her face that she had noticed he was looking at her. For a moment they looked at each other. She smiled. He heard the doors of the train close and her train pulled away.

Over a period of several days he designed a camera. He began by writing the specifications. The first problem to solve was the relationship between the photographer, the camera, and the subject. Holding the camera, pointing it, and visibly taking a photograph created the wrong relationship. The device would blend into his clothing. It would have to be unnoticed by his subjects. The action of focusing and shooting the picture must be as natural as focusing with the eyes. Nothing should be introduced to separate the photographer and the subject.

Many people were wearing a variety of headsets for music systems while they traveled. The device needed to be small enough to blend in with this environment of portable telephones and music systems. The focus would use an eye tracking system, so that only the muscular movements of the eyes were needed to select a subject. The focus would be controlled by the focal point of his retina. He would use a wide angle lens to simulate the normal field of vision – he could crop the image later after it was captured. Given sufficient resolution, he had no need for magnification. The aperture would adjust to any natural light. The picture would be what he saw with his eyes. He would mount the lens on his glasses and the selection mechanism would be an object in his hand. He selected the electronics required from components in other digital cameras and music systems.

He went from the hotel to the office each day on the metro, following the same route, changing at the same station. By the second day he had calculated where to stand on the platform at the station near the hotel so he would be standing in front of the middle door of the first train car when it arrived. Coming out from this door was the shortest walk when changing trains. After exiting the first train, he had to mount the stairs, turn right, and walk down a tunnel to the

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stairway leading to the platform for the next train. In the evenings, he built a prototype, using the electronic parts he disassembled from cameras he bought in the shops near the office. He selected an MP3 player in the shape of a pen as the storage device.

As he rode towards the office, he began the first test. He moved his gaze around the train. The car was crowded, with many people standing between the seats.

He could only fix his gaze on people close to him. When he entered the train, he had chosen a position standing against the inside of the car, away from the opening door. He captured images of people standing around him. The people changed each time the train stopped, as people exited and entered the car. After several stops, the train reached the station where he changed, and he followed the group of people standing by the door out onto the platform. He turned to his left, towards the exit to the stairwell.

People pushed onto the train as he was leaving, while others moved down from the stairs heading towards the waiting cars. The bell sounded, announcing that the doors would close. He noticed a woman leaving the train from the first door, heading towards the stairwell. To his right he could see a tall thin man wearing a long coat heading down the stairs. The man’s gaze was fixed on the open door of the train. As the bell sounded, the man began to move quickly towards the door.

It was clear that he did not see the woman coming towards him. His forward motion opened his coat, which fluttered like a cape, and his left arm swung outward from his body as he accelerated towards the train.

Sheldon saw them collide on the platform. The woman walked into the man’s embrace. His arm swung back towards his body and for a moment she was folded into his coat, her head resting on his shoulder. While he appeared to be holding her, his gaze was still fixed on the open door of the train.

Excuse me.

Sorry.

Excuse me, please.

He could hear the release of the doors, a pneumatic sound mixed with the textures of sliding metal. The doors of the train began to close. The man and woman slid past one another and the man leaped through the closing doors onto the train.

As he witnessed this event, Sheldon had continued walking towards the stairwell. The reflexes of his hand had not been quick enough to photograph the embrace, yet the image of the man folding his arm around the woman, and the woman resting her head against the man’s shoulder had registered in his visual system and remained in his mind. He continued up the stairs, through the tunnel, and down the stairwell to the next platform. The train arrived and he sat in a seat facing the front of the car. He looked at the passengers around him, wanting to select someone to photograph. He immediately recognized the woman. Her face, the pattern of her clothing, was the same as the image in his mind. She was sitting at the front of the car, in a folding seat facing him.

When he reached the office, he reviewed the images on the computer at his desk.

The focus controls needed adjustment. He looked at various images of the woman sitting in the train. He had looked at her shoes. She was wearing polished black shoes with sharp toes and low heels. He looked at her hands. She appeared to have something pressed between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, resting on her lap. In one image she was clearly looking at him. He wondered if she realized he had seen her collide with the man coming down the stairwell.

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He remembered an experiment described in a book he had read. The book was about consciousness. The author was discussing current theories of where conscious decisions occurred in the brain. He summarized an experiment in which researchers had sought to isolate the location in the cortex for specific muscular movements of the hand. A patient had volunteered to have a brain implant. They had placed the patient in front of a screen in a darkened room with a slide projector, and given him a remote control device to control the slides. In fact, the button was unconnected to the slide-changing mechanism.

Instead the mechanism was controlled by the electrical field measured at the implant in his brain. When the patient pressed the button, the slides would change. The data they collected could not determine the difference between the moment in time when the electrical field in the brain registered a measurable change and when the patient pressed the button. When the patient was interviewed, however, he reported that the slides appeared to change before he actually pressed the button. He had the impression that the slides were changing when he thought about changing them.

Sheldon send email to his assistant and asked her to find the name of the published paper in the book. He would have to locate the original data set. Later that day, she sent him the citation. He located the paper in a database. He made copies of all the later research papers that cited the study. Several of these papers were written by a group at a nearby hospital working with paraplegics and artificial limbs. This hospital was located in a nearby city. Diana’s fashion show was Thursday evening. He copied the train connections for Friday morning.

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41. The Hat What struck him was the hat. He wasn’t sure if he had seen the face before and he was certain it was because the man was wearing a hat that he noticed him at all. The hat made him stand out from the other people sitting at the café. There were dozens of people sitting on the chairs placed around the small round metal tables, all facing the busy street. On the sidewalk groups of people swarmed past, couples and small groups pulling luggage on wheels, carrying bags on their shoulders. Empty taxis blocked the street, lined up in front of the train station, while others moved in and out of spaces between parked cars, opening doors and trunks to discharge groups of bags onto the sidewalk.

The man with the hat was sitting behind the glass wall, inside the café. He could see him from the corner of his eye, to his left. He was aware the man was there without turning his head. He focused on the kiosk across the street, covered in posters advertising magazines. A woman placed her bags on the sidewalk in front of the kiosk. She arranged the bags, turning her back towards him, then turned again and sat on the bags, facing him. She looked around her quickly, then seemed to collapse on the bags, holding her bowed head in her own hands. Her hands folded over her black hair and her face disappeared for a moment, then just as quickly she was sitting upright, her face extended forward as she scanned the traffic before her through the crowd moving on the sidewalk. A group of pigeons descended from the top of the kiosk, heading for a free space in the gutter. As they passed over her, she threw her hands up, shielding her head and her face from the fluttering of their wings. He captured the picture.

Sheldon heard a cell phone ring. The sound startled him for a moment. He had placed his phone in a pocket on the inside of his jacket, and as he moved his hand across his chest to open the pocket, his fingers became tangled in the cord extending from the recording stick in his breast pocket. He had to withdraw his hand to untangle his fingers from the cord and then start again, all the while listening to the ringing repeat and repeat. Several people sitting around him had lifted their own phones from the small tables or from inside their bags before he finally disengaged his phone from the inside pocket and held it before him. The ringing ceased at the moment he managed to get the phone into his hand. The display recorded a missed call. He pressed several buttons, reflexively searching for the identity of the caller. Nothing was recorded. He placed the phone on the table, between the coffee cup and the small tablet. He re-adjusted his coat, looking up at the kiosk across the street. The sidewalk was empty. The pigeons that had been in the gutter had returned to the roof.

He turned his head to the left and moved his focus towards the corner of his eye.

He could still see the man with the hat sitting behind the glass wall of the café, at a table in the corner. He looked at his watch. It was later than he thought.

Do you recognize this man? She had taken a large envelope from a space between two boxes on the shelf that hung by a thin metal wire over her worktable. The wire extended from anchors in the high tin ceiling, supporting the shelf at either end. She pulled a group of large black and white prints from the envelope. As she pulled the pictures apart, he could hear a snapping sound. It was the elements on the surface of the photographic paper, he realized, disengaging from the surface of the print it had been pressed against for some years in the envelope.

The picture at the top of the pack was a man sitting cross-legged on the floor.

He was smiling at the photographer and gesturing with his hand in the air. The next photo was a group of three people standing next to a large rock. The

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surface of the rock was inscribed with letters he could not recognize. The same man was in the middle of the group. He had one arm around a woman with a round broad face standing to his right and the other arm at his side. The third person in the picture, a man with broad high cheekbones and slanted eyes, was holding a bag on his shoulder.

In the third photo, a group of people were descending the stone steps of a large building. He recognized Diana in the front of the group, flanked by two men in dark suits. The man from the other photographs was standing to her left, just behind Diana’s shoulder. He was also wearing a dark suit and was the only one in the group looking at the camera.

He looks familiar. Who is he? He placed the photos on the table, on top of the drawings she was working on when he entered her studio. He spread them out and looked at the man’s face in the three pictures. The eyebrows and the nose were the most distinct features of the face. The eyebrows were heavy and close together, forming a dark line over the large nose. The eyeglasses he wore in each picture were slightly different. The man had a full beard in each picture. In the picture of the man sitting on the floor, the beard was cut very short. In the others his hair was longer and the beard extended farther from his chin.

There is one more, she said, pushing her fingers into the envelope. She brought out a color picture much smaller than the others. This was a group of people standing in a room filled with glass cases. It appeared to be some kind of exhibition, though he could not recognize what was in the cases, perhaps some kind of machines. There was a woman in the foreground turned away from the camera, though a part of her profile was visible. Her hair was striking, a bright blond mass of curls and knots extending outward in all directions. He recognized the same man standing in a group facing the woman. They seemed to be talking.

The man’s beard was very short in this picture and his glasses reduced to thin black metal frames. The man’s hair was also short, but it was a mixture of gray and black.

You introduced me to him once. He looked more like this, he said pointing to the picture of the group descending the steps. I think his name starts with a K. She was pushing the color photo across the table with the long red nail at the end of the index finger of her right hand. As he looked at the photos he began to admire the back of her hands. All her fingernails were painted red, though several also had blue and yellow patterns added to the red background. His gaze moved from her finger up her arm to examine the details of her clothes. Her blouse left one shoulder bare, while bands of cloth straps connected the covered shoulder to the area above her other hip. A white belt hung below her hips fastened by a round buckle. This too was off-center. You’re aggressively asymmetrical today.

She pulled the edges of her mouth upward into a fleeting smile. Dimples appeared briefly on her cheeks and then quickly faded. What else do you remember?

It was a long time ago, when you were still living with the doctor. It was at one of the receptions. You introduced us. He looked at her face as he was speaking to her examining the lines that had formed between her nose and her cheeks. When he first met her, there was no line at this point on her face. I remember faces, but I am lousy with names.

His name is Koenig. We went to school together. We were friends. She lifted the prints off the drawings and arranged them back into a pile. Let me know, she said as she put the prints back into the envelope, if you see him. She pushed her

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fingers between the boxes on the shelf to re-create the space where the envelope had rested before his arrival.

Sure, he said. She looked nervous. She was always nervous before a show. He looked at his watch. He calculated that he needed twenty minutes to get from her studio to the train station. Send the drawings to the lab when you’re done.

Celine knows what to do with them. If you get it to her today everything will be ready when I get back. Who did you schedule to model for the fitting?

I want to use Angelika. I don’t know if she’s available yet. She was turning a ring on her finger. It was a small silver ring. She removed it and placed it on the desk where the photos had been a moment before. When you see him, give him this.

He looked at the ring. It had a thin silver band, but the top of the ring was a round shape that came to a point in the center. It reminded him of a Chinese hat. Or perhaps it looked like a shield.

Just give it to him? He held the ring between his thumb and forefinger in his right hand. It was entirely smooth, nothing was inscribed on the interior or exterior of the band. Why do you think I will see him? He placed the ring in the breast pocket of his shirt. This created a bulge that felt uncomfortable under his jacket. He removed the ring and placed it in the outside pocket of his jacket, where it didn’t press against his skin.

She sat on the high wooden stool, moving her feet from the footrest to the floor then back to the footrest again. Remember where you put it, Sheldon. She was running the end of her thumb over the space on the inside of her finger where the ring had been. And if you don’t see him, give it back to me at the fitting. Don’t worry about the drawing. I’ll have it finished today.

You’ll let me know when you’ve talked with Angelika. He patted the sides of his jacket and the pockets of his pants as he got up from the stool. He wanted to be sure he had everything he needed. You still didn’t answer my question. What makes you think that I’ll see him? Why do you think he’s here?

She was looking at the drawing on the table now. Her right hand held a pencil and she began to add details to the image of the cloak she was sketching before he arrived. He watched the lead moving quickly over the paper as her hand began to move. He could hear the scratching sound.

I’ll tell you later. Don’t miss your train.

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42. The Desk Part of what we need is in that room.

And how am I supposed to get inside? He looked at the image of the building on the screen. It was not difficult to recognize the building. He had seen it many times as he walked across the bridge. On one side of the bridge was the museum and the large park. This had once been the palace and the royal gardens. The oldest bridge was farther up the river, connecting the museum, which had once been a castle, to the island. This was where the river, split by two islands, came together. This bridge had been built some centuries ago, and now carried cars and pedestrians to the other bank, where a row of buildings commanded a grand view of the city. The large flat tourist boats would pass under one side. moving up the current, and after circling the islands, return beneath the other side of the bridge. The building opposite the bridge was connected to the others along the river bank, but separated on one side by a narrow street. The top floor of the building ended in a turret, a large almost circular room that jutted a full story above the roof. The roof of the turret was covered by small overlapping tiles of gray slate. As he looked along the roof towards the connecting buildings, he could see small gables extending towards the river from the rooms on the top floor, each with a small window. The turret had two large circular windows, one facing the bridge and the other facing the corner of the building towards the park on the other side of the river.

I’m sure you can get inside the room, Mr. Koenig. The difficult question to answer is how are you going to locate what we need. Abramov’s voice was very clear this morning. His tone was calm and patient. He imagined Abramov leaning back in his chair, fingering the control device in his right hand as he gazed at the screen displaying the same image as the one he looked at from the machine resting on the desk in his apartment.

And where is the other part? He was reviewing the floor plan. Someone had marked the interior wall that abutted the stairwell on the rear of the building.

The electrical system was marked in red, the communications network in blue, and the water system in green.

I have several theories. We’ll decide which one to pursue when you bring us what we need from the desk. Do you know how to recognize genuine antiques from copies, Mr. Koenig? A real Louis XIV desk, for example, from a copy made by a furniture maker in Lyon in the 1960s?

No. I’m afraid my experience is rather limited there.

You’re an honest man, Mr. Koenig. I appreciate that. I suggest you go to the antique market on Saturday in the Parc Floral. Here is a list of booths to visit. He could see a document icon appear on the screen. I have marked the dealers who will try to sell you copies. Pay particular attention to the joints. And make samples of the paint. Cecile will provide you with an analyzer. But be careful, Mr. Koenig.

Careful of what? He could see the way in from the back of the restaurant that occupied the ground floor below the turret. He had been in the restaurant once, some years ago. He had stopped for lunch. An older couple was sitting at a booth opposite where the waiter had placed him. They had a small black dog sleeping beneath the table. He remembered the texture of the red velvet on the chairs and the shaggy black and gray hair of the dog beneath the table.

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If they see you scratch the furniture you may have to pay for it. Be discrete. There are likely to be many desks in the room. Several may fit the description we have, including the drill holes on the top surface. When the Tax Office impounds a company’s records, the investigating officers drill a hole through the papers they find, then tie them together with a rope and place a wax seal on the knot. It is probably a very ancient practice. The electric drill is relatively new, however, and they are often not careful with it. Mr. Boyar’s secretary informed us that the officers made two holes in the top surface of the desk during their work. She is probably remembering events correctly. But many of the desks may have holes like this, as I said. The desk you are looking for is a copy. So verifying the false provenance combined with the description should narrow the search. Mr. Boyar was not a discriminating shopper.

Is that another one of your theories? He looked at the elapsed time display on his screen. These exchanges did not usually last so long.

No, Mr. Koenig. That is not a theory. That is an observation. What we need is in the desk. Will you do this alone?

He had been asking himself the same question as he calculated the time needed to reach the top floor and gain entry to the attic room. He had located several possible exits. Yes. Good. Cecile will give you delivery instructions with the analyzer. You will be paid by the usual methods. The elapse time indicator stopped at 16:32. His gaze drifted from the screen to the window overlooking the street below littered with yellow leaves.

What are you doing?

He turned in his chair to face her. She was wearing the black robe that hung in the bathroom on a hook behind the door. He could see by the moisture in her hair that she had been in the shower. I was on the phone. I’m finished now.

Listen, she said. She moved across the room to the window facing the street. He tried to hear a sound that might have attracted her attention. As she twisted the handle on the windows and pulled them into the room, he heard a woman’s voice singing. She’s singing this morning.

He rose and walked to the window, standing behind her now, placing his hands on her hips and pressing himself against her. She leaned her head out the window and turned to the left, where the sound was coming from. She must be sitting in the window. Do you recognize the song?

No, she said. They both stood there, listening. She took his hands from her hips and raised them to her breasts, placing her own hands over his. She has a very lovely voice.

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43. The Coin I want to see the inside of the room. They were eating a meal he had made in an old wok, one of the objects he had carried with him from place to place as he moved. When he did not use it, the wok was balanced precariously on a shelf at the top of the kitchen, inside a large irregular wooden bowl. He had used the bowl to make bread for many years, and its interior was sticky from oil rubbed into the surface, transformed over many years into a soft dark film. The wok was not so old, but retained the color of scorched metal, gray without a shine.

She didn’t understand the method that he used to cook. For many years she had watched her sister’s husband cook with a wok. Her sister’s husband prepared dishes he had learned in Viet Nam, following specific ritual, using different implements to place and stir different foods prepared by cutting or carving with specific knives. The way he cooked did not resemble the technique used by her sister’s brother. It seemed to have no formal quality to it. Before they sat down for dinner he had poured the contents of the wok into a large black ceramic bowl she had given him. The bowl was placed on a brown woven mat. She had chosen green sticks to eat with. The color of the sticks matched the colors of the chairs at the table. What room are you talking about?

The room at the top of the building by the bridge. I thought I remembered the building correctly, the one with the turret room on the corner. He placed some rice in the empty bowl she had set before him. When I first looked up at it from the bridge, I could see it filled with boxes. The boxes were sitting on metal shelves.

Each box was made from heavy brown cardboard, with a number stenciled on it in black ink. Inside the boxes were folders and envelopes. Each folder had a label on it containing a word or phrase that was meant to represent its contents. Beside the door was a wooden cabinet with drawers, a card file. Each drawer was filled with cards arranged in alphabetical order. On the card was a word or phrase and a description of each item, a report, a collection of letters, a transcript. On the upper right corner of each card was a number. The numbers correspond to the numbers on the boxes. A man was in the room looking for something. He began to put cooked food from the black bowl on top of the rice with a metal spoon. But then I realized I remembered it wrong. When I took a bus last week I was looking out the window and I realized the bus was going to pass by the building just before we crossed the river. I hadn’t seen the building in months, I hadn’t been thinking of it when I was nearby. I tried to look up at the turret, to see how the windows were arranged. It was difficult from where I was sitting on the bus. I realized I had it wrong. The building was on another street, facing a different bridge.

I think he’s looking for a letter in an envelope with a stamp from Morocco. She was eating from her own bowl, which matched the one he had before him.

The room is piled high with furniture. It looks like an antique store, the back room of an antique store, with desks and tables piled on top of one another, with just enough room for a person to squeeze through between them and reach the window at the far end of the room. The piles of tables and desks reach up to the arched ceiling beneath the turret.

If he opens up the drawer of the correct desk, he’ll see the compartment. One of the drawers has a false bottom that slides back. There are four letters in the compartment and one has a stamp from Morocco. She began to eat and waited for him to continue.

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He stirred the bowl and looked at her. And who is the letter from, he asked. Can he read the return address on the envelope?

The return address is the name of a hotel. It’s printed on the back of the envelope.

There’s no handwriting on the envelope. There is no address on the front, only the stamp from Morocco. There is no letter inside. There is a photograph, only a single photograph.

No, he said, putting down his sticks. The narrow end rested in the holes on one side and the other end of the sticks rested on the groove fashioned on the lip of his bowl. He’s not looking for a photograph. He’s looking for a different kind of recording. He can’t actually see what he’s looking for. He can only see the media it’s recorded on.

If he can’t see it, how is he supposed to know when he’s found it?

He can’t know. He only knows that its recorded on an object that’s about this big, he said, taking a coin from out of his pocket. He ran the edge of the coin over the cracked and worn surface of the table until he found a place to rest it. He forced the coin into a crack in the table between their bowls. It balanced on its edge.

She looked at it as she guided the food into her mouth with the sticks. He had chosen the smallest coin, a tiny almost worthless piece of metal. It looked like a tiny zero with the numeral one inscribed on the side that faced her. The numeral was very hard to see.

It looks quite worthless. But there’s information recorded on it, he said, looking at the coin. There’s nothing magic about it, he said, lifting up his sticks again, and stirring the food into the rice. It’s just a surface for recording information.

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44. The Job Did you ever make love to a one-legged woman?

Sylvio turned to look at Kiki, taking his eyes off the road just long enough to notice if he was looking at him when he said this. He appeared to be staring straight ahead. He had taken a cigarette out of a pack in his pocket and was tapping it against a metal lighter. Are you talking to me?

Yeah. I asked you a question. He stopped tapping the cigarette and put it in his mouth. Sylvio heard the snap of the lighter, followed by the hiss of a flame. He heard the window go down and the sound of the nearby cars increased.

You know, I would like to think that the vastness of my sexual experience would force me to pause and think about how to properly answer that question. But the truth is simpler than that. They were approaching the end of the large boulevard.

The street was lined with lights and cars filled all the lanes. The curbs were blocked and covered by cars parked in every possible space. Small groups of people were threading through the slow moving traffic in all directions. No, I never have. Sylvio could see an elevated highway passing over the boulevard after the approaching set of traffic lights. All the cars were moving very slowly.

There’s a roundabout after the underpass. Bear to the left. Turn here, he said. He pointed to a small street coming off the traffic circle. Pull up to the next corner and find someplace to wait.

Sylvio pulled the car out of the traffic circle into the narrow street. Cars were parked on both sides and there was just enough room to drive between them. He had to slow further to be sure he would not strike the side mirror of a car parked badly on the right. Street lights faded as they moved away from the traffic circle.

I was thinking about it. Kiki carefully blew the smoke out the open window. Stop here. He gestured towards an opening between the parked cars. There was a garage entrance. On the garage door a sign with a red circle was illuminated by blinking blue lights. Where would you put your weight?

The car stopped in front of the garage. Sylvio pulled far enough in to allow other cars to pass. Why are we stopping?

We’re early.

I thought you said we were late?

We were late. Now we’re early. We just wait here till he tells us to move.

I suppose it depends on what part of her leg is missing. I mean, if its below the knee it shouldn’t make too much difference. As long as you’re lying down. He noticed Kiki cupping his hand over his left ear. How long are we going to wait?

Max is talking to someone else. He tossed the cigarette out the open window.

Do you know what the job is?

We’re just doing an inspection this time. We’re collecting information. These people know me. Just pay attention and you’ll figure it out. He looked at Sylvio’s hands.

You growing your fingernails?

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Sylvio took his right hand off the wheel. His hand looked blue in the faint light from the garage. Just on this hand. I get to play guitar tonight, remember? You got good eyes.

Okay, straight ahead, then turn left at the next street. Sylvio put the car into gear. As he lifted his foot off the clutch, the car stalled and jerked to a stop. His face was illuminated by the headlights of a car coming towards them on the narrow street.

Sorry, he said. He started the engine again. They were blocking the street now, and the other car idled. They could hear loud music coming from the other car.

Sorry. The car was behind them now and the headlights were reflecting back into Sylvio’s eyes. He had to raise his right hand to see the street.

Turn here. Kiki gestured to the left. As the car began to turn, the other car raced past them, moving quickly down the narrow street. The sound of the music disappeared. Sylvio could make out the fence of a paved yard on the left. He saw the hoops of a basketball court. On the right was a corrugated metal wall. The short street ended at a gate. Beyond the gate he could see the banks of the canal and a large building on the other side.

Pull over on the right, so you have enough room to turn around. Don’t lock the doors.

As soon as Sylvio stopped the car and turned off the lights, Kiki was out of the door and standing by the gate. He had a bag slung over his right shoulder. He hadn’t noticed the bag in the car. It must have been on the floor at Kiki’s feet, he thought, or pushed under the front seat, and he hadn’t noticed it. Sylvio saw him take something from the bag and press it against the latch of the gate. The gate was open.

Just follow me. Stay behind me. Look at the guy when I talk to him.

To the left Sylvio could make out a loading chute and a pile of gravel. They were walking across a quay paved with cobblestones. In front of them was a barge tied to the side of the canal. There was a small pilot house on one end of the barge.

Red and green lights were illuminated on the side of the pilot house. The barge was tied to low pillars on the quay by heavy ropes. There was a man standing beside one of the pillars. Kiki walked directly towards the man and Sylvio followed close behind him. He could see the man’s face turned towards them. The overpass of the highway was not far down the canal, and the illumination from the road provided a faint light. He could see that the man had broad high cheekbones. He wore nothing on his head.

Hello, Khasar. How is your mother?

She’s well. How is your woman? Is she still selling cashmere?

Sylvio could see that they were greeting each other. He could not understand the language they were speaking. Kiki began to laugh.

No, my friend. She’s not my woman. I haven’t seen her in many years. I don’t think she is selling cashmere now. He paused. Sylvio could hear the sound of traffic flowing on the highway. I would like to see your mother. I would like to wish her good health. He paused again. The two men stared at each other. I have some gifts for her.

The man looked at Kiki and then turned his face towards Sylvio. He returned his eyes to Kiki and bowed his head slightly as he spoke. Thank you for your wishes.

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We’ll see if she accepts your your gifts. He took his hand out of his coat and gestured towards the barge. Sylvio thought he had invited them to board. The man put his hand back into his coat, turned and stepped across the gap between the stone quay and the deck of the barge. He opened a doorway on the side of the pilot house and disappeared.

What’d he say to you?

He invited us to go inside. I’ll tell you what to do. Kiki moved the bag from his shoulder and held it against his chest as he stepped onto the barge. He opened the door with his other hand. Sylvio could see him moving down and he could hear the sound of his feet scraping against metal steps. He grabbed the door and followed him, quietly pulling the door shut behind him. There was an electric light hanging from the space above the stairs, and Sylvio bent his head to avoid hitting the light.

The man who had been on the quay was standing at the far side of a small room.

The floor was covered with rough carpets. The outside walls were covered with cloth the texture of tablecloths and dishtowels. Each cloth had a different printed pattern and they were tucked into ropes knotted around nails and hooks.

Against the wall facing the canal was a wooden bed. A person was sitting on the bed, his feet resting on a mat laid over the rough carpet He could make out the form of two children sleeping on the bed covered with blankets. The person sitting on the bed was wearing a green felt hat with a round brim. The hat was pulled down to the hairline, covered his hair and the brim extended outward. He was very small, Sylvio thought. His face was the same shape as the man who had met them on the quay, but the nose was very flat, and the eyes drooped downward at the outer edges, meeting the high cheekbones. Kiki turned towards the small man.

I wish you good health, Mother Badchar. Kiki was speaking to the small man. He was wearing a coat that came down to his ankles, fastened at the waist by a sash the same color green as the hat. As the small person raised his head to look at Kiki, Sylvio was no longer sure it was a man. There was no trace of hair on the chin. The lines on the face were sharp and deep, separating the mouth from the cheekbones, the round chin from the jowls on either cheek, the absent bridge of the flat nose from the lined forehead that disappeared into the shadow of the hat brim. It looked like an old woman’s face. Her coat was fastened at a collar stitched with red piping. Kiki reached into his bag and took out a bottle of white alcohol. The man who met them on the quay handed him a small cup. I brought you a gift. Kiki poured the white alcohol into the glass and offered it to the person on the bed.

Hmm. The person on the bed reached out her left hand and took the cup that Kiki held out with his right. Her right hand emerged from the sleeves of her coat, and she dipped a finger and thumb into the glass, sprinkling the liquor off her thumb with a flick of her forefinger. She did this four times, making a humming sound, each time moving her finger in a different direction. Then she took the cup in her right hand and swallowed what remained in the glass, tossing her head back. The man brought a small stool over to the bed and placed it beside her knee. She put the empty cup on the stool. Kiki reached out with his right hand and filled the cup again, then placed the open bottle on the ground beside the stool. You’ve traveled a long way for you to find us here. You brought a strange man with you this time. Where is your woman?

She’s not my woman, Mother Badchar. She’s gone now. She went back to her own country.

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She came to see me without you. She wanted to sell cashmere. I told her she would have bad luck.

Yes, she had very bad luck. She found another business now.

The man who had met them on the quay remained standing beside the bed.

Sylvio recognized that he was wearing a coat similar to the one that covered the old woman. The sash around his waist was a dark color that blended into the coat. He reached his right hand into the fold of his coat and came out with a small bottle. He cupped this in his hand, the top of the bottle visible above his thumb. Kiki reached his right hand into the bag he held in front of him and came out with another small bottle. The two men reached towards each other’s hand. Their cupped palms met and slid over each other and each withdrew their arm, holding the other’s bottle. Sylvio watched as both men opened the top of the bottle with their right thumb and tapped it against the skin between the thumb and forefinger of their left hand. He could see black powder on the skin.

Kiki lifted his left hand to his nose and inhaled the powder. He reached out his right hand to the man, exchanged the bottles again, and returned his into the bag. When his hand emerged from the bag a third time, he was holding a small white pouch.

Mother Badchar, I’ve brought a coin for you, in exchange for the coin that you carry. He took a silver-colored box out of the pouch. He flipped it open with a movement of his wrist. He took a copper coin from the silver-colored box and extended it towards the old woman. She squinted her eyes to focus on his hand.

Sylvio realized that she was having trouble seeing the object in his hand.

Where is the coin, Khasar? She was speaking to the man who had met them on the quay. He reached his hand into his coat again. Give it to me. The man placed something in the old woman’s hand and then stepped back to his place beside the bed. She reached her other hand out to Kiki and he placed the coin he had taken from the silver-colored box in her open palm. She held the palm up to her face, almost covering her flat nose. Take this one, then. She placed the coin from her other hand on the stool, beside the cup of white liquor. Who do you work for now?

Someone in the shipping business. Kiki took the coin from the stool and brought it towards the silver-colored box. Sylvio saw him slid a piece out of the bottom of the box, put the coin into the space, and then slide the piece back into place. We need to check what you are carrying today. He could see a small illuminated display on the inside of the lid that Kiki held towards his own face. Show us the boxes, Khasar.

The man who had met them on the quay stepped back towards the wall that faced the front of the barge. He lifted up the cloth that covered the wall and tucked it into the rope that ran along the low ceiling. He grasped a latch along the floor and lifted the wall into the room. The hold behind the wall was stacked with wooden crates. Each crate had a number stenciled on the side.

Give him a bar. Kiki was speaking to the man. He was gesturing towards Sylvio with his right hand, while he held the silver-colored box in his left hand. The man pulled up another cloth on the wall facing the canal. He had a crowbar in his hand. Sylvio, take the bar from him. Sylvio stepped towards the man and extended his arm. The man handed him the crowbar. Find two fifty-two.

Sylvio looked at the crates. He could see the numbers on each crate, but there was no order to them. Just a minute. He moved his eyes along the top row of crates, looking for the number. He found it at the far end of the room. Here it is.

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Open it and give me a count.

Sylvio slid the crowbar into a slot on the exposed side of the crate. As he pushed on the bar he could feel the nails sliding outward. He pulled the end off the crate, leaving the small silver nails in place. The barrels of the guns were wrapped in matted cotton. He touched the end of each barrel with his hand, counting in his head. Forty-eight, he said.

Okay, leave it. Find one thirty-seven.

Sylvio started to look for the number along the row where he had found the first box. He moved his eyes back and forth across the wall. He turned around and raised his shoulders. It’s not here.

Where’s one thirty-seven, Khasar? Kiki was speaking to the man standing beside the bed.

Sylvio saw the man gesture towards the floor. He lifted the cloth draped over the end of the bed, and began to drag out another wooden crate. As the crate scraped along the floor, Sylvio could hear the children moving in the bed behind the old woman. The man stepped back from the crate. The crate had 137 stenciled on the end and on the top.

Open it from the top, Sylvio. He stood beside the man now, who stayed close to the end of the bed, and placed the crowbar in the middle slot, prying open the top of the crate. He placed the top against the wall, resting the nails against the cloth drape. He placed the crowbar against the top of the crate. Inside the crate were small packages wrapped in dark green plastic bags. Take out the third one from the left. Sylvio counted the packages from the side of the crate facing the bed. He lifted up the third package.

What do you want me to do with it?

Just hold it. Give me the one underneath it. Sylvio cradled the package in his left arm and pulled the package beneath it out with his right hand. He felt one of the nails on his right hand crack against the side of the wooden crate.

Shit.

What’s the matter?

I broke my nail. Where do you want me to put this?

Put it down on the floor over here. Kiki gestured at his right foot. As Sylvio put down the package, Kiki knelt down beside it. He took a thin metal tube from his sack and pushed it into the package. He pulled it out slowly and slid it into another metal tube, then placed them both into his sack. He put a piece of black plastic tape over the hole he had made and stood up. Put them back in the crate, in the same place.

Sylvio was running the finger with the broken nail on his free hand along his teeth. Okay, okay. Do I close the top?

No, just put it back in the same place. Kiki was standing in front of the old woman. She was rubbing her left foot against the ground in a slow shuffling motion. She reached her right hand into the opposite sleeve of her coat, and emerged with a stained red cloth. As Sylvio put the packages back into the crate, she began to hum and wave the cloth back and forth with her hand. Sylvio stepped away from the crate and the bed. She began to sing in a low voice. Her

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voice began to tremble, moving from a low pitch to a high whine. As she continued to shuffle her foot, her body began to rock from the waist in time with the waving of the cloth.

You are lost in a strange country.

The air is full of sickness The water is full of sadness Beware of the air you breathe Beware of the water you drink Sylvio moved behind Kiki. He ran his thumb along the finger with the broken nail as he looked at the woman rocking on the bed. We are sorry to bother you, Mother Badchar. Kiki was speaking to the old woman. We have what we need.

Have a safe journey. He began to walk backwards towards the door. You go out first, he said to Sylvio. Don’t turn your back on her. He was stepping backwards towards the door. He gestured for Sylvio to pass behind him.

You are lost in a strange country.

The trees have lost their leaves The pines have lost their needles The iron pot is cracked The wind will take you away Sylvio reached the steps. He walked backwards up the metal stairs slowly until he felt his back against the door. He reached his hand behind him to find the latch. As he lifted the latch, the door opened and he felt with his foot for the gunnels of the barge. He tried to remember the gap between the edge of the barge and the quay. He turned his body away from the door and jumped onto the cobblestones.

Kiki emerged from the stairs with his back to the doorway. He stepped onto the deck and closed the door behind him. The sound of the old woman’s singing was muffled by the closed door. He turned and stepped off the barge, the sack hanging from his shoulder. Let’s go. He walked quickly to the gate and held the gate open. By the time he had closed the gate, Sylvio had started the engine of the car. He got into the car. Sylvio drove the car towards the fence.

Turn on the lights. Sylvio reached for the light switch. The headlights illuminated the empty basketball court. Turn left and then take the first right. Go back to the traffic circle.

Jesus. What was she singing? He turned sharply into the narrow street. He realized he had not bothered to see if any traffic was coming. He looked in the rearview mirror. There were no lights on the street behind him.

She was sending us away. Go back to the place where you met me. They passed into the traffic circle and emerged onto the boulevard heading into the city.

Jesus. He gripped the steering wheel with his right hand, to keep it steady. Well, that’s okay. My motorcycle is there. Kiki was staring straight ahead. What time is it? Kiki continued to stare out the front windshield, not speaking. What was in that package?

Kiki looked at him. We’re clear. He took the wire off his ear and tucked it into his collar. Take your equipment off. The job’s over. He reached over to Sylvio’s ear and removed the wire. He pulled the transmitter out of his pocket and placed it into his sack. She really spooked you, didn’t she.

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45. The Coin (2) He went to the office with the coin. He put the equipment bag on the receptionist’s desk. I would like to speak to Mr. Abramov. She told him to wait. He sat down and looked at the magazines arranged on the glass table.

Go right in, she said. There was no one standing by the inner door. He pressed the palm of his hand against the door and it opened. As he entered the room, he was facing Abramov sitting at the table.

Sit down, Mr. Koenig. You wanted to see me? His face was calm. His mouth seemed to smile.

Yes, he said. He looked around the room. There was no one else visible. He pulled back the chair and sat down. I wanted to give you this. He reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and took out the small coin. He placed it on the table.

So you found it. Abramov looked at the coin for a moment, then slid his hand across the surface of the table. When he reached the coin, he stopped the motion of his hand. He placed his thumb and forefinger on opposite sides of the coin, lifting it off the table surface. He began to rotate the coin with his fingers, looking at the two surfaces reflecting light from the lamp that hung from the ceiling over the table.

Where is your family from, Mr. Koenig? He tilted his head slightly, moving his gaze from the coin to the face of the man seated opposite him.

You know my history. You knew that before you hired me. What do you want to know?

What do I want to know, he said, moving his gaze back to the coin. He continued to rotate it in his fingers. New York, Massachusetts, Louisiana. That’s what your records say. Where did your people come from? What part of the world?

The place where they came from?

Yes, Mr. Koenig, everyone came from somewhere. He put the coin down. And is going somewhere. The two men stared at each other.

At the point when they arrived in America? He shifted his weight in the chair.

Yes, I suppose that is the most objective criteria. At the point of departure.

At the point of departure the name of the country was Russia. Sometimes it was Poland. Sometimes it was Lithuania. Sometimes it was Latvia.

That’s all you know, isn’t it? You don’t speak any of those languages. You don’t really know where they came from, do you?

No. Abramov took two glasses from the tray on the table. He poured a clear liquid into the glasses from a decanter. You prefer water, am I correct?

Yes, sir.

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Really, Abramov pushed one glass across the table towards him, you are a difficult man to talk to. I suppose you know that. He took a sip from the glass he had poured for himself. This has to be delivered somewhere else.

I did the job, he said. When you pay me the other half I’ll talk to you about doing another job.

The money. The money. Abramov puffed his cheeks. The money has been transferred. I am not responsible for the machinations of the international banking system. He paused to put his hands together. Do you know who you are working for, Mr. Koenig?

I’m working for you. He shifted his weight again. He felt a tingling on his left cheek and he glanced aside for a moment. He could see nothing in the room aside from the table, the chairs, and the lamp hanging from the ceiling.

And who do you think, he waved his cupped palm towards himself, I work for? He pushed himself up in his chair by pressing his elbows against the table. He waited for an answer. When nothing appeared, he continued to speak. Russia, he made it sound like an observation. Russia is a place where some people come from and some people go. My family, he repeated the gesture with his palm, Mr. Koenig, is from the city of Samarkand. You know where that is, don’t you?

He didn’t respond.

Of course you do. You know a great deal about the world. My family has been in Samarkand for thousands years. We trade. Things come from the east and go to the west. Things come from the west and go to the east. Cloth and material to make into cloth. Cloth and the garments made from cloth. We trade what people want.

My grandfather came to this city to trade cloth. He came from a place that became a part of Russia for a time. Now the country has a different name. The place is still Samarkand. We traded peaches and horses to the Tang Emperor. We traded silk to the Romans and the Kings of France. We traded cotton to Stalin. And today, he leaned back in his chair, taking his elbows off the table, we no longer trade things. Heroin, Kalashnikovs, plastique explosives, missile parts, these are all things. We trade information, pure information. Do you know what information is, Mr. Koenig?

He tried not to move in the chair. The two men stared at each other. He could hear his own pulse moving through the artery in his neck. He began to count his breath. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. When he reached ten in his mind, he began with one again.

Answer me! Abramov’s face had become tense. His tightened mouth held no memory of the smile he had used to address him at the start of the meeting.

Koenig shifted his weight in the chair. He listened to the reverberations of Abramov’s voice until the room was silent. He parted his lips. When I was in high school, I was a very bad student. He straightened himself in the chair and placed his right hand on the table. I talked too much. I interrupted other students when they answered questions. I argued with teachers. I made comments during lectures.

He reached across the table and took the coin in his hand. Then one time, it was in history class, I really got into trouble. The teacher was absent and the woman who was the head of the history department came to run our class. She was a little old woman with a hunch on her back. We all thought she was very ugly. She started writing dates on the board and telling us about battles and treaties after the battles. I said to the fellow sitting next to me – you’d think that history was nothing but a timeline – and she heard me. When class was over, she took me to her office. I thought she was going to have me thrown out of the school. The

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strange thing was, he put the coin into the breast pocket of his shirt, she was less angry than she was upset. This childish reflex, this stupid remark, threatened her existence. She cursed at me. She told me how long she had been a teacher, how she had raised two children, how she had fought to become the head of the department at a school with thousands of students, and I, he tapped his fingers against his chest, I had the nerve to say to her that history was nothing but a timeline. She was sitting there behind her desk and she started to cry.

He stood up. I know what information is, Mr. Abramov. He took the back of the chair in his hands and moved it around his body, placing it in front of him.

Information is difference. He quietly slid the chair towards the table. He released the back of the chair and raised his left hand, holding the palm upward. It’s the space between your fingers.

He was standing behind the chair now, facing the man seated at the table. He was looking down on skin that covered the top of his skull. He could see wisps of dark hair fading into a receding hairline. If I hold the information, it’s mine. If you want me to deliver this information, he tapped his pocket with the two fingers of his right hand, you’ll let me know. You will tell me what to do and when to do it. And I will tell you what it costs.

You’ll do what I tell you to do, said the man seated at the table. We understand each other. Abramov turned away from him, swiveling his body in the chair to face away from the door. You can go now.

Thank you, he said. He buttoned his coat and turned around. The door to the reception room swung towards him as he approached it. He saw the hand pressing against the door from the outside, holding it as he walked into the reception room. He kept his eyes fixed on the woman at the desk, not glancing at the man by the door as he walked past him. The woman had turned her head to look at him. You’re to take this, she said. She held out a soft black case, fastened by a Velcro strip. He placed the case in his left hand and opened the strip with the thumb and forefinger of his right. There was a telephone inside.

Mr. Abramov will call you, she said, and turned back to her desk.

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46. The Story of Joseph Why do you do this?

What do you mean? He ran his fingers over the side of his face. The edge of his fingers pressed against the skin, stroking downward until they reached the hair of his beard. He moved his fingers, pushing the sharp points of hair against the fingertips. You mean why do I work for this guy?

Sylvio put his forearm down on the table. As he leaned forward, Kiki focused on the lines that ran from Sylvio’s eyes outward across his face. No, I mean why do you work, for this guy, for another guy, why do you do it?

Ask me another question. He could see the pupils of Sylvio’s eyes darting back and forth as they examined his face.

What did you have for dinner last night?

I don’t remember. C’mon, let’s go. Kiki put money down on the bill that rested under the ashtray. He took his coat from the back of the chair and threw it over his shoulders, holding it with one finger of his left hand. He placed his other hand on Sylvio’s shoulder. Sylvio could feel the fingers pressing through his jacket against his shoulder blade. This way, he said, turning towards the street.

There were many people passing the table outside the café, moving in both directions. Cars were moving slowly down the street as people passed between them, moving from one side to the other. Kiki stood behind a woman pushing her child on a tricycle. The tricycle was connected to a long handle which the woman grasped in her hand. Wait for the cars to stop, she said. The child was pushing his feet against the sidewalk. A man driving the car before them slowed, looked at the woman and waved to her. She pushed the child before her. Kiki walked behind her to the other side. He turned to look back at Sylvio, who was reaching under his chair to find his helmet. He turned left and continued along the sidewalk, weaving through the people moving in and out of the food stores and clothing shops.

Where are we going? It had taken some minutes to catch up to him, pushing around people on the narrow sidewalk. If its far, we can take the motorcycle. I have an extra helmet.

Do you know the story of Joseph?

Joseph? Joseph who?

Joseph. His brothers threw him down a well. They sold him to slave traders who took him to Egypt. They followed the street up to the right, where it began to rise steeply. The storefronts were replaced by apartment doorways and the crowd of other pedestrians became thinner.

You mean the Bible story?

There’s a version in the Hebrew bible. There’s a version in the Koran. Did you know that?

Don’t get intellectual on me. Where’re we going?

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I want to show you something. They walked on, passing a restaurant decorated with North African arabesques. The street narrowed and rose steeply. It turned again to the right, cutting through a row of apartment buildings rising up the hillside. Kiki headed across the street towards a metal gate that blocked an alley between two buildings. He pushed the gate open. Sylvio followed him in as the gate swung shut. There was a loud bang. Pigeons flew up from the sidewalk. He turned his head back towards the gate and noticed a blackened rag tied to the gate. Someone had tied it there to quiet the noise of the gate closing, but a hole had worn through it. There were piles of paper trash pushed by the wind against the walls of the buildings. The walls to the right and left were covered with random patterns of sprayed graffiti. A steep set of concrete steps led up the hill between the apartment buildings. Iron posts in the center were all that remained of a set of railings on the sides and center of the steps.

This place used to be a shanty town, Kiki said without turning to look back at him. He began to climb the steps. There were shacks built along the hill and fields of brush between them. This was the trail to a goat pasture. One side of the steps was lined with shuttered apartment windows. Trees and bushes spilled over the wall on the other side. At the back of the building facing the street, there was a door in the wall. Sylvio thought he could see a path behind the door that led up into the brush. He could not see much over the wall, but the space behind the apartment buildings seemed to be covered with trees not visible from the street.

He was breathing heavily when he reached the top of the stairs. There was a large rock in the center of the path reaching above his shoulders. The rock was pitted and broken with hollow spaces, surrounded by a border of cobblestones.

The passage continued around the rock on both sides.

What is this thing? Sylvio stood in front of the rock. It was difficult to tell if it was a solid stone broken in many places, or pieces of stone patched together.

The surface was rough and dirty. There was moss on much of the surface, small plants growing on the top, and cobwebs in the cracks. Empty cans and bottles filled an opening at the base.

It’s a rock. Kiki went around it to the wall separating the path from the trees which were quite visible now, hanging over the wall. He pressed the buttons on a door in the fence. Sylvio could see him press a code sequence and then push it open. He could see ivy growing over the ground beyond the door. There was a narrow dirt path almost covered by the ground ivy.

Where are you going?

Kiki did not reply. He walked through the doorway and disappeared from view.

Sylvio stood still for a moment, holding his helmet in his left hand, looking first at the rock in front of him and then to the doorway moving slowly back towards the doorframe to his left. He moved his left foot to the doorsill, a metal bar connecting the two sides of the wall, and prevented it from closing. Okay, I won’t ask you where you’re going. He realized as he said this that he was talking to himself. He pushed the door back with his right hand and stepped over the bar.

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47. The Beautiful Man So tell me the story of Joseph. Sylvio sat down at the table. The wooden chair creaked as he settled into it. He looked down and saw that one of the struts joining the legs had come out. He stood up and pushed the strut back into its hole, slapping the leg with his fist. You live in this place?

Sometimes. Kiki had taken a bottle of whisky from a cupboard beneath the sink.

He opened the door of a small refrigerator beside the sink and took out a tray of ice. He put two pieces into a glass on the table. It belonged to a friend. The shack went with her apartment in the building next door. When she died her family sold the apartment but they couldn’t agree about the shack. The land is too small to build on and no one wants to live here. He poured the brown liquid into the glass, then poured a second glass without any ice. It was built by two clowns who worked in the circus at the bottom of the hill. They lived here until sometime after the war.

Sylvio took the glass without the ice. He looked around the room. There was a single window on the wall beside the door. The glass was opaque with dirt. There was a bed against the back wall. He could see a wooden chest beneath the bed.

Kiki had switched on the wall lamp which was the only light in the room.

Zulaykha is the daughter of a king somewhere between the mountains and the sea in the north of Africa. One night she has a dream. She sees a beautiful man. She’s overcome by how beautiful he looks. She asks who he is. He’s the King of Egypt, one of her companions tells her. When she wakes up, she goes to her father and asks him to marry her to the King of Egypt. A year passes and her father arranges her marriage. She travels across the desert with a thousand servants. The man she is to marry comes to meet her at a place on the edge of the desert.

When she sees the man, she realizes he is not the man she saw in her dream. But it is too late to refuse. She requested the marriage, so she joins her husband in the royal carriage and they lead her servants back to the palace.

As they approach the palace in Egypt, Zulaykha pulls back the curtain of the carriage and sees a beautiful man. He is standing on the platform in the slave market. She recognizes the man she had seen in her dream.

She takes the jewels from her neck and hands them to a servant. Go to the market and buy that slave, she tells him.

When he returns to the palace the servant tells her, The slave is a man named Joseph.

The King thinks Joseph is a useful servant and he gives him many jobs to do. Joseph always does what the King requests and he does it very well. Other servants see him talking to no one and they think that he’s strange. When the royal cook asks him what he is saying in these solitary moments, Joseph says, I am speaking to God. The other servants stay away from him, but the King likes to look at him and trusts him. So the King makes Joseph the supervisor of all the servants in the palace.

When Joseph enters a room, Zulaykha can’t take her eyes off him. She thinks she can see flames around the edges of his hair. The sight of his bare arms makes her skin tremble. You’re very beautiful, she says to him one day.

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What is the use of beauty, he answers her, then bows and backs away from her out of the room.

Another day she comes on him standing by a wall, speaking to the air.

She asks him what he is doing.

I am speaking to God, he replies.

You were not born a slave, she says as she approaches him.

No, he replies, my father was a free man and he fell in love with a woman he saw drawing water from a well. He married her and she gave him many sons, but I was the one who resembled her the most. She made me a coat from different colored cloth to wear when I watched the flocks. My brothers hated me and they tried to kill me by throwing me down a well.

Come to my room, she said and she reached out to touch his skin.

He stepped away from her. The King trusts me to manage all his properties, he says to her. I cannot touch his wife.

Kiki was holding the glass in his hand as he spoke. Sylvio could see that the ice had nearly melted. Two small white pieces were floating at the top of the brown liquid. He took a sip from his own glass. The whisky was very strong and smooth.

It felt like smoke on his tongue. I don’t know this version of the story, he said.

Where did you find it?

I found different parts in different books. It changes every time it’s told.

Zulaykha decides to build her own place. She designs the building herself, drawing seven boxes, each inside the other. A single door leads from one box to the next. In the seventh room at the center of the palace she designs a bed chamber with a window overhead. She brings the finest painter in the court, an old man who is a master with brushes of all sizes and shapes. He can create anything in the world by moving one of his brushes across the surface of a wall. Cover the walls of the chamber with images of myself and Joseph making love, she commands him. The old painter refuses. You won’t leave this room until you do what I command, she says, and she locks all the doors of the palace.

One of her servants lowers food to the old painter through the window in the roof. After many months, he covering his eyes with a cloth and begins to paint the walls with only his memory and imagination directing his brush. Each day the servant lowers food in a basket and takes away the refuse from the day before. One day the painter sends up a message in the basket. The task is complete.

Zulaykha unlocks the doors until she reaches the seventh room. The old painter is sitting on the floor. The walls are covered with images of Zulaykha and Joseph making love in every way she has ever imagined.

She looks at the old man and sees that his eyes are opaque. I did what you commanded and now I am blind, he tells her. He refuses to take the money she offers. He leaves the palace by running his hands along the walls until he finds each open door. He is never seen again.

The day of the river festival arrives and everyone n the palace prepares to go to the river. Zulaykha tells the King that she’s ill. I’ll go to the bed

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in my palace to heal myself, she tells him. Send Joseph to bring me something to drink.

Joseph takes a glass pitcher to the river and fills it with water. He goes to Zulaykha’s palace, as the King commands. He goes through the six doors that lead to Zulaykha’s bed chamber. As he passes through each door in the palace, he hears it close behind him. Zulaykha has instructed a servant to hide behind each door and close it after Joseph passes. Each servant then locks the door and leaves by a tunnel Zulaykha has engineered and concealed in the floor of each level of the palace. When Joseph passes through the seventh door, no one else remains in the palace.

Joseph enters the room and he sees Zulaykha lying on her bed. Come in, Joseph, she says. Her body is wrapped in a piece of blue cloth tied around the neck and held around her waist by a single band. He sees the paintings on the walls and recognizes himself in every picture. He has never seen anything so real as these images painted on the walls.

Joseph walks into the room and kneels beside Zulaykha’s bed, reaching his hands out to place the pitcher of water on the carpet beside a table supporting a statue of the river god. As he puts down the pitcher he feels his hands shaking. Water leaps from the pitcher and splashes on the floor. He raises his head and looks at this woman lying on the bed.

His body begins to swell and he feels desire radiating from his hands. He looks at Zulaykha’s face and he has a vision.

First he sees his mother. Run away, she tells him. Then his father appears. The old man’s face is red and he speaks in a language he has not heard in many years. Your children will never be priests if you let this woman touch you, he says. He feels his body turn cold, as if his blood had turned to stone. He stands up beside the bed. I must go back to the river, he says and begins to walk away from the bed, backing out of the room.

Zulaykha rises from her bed. I want you, she says. No one will see us here. We are alone. She takes a cloth from her hair and places it over the face of the statue of the river god on the table beside her bed. She moves towards Joseph and he stops. You’re beautiful, she says to him as she approaches. He feels his body swell again. He feels heat rising from his legs.

As she comes closer to him, he looks at her face and this time he has a vision of God. God is standing between them, holding out His hand. In His hand is the rock that holds up the earth. He hears a voice say, I will throw down this rock and the world will fall into ruin if you touch this woman. She continues to move towards him and he is motionless. He looks into her eyes and speaks. Your cloth cannot cover the eyes of God. Zulaykha stops moving when she hears this. The vision is gone and he can see her face again. Her skin is flushed. She begins to sob and reaches her right hand into the band that holds the blue cloth around her body. Her hand emerges from the cloth with a dagger that reflects the light shining through the window overhead. She raises the dagger to her own throat. If you refuse me, I’ll kill myself, she screams at him.

Joseph reaches out his left hand and grasps the wrist that holds the dagger. He closes his fingers around her wrist and twists it away from her throat. With all his strength he twists her hand until her fingers are

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white and the dagger falls to the ground. Be quiet, he says. The words hiss from his pursed lips. You will not die today.

As Joseph loosens his grip on her wrist, her hand grasps the cloth of his shirt and her other hand wraps around his waist. She presses her mouth against his mouth and begins to kiss him with her parted lips, her tongue and her teeth. She presses her body against his body and holds him tightly with both her arms.

Joseph pulls away from her, lunging towards the door at the far side of the chamber. She is still holding his left arm with her right hand. He wrenches his arm away from her, and she falls forward, reaching out her hands. Her fingers touch the back of his shirt, and she closes her fingers around the cloth as she falls. She feels the ripping of the cloth. The shirt is in her hands on the floor. She looks up and sees his naked back His head is wreathed in flames as he passes through the door and disappears from her sight.

Sylvio sat with his elbows resting on the table. He had placed his left hand under his chin and was covering his mouth with his fingers. How does he get through the door, he said through his fingers.

He just passes through it. I always thought he should have passed up through the window in the ceiling, but that’s not the way the story goes. They sat silently, facing each other across the table.

Here, I’ll show you a picture. Kiki took a quick drink from the glass he held in his hand, put it on the table and pushed back his chair. He stepped to the small bookcase beside the foot of the bed and knelt down. His fingers pushed two books aside and drew out an envelope. Sitting back in his chair again, he drew the back of his sleeve across the table to wipe the moisture left by the glass. It’s a copy, he said as he drew a print out of the envelope. You can hold it on the edges. He handed the print to Sylvio.

Sylvio looked at the paper in his hands. The edges were light gold. The walls of the palace were an interlocking network of flat planes and angled panels. The angle of each panel was defined by parallel lines, moving up or down to the left or right of the walls, conveying a set of open boxes. He counted six doors connected by hallways and a winding stair. Each wall and floor was decorated in geometric or floral patterns, mixing greens, blues, and gold. In the upper right section of the boxes were two figures. A man in a green robe was standing on a carpet, reaching his right hand upwards towards the top of a door. Below him to the right was a woman in a red robe. Her legs were bent and she appeared to be kneeling as her bent knee was parallel with the man’s feet. Her right arm was raised, aligned with his right arm. Her right hand grasped his lowered left arm while her other hand grasped the hem of his cloak. Where did you find this?

In a book on Persian painting. It was painted in Herat in 1488 to illustrate a book of poems.

Herat? Where’s Herat?

Afghanistan. Kiki reached out his hands. He took the picture and put it back into the envelope. Here, he turned back to the bookcase and knelt down again, I’ll show you another picture. He pulled a large book out and placed the envelope on the bed. He held the book in both hands. It was very large. Move my glass off the table, he said. He placed the book facing Sylvio and opened it. This is the Chronicle of the World from 1493 printed in Nuremberg. He could see Sylvio moving backwards in his chair, away from the table. It’s a reproduction. It just

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looks old. Here, he pointed at the roman numerals above the text on the righthand page, the plates are numbered on the upper right. The picture is on plate twenty-seven. He sat down and looked at Sylvio. Turn the page.

Sylvio wiped his hands on his pants after placing his glass on the floor beside his chair. He could hear the sound of a motorcycle going up a nearby street. What’s the roman numeral for twenty-seven?

XXVII. He turned the page of the book by grasping the upper corner between his fingers. This one, he asked, this picture? There were illustrations on every page he exposed. On the left page where he stopped there were groups of men and women emerging from flowers. The figures were drawn from the waist upwards and the flowers were connected by green vines that stretched across the gutter of the book to connect to illustrations on the facing page. Beside and between the illustrations were blocks of black text. Each block of text began with a large letter, stretching across two lines. At the bottom of the right-hand page was an illustration with four figures.

Kiki placed his finger on the illustration, touching each figure as he spoke. This is the King, he said, pointing to a bearded man seated in profile on a throne. This is Zulaykha, he touched the figure on the opposite side of the illustration. The figure in a green dress, her head draped in a scarf, was standing beside an open doorway. A bed was visible through the doorway. There were two slippers under the bed. The woman’s left hand was thrust through the doorway, while her right hand was holding onto the red cloak of the man standing to her right. This is Joseph. The man with his back to her was gesturing with his hands toward the King. His left hand was held close to his body with the palm upward. The fingers of his right hand were curled with the index finger pointing towards the eyes of the King. The man’s head was bare but covered by long thick hair the same gold color as the crown on the bearded king.

And this one? Sylvio touched the green robe of the fourth man seated by the window between Joseph and the King. The collar and cuffs of the robe were white. His round face was topped by a conical brown hat.

That’s the Judge, said Kiki.

When Joseph escapes, Zulaykha takes his shirt to the King and tells him that Joseph attacked her. The King has him arrested and brought before the Judge. Joseph claims he is innocent. Zulaykha claims he tried to rape her and she ripped off his shirt as she struggled to push him away.

The Judge examines the shirt. He sees it is ripped apart in the front and not in the back. This man is innocent, the Judge replies. This evidence shows that the woman is lying.

Then everyone knew what Zulaykha had done. The women began to speak about her and she was humiliated. She invites all the women in the palace to a feast. The women are seated on cushions and servants bring out large bowls of fruit. The servants give each woman a portion of fruit and a paring knife. Zulaykha waits until everyone is carving the fruit in their hands. She has Joseph brought into the room. The women cannot take their eyes off of him, he is so beautiful. As he stands there, each woman forgets the fruit and cuts her own hand with her knife. No one notices what they have done. They are staring at Joseph. The blood begins to stain their clothes and the cushions they sit on, but still no one moves. Finally, Zulaykha claps her hands. Now do you blame me, she cries. The sound startles them and the women see the blood flowing

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from their hands. I have to look at this beauty every day in my own household, Zulaykha cries and she runs from the room. She throws herself at the feet of the King and demands that Joseph be sent to prison.

Kiki closed the book. He lifted it from the table with two hands and placed it into the space on the bookshelf. He took the envelope from the bed and replaced it between the same two books.

Is that it?

Oh, no. It’s a long story, it goes on.

Yeah, well. Is that what you wanted to show me, the pictures?

Yes. Sylvio looked around the room again. There was a broom leaning against the wall. It’s a cozy place. He looked at his watch. I have to meet Celine in an hour.

He reached under his chair for his helmet.

I have a job this afternoon. Kiki was standing behind his chair. Can you find your way back?

I think so. He stood up. The door opened by pulling up on a metal latch. He opened the door and looked up at the sky. The late afternoon sun lit the tops of the trees hanging over the small wooden structure. Kiki was standing behind him, holding the door from the inside.

The release for the gate is over there, he said, gesturing towards the wall. Sylvio walked along the path to the wall. As he pressed the button he heard the click of the gate releasing. He stepped through the gate and stood facing the rock. He heard the gate close behind him. There were voices, a woman speaking softly and a man answering her. As he stepped around the rock he saw the couple sitting on the steps. The woman was sitting on the top step and the man was standing a few steps below, facing her. As Sylvio continued to walk down the steps towards the gate, the couple continued to talk as if there was no one else there.

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48. The Coin (3) You know, there are two ways of eating pistachio nuts. Kiki had taken a sealed brick of nuts from the shelf above the sink. He pulled a drawer open with one hand and pushed objects back and forth, making a great deal of noise.

What are you looking for? Sheldon sat at the table tapping his fingers on the surface. He listened to the sound of his fingers on the surface, trying to determine the composition of the table. It sounded like a thin veneer of wood placed over pressed sawdust.

Something to cut this. Kiki’s hand emerged with a small scissors. He clipped the edge of the brick. The triangle of packaging fell to the floor. Sheldon heard the sound of a vacuum being released. The package of nuts relaxed into a sack swollen with air in Kiki’s hand.

It’s quiet here. Sheldon had looked around the room, noting the bed, the desk and chair against the side wall, the shelves that held a few dishes and books. You don’t have too many things, do you. Sheldon’s fingers were tapping a rhythm from a song he had heard a man playing on the metro earlier that day. He could hear the song clearly in his mind.

I have enough. I used to have more things, but I got rid of them before I came here. One advantage of living in the city, you know, he was using his free hand to lift a wooden bowl from the shelf, is that you don’t need much. You don’t need much room, there are places to walk, places to sit, places to listen, places to read.

And you don’t need many things. There are things everywhere in a city. You can pick up something in the morning when you wake up, you use it and by evening its gone. The only thing you need is money, he put the bowl on the table, and money is a card that works in a bank machine.

Yes, the bank machines are very reliable here.

So, Kiki sat down opposite Sheldon at the small table, there are two ways to eat pistachios. You put them in a bowl, he poured the contents of the sack into the wooden bowl, you take the nuts out with your fingers and take off the shell. He pushed his fingers into the bowl. Sheldon listened to the tinkling sound of the hard shells striking each other. You can pick up more than one, but you can only open them one at a time because, he held a nut between the thumb and two fingers of one hand, you need two hands to open the shell and get to the nut. You grab the two sides of the shell if they are wide enough apart or you push a fingernail into the crack if its too tight, he pulled the shell open with the thumb and fingers of his right hand. There was a popping sound as the hinge of the shell separated. Then you have to make a choice.

You don’t eat the shells, I know that. Sheldon smiled. He thought about one of the pictures Diana had showed him, a photo of this man sitting on the floor, smiling at the person holding the camera, gesturing with his hands in the air. He tried to imitate the facial expression he remembered from the photograph.

You choose. Kiki held out his palm in which the two shells were resting. Either you place the shells somewhere else, the floor, an ashtray, some other container set aside for refuse, or, he put the green nut into his mouth with his other hand, you put the refuse back into the bowl. He tipped his palm and the empty shells fell into the wooden bowl. Sheldon noticed that the sound was higher than the sound of the nuts striking each other. The implications of the choice are profound. As you continue to eat, you have to feel the difference between the ones

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that are food and the empty shells. He pushed his fingers around in the bowl. The sound changes over time. As you eat the nuts, the sound of the empty shells striking one another is different. And you begin to feel the difference, you feel the sound with your finger tips. He had been opening nuts and dropping the empty shells into the bowl as he spoke. Here, he pushed the bowl across the table.

Sheldon plunged his hand into the bowl and removed a group of nuts. He looked at what he had taken. It included several empty shells. He separated the empty shells and put them back into the bowl. I guess it takes practice. He opened a nut and placed the green meat into his mouth. You don’t remember meeting me, do you?

No. When did I meet you before you came up to me on the subway car today to deliver Diana’s message?

At a reception. It was, he started calculating time, first marking the likely year when the reception event would have occurred by remembering when he had first met the doctor, estimating the time it had taken to adapt the prototype of the magic suit to track the shape and gestures of Diana’s body, remembering the number of the current year, and then doing the arithmetic, about twenty, twentytwo years ago.

You have a formidable memory, Kiki glanced down at the card facing him next to the silver ring on the table, Mr. Borkin. I don’t think I can remember all the people I met at a reception twenty-two years ago. Even if I try to focus my mind on the images of people introduced to me by our mutual friend.

Pattern recognition is a gift, I think. Like perfect pitch or what is called photographic memory. I don’t believe photographic memory is a useful term. It mixes too many kinds of abilities. I remember patterns, and faces, he said pushing his fingers into the bowl, are a special kind of pattern. I believe it is the purest form of synecdoche, where the pattern of the face represents the entire person without the intervention of language. It is widespread and normalized across the species, from what I’ve read. There’s evidence that it appears in all mammals.

I’ll take your word for it. Kiki looked at the card again. Your face is hard to describe. I think I would have a hard time remembering you if I didn’t have you sitting here at this table. I didn’t notice you on the train until you introduced yourself. And then I realized you had been sitting in the car listening to the same musicians that I was listening to. You were in the car when I entered the train, weren’t you.

Yes, I happened to get on that train six stations before you did. I had gotten off another train and as I came up the escalator, I heard music. It was a violin. At the top of the escalator I realized it was coming from the corridor to my left. At the end of the corridor there was a man playing a violin, standing against the wall. His case was open on the floor and people were placing money in it as they walked by.

I realized the place he was standing was acoustically perfect. The vibrations from his instrument came off the ceiling and passed in both directions along the corridor to his right and left. At the same time the vibrations moved forward in the direction he was facing into the connecting corridor and down the stairway beside the escalator to the train platform below. By playing his instrument at this spot his music was heard by hundreds of people moving in all directions.

Are you an acoustical engineer? It says inventor on your card. Kiki had been eating nuts. He had been watching Sheldon’s eyes move up and down as he talked, following the motion of his hands. As he raised a nut to his mouth, Sheldon’s eyes focused on his face and then descended towards the table as his hand returned to the bowl.

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No, I am basically a software engineer. I invent systems to, Sheldon paused, systems to make the software visible. I’ve done a lot of work programming images, light, calculating how light moves, refraction, diffusion, his voice began to trail off, 3D images, light waves and sound waves have similar characteristics, not really the characteristics but the mathematics of wave motion in common, they are both waves, though light has a particle dimension and both light and sound are synthesized by the brain as space, he was speaking so softly that Kiki paused in his eating of the nuts, deciding not to put his hand back into the bowl. Kiki noticed that Sheldon’s eyes were now looking beyond him, focused on the wall behind his head. What do you do?

The room was silent. Kiki looked at the empty shells in his hand and dropped them back into the bowl. Do you want something to drink?

I’ll have some water, thank you. Sheldon turned his gaze back to Kiki’s face.

Diana said that you two went to school together.

Kiki got up from the table. Sheldon’s eyes followed him as he knelt down in front of the small refrigerator under the desk on the opposite wall and removed a bottle of water from the shelf on the door. He stood up, walked back to the table and placed the plastic bottle next to the bowl of nuts. I like to ride on the front of the train, he said, opening the bottle by twisting off the cap and holding it away from his body towards Sheldon. He could see that Sheldon’s eyes were now on the water bottle. I like to put my face against the window and watch the motion. The view from the front is the most interesting view on a train. Sheldon took the bottle from his hand. He paused for a moment, looking at the label on the bottle, and then raised it to his mouth. Then sometimes I get off. Sheldon placed the bottle on the table. Kiki immediately picked it up and took a long drink. What did you see on the train?

Oh, nothing out of the ordinary. The only extraordinary thing was seeing your face so soon after Diana had shown me your picture and asked me to give you this ring.

I didn’t expect, I didn’t set out to find you today. I had some spare time, I was simply wandering when I got on that train and hadn’t decided yet when to get off.

I was watching people. There were two musicians on the car in front of the one I entered, six stations before you did, as I said. I could see them through the window that separated the cars, and when the train stopped and the doors opened I could hear the music they were playing. They came into the car and stood in the middle, as most of the musicians do, so more of the people in the train would see and hear them. One man, the heavier one with the long hair tied behind the back of his head, had an accordion, and his partner, the thin one with the short hair, had a saxophone. They started to play the same songs I heard through the open doors. It was the station just before the one where you got on the train. I was, Sheldon paused, looking at Kiki’s face, focusing first on his eyes and then looking at the gray beard hairs around his mouth, looking at the musicians. When they finished the second song, the saxophone player stopped playing and took a leather purse from the side pocket of his pants. He walked towards me, moving through the car to collect money from the passengers.

What did the man look like? Kiki opened a drawer on the side of the table. He put a white sheet of paper and a pencil in front of Sheldon.

Sheldon picked up the pencil and turned the paper slightly. He began to draw rapidly, making quick lines to represent the man’s face in the top half of the page. He began with the outline of the head, the shape of the chin and cheeks.

He added the eyes, nose, and mouth, and then the hairline. He added ears and filled the eyebrows and hair by making small marks with the pencil. Without pausing, he began to draw the same face in profile, capturing the shape of the

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man’s brow, nose, mouth and chin, adding the eye, and filling in the eyebrow and hair. He put down the pencil and rotated the paper towards Kiki. He looked like this, he said. His partner continued to play the accordion. They often do that, one man continues to play while the other one asks for money. It was when the saxophone player passed me that I noticed you standing by the door. He put the purse in front of you and I saw you put something in it.

Did you see what I put into the purse?

I’m not entirely sure. It looks like a coin. Kiki was looking directly into Sheldon’s eyes. They seemed to be focused on the wall behind his head, as if Sheldon was looking at an image on a screen. It looks like something round. The surface is metallic. Kiki noticed the movement of Sheldon’s hand, resting on the top of his leg. His thumb was moving, rubbing against the side of his finger. If I make the image larger, I can see the shape of the object but I can’t resolve the image engraved on the visible side. It doesn’t look like a normal coin.

What are you doing?

I’m remembering the image of what I saw in the train. I use a system I invented to help me remember things that I see. He saw Kiki staring at his eyes as his hand flashed across the table and grabbed the glasses off his face. I can’t see very well without my glasses, Mr. Koenig.

Kiki held the glasses up towards the overhanging light above the table. What do you think is more real, Mr. Borkin, photographs or memories? As he rotated the lens against the light, he could see small refractive surfaces on the upper right edge of each lens.

Photographs. I’m quite sure of that. Photographs are made entirely of reflected light, while it’s not clear what memories are composed from. I think memories are the result of distributed patterns, an alignment of patterns formed in several areas of the brain. Can I have my glasses back?

Sure. Take them. Kiki put the glasses on the table. Where do you store the photographs that you take?

Sheldon lifted the glasses with both hands and carefully replaced them, first on his nose and then guided the thin side pieces behind each of his ears. What photographs are you talking about?

Kiki took the sheet of paper from the table. He folded it several times and placed it into the pocket on the front of his shirt. He lifted Sheldon’s card off the table and held it between the nail of his finger and the edge of his thumb, then placed it into the same pocket. He looked down at the silver ring on the table. When he looked up, he could see that Sheldon’s eyes had followed his gaze and were also looking at the ring. Let me give you some free advice. Kiki stood up. If I were you, I would erase the photographs. Delete them, destroy the data, make sure there’s no trace someone else can find of what you saw on the train. He had walked behind Sheldon as he spoke. He opened the door and pushed it outward, holding it with one hand. Do what you want with your memories, Mr. Borkin, but don’t let anyone think that you have photographs of me when I’m working. He gestured with his head towards the open door. Especially our mutual friend.

Sheldon had turned his head to watch Kiki as he went for the door. He looked past Kiki at the green ivy covering the ground outside the small house. He stood up carefully replacing his chair under the table. He lifted the chair as he moved it, preventing the legs from making any scraping sound against the wooden floor. He took the water bottle in his left hand, removed a white handkerchief

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from his pants with the other hand and wiped its mouth, took a drink and replaced the bottle on the table. I can see much better now, thank you. He was standing in the doorway facing Kiki. It was a pleasure to meet you. I’ll tell Diana that I saw you.

You do that, Mr. Borkin. Kiki looked at Sheldon’s face, examining the refraction of sunlight on his glasses. You tell her that I got her message.

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49. The Invitation This system that your friend built that makes clothing appear on your body, how does it feel when you’re wearing it? What does it feel like to walk around like this?

Oh, you feel the underwear. She emitted a nervous laugh. The underwear is always touching your body, holding on to your skin, pressing against the usual places where underwear presses, you know, your crotch, your hips, holding your breasts against you, covering your ass and your back. The color of the underwear has to match your skin, so it’s difficult for anyone else to see it, but you can feel it, where it ends. At first you couldn’t touch yourself or your fingers might appear to go right through it. I found that rather difficult to remember. You couldn’t carry anything. I mean, there’re no pockets, of course, and you couldn’t wear a bag. But he figured out a way to train the system to understand the gestures of my hands.

He didn’t want to do accessories. But he’s changed all that since we started to show it. Now if I use the right gestures I can touch the projection and move it, I can lift up the hem of the skirt, for example, or straighten a sleeve, pull a cuff down to make it come out of the jacket. That’s how it feels to me. But everyone is different.

She was drawing as she spoke, adding the details on the front of a jacket. Her thumb pressed the end of the pencil and a thin line of graphite emerged from the tip. She pressed the pencil against the paper and he heard the graphite snap.

He saw it jump across the page. Damn, she said, and reached for the eraser gum with her other hand. I like it, some people like it, some people get very good at wearing it. It makes you feel like you’re performing, you know? Like when we used to do dance performances, your body is projecting as you move, your arms, your hands, she lifted the hand holding the pencil and extended her fingers in a fan motion, are saying what you want them to say, in the language you want other people to understand. The clothes are a costume. I design costumes. She looked at him with a mixture of impatience and amusement, as if to reassure herself that people who did not already know this were children who would eventually learn to understand the rules of a grown-up world. You are wearing a costume and performing a dance to make others believe you are there, you exist.

And can you see what other people see, even though it’s projected on you? Her face took on a stone-like quality. He was asking the wrong question. I’m not trying to be hostile, he said, I believe you, I’m just trying to understand.

I can see it. I suppose it is partly my imagination, but then I designed the costumes, why shouldn’t I be able to imagine what I look like when I’m wearing them? She stopped drawing and turned on the stool to face him. If you really want to know, I can’t really see what someone else sees from across the room. But I can’t see that in any case, no matter what kind of material I’m wearing. You know, when you dance you train with mirrors so you can understand what you are doing, what your body looks like. Some of the models use a mirror, they feel more comfortable when they can see themselves in a mirror. I don’t use a mirror anymore.

Yeah, I imagine some people are not very good at it. Some people don’t know how to perform in front of a camera either. I was just curious. He ran the fingers of his left hand through the part of his beard that covered the side of his face. It is a habit, he thought, his hand would brush the side of his face and when he felt the hair his fingers would press down to his skin. If the beard was long enough his fingers would pull on the hair. His fingers wanted to touch his face. He looked up at her balanced on the stool, resting one elbow on the drawing table.

Well, it was a surprise to meet this friend of yours and get the message that you wanted to see me. I didn’t expect to see you again. Not here. Or anyplace else for that matter.

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You know a lot of people, Kiki. And a lot of people know you. You’re not invisible, y’know. She was looking at him. He thought he saw her eyes moving over his clothes. Her face began to soften. It’s the same with me, y’know. Sometimes I don’t stay in one place.

Thanks for the ring. I always liked it.

That’s why you gave it to me, I suppose. She turned the edges of her mouth up and pressed her lips together.

I suppose. Actually, no, I gave it to you because I wanted you to remember me.

Aren’t you going to give it back?

No, he said, no, I think I’ll keep it. I didn’t bring it with me. He was trying to remember what her face looked like the last time he had seen her. He tried to merge the image he held in his memory, the face of a woman he had wanted to look at closely. He had often looked at her eyebrows and thought how they resembled brushstrokes in a painting, and the pores on the end of her nose, the tiny black pores he could only see when his face was very close to her face. His fingers were remembering the texture of her thin black hair. The image of her face in his memory blurred against the image of the face he was looking at now.

As she spoke to him, he could see her lips moving through the blur. The lips were obeying a different kind of physics than the rest of her face, as if they were both speaking to him from different worlds.

So what are you doing here?

I ended up here. I have some work now.

What are you doing now? She turned her attention back to the paper on the drawing table. He could see her eyes searching for the detail she had left unfinished on the drawing of the jacket.

I keep busy. He was bending forward on the chair, resting his elbows on his knees. He lifted his shoulders up. I had an experience once. It was years ago, it seems like a long time ago now. I was with my wife, your old friend my ex-wife.

She turned to look at him again. We went to a place near the house where the rocks stick out into the ocean. We weren’t living together anymore, but we wanted to spend the afternoon together and we went to this place that was always nice.

The rocks are flat and you can walk out into the ocean. You know, you’re walking on the rocks but it feels like you’re out in the water. We found a place to sit down and I was looking at the sky. It was a peculiar day. We were near the mouth of the bay where the weather patterns mix sometimes, moving in different directions at once. The clouds were broken, the sun was low, and you could see three separate layers. You know, clouds appear at specific altitudes, he raised his hands as he spoke, holding one hand over the other with his palms pointing downward. You see this when you fly, but from the ground you only see the layer at the bottom.

He raised his hands closer to his own face, spreading his fingers. But this time they were broken and you could see through all three layers. One was moving this way, he passed the hand on the top away from his body, and the other one was moving this way, and the layer on the bottom was moving much faster than the other two. And I was looking up, seeing right through these layers. I had seen this before, but this time I thought – people are like clouds I suppose I started to see things, after I left her. I started to see things differently.

He paused. She was sitting quite motionless. She had put her feet onto the rungs of the stool, and her back was straight. I turned to her and said, People are like

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the clouds in the sky. They appear to be a single thing, but they’re made out of many layers, and the layers are moving in different directions at different speeds.

You look at another person, at a woman that you love, and you think you can see her, like a single cloud. He was holding his hands in front of his chest now. His palms were angled towards his face with his right hand overlapped his left. But it’s just an illusion.

She was looking at his hands. When he stopped speaking, she returned her eyes to his face. I heard you were in town. I thought it would be nice to see you again.

His hands were resting in his lap now. As he stood up, he kept his eyes on her face. Who told you I was here? He was looking down at her now, sitting on the high stool beside the drawing table. He took the scarf off the back of the chair without looking back and began to tie it around his neck.

Listen, she said to him. Her hand reached for an envelope at the far end of the table. My show is next Thursday. She held out the envelope. I’d like to know what you think.

He took it from her hand. He turned it over, opened it and pulled out the card inside. Am I a customer or do I represent the fashion press?

You’re a guest, she said. He could see the word “guest” stamped on the ticket.

I’ll think about it, he said.

She turned her back to him and focused on the drawing of the jacket she was making on the paper in front of her. She heard him walk out of the room and close the door.

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50. Dead Man I think you killed him.

No, I don’t think so. The morning sunlight entered the room, filtered through the leaves on the tree growing from the sidewalk below. The tree shadow formed abstract spots of light on the surface of the window glass. As he exhaled the smoke he’d drawn from the cigarette, it passed through the slanting light, forming a series of twisting white strings. The strings continued to move, drawing whirls on the surface of moving water. As these shapes stretched across the space illuminated by the sunlight, their white color gradually faded to a transparent gray. He’s still out there. He’s part of the present. The dead are in the past.

Well, I saw him. He looked dead to me.

He turned away, twisted the handle with his right hand and opened the window, leaning both hands against the rough concrete railing. Sunlight was pouring over the yellow and brown leaves remaining on the branches of the tree. Where the leaves had fallen, thin brown petals hung beside black seed cases, trembling like needles. He heard voices on the street below. The sidewalk was covered in patterns of leaves, pushed aside by strolling feet. Three children were lining themselves up on the sidewalk, balanced on scooters and skateboards, poised to ride gravity down the hill. He leaned over the railing and called out. Michel, be careful at the bottom of the hill. Watch your sister. He turned his head back towards the room, speaking over his shoulder. You see what you want to see. You see in terms of what you understand. You might have seen a man who was paralyzed. You might have seen a blinded man, if you understood what that looked like.

I saw a dead man.

You remember seeing a dead man. You know what a dead man looks like? He raised the cigarette to his lips. The smoke coming from his mouth moved into the room and then swept back against his face. The white strings swept past his cheeks and mixed with the illuminated strands of hair jutting from his head, framed against the sunlight beyond the tree, then continued out the window.

Look at me, he said. I’m a dead man.

They both could hear the sound of church bells, the children shouting at each other on the sidewalk, and the movement of the cars along the street. The bells grew louder, the swinging and slapping of the curved metal against the clappers echoing off the stone and concrete facades.

You don’t look like a dead man to me.

Well, there you go. It depends on what you expect to see. Smashed face. Blood stains on the shirt. He grasped his white shirt between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, looking down at the cloth. Smoking a cigarette, talking, these are not the characteristics of a dead man. He sat down in the chair, facing the window. I’m a dead man and I remember things. I remember a dream I had when I was very young, I must have been about five years old. I was walking down a street near the house where my family lived. The whole neighborhood was small houses on both sides of the street, trees between the curb and the sidewalk. I was walking alone, towards the house where a friend of my mother lived. It began to rain very hard. The water poured down and I stood on the sidewalk under a tree. A stream of water began to rush down the street gutter. The rain stopped, but the

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water continued to rush by. And then two large white swans came floating by on the stream of water. When I think about it now it was like seeing an angel. He turned and stared into space, focusing on something between himself and the far wall. I don’t think I knew what an angel looked like then. But I had seen swans in the lake. And these were very large, very white, very calm, with all the gravity and lightness of great birds floating on this rushing stream of water that had appeared not from the ground but from the sky. And I was alone on this deserted street. I was very conscious of being the only person who saw them as they floated by, their beaks and small black eyes pointed straight ahead, moving with the flowing water.

I thought they were beautiful. I woke up feeling very good. I realized it was a dream. He dug the cigarette into an ashtray on the table. I didn’t kill him. I told him to erase the pictures.

When I saw him, he looked like he was dead.

Well, he said sitting in the chair, then maybe he didn’t take my advice. Maybe he thinks he’s immune.

Immune from what?

Immune from reality. Maybe this guy thinks he’s so smart that reality doesn’t infect him like the rest of us. No one can forgive Rimbaud for abandoning poetry, he said, gesturing towards a book on the table beside the ashtray. That he mastered the language at such a young age was incredible and frightening, but his precociousness was forgivable. After a few decades it was justified by the objective cleverness of the poems themselves. He was part of a community of poets for a few years. He picked up the book and opened it to a page marked with a postcard.

Language is a shared hallucination, Sylvio. Some people are very clever. Rimbaud transformed the details of excess and appetite into images drenched in suggestion.

The Prince fell in love with the Genie. They slaughtered each other in their embrace, the putty of white sperm squeezing between their fingers as they rendered each other’s limbs over a boiling vat. After the contest, he stood up, pausing on his way to the bathroom. He looked down at his own corpse on the bloody sheets and rain fell from between his legs. As he leaned on the sink, splashing water on his face, he realized that all this language was far less important, he took an orange from the bowl on the table and placed it in his other hand, than the act of removing himself from the people he knew. These men were his audience, his critics, and his lovers. They could believe that an excitable teenager from the provinces might write beautiful verse, but a man cannot abandon an achieved art to find fulfillment in commerce. They would think that he was dead. So he disappeared.

I thought he became a gun runner. Sylvio turned the device in his hand, looking at the small display each time it faced him. What time is it?

It’s about twenty after nine. Kiki stared straight ahead, looking at the wall.

Sylvio turned the device over and looked at the display. This says eight seventeen. What time zone are you in?

He was engaged in commerce and logistics. Once he abandoned poetry, he learned to speak several languages. Whatever he was before was dead. Finally his legs began to swell until he couldn’t walk. They had to carry him to a ship. When he died, his body was on fire, his blood embracing the infection. Sometimes the body destroys itself, he said, trying to save its own life. His fingernail dug into the skin of the fruit. You can think I killed him, if it gives you a sense of completion. But I think he’s still alive.

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51. No Problemo As he entered the train, he saw three musicians sitting on the folding seats at the back of the car. In the center was a woman with a small sound system on a wheelie, topped with a mini-disc player taped to the speaker, a plastic cup hooked to the wheelie’s handle, a microphone in her hand. She was sitting beside a man holding a clarinet, his face a neatly trimmed goatee and moustache. Opposite sat another man with a speaker on a wheelie. The three conversed in a language he did not understand.

He stood between them. They got up as the train approached a station. The single man left as the door opened and the woman pressed a button on the minidisc player and began to sing Fools Rush In, while her companion played his clarinet almost silently. He could hear the man breathing on the reed a few inches from his face. After the musicians stood and began to play, he rearranged his position, taking one of the folding seats they had abandoned. He noticed the Star of David hanging from the woman’s neck over a modest sweater. He watched the man fingering the clarinet though hardly a sound was coming from the instrument. The end of the train was filled by the woman’s voice and the recorded sound coming through the speaker from the mini-disc player.

It was only then that he saw the woman leaning against the inside door of the train. Her necklace was the combination of elaborate and modest, blue stones set in a small network of silver wires covering the area from her neck to the edge of her sleeveless top. Her hair was cut short, her arms were thin and tiny and smooth. Her breasts were small and she had no waist, but the flair of her brown pants hung down over long pointed boots. The points of the boots stuck out from the hanging flair of cloth at the end of each leg. Wires of a sound system hung from her ears. She watched the woman sing as he turned his attention to watch her face.

As they approached the next station, the singer stopped the second song. He had not noticed the song’s melody or tried to guess it’s title as he stared at the woman by the inside door. The silent clarinet player took the cup around the rear half of the car. The woman by the inside door gave some coins. A second woman sitting with her son on the folding seat agreed to let her child give a coin. The clarinet player stood in front of the boy for several seconds as the child took out a purse, removed a coin, and placed it in the cup. The singer had stopped the mini-disc player. Both she and the clarinet player left the train. He stood up as a new crowd entered and then left at the next stop to change to a different line.

He found himself walking behind the woman he had been staring at with the short hair and necklace. As he moved behind her, he looked at her back. The sleeveless top came down in the back exposing the wings of her shoulders. She moved with a sinuous grace, walking quickly up the steps. He found himself moving quickly to stay behind her, watching her hips and her shoulders moving almost independently. She must be a dancer, he thought, she is certainly thin enough, small and quick.

As they approached another stairway descending to the platform, a woman was stopped with a baby stroller and child, about to lift them down. The short-haired woman stopped and offered to help the woman with the stroller. He slowed down to watch the interaction. He didn’t expect the short-haired woman to notice the woman with the child. She stopped and offered her assistance to the mother with the same gracefulness she displayed in her walk, slowing and speaking in an easy manner, accepting the woman’s thanks even as the young mother declined

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the offer of assistance. He was lingering on the stairway below them as the mother lifted the child inside the baby stroller by herself and the short-haired woman continued quickly down the stairs, passing him.

Now they were both heading through the people on the platform. He resumed his position behind her, following the shape of her back as it moved between the stationary people. They both headed for a position on the platform to enter the first car. He began to wonder if she noticed him following her. She stopped and faced the tracks, adjusting the music in her ears. He looked at the yellow chairs against the station wall behind her. One had a paper on it, the other a puddle in front of it, the third was occupied. He stood behind her, looking at the skin of her shoulders.

When the train arrived, they entered through the same door, but he took an empty seat facing away from where she stood. He looked over his shoulder to see where she was. He could see her profile as she stood by the inside door again, looking straight ahead. He looked back to check on her presence each time the train stopped. He began to wonder if they would get off at the same station. But at the next station he noticed she was gone. He watched her back from the window of the train as she walked swiftly and gracefully to the exit at the head of the platform.

As he watched her disappear, he changed his mind. He did not need to go where he was planning. He opened the door of the train at the next stop and followed the signs to the closest stairway. On the street he began to walk, skirting the entrance to a park, following a street along a fence until it ended in at the bend of a street and a stairway ascended the hill at an angle too steep to support a vehicle. Facing the stairway was a bar with tables jammed between the entrance and the narrow sidewalk. He recognized the street. He looked above the doorway. The name of the bar was No Problemo.

He sat in the chair, balancing his left leg on his right knee, placing the book on the table after running his hand over the surface to determine that it was not wet from a previous drink or the careless rag of a waiter. The table was one of several between the narrow sidewalk and the open entrance of the bar, circumscribed by the tight corner of a street.

He opened the book to a blank page and smoothed the binding down with the palm of his hand, pressing the heel of his palm against the place where the two pages joined. He took a pen from his pocket.

Is that a sketchbook?

He had noted the woman sitting at the table beside him. He turned his eyes toward her without turning his head to determine if she was speaking to him.

No, I don’t draw. I write. He kept his eye on the place where his pen hovered over the white paper.

Then why do you carry a sketch book?

He began to draw the point of the pen over the white surface of the paper. Why don’t you mind your own business.

Well, if you don’t want to talk to anyone, why did you come to a bar? She raised her head as she spoke to gain a more favorable angle to view the surface of the book he held with his left hand while his right hand hovered above the white page.

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I was walking for a long time, he said, his eyes still fixed on the pen in his hand.

I thought this would be a good place to sit down. If I go up the hill everyone is taking pictures. I don’t like to watch people pointing cameras.

Her cell phone rang. It was on the table beside the one where he had placed his sketch book, next to a glass sweating moisture onto a coaster. They both watched it vibrate. It began to rotate on the table. It had turned 180 degrees before the ringing and vibration ceased.

He continued to look at the silent cell phone. Does it have a camera in it?

Yeah. She raised a hand that had been resting in her lap. She picked the object off the table and offered it to him. Have you ever seen one like this? It has a GPS too. You know what that is?

He took his left hand off the book and she placed it in his open palm. Yes, he said, now looking at the silver phone. I was in communications. He turned it in his hand, moving his thumb and fingers, sensing its weight and the texture of the metal skin. They used to be much larger.

My boyfriend gave it to me.

He wrapped his fingers around the phone. I suppose that means he wants to know where you are.

I suppose. Sometimes. Sometimes he doesn’t really care.

GPS. The last time I used a GPS, he said as he put the pen down on the table and closed the book. Then he stopped, as if the act of closing the book reminded him of where he was. He looked at the woman he had been speaking to for the first time, estimating her body shape and weight as best he could from what was visible above the café table. What’s your name?

Ray. My friends call me Ray. That’s not my real name but it’s easier to remember than my real name, so that’s what they call me. And your name is Kiki.

He had been looking at her face as her lips formed the last syllables and felt his own face harden, the corners of his mouth pull inward, the skin over his cheekbones tighten, narrowing his eyes and lowering the lids beneath his eyelashes. What, he said as he placed the phone back in its place beside the sweating glass on her table, do you want?

She forced a smile across her mouth, raising her eyebrows in what he thought she intended as a comic gesture. A cigarette?

The book was closed now. He placed the pen inside the pocket of his jacket and reached with the same hand into the outside pocket, grasping the metal lighter and pack of cigarettes in his fingers. He pushed the cigarette box open with one finger and held it towards her. She pulled a cigarette out of the box by pressing the edges of her nails into the white paper. What makes you think, he said to her as she placed the cigarette into her mouth, that you know my name? He put the cigarette box on the table, lit her cigarette with the metal lighter, and placed this object on the table as well.

You do a pretty good job of making your face turn into stone. Maybe I should just call you Stoneface. I’ve seen you around. I saw you talking with Sylvio once. That’s what Sylvio called you. She put the phone into her pocket.

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Well, I don’t know anyone named Sylvio and that’s not my name. You must be mistaking me for someone else. So where do you live?

Around. Not far from the guy you don’t know, actually. Listen, I’ve seen you before. I’m not making this up. I’ve seen your face.

You remember a face like mine, but it’s not my face. Only his mouth was moving as he stared directly into her small brown eyes. Perception is made from differences. What you remember, he lifted the beer glass from her table, took a sip, and replaced it without looking down, is made from patterns. Do you mind if I drink some of your beer? These perceptions, they happen in cycles. We perceive units through repetitions – day and night, hot and cold – our sense of place is constructed from movements that create constant change. She felt the telephone buzzing in her pocket, vibrating against her skin. We look for rhythms in this change, patterns. You’ve seen a face like mine on someone talking to a friend of your’s named Sylvie…

Sylvio. It’s a guy. He’s a musician. She pushed back her chair and started to shift her weight in the chair, as if to stand up. Listen, I don’t think you’re being serious with me. If you don’t want to talk to me, I’ll just…

He reached out his hand and grabbed her arm. He could feel how thin the arm was as his fingers pressed on her shirt. No, I’m happy to talk. I haven’t talked to anyone all day. I’ve been meaning to talk to you from the moment I noticed you were sitting there. He was looking at her now, measuring the cloth hat covering her hair, the braids hanging down on both sides of her head wrapped with colorful threads, her tiny mouth. Do you know where you are?

She felt him looking at her mouth. As she settled back in her chair and took a drag of the cigarette, she began to feel her own lips pressing against the end of the cigarette. Sure. She threw back her head and the braid of black hair that was resting on her left breast moved up and over her shoulder, sliding down her back. I live here. I mean, this is where I live. Not here exactly, she said gesturing with the cigarette at the entrance to the bar behind them, you know, around here, I live, nearby, I come here, sometimes, when I feel like it.

How do you decide where here is? He let his fingers slide off her arm as he turned in the chair to face her. Do you remember where you are or do you see where you are? Memory can play tricks on you. That’s why people can remember things that never happened. Me for instance, he pressed the ends of his fingertips against his chest, I decide where I am with my memory. I move through space and record sensations. That’s how I know where I am. I smell dog urine on the street. I see the color of flowers and seeds falling from the tree over the sidewalk there. All this becomes a memory. You were sitting here before, you were talking to someone you know, or you were talking to someone, you’re not even sure who you were talking to, but you heard someone else talking and you think you remember the face of the person he was talking to. But it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me you remember. It wasn’t me your friend was talking to. He looked at her staring directly into the eyes returning his stare. She could feel the details of his face. She would remember his face and the tight tone of his voice. They were both motionless for some time. She moved her eyes away from his to look at the cigarette burning in her fingers.

As she moved, he spoke. So Ray, have you ever seen me before?

No, I’ve never seen you before.

Do you know my name, Ray?

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No, mister, I don’t know what your name is.

That’s good. He picked up the beer glass and took another sip. His voice began to relax. I was up on top of the hill earlier today, and I saw a young woman sitting on the stone bench in the park. She was sitting with her back to the corner, he joined his hands at the fingertips, resting them on the table in front of her, looking down at the place where his fingers touched, the L-shaped corner of the stone bench. She was leaning back with her legs stretched out along the seat. I sat there once myself, I knew the spot she was sitting in. It’s a magnificent spot, you look up and you can see, the white dome of the basilica and the projection of the bell tower along with the green copper of the angels.

There was a silver buckle on the square railroad boot visible below the ends of the woman’s jeans. Her knee was raised to cradle the book she rested on her thighs. A brown shirt with small silver buttons was loose over her waist. She held the book with her left and pushed her hair back with her right hand, piling the thick knows of brown hair against the stone behind her.

Even as he noticed the woman sitting on the bench, he remembered taking pictures from that place sometime before. The act of taking photographs had changed the place. He had an image of the eccentric red brick lines on the exterior of a building below the park, though it was now obscured by the trees covered with leaves. As he looked up at the canopy of leaves and flowers that were the arbor over his head, he could see the bare maze of woody lines that existed before the leaves and flowers appeared and similar lines that returned when the leaves and flowers disappeared.

He watched her. She was reading the book and then she would stop and look around at the people who approached her bench. A couple came into the space between them – he was hidden under the arbor and she exposed on the corner bench at the other side of the green square – and the couple began to clown with each other. The woman was posing for pictures, the man squatting down and backing up to get the towers of the church in the picture frame. The man walked backwards towards the corner where she sat and he watched her face, amused and uncomfortable, preparing for him to back into her bench.

She returned to her reading as the couple left the park. It was a large book with a white cover. A serious book, it had no image on the cover that he could see as he moved his head slightly, hoping to see it better. A man came up the ramp behind her bench and placed his camera bag on the stone railing. He took out a camera and photographed the church, looking away from her. Then the man with the camera began to talk to her. He could make out that the man was asking directions and the woman was answering with a mixture of hand signals, her own language, and the language that the man was speaking.

Shortly after the man asked her for directions, she got up from the bench. She walked directly in front of him, gazing straight ahead, holding her book at her side. He thought about how the entire experience of sitting in the park that afternoon, a spontaneous destination caused by a long sequence of previous choices of direction, had become his act of observing this young woman reading her book. She hadn’t seemed to notice his attention. He got up from the stone bench and went to the gate she had walked towards.

He saw her walking to the right behind the church. He followed her at a steady pace. They were almost a block apart. He would see her enter an intersection. At the rear of the basilica, she turned into a narrow street lined with tourist shops.

She had to speak to a sketch artist who approached her at the intersection. He went into the street looking to see if she had gone to sit in a café. But at the

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end of the street he saw her on the right walking past the water tower and turning left down another narrow street beside the oldest building on the hill.

As he turned to corner, he saw her back. She was walking down the middle of the street, which rose and fell like a stone ribbon at this crest of the hill. She seemed to float on the surface of the road. At the next intersection, he watched her continued straight down the road and he continued at the same pace behind her, wondering now what he would do if she turned and looked at him, or if she stopped somewhere to sit down on a bench or at a table, or if she entered the doorway of an apartment building. When she noticed him, he would smile and if her expression were not too uncomfortable he would make a joke about asking directions. He thought of this as he followed her and remembered the way she had given the man with the camera directions, and then he thought that the joke would be a way of acknowledging how he had been watching her for a long time and perhaps she would not understand this.

But she did not turn around or stop. At the bottom of the street where the top of a stairway formed a plaza with benches and statues, she continued walking down the center of the road which twisted back up the hill to the left. Tourists were sitting on the benches and standing around the signs explaining the history of a building, but she continued walking up the street, looking neither right nor left, and he crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk so he could better see where she would go at the next intersection. She went straight again, down a short street, and at the next intersection she selected a street that was little more than an alley. She was walking deliberately, he thought, taking a group of streets that led down the hill in a round-about manner. As he entered the alley, he did not speed up his pace. He knew the length of the street on the other side. At the speed they were both moving, he would see her before she reached the next intersection. As he came out of the alley, he saw what he remembered of the woman who had been sitting on the stone bench, the brown hair piled on her head and the brown shirt above the blue jeans. He saw this person come to the end of the street and turn to the right, heading down the hill.

When he reached the end of the street and turned in the direction she had disappeared from view, he was facing an intersection and a stone square. The street he was on continued downward to the left, undulating like a narrow ribbon between the buildings along the hillside, seeming to end where it rose toward the sky. She was not visible on the street. He could not see her on the stone square to his right. He moved down the square, to where three streets descended in different directions, standing in one place and moving his head to look in each direction. The woman he remembered had vanished.

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52. The Woman in the Bath He sat down in the middle of the gallery, facing on the far wall. The room was not crowded. No one blocked his view of the painting.

He saw the yellow as sunlight, illuminating the wall from blue to dark violet.

Between these colors, shades of pink and yellow were glowing on the wall. She appeared to wear the surface of transparent water like clothing. He could see her exposed skin above the water surface. The boundary of the water and the skin formed a shape like the neckline of a modest blouse. Through the water, her navel was darker than her pubic area. The top of the bathtub dissolved against the wall. She lay with the top of her head facing towards him, as if he were above her. He was sitting on the round red cushion in the middle of the room and her image was hanging on the wall. She tilted out of the tub, which was presented from a lower angle. Bright red shadows highlight the two visible feet of the tub, lifting it from the blue tile floor. She floated on a surface of the painting with no gravity, as if she lay buoyed by the ocean in a tide pool, resting on the edge of an open shell.

Nine and nine is eighteen, he thought, eighteen hour is six o’clock. He looked at his watch. It was four-thirty. He had been wandering. When he came out of the metro the first time, he had bought a crepe from the man working in the small green stand on the sidewalk. It was a small wooden box, open at the counter on one side. He stood in the sunlight in front of the church and ate the crepe.

When he entered the bookshop, he began by moving to the left. He moved in an arch around the store, running his eyes over the covers of the books displayed on the table. Occasionally he would pick up a book if the title or cover attracted him, and open it to a random page. He could barely read the language printed on the pages. He would recognize a word or phrase. He flipped the pages with the thumb of his right hand. He examined the date of publication. He felt the telephone vibrate in his pocket. He put the book down on the table and pulled the ear piece out of his pocket, placing it in his right ear.

I told you it was time to disappear, said a voice.

Give me five minutes and call me back, he said.

He took the ear piece out of his ear and wrapped it around the fingers of his left hand. He took a clear plastic pouch from his pocket and inserted the earpiece and wire, carefully closing the flap of the pouch. Without taking the phone from his pocket, he pressed his finger tip against the power button, and listened to the sound of the phone turning off. He continued around the bookstore, looking at the covers of the books. He picked up a magazine he had seen before. Six and ten. He found the coins in his pocket. As he completed the arc, he handed the magazine and the coins to a woman behind the counter.

Thank you, she said.

Thank you, goodbye, he said. When he crossed the street, he saw the gray buses parked along one side of the street, filling the public bus lane. He walked along the sidewalk beside the buses. He could see the police sitting inside, young men without hats or helmets, all with short cropped hair. The door of one bus was open to the street. An older policeman was standing on the side of the bus talking into a phone. As he reached the next intersection he saw the line of plastic tape drawn across the road. Two police women were directing car traffic into the side street to his right.

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He crossed through the stalled traffic and walked into the middle of the blocked avenue. He could see blue lights flashing on the top of white police vans at the next intersection. He turned to his right and walked down the stairs into the metro station.

They had been watching a movie from a DVD she had bought the previous day.

She found a store going out of business, near a place where she had frequent meetings. The table in the middle of the store was covered with plastic cases, each with the image and the title of the films burned onto the plastic disc. She purchased a group of films from the pile. The price was very low, she said, only 10 each. This film was by a filmmaker she admired, but she had not seen it before.

Did you ever notice, he said when the film ended, how interesting a film becomes when someone is about to be killed? Did you notice how many people were killed?

At first she was unsure if he as being serious. He was sitting on the couch they had moved to view the film. She had organized the room for working and eating, with the television on a cabinet against one wall. They had to move the furniture around to comfortably watch a movie. She was standing now beside the television, looking at the remote, searching for the correct button in the dim light. Several people had been shot to death in the film. She tried to recall how many people had died. She recalled the final scene, the main character standing outside his club, his business, pressing ice in the pocket of his jacket, trying to numb the pain from the bullet wound in his side.

As soon as a human life is about to end, the entire focus, the pace, the tension, everything, he was waving his hands as he remained seated on the couch, it changes. You know, you can see it happen.

He saw a couple looking at the map. He had gotten off the metro to change to another train. The train had been packed with people pressed against one another. The woman he was pressed against had shaved her head. The metal rings and studs in her left ear were very close to his face. The couple had also gotten off the train at the same stop. The man was quite tall and he held a large camera in his hand. His hand wrapped around the motorized film magazine. The lens and lens hood of the camera were large enough to be professional equipment. The couple studied the map as he passed them. He tried to listen to their conversation. He could understand the language they were speaking, but he was not sure he understood what they said.

The entrance to the long tunnel connecting the two trains was empty. He could hear a musician singing. Three men were standing on the side of the tunnel, holding merchandise for sale. They moved back against opposite walls as crowds filled the tunnel, moving in both directions between the trains. The man to his left had leather belts draped over his arm. The men on his right were holding bunches of strings with glowing lights dangling at the end. As he passed by them, he saw the musician standing against the right wall, strumming a guitar.

He had finished the song he heard when he entered the tunnel. A new song began as he moved his fingers over the strings, just strings against the fingers of the hand, then a voice, behind him now, began to sing the words to a tune already started by the fingers making the strings vibrate into the wooden box and rebound against the tunnel walls. He continued to hear the song as he went down the stairwell to the train platform. As the train arrived, he entered the first car and sat down.

She was not sure how many people had been shot. I don’t know, she said. She found the button on the remote that turned off the DVD player. As she pressed the button, the television screen went from a bright blue color that made her think of ice to an empty absent black. Tell me.

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You know, I’m not sure. Once it happens, it’s not important. Waiting for it to happen, expecting it to happen, that’s the interesting part, that’s what transports you, makes your senses open up, you want to feel and see and hear that series of moments. He paused, closing his eyes. I think five people died. No, maybe four.

He wasn’t really trying to tell us that.

He got off the train at the next stop. The exit was in the middle of the platform.

He walked into the short tunnel, through the exit doors to the stairs. As he mounted the stairs, he saw the couple ahead of him. They must have walked behind him as he was listening to the song, continuing down the platform and entered a car near the middle of the train. This placed them closer to the exit when they got off the train. The tall man still grasped the camera in his right hand as he walked up the steps. As they came to the street, sunlight hit them in the face. The broad avenue cut through the buildings to the west and the afternoon sun reflected off the stone facades filling the small plaza in front of the church. The man and his woman companion turned to their right. The woman had seen the small carousel set up in front of the church. It was turning slowly with several children riding on horses and cars.

Excuse me. Excuse me. He wanted to get the man’s attention. The man turned towards him. The combination of hearing his own language spoken in a foreign city by a stranger startled him.

Yes? He faced the man who had been walking up the steps behind him, holding a magazine.

Would you like me to take a picture of the two of you together?

No, really, that’s not…. He had raised his camera to his shoulder. No, we were going to take some pictures of, the man paused and looked at the stranger’s face, other things. His companion had not noticed the conversation. He could see now that she was standing by the carousel watching the children.

Well, I’d like to ask you a favor. Would you take a picture of me, over here, he gestured towards the front of the church, just a simple picture, in front of the doors. He walked around the man towards the church. That’s a beautiful camera.

Sure. The man gripped the camera. The light was behind him now, and the stranger positioned himself in the sunlight before the door of the church. He held the magazine in front of his coat, exposing the title and cover image. The man rotated the lens to frame the shot and pressed a button. They could both hear the click of the shutter and whir of the film mechanism advancing.

Thanks. Thanks a lot. Listen, if it comes out could you send me a print? He had opened his coat with one hand while he rolled up the magazine with the other, taking out his wallet. From inside the wallet he took a ten and a blank white card. He put the wallet back into his coat and took a pen from another pocket.

Just sent it to this address, he said as he wrote on the card. He held out the card to the man with the camera, folded inside the money.

The man put the camera down from his face and held it in both hands. That’s too much. What do you want?

He noticed the woman coming towards the man with the camera. She had realized he was not beside her by the carousel and was walking back towards him. Here, ma’m. Take this. You’re really very kind. Thank you very much. He held the bill and card out towards her and she took it without noticing what he was offering. I just wanted a picture of myself, he said turning back towards the man

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with the camera, here, today. I don’t know where you’re going and the money is for the postage and the trouble. Thanks a lot. He backed away from them towards the intersection and crossed into the market street filled with afternoon shoppers. He had walked steadily into the crowd for a block before he turned around to look back. He couldn’t see the man with the camera or his companion.

The market street came to a place where five roads crossed. The market stalls and shops continued on one side of the street. An island extended from the corner, blocking traffic from entering a one way street. Beyond the island was a café. An old man stood in the middle of the island in front of a telephone booth playing a saxophone. He dropped a coin into the case at the old man’s feet and walked around him to enter the booth. The old musician nodded and turned his instrument away, facing the shoppers on the street. He took a card from his wallet and placed it in the phone. He listened to a ring and then the sound of someone answering the phone. Hello, Jack? It’s not too early, is it?

Oh, hello. No, no it’s not too early. Nice to hear your voice.

Listen, do you still have that place up the coast, the little house?

Yeah, we were there a few months ago. Do you want to use it?

I have a reason to disappear. Not too long. If it’s possible.

Sure. How do you want to pick up the key?

I don’t know yet. I’ll call you on Tuesday. I’ll be nearby. He was looking at the back of the old saxophone player’s head. Shoppers past moving in both directions. When one dropped a coin into his case he would nod his head and swing the horn back towards his body.

Where are you calling from?

I’m at a market. Why do two people enjoy making love, Jack? There was silence on the phone. He could hear the tune the old musician was playing. It was a Sonny Rollins tune. He knew the theme but he couldn’t recall the name.

Jesus, you ask the strangest questions. What do you mean why? What kind of question is that?

I mean why two people in particular. Why doesn’t it work for any two people? I mean, sex is something that happens inside you. You’re a doctor. You know you can’t actually feel what anyone else feels.

If lions could talk, we wouldn’t understand what they said. Where’s the music coming from?

There’s an old guy playing on the street. He’s not bad.

Are we talking about any two people in particular?

It doesn’t matter. It’s still the same question, isn’t it? I should get off the phone.

My card’s going to run out. I’ll call you when I’m nearby. He put the phone back in the cradle and stood still, waiting for the song to end.

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Périple: The Stories

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53. Portrait of a Ghost It is morning. Sun pours in through the blinds, exposing geometric patterns, shapes of sharp edges and curves. White becomes black when received by the nerves of the eye, contrasted to the light itself. The soft flannel sheets cover his arms and its weight clings to the hair of his legs and torso.

After uncovering his body, he reviews the world, page by page, grasping the newsprint between his fingers. His eyes scan the black letters set into columns, chopped into words, re-glued into phrases and thoughts. His ears are poured with voices reporting the daily news. His nose and throat vibrate with steam and infusions of coffee. He thinks that the coffee tastes like Africa.

He takes the neck of the world in his hands and feels it. He feels the nails of his fingertips press against the muscles beneath the soft neck skin. He feels the bones in his fingers press against the line of the skull where it becomes the spine. He presses his fingers against this line, projecting himself towards the interior of the brain, shielded by layers of tissue, muscle, bone and a throbbing rhythm. He runs his fingers along the grooves, caressing the edge of the world.

He finds a memory. The original people of this region would strike their enemies on the head with clubs and hatchets, then remove a portion of the hair and skin with a knife, stretching the skin on a stick frame until the moisture evaporated into the moving air.

The shields of blood yield a swarm of shifting points. He remains outside, adhering to gravity, pumping sensations into a vessel. He does not identify with the vessel. At some moment in the past he was inside and then he was outside.

His eyes parse hard walls from soft ivy, flat surfaces from curving leaves, dust and crumbs of previous meals from the empty surface of the table.

The night before he was a ghost, walking along the street. It had happened before and it would happen again, he realized. He was walking down a street. It was a Friday night. That street begins edged with parked cars illuminated by the lights of cafes, bookstores, restaurants, a movie theater. There are empty tables and chairs and groups of people walking in opposite directions, talking in English, Spanish, and Russian. The street continues downhill, imperceptibly at first and then with an increasing slope. It is midnight. The buildings that were homes are now empty classrooms. The store that once sold formal clothes, where salesmen leaned their receding hairlines towards the uneven shoulders of rising young men, is deserted. Groups of young people enter and discharge from openings in the walls surrounding the dormitories. The slope of the street increases and plants spill over the fences enclosing houses built in the eighteenth century. The street darkens. He passes through a group of young people moving in the opposite direction, up the hill. It is almost imperceptible how they part to let this ghostly vessel flow through them.

He is in the movie theater. His eyes are creating the motions of a story from the light, his eyes are rolling upwards and the Spanish words synchronized to the flickering images of actors become pure sounds without the English subtitles to decode them. Then he is on the street, growing darker as it sloped down the hill where a stream of water once defined the boundary between the houses separated by walls and tiny dooryards. As he moves with the force of gravity he imagines that the water is flowing through a pipe buried beneath the asphalt.

The sidewalks are slabs of stone tipped by tree roots. Black metal bootscrapers protrude from the sidewalk beside the doors.

He chooses a corner and turns towards the greater slope, flowing down the hill.

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54. The Scream We all look for lessons in the past, instructions to reveal the truth so hard to discern in the present. What could we know that might reveal the future? I try not to make the same mistake twice, he often said to himself. He even said this to others. There was a logical and moral dimension to the thought. A mistake is natural. A choice is presented. One wants to perform an action which will cause a certain effect. One tries by making a judgment and when one fails, there is a learning experience. Learning from your own mistakes is a deep form of education. One sees the consequences of one’s own actions. Learning from mistakes undermines self-righteousness and moral superiority. When you’ve done it wrong and survived, you are not above the others who have to learn by their own experience. You value education and self-direction. You experience how rote learning cannot produce this form of understanding. This applies to everything, he thought.

But when you make the same mistake twice you are either stupid or deficient in free will. What would make you do it again, after you had done it once and seen that it was wrong? It was either lack of judgment or lack of will, he thought, and both these qualities were aspects of life he thought he should master. He wanted to believe that his judgment would improve and that he had sufficient will to master things that others thought difficult or impossible. At the same time, he did not like to think about impossible things. He liked to avoid them, either by removing himself from the situation or, when necessary, by deadening his senses. He could not sustain the option of deadening his senses for very long. He preferred to remove himself physically from a place. This required a trust that he would not make matters worse by trying something new.

He usually stayed in one place for several years at a time. Though his situation always changed during these stays from year to year, he maintained a single sense of place which he associated with each location. At one point in his life, he had spent fifteen years living near one city, though he had spent only three months of that time living in the city itself. Despite this lack of direct confrontation, he came to know this city extremely well by the time he left it.

His mind was filled with complex strategies for getting from one location to another across the network of roads which had grown from cattle paths connecting town commons to trolley lines to roads for heavy car traffic. He held in his head complex variables of weather in all seasons, traffic patterns for different times of day and different times of year. He could select the best path to travel by bicycle, bus, subway, or car. He knew the parking rules in each town, as well as the location and relative price of parking lots. Each time he tried a strategy and it did not meet his expectations, he adjusted his model. Each new journey was directed by his accumulated experience.

At the same time, he lived within a tunnel of ritual actions. He established pathways to common goals and once on a familiar track he moved almost unconsciously. The familiarity of the surroundings pushed his mind on to something else, something wholly interior, and he ceased to notice his surroundings for a time. At these times he would turn over ideas he found in books and weave networks out of facts and images. These networks would suggest other subjects needed to fill out patterns that began to form, and this directed his reading. He went from topic to topic, following specific lines of enquiry for years at a time, punctuated with sudden bursts of focus. He had begun this pattern of behavior in college, when he had first left his parent’s home and lived with a series of roommates to whom he rarely spoke. The pattern did him little good in his studies, but he enjoyed the process and continued it after he had left school and began a series of jobs. At first, he worked in places

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where he could have access to very large libraries. This encouraged the process.

He discovered that if he was interested by something, he could find it. It was very similar to finding his way around the city. He learned the location of subjects on the floors of various libraries.

This was how he felt when he left his wife. He was in a marriage of twenty-five years, immersed and enmeshed in every aspect of it. His daily actions were entirely dependent on this relationship. It determined his concept of himself and of others. It was also his home, the place he owned and identified as himself, the place he had to return to. At first, when he tried to leave it, he had only managed to remove himself to the attic, the third floor of the house where memories and unnecessary possessions were stored. He had put himself in the attic on occasions of extreme stress or discomfort in the past, to remove himself temporarily, to sleep alone. But on this particular evening he had created a much more difficult situation by admitting to his wife that he wanted to end his marriage. He had explained first to his wife and then the next morning to his children what he had been hiding from them, and then removed himself to the attic. After taking this first step, he lived in the attic for some weeks, coming down to use the bathroom, for meals, and to enter and exit the house.

He was walking up the stairs when she taunted him. He had said goodnight to her and the children. They were sitting on a couch watching a television show.

He was already on the stairs, about to enter into one of his dulled and habitual states, placing one foot in front of the other, moving on a familiar path through the house. She said something to him. The words she chose were meant to enrage him. She knew how to bring him back when she needed to do it. They were screaming at each other. They were facing each other in the bedroom, away from the children. He held something in his hand and he felt himself throw it at her. He saw it striking the wall behind her. He moved towards her with her back against the wall. He felt the anger in his arms rising up into fists. If she voiced the right phrase, the right combination of sounds, he recognized that he would kill her with his bare hands.

I’m leaving, he said. His voice was barely controlled, but it was suddenly very quiet. He began to think about what he should take with him. He was only thinking about the temperature of the night, what kind of coat and shoes he should get. It was familiar, this act of walking out into the night. He had done it before, recently. He had walked the five miles that he habitually covered on his bicycle or in his car. At night there was no one on the streets, few cars, nothing open. Even the strip clubs were closed at this hour. He knew this because he had walked past them at this hour before. He knew he could do it on foot in about one hour. He knew where his keys were. He knew the four digit code for the alarm that he would have to press on the keypad once he had unlocked and opened the door to his office. He had done all these things before, but he had always gone back. By going back, he had changed nothing. The balance of two lives, the tunnels, the pathways, were still there, the connections and dependencies that now felt like a million tiny strings binding his arms and legs to her arms and legs, forcing their faces together into a terrible scream. He would not make the same mistake twice, he thought, and as he thought this he knew he had lost track of how many times he had made the same mistake. He was not sure if he could distinguish himself from the mistake he sought not to repeat. But he was able to select the proper coat to take, a green leather coat he had granted himself years ago even though it cost hundreds of dollars at the time. The satin lining of the pockets were torn from the repeated act of thrusting his fists into the pockets. But the leather was warm and it was the right choice for the evening and for this walk. He would get to his destination, his second home, his office, and then he would figure out where to spend the rest of the night.

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For several years after this he had a recurring dream. He would enter a room in which his wife was present. This occurred in various places, with various other people present. She would say something to him and he would begin to scream at her. The scream came from an anger that was beyond his control. It possessed him like some foreign being, but it came from inside himself and quickly it replaced him. He felt it coming out of his mouth, a hot mixture of moisture and breath forced from his lungs together with a vibrating rage. He could often hear his own slurred curses, as a conscious part of his mind slowly becoming aware of the actual sounds he was making, as his sleeping body tried to act out the thoughts and images in the dream. He was always sleeping with her, the woman he had fallen in love with before he left his wife, when this nightmare occurred.

He would wake up, sweating, filled with anger and a deep and painful sense of defeat. The dream had never occurred when he slept alone.

Once his arm had struck her as his body slowly twisted before he woke up, and the dull force of his movement had startled her. What is it?, she said.

His body felt like it was made of lead. He was silent and could barely move. I was having a bad dream, he said. She comforted him and he held her until he forgot the images and the feeling and returned to sleep.

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55. His Dreams As he watched the animated film he began to understand his dreams. The theater was filled with people on a Sunday afternoon. There were couples both young and old, and families with children. The theater was very old, and entering late they found a seat on the second balcony. They had stood in the lobby drinking coffee. He had been admiring the statues, female figures that reminded him of figureheads on the prow of old wooden ships. The crowd had entered the theater, expecting the show to begin. When they finally found a seat, they were very close to the ceiling, in a gallery of hard wooden seats to the left of the stage. This presented a very good view of the theater itself, though their view of the stage was blocked on one side. The carved ceiling suggested the grand design that the theater possessed when it was new a hundred years before. Above the movie screen he could see the carved figure of a reclining woman framed by two angels. The relief of her nude body was dark with accumulated dust and dirt.

Above this was a painted panel, so faded that the dancing figures were hard to make out, even at such a short distance with the lights illuminated. The name of the theater was still visible on the upper right of the composition.

It reminded him of the old amusement park in his own country, a place he had visited often when he was growing up. This park on the edge of a beach, with its wood and stone buildings, was from a time long before he was born. It was a survival of a past that did not endure in the landscape of his childhood. In the town where he grew up old things, old buildings, were rare. The oldest buildings, the one or two houses that remained from the eighteenth century, were the opposite of grand. They were humble structures with tiny rooms, low ceilings, and staircases so narrow that it was hard to imagine grown men and women living there. The homes that now stood nearby were so much larger. The apartment buildings rose above them like cliffs.

The amusement park was from the late nineteenth century, the same period as the theater he now sat in, a time of powerful wooden structures, iron sculptures, and decorated landscapes designed for men in tall hats leading women carrying parasols. One end of the park was a raised boardwalk by the sea, above a narrow sandy beach. The opposite end faced a small lake, with several wooded islands.

On the dock of the lake he could rent a row boat or canoe – he had done this some years before, when revisiting the place with his grown children – or pay for a ride in a powerboat with a false paddlewheel that made a circuit of the lake, passing close to the wooded islands where old statues of animals stared back through the trees.

The mechanical rides moved. They all went around in a circle, returning to where they began, spinning, moving around tracks, rising and falling. The motion was smooth and fast. As they circled and spun the people felt the thrill of motion.

Some rides rose in the air. The people looked down.

The largest structure was a wooden roller coaster with the figure of a dragon carved on the side. The red and green paint was faded by decades of weather. At the ticket booth there was a wooden sign with a red horizontal line. You had to be taller than this line in order to go on the roller coaster. He could remember standing next to this sign and wishing he was tall enough.

The beginning of the film was delayed. Someone explained that there was a problem with the projector. He was remembering a visit to the park. He was with his son and his brother was with his stepson. The children were about the same age and both were smaller than the red line that year. He and his brother placed the children on a ride, metal airplanes suspended from the end of hydraulic

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pylons. The two boys each held on to their own metal stick. As the ride began to rotate, he and his brother shouted to the children to pull the stick. He remembered that this made the hydraulic pylon move and the metal airplane rose in the air. Pressing a button on the stick caused lights to flash as if the rider was firing a gun mounted on the nose of the plane. Pushing the stick forward caused the pylon to lower as the structure rotated. He stood beside his brother and they watched the children spin, rise, and fall. In a few minutes the ride began to slow, the pylons lowered as the air escaped from the hydraulic mechanism, and the motion finally stopped.

He looked up, examining the carved figures suspended from the painted ceiling.

He could see the children sitting in the front of the balcony. He had seen the boy, his brother’s stepson, only in photographs for over a decade. He had grown up into a tall young man. Usually he had a guitar when someone was taking his picture. His brother would send him the photographs in letters.

Now the young man was dead. He knew this from a series of phone calls.

Speeding cars had collided and crushed the people inside the cars. The young man had been in a car on a highway. The first and second phone call had been recorded messages describing the event. The third phone call was a conversation with his brother. He could hear his brother crying.

The animated film began with the figures of two women striding through an industrial landscape. Their long legs leaped and bounded with the grace of ballet steps. Factories moved behind them. Power lines scored the air forming patterns of lines that pulsed gracefully. Music filled the theater and these figures moved to the swirling music. The motion lifted their skirts and they rose in the air, leaping along the tops of wires. His attention was focused on the moving images.

His eyes constructed human figures, buildings, power lines. The music supported the illusion as the women danced in the grid and flickering lines suggested electricity flashing through their bodies. A black shoe flew off the foot of one woman and began to float like a leaf in the wind. All these images were in his mind. They were in the minds of the children sitting at the front of the balcony opposite where he sat, illuminated by the lamp of the movie projector reflecting off the huge screen, a combination of the images of memory and the drawings that seemed to move because of the motion of the film.

He remembered a dream he had many years before. He was away from home for the first time, living at a college. He shared a room in the dormitory. His bed was against the wall of the room. Against the opposite wall was another bed where another student slept, a young man from a town near the college. His own home, the house where he lived as a child with his brother, was far away, ten hours of driving in a car.

In the dream it was winter. The ground was white with snow and they were riding sleds. The sleds were made of wood with metal runners. He would lie on the sled and hold the wooden bar with both hands. By moving the bar from side to side and shifting his weight, he could steer the sled. He and his brother had devised a sled run. It began at the top of the steep driveway beside their home, then as the rider reached the bottom of the sloping driveway, the momentum carried him onto the lawn. A tall hedge separated this back lawn from the back of a neighboring house. By steering the sled through a small hole in the wooded hedge, the sled emerged onto the neighbor’s lawn. To steer though the hole required him to drag his feet in the snow. There was always the danger of missing the hole and colliding with the hedge. But if he succeeded the momentum carried the sled along the side of neighbor’s house to a small slope which led to a street. When the snow was deep and hard enough, and the plows left enough packed snow and ice on the street, it was possible to continue down the slope and bounce across the street, finally coming to rest on the front lawn

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of the house on the opposite side. Sometimes sparks would fly as the metal runners struck the pavement exposed between patches of ice. The speed was thrilling. The sound of the metal runners hitting the pavement was exciting. The danger of crossing the street was also thrilling. To do this run, one person stood at the top of the last slope, looking at the street. This person would signal the person on the sled to turn and stop on the lawn if a car was coming down the street.

In the dream he was remembering, he was looking down on the lawn above the slope that led to the place where the sled crossed the street. He was floating in the air above the lawn. His brother was on the sled, coming toward the slope that would accelerate the sled across the icy street. He saw the car coming toward the place where the sled would cross. He saw the sled coming into the path of the car. It was a leaf blowing in the wind. He was mute. He had no voice, no arms, there was no action he could perform or express. The sled rushed down the slope as the car drove down the street. The car drove into the sled.

He woke up in the bed against the wall. His brother was dead. He could feel it.

Grief filled his chest. His legs felt like metal. He could not move. He lay in bed for several hours. It took most of the day for the grief to leave his chest. It took hours before he was sure it was a dream.

The figures of the two women were now running through a landscape of flowers and butterflies. The movement of their skirts was similar to the movement of the wings of the insects. They were pursued by a young man on a bicycle, holding the black shoe. The three figures arrived in a cabin above a maze of railway lines.

It reminded him of the place near his apartment where the railway lines entered the city. He had ridden his bicycle over a bridge that crossed the tracks. In the film the women and man pulled levers rising from the cabin floor, dancing to the music in the theater. The movie screen filled with drawings of speeding trains crossing back and forth along the maze of tracks, narrowly missing each other.

The trains moved like the cars on a roller coaster.

Everything was moving into place. The wall of the cabin came down and the man rode the bicycle into the air, one woman balanced on the handlebars while the other woman balanced on the seat behind him. The motion of the man’s legs on the bicycle was transformed into the act of flying through the air. He could feel the folds of his own brain, the jagged crossing of impulses. The sharp pieces fell into place, into a pattern absorbed by a larger pattern. He could see the entire theater, all the people sitting below him, the children absorbing the images on the moving film. There was a sense of calm as the film ended, the music ended, and the audience burst into applause.

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56. In the Library There is a rule about making love in a library. He knew there was a rule. There must be a rule. He was determined to find out for himself. He couldn’t read the regulations. They were posted on the wall beside the entrance. There was a door on the outside of the building, a huge heavy door made of metal, with figures carved in the panels. There were many animals – bears, wolves, stags with large racks of horns, boars with curved tusks, a leopard dragging her tail across the snow. The door was open. Inside the door there was a small entryway, and another door covered with worn brown leather. He pushed on the inner door and it swung open, then shut quickly behind him, blocking the outside light.

He entered the library. There was a paper held to the wall by four pins. These were the regulations, written in a language he could not understand. There were many people inside the library, sitting on benches, leaning over long tables.

Several people were wearing heavy coats. No one was speaking. He had no idea what language they would speak. If they spoke the language written on the paper, he would not understand what they said.

He walked down a long corridor with open doors. He could see shelves filled with books through the doorframes. He noticed a room with no shelves. He stopped.

The room had nothing on the walls visible from the corridor. There was a single wooden bench beside the far wall. He went inside.

He sat down on the bench and looked at the wall he had passed through. Beside the door was a painting. The painting was on the wall, it was the wall itself. Two figures were kneeling, crouching on the ground, over a cloth. They were figures of men, facing each other, kneeling on the ground. They were looking at the cloth between then, and one man’s hands were crooked with his palm open, suggesting he had just dropped something on the cloth. He followed the gaze of the figures to the cloth. He recognized the shapes sitting on the cloth. It was the vertebrae of sheep.

They gambled for his bones. The phrase was already in his mind. He couldn’t place it, but now it belonged to the painting on the wall. He wondered what the man who won the toss would do with his bones. He was thinking this as he looked at the faces of the two men. Which one is the man who wins the game?, he asked himself. It is an old story. He didn’t know the story, but the person who created the painting on the wall knew it. He tried to understand the story by looking into the faces of the men in the painting. If the information was there, he couldn’t understand it.

He looked at his watch. He had promised to meet her at half past the hour. That time had passed already and he looked at his watch to see how long it had been.

He tried to remember if this was where she had promised to meet him. He reached into his pocket and took out a paper she had written on. Her handwriting was obscure. As he looked at the writing again, the meaning of the words changed. The strokes and curves and dots realigned into a different pattern. He looked at his watch. He rose to his feet and walked quickly out of the room. It occurred to him that he was in the wrong place.

He joined the people moving through the corridor. At the end of the corridor he saw a staircase leading down. There was a map on the wall, embossed on a metal plate. It showed three levels. Perhaps he was on the wrong level. The words on the map did not match the words on the paper. He walked to the staircase.

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The staircase was made of polished bright stone. Despite the polish, the stone was worn near the center of each step. The railing was the color of brass. As he placed his hand on the rail, he felt how cold it was. He ran his hand along the metal rail, as he walked down the steps and his hand became cold. At the bottom of the steps there were cases recessed into the walls, sealed in glass. Through the glass he could see wooden models of buildings and the surrounding landscape, extending onto paintings on the walls of the cases. They were models of the town, he thought. The old library building was there in each model, but the surrounding buildings and landscape was different in each case.

He put his hand against the glass. It was warm. Perhaps the lights in the cases were heating the glass, he thought. Suddenly two figures were walking past him.

He had not noticed them coming towards him as he looked at the glass cases. He saw two men in large coats, their heads covered in fur-trimmed hats. As they walked past him, he could see their breath. The moisture of their breath condensed in the air and quickly disappeared. They passed him and he heard their footsteps continuing up the stairs.

At the end of the corridor there was a café. A man was standing behind the bar in front of a machine. The man was polishing a cup with a white towel. There were glass doors leading to a lawn. Tables were set up inside the glass doors, and more tables were visible outside beneath an awning. There were black metal poles between the tables, each with a wide round cap covering a heating coil.

The coils were glowing with a red color that reminded him of burning coal. He looked at the heads of the people sitting at the tables. He didn’t recognize anyone. Some of the women had scarves over their heads. The men were reading small books and newspapers were hanging from the wall on brown wooden rods.

He took a newspaper in his hand. He could not read the language written on the paper. The paper was a dark yellow color, and as he raised the page between his fingers he felt it crack and break. The fragments of the paper slowly drifted to the stone floor.

He looked through the glass doors at the people sitting outside at the tables under the awning. She was sitting at a table under a glowing heater. She was holding a white cup in one hand. The other hand was holding a cell phone against her ear. He tapped on the glass behind her. As he touched it with his fingers, the glass began to crack. He heard himself calling out her name, though he couldn’t feel the breath in his lungs. But he heard his own voice shouting her name in his ears. The glass cracked and splinted each time he tapped it with his fingers. She continued to talk on the cell phone and occasionally took small sips from the white cup she held in her other hand.

He removed his hand from the glass and thought for a moment. What was he doing here? Why was he trying to attract her attention? He reached up with both his hands and ran his fingers through his own hair, pushing the hair behind his ears. Then grasping the sides of his head with both hands, he lifted his head off his body in a smooth motion and held it in front of his chest. There was no resistance as his head came away from his body. He stood motionless for a moment. He felt very light. The object in his hands had no weight at all and his shoulders felt very light. He heard a rustling sound. It reminded him of the sound made by swans when they folded and unfolded their wings.

She was standing next to him, with her back turned. She was looking out the window of a hotel room. There was a small round metal table in front of the window and her hands were resting on the table. She had wrapped herself in a large blue scarf. The ends of the scarf were gathered with tiny ceramic beads.

The beads made a sound as they hit one another. She was motionless but the beads were vibrating.

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He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. He placed his palm against the space between her breasts and ran his fingertips gently over her skin.

She began to sing and the sound of her voice blended with the sound of the beads. She brought her hands up to cover his hands as he ran his fingers over her skin. Her hands were large, as large as his hands. They covered his hands and began to guide his motion. He could feel her fingers slipping between his own fingers and guiding the motion of his hands along her skin. He felt their fingers hook together and press against her breast. Then he was moving his hands apart.

It was the motion he made when he was swimming, both hands moving outward, pulling the water away from his own chest and pushing it behind him. He felt her body open like a door. He felt her arms behind his shoulders, pulling him forward. He was inside her body. He was warm. He could feel the liquid from her body running down the insides of his legs.

He could feel the books on the shelves moving. They were resting on a bed on the floor, and the walls were covered with shelves. The shelves were filled with boxes of papers, large bound volumes, metal tins with paper labels glued to their sides. There was a low table beside the bed made from transparent glass. In each leg of the table he knew there was a silver hand or foot, visible through the glass. The hands had bright rings with jewels on each finger. The ankles of the feet were covered with bracelets made of rope and metal.

He tried to move his head, to shake it so that he could feel the hair move against his ears. Nothing happened. He didn’t want to move. He was inside her and he could sense that she was sleeping. It had taken so long to get here, he thought. He had not asked her about the rules. He realized he had always wanted to reach through the glass and touch the things on display. He couldn’t hear anything moving. I will find out soon enough, he thought.

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57. The Novel He was looking for a woman who would write a novel with him.

This had been going on for many years. It lay there, quietly like water in the ground, invisible beneath his feet. The first time it swelled up and broke the surface he was walking through the square surrounded by the stores and restaurants that had grown up around the university where he worked. He was walking past the newsstand where papers from every city in the world were on display. He would pause and look at the different languages on the headlines, the different writing systems, He imagined a story about two men. The first man was a detective. He had been hired by a woman, a fashion model who had recently returned from working in a foreign country. She was an old acquaintance and now she was in trouble.

Someone had died during the preparation for the fashion show, another model.

She had nothing to do with it, she told him. The other model had died of a drug overdose. She needed him to find out if she had committed suicide or if someone had murdered her. So the detective had traveled to the city where the woman had died to make enquiries. As the novel began, the detective was walking the streets of the foreign city without a map, learning to find his way around.

The second man was an engineer. He had developed a system for projecting clothing onto people’s bodies. The projection appeared to the human eye to be entirely realistic in three dimensions. The system could respond to any movement of the body so that the clothing moved as the body moved, smoothly in real time, tracking each gesture. This hardware and software had been conceived in a small office, located not far from where he was standing by the newsstand. One wall of this office was covered with a white board. The design for the software was written on the white board with a black felt pen. On the bottom right of the board do not erase was written in red felt pen.

The lives of the two men had to intersect. The second man was driving his car, an old Volkswagen, to a nearby city, to meet a third man, a potential investor.

He needed capital to develop his invention. This third man had great wealth. He had started life studying medicine, but rather than practice medicine he had made a career as a publisher of medical journals and books, amassing a great fortune. He had used his wealth to become a patron of the arts, with an acute interest in both medical science and fashion. The second man was going to demonstrate his invention for him.

The model who had hired the detective lived with the third man. The second man would meet her and use her to assist him in the demonstration of his invention. The inventor called it the Magic Suit because it rhymed with the Magic Flute.

The woman’s name was Diana and he named the second man Sheldon.

He had to write this novel because he had fallen in love with a woman and felt certain that she needed to collaborate with him on the novel. She would write sections of the story for him. He wrote several chapters and sent them to her.

The sensation caused a kind of light headedness. He felt his senses intensify, as if a veil had been removed from his eyes. He focused on the beauty he saw. He saw how she made beautiful things with her hands, graceful folds of cloth that moved as her body moved. He moved through the same landscape in which he had lived for many years, but now each building and each street appeared to

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have a relationship to where they had met the day before. Each moment he was not occupied was a chance to talk to her or to meet her on the street. Each phone booth was a place where he might call her from.

He went to a phone booth in the square and called her. The first time her husband answered the phone and he hung up. He went to a book store and looked at the titles of books on the shelves. When he called sometime later, she answered. She was sewing clothes. There would be a show of dresses she designed in a few weeks and there were many dresses to complete. He had gone to the notions store a few days before to watch her pick out thread, buttons, and cloth.

He told her about the story and asked her to write the next section. He remembered his own excitement as he held the phone in his hand. The sun was in his eyes, shining through the glass walls of the phone booth. Traffic was moving through the square, regulated by changing lights and groups of pedestrians crossing between the stores and the university campus separated from the street by red brick walls.

He was thrilled to be telling her these things and imagined a long narrative in which the lives of the characters intertwined and each of their fates were changed forever. He didn’t remember what she said in reply.

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58. The Alligator The plane had been late. By the time he emerged from the metro it was nearly midnight. He walked up to a man standing in a doorway. The man appeared to be working there, in the place behind the door. He knew he appeared to be a traveler, wearing a pack on his back and dragging a suitcase and camera behind him with one hand. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand that contained the name of a hotel and a street address. He focused on the man in the doorway Excuse me. Do you know where this is? He raised the paper in his hand to the man’s eyes.

Is it around here? the man said, gesturing with his hands.

Yes, near this metro stop. He repeated the name of the metro station where he had just emerged onto the street.

The man took the paper and gestured with his hand to follow. He began to walk inside. The man was looking for someone, he realized. The walls were lined with electronic games. The room was nearly empty. Lights were blinking on the machines, though no one was playing them. The man held his paper and walked ahead of him, passing deeper into the room, past a glass booth where another person working in the parlor sat behind a counter. They continued into the room. The only sound was coming from the machines. They approached an old woman sitting at a slot machine. He realized the woman was the one they were seeking.

They approached the woman. She was seated on a stool in front of the machine, her handbag balanced on her knees. She was small and her face was hidden behind large round glasses. She was wearing a white dress with flower patterns.

Do you know where this is, the man asked her.

She looked at the paper and was silent for a moment. She had just put a token in the slot machine and the symbols were spinning. He looked at the spinning symbols as she looked at the writing on the paper. Two cherries appeared side by side as the symbols came to rest. She was telling him something. She was saying to go to the next plaza, repeating the name of the saint used to identify the place where several streets crossed. You go to the next fountain, she was saying.

She made a gesture with her hand, tracing the circle of the plaza, indicating the second street to the right of the imaginary circle. She turned her head back towards the machine. Numbers appeared in blinking lights and she immediately pressed two buttons that also lit as the third symbol continued to rotate. She turned back to the two men before her, waiting for her finish. You take the second street and you will see another plaza to your right. Satisfied, the man handed him back the piece of paper. The woman returned her attention to the machine.

The man led him to the door where he had entered. That way? he asked, gesturing towards a street across the plaza where a bus had stopped at a traffic light.

Yes, that way. The man resumed his position in the doorway, standing with his hands clasped behind his back.

He was sitting on a plastic chair. It was early evening the following day and the sun was still very bright. He had sat in the same place the night before after depositing his bags, drinking a beer. Now he was drinking another beer and his telephone and cigarettes where resting on the plastic table. The cafĂŠ was a space

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between the busy street and the sidewalk and the plaza behind him where children were playing football around a fountain. I grew up here, the man sitting with him at the table was saying to him, and now I don’t get so many occasions to come back.

He noticed a bright color on the cuff of his pants. He reached over to scrap off the yellow mass that stuck to the dark blue synthetic fabric. The phone rang.

Excuse me, he said as he picked up the phone. He could see her name on the small display in his hand.

She told him about the monastery. He repeated the name out loud as he spoke to her and the man sitting with him began to draw a map on the napkin. He felt something fall on his shoulder. He brushed it off and looked up. There was a small bird above him, sitting on the branch of a tree. He moved his chair to the other side of the table. There are many surprising things inside, the man said. The conquistadors brought back many gifts. In one of the churches there is an alligator in a glass box. He laughed as he remembered this.

The windows of his hotel room opened onto an interior courtyard filled with air conditioning equipment. The courtyard received no light in the morning and the room was completely dark. He slept until 10 o’clock. In the dream he was looking at a swamp from behind a large fence. In the water on the other side of the fence were alligators. They lay motionless in the water and stared at him. There were also lizards with large claws and rattles on their tails, flicking their tongues in the air and making a hissing sound. One large lizard approached the fence and hissed at him. With a swimming motion, it burrowed under the fence and continued slowly towards him. He was standing on sand, and as he moved backwards to avoid the lizard he noticed the arms and heads of other lizards beginning to emerge from the sand. He thought he should tell someone about this. The lizards were moving slowly. He realized they resembled the dried creatures he had seen a few days before mounted on the wall of a curiosity cabinet, where a fifteenth century nobleman had collected natural objects from lands he had never visited.

He sat in the waiting room. The woman leading the tour opened the large bolts on the wooden door, and pulled one side towards her. She led them around the edge of the interior courtyard, into another door out of the sunlight. The entrance hall was a trompe l’oeil painting from the floor to the top of the walls.

The composition continued up onto the ceiling, enveloping the space around the stairs rising from the entrance to the series of chapels on the first floor, arranged around the outer wall. Marble pillars were painted on the walls. The brilliant sunlight broke through the narrow openings of dark wooden shutters guarding the windows on the courtyard filled with trees. By peering through the cracks he could see yellow and orange fruit hanging from the small trees.

Where the stairs rose to the hallway, a portrait of the royal family – a mustached man, a woman with jewels in her hair, and two children – looked down on the turn in the stairs from a balcony painted onto the plaster wall. He could see where flecks of paint had fallen from the plaster. As he came to the top of the stairs, the image of the royal family leaning over the balcony receded and flattened. As he turned to look back at the bottom of the stairwell, the pillars of marble painted on the far wall re-emerged and rose from the corners where the walls and ceiling met in the embrace of angels.

The guide snapped open her fan and began to explain the first chapel. She moved her wrist as she spoke, fanning her face. When she stopped speaking, she closed the fan with another snapping gesture and stepped toward to the opening of the chapel to push the switch for an electric light. Once the light was turned on, he could see the interior of the chapel. The walls were decorated with

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paintings depicting angels and human figures. The shelves were covered with dolls. Each doll was dressed in a different delicately embroidered costume.

A large figure at the center of the shrine, a man in a dark robe, held a child balanced on an outstretched hand. Beneath the feet of the statue was a small chamber sealed in glass. Inside he could see the carved image of a small child.

The child was resting against an enormous skull, not in the posture of an infant, which could not raise its own weight with its arms or hold up its own head, but with the dexterity of a two year old. The bony remains of the dead this child rested against was equal to the size of its own body.

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59. The Story of Simon As a young man, he had gone to Paris. He had left New York, the city where his family settled, and returned not to their country of origin, but to Paris in a time he later knew as between the wars. He spent his time collecting books. When he returned he settled not in New York finally, but in the capitol, where he found an uninteresting but reliable job with the government. He lived alone and never married. He went hiking in the mountains of Virginia, dressed like a scout in the photos he sent to his eldest nephew. This nephew, a fastidious man of many deferred hobbies kept neatly in compartments in the basement of his home, including the parts of watches to be repaired and a complete set of jeweler’s tools, was his only correspondent. They would talk on the phone occasionally and exchange cards on holidays.

The bachelor uncle felt ill one day and called the nephew, perhaps with a sense of premonition, perhaps to share his feeling, perhaps to keep someone informed.

He died on the phone, dropping the receiver as he fell to the floor. The nephew, himself the receiver of the chest pains of a heart attack some years before, understood the message and instructed the police to find his uncle where he had fallen. A few days later he was able to retrieve only a few books from the apartment, as another relative arrived first to clean out the old man’s possessions and water had destroyed other books stored in another relative’s basement. He returned with a Modern Library edition of Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry from the 1920s, by evidence of an internal stamp purchased at Macy’s in New York; a Borzoi edition of a novel by a French symbolist no one had ever heard of, in an illustrated slip case that crumbled when touched; Robert Frost’s Collected Poems 1939 wrapped in a badly disintegrating dust cover but otherwise sound; and one item from Paris, a late Shakespeare & Co. printing of Ulysses. These books he gave to the man, an aspiring writer making his living with odd jobs in the city north of New York, who had married his daughter.

This man, who received such an unexpected gift, had read Ulysses several times.

The book had formed in him the concept of an aesthetic philosophy. He thought it was the structure of the perfect mind, the example of how language and narrative forged by a master, a man in complete control of the English language, could tell a story while demonstrating that the author knew everything there was to know about the material stories were made of. This novel defined the form, the material and the theme of the journey-return-redemption in its most ironic form, at once a highly serious work, a satire, a parody and a super-human demonstration of mastery of literary art. The story included the most mundane and base details of human life, which in its own time had brought a judgment of obscenity, but to him seemed to capture the essence of human thought between two covers. From reading this book he learned that the literary artist was the author of the numinous, which appeared in the mind of the reader through the powers of the Master of Form.

This book, while it came from Paris, was not an especially rare edition, being a late printing and showing evidence of rebinding in the present covers in the opinion of the rare bookseller who, at his request, established its monetary value. It differed from the two popular editions he already had in his library in some trivial variations in the text he had no interest in determining, but for one.

On the final page, not of the final soliloquy representing the thoughts of the faithless heroine, where I was a flower of the mountain yes, but in the account of the end of the hero’s day, in answer to the question Where, the punctuation mark was a black square. In the American edition there was a bullet which looked as if it meant to be the start of a list, while in the British printing he had found in London there was nothing at all. This edition contained the original

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typographic design approved by the author, a black square set in the middle of the otherwise empty line.

This was the ending the author intended to be set in type. This detail set the reproduction apart in his mind. It was a gift he could not keep for himself and so he gave it to the library of the college where he had first studied the common edition of the text. He executed transmission of the gift by mail, as the college was now far from where he lived. He imagined it would remain in the rare book room with a plate declaring it a gift of the original owner, his father-in-law’s bachelor uncle, to be found by another student wishing to see an uncommon reproduction of that book.

The story is a city of memory, reproduced at a great distance from maps and charts. The characters in the story are pieces of a plant, shoots and cuttings of a single tree, father and son by asexual transmutation, turning around the unmoving light of an alien female star.

He went to the city of memory in his youth, traveling by train and night ferry, to arrive in the morning where the novel begins, at the stone tower. It had recently been transformed into a museum so that entrance, once the morning had begun in earnest, was possible for a small fee. There were photographs of the real people who had lived there on the stone walls, the author as a young man, and the two cohabitants who became his characters. There was a bus into the city. He recognized the names of the roads. He had read them in the book. The characters on the bus crossed themselves as they past a cemetery. As he gazed out the window of the bus, he thought of the Master of Language, selfishly closing his eyes as he walked along the sand.

The uncle’s given name was Simon, not Christian as he was not, nor did his surname match the name of his European family, which changed with their location to erase the world they came from. The uncle had lived in a time when the new could be made from the old in the belief that the old should be changed like a name in the new world. Years later he heard about another man with the same name, pronounced Shi-mon in the old way, who had served as a culture minister in the government of the country that the uncle’s parents had fled. This gentleman had saved a man who would become his friend and mentor, as this friend explained one night while he drove them across a bridge connecting cities in the western edge of the new world.

On what he thought would be his last day in Paris, his friend told him, he had been presenting himself to prospective employers, hoping to find a way to gain work and thereby not go back to his own country. He had failed and was now standing on the platform of the metro with his portfolio, resigned to the ignoble return he would face the next day, without the money left to buy himself a dinner, when he met this Simon by chance coming off the train. The cultural attaché recognized him, as they had met some years before in the city they both called home, and scribbled for him on a scrap of paper the name and address of a magazine editor. He walked to that address to receive a job that would keep him in Paris for several years, until his father’s death brought him back home and the government took away his passport.

Several years passed. One day he finally met this Simon, at a gathering of professors, artists, and exiles at his friend’s home. Simon was a small man, as the bachelor uncle had been in photographs. His hair was white as snow. He sat in a chair as the party moved around him, living through the decades few men are allowed to experience, speaking to a young woman sitting beside him, recounting his annual swim in the ocean to mark the New Year, planning the next cultural cabaret performance by the art students at the university before

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returning once again for another spring in his solitary apartment in the city where he was born.

He looked at Simon. He could sense the collective gaze of all the men at the party, all of them much younger than the old man in the chair beside the young woman, all of them feeling the diseases eating their lives, all of them glancing at Simon or watching him from the corners of their eyes, each of them wondering how this man had lived so long.

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60. Recognizing Strangers He was not aware of the moment when the strangers he saw on the street became familiar. It had happened gradually. First, he had come to recognize the door of the building. It was different from other doors, but the difference did not account for the sharpness of his recognition. From the street the difference receded into the rhythm of the architecture, the sameness of the color to the stone façade and railings below the windows at specific floors, the shapes of the windows that repeated in columns and rows. It was gradual, beginning with the woman who lived in the rooms beside the entrance. There were many times when she was in the hallway as he arrived or departed, followed by her young daughter who opened the door for him.

The woman who lived in the window of the adjacent building, sitting perched on the windowsill playing with a child’s toy or drinking a bowl of soup held in both her hands was next. She, of all the people in the district, was the most public, living at the intersection of her window, the sidewalk, and the steps leading to the street below, speaking to anyone and everyone that passed.

This was followed by the stationary people who received him as he waited patiently to be served. The man in the wine shop, tall and thin as a bottle, became familiar. The woman in the bakery greeted him as she greeted every other person in the line, and seemed to know which kind of bread he wanted, so that one day he realized she was looking at him and then at the space on the rack where the loaves would be if any remained at that hour, then shrugged with a smile to communicate that he would have to choose something else that day.

He watched the man in the butcher shop clean the trays and cases where he placed the meat early on the morning of the same day each week.

One day he passed a woman coming down the steps as he was going up and recognized that she had also sold him bread. The man from the wine store passed him on a bicycle one afternoon. The man behind the bar in the restaurant pulled his car out from a parking space as he was parking the car one evening.

This accumulation left no visible mark. Days would go by during which he never saw a person that he had seen before or would recognize again if that person passed him on the street or happened to sit across from him on the train. He rode the first car on the train in the evening, to give himself the best chance to gain a place on the elevator and avoid walking up the hundred steps. Many people exited the train at the stop each day, and each day they were a different combination of shape and size and sex, carrying bags or holding books which they returned to as soon as the crowd stopped moving into the room-sized elevator and the chime sounded, indicating that the door was about to close.

After the horizontal and rocking motion of the train, he stood in the crowd moving upward smoothly and slowly. When the door opened again, he moved with the group through the control gate. As the motion reached the mouth of the station, the crowd dispersed onto the sidewalk, branching to the right and left to climb the stairs, moving down the hill to the left or up to the right, or crossing the street to descend the steps on the other side. He followed the urge to turn one way or the other depending on the motion of the crowd, mounting either set of steps that led to the street above.

Then the day arrived when he realized he recognized most of the people he passed on the street. The pregnant woman with the short hair passing by the video rental store was someone he had seen before. He recalled the tall man with the shoulder-length white hair pushing a child in a carriage that he had not seen in many months. He saw the man who walked very slowly behind his small dog

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sitting beside him in the cafĂŠ. The dog sat beneath the chair, hiding from the passing legs.

It was the combination of their faces and the way they moved. This had entered his memory. The process had taken several years.

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61. The Souvenir He watched the swallows hurtle themselves down between the buildings, their narrow wings beating irregular rhythms as they twisted and turned. He had woken to the sound of their shrill cries. He climbed to the top floor of the exterior stairway to look out over the roofs at the city. The exposed side of the staircase was enclosed by a black net, to keep the pigeons from nesting there. He could hear pigeons cooing on the roof above. The sky was completely empty. The color of the sky was a deep blue looking up, whiter as he looked straight ahead.

Along the line of horizon the white darkened in haze. He could see beyond the limits of the city, to wooded ridges and the edge of the plain.

He was waiting for the airplanes to arrive, to fly over the military parade.

He was admiring the red clay of the chimney stacks placed at regular intervals along the top of each building, regardless of its age or style. Some of the chimneys had small caps but most ending with empty tubes. His contemplation of the rhythm of chimneys was interrupted when a figure emerged on a rooftop below. It was a man, he thought, from the shape of the hair and the flat shirtless torso and jeans. Another pair of eyes had come to watch the planes.

He had seen a group of people on this roof a few evenings before, appearing from a hidden door and moving along the edge of the roof, as if they were exploring the space. It was a dinner party, he imagined, men and women guests invited dinner by their host to look at the view from the roof after. They peered over the edge in each direction, then formed groups of four and six, turning their backs to the center of the city while another person in the group faced them with a camera.

Together, they gazed at the empty sky, looking towards the monument that rose above the other shapes, marking the beginning of the city’s central avenue. He wondered if he should make a welcoming gesture towards the other person, but the figure never turned back to look in his direction. He was not sure he was visible, in any case, standing on the stairway behind the black net. The planes would come from the west, to their right, to fly over the parade. In this direction they could both see the cluster of glass towers, a small city of its own on the opposite bank of a river that was invisible below the roofs of buildings. They could not see the river moving in enormous loops north then south then north then south again, crossed by bridges and lined with stone embankments, invisible from this vantage point in the upper stories of buildings on the hill. He superimposed the shape he knew from the maps on to the light reflected off the roofs. The sunlight reflecting off on the back of the figure on the rooftop was the pleasant color of flesh. The birds had stopped moving. He thought he could see a group of shapes drifting above a ridge to the north. They were moving too slowly to be planes, he thought. They must be helicopters, very large helicopters.

Then they were coming from the west, as he expected, a group of jets trailing colored smoke, a thin line just below his eye level so that he could barely distinguish their individual shapes, close beside each other, mixed with the smoke that dispersed quickly behind them. It was silent for some time, despite the motion of the enormous machines in the air. To the right he could see them approaching, small black spots in tight patterns of four, six, and eight, moving towards the position over the monument, and then continuing out of his sight over the avenue that marked the axis of the capitol.

The vision of bombers moving over the city made him calculate the number of years since such a sight would have been ominous. Fifty-nine summers before

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neither he nor the other figure would have been standing on the roof or the exterior stairway of the apartment building. They would have awoken to the sirens and been running towards the entrance to the metro station. He remembered photos of the people sitting on the steps leading down into the station, which descended several stories beneath the hill, waiting to hear that the planes had passed.

Do you remember, his mother had asked him on the phone, riding on the elevated train?

No, he replied. He had no memory of the train rattling over the avenue below, nor could he remember climbing the iron stairs to the platform and looking down at the fronts of the stores. The memory he had came from photographs he had seen in books.

I made a special effort to take you and your brother for a ride on the front car of the train the week before the tracks were torn down, she said.

It’s hard to know what you will remember, he said. He remembered going to the front of the train, but it was in the tunnel. The train was metal, lined with seats facing inward, and high above there were metal loops hanging from the ceiling so that people could hold the loops and sway as the train moved. At the front of each car was a small cabin behind a metal door. This is where the driver sat, someone told him when he asked, and he imagined a man sitting with controls in his hand, looking at the tracks ahead. Sometimes the door would open. It required a large metal key that the driver kept on a chain in his pocket. He went to the front of the train and tried to look out the window, but all he could see was a reflected image of the interior of the car behind him. Someone lifted him up to the window and he pressed his face against the glass. Only then did the interior of the train reflected on the glass disappear and he could see the lights lining the walls of the tunnel speeding by, and the platform approaching in the distance. He laughed as the lights flew by. There were colored signal lights changing from green to yellow to red as they approached the platform and the speed of the train would change.

I have a feeling, he said, I know where all the memories are kept. He was speaking to his daughter. She had just returned from her laboratory. She had spent the day making images of cells too small for the human eye to see, manipulating instruments that record each difference proposing the edge where one molecule ends and another one begins. Now she was sitting on her bed beneath the yellow covers, waiting for him to read her a story on a summer evening. The bed was in the center of the room so that her head was framed by the window in the gable that protruded behind her. The curtains were moving, articulating a breeze from the ocean below.

He sat beside her holding a book in his hands. She did not want to go to sleep.

He did not want to stop reading this book where the memories were kept. They appeared in the form of knots and lines pressed onto each page. Do you know where this came from, he asked her, pointing at the picture framed on the wall above her desk.

No, she said. The music in her voice told him that she did not like him to interrupt the story. She wanted him to keep reading from the book.

When you were two years old, I took you to China. We arrived on a hot summer night after several days of moving east with the sun, finally landing in darkness. I carried you in a pack attached to my shoulders. We walked out of the airport onto the street and found a bus going into the city. It was so hot that night, he said to her, placing one hand on her forehead, everyone was out on the street. He could

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feel the damp sweat on her brow clinging to his fingers. Entire families had moved their beds out onto the sidewalks. Children were playing card games on their mattresses as our bus went by. We arrived at the guest house. A man opened the gate, led us through a dark place I thought was a garden, though it was impossible to see anything in the darkness. We came to a building and he opened the door. He switched on an electric light and pointed at the bed. There was a thermos of hot water on the table, he touched the night stand beside her bed, and two glass cups. I took you off my back and placed you on the bed. You were already sleeping, and so I drank a cup of tea alone, and sat on the edge of the bed for a few hours until the sunlight entered the room. You were still asleep. I opened the door and stepped into the garden. The sound of cicadas rubbing their wings came from every tree. I could feel the buzzing in my chest, right here, he said, touching the bone between her breasts. And when you woke up, I put you into the pack and we walked to the train station. There were hundreds of people sitting on the ground, eating melons and spitting seeds in the dirt. Men and women sat squatting beside their bags while their children slept in small piles. We stood on the platform until night when the train arrived. I showed my ticket to the man who appeared in the door of the train. He led me to a compartment with four beds hanging from the walls. An old man was sitting on one bunk, smoking a cigarette. He was very thin, dressed in blue trousers and a white cotton shirt with no sleeves. Two men were sleeping on the opposite bunks. I put down the pack and placed you on the upper bunk, then climbed up to lie beside you. The train began to move and the man below us began to sing very softly.

The next morning we arrived at the ancient capital. I put you in the pack and walked to the entrance of a tomb. A sign explained that a woman from a wealthy family had been buried there. The entrance was next to the park, a short walk from the station. We walked down the tunnel covered with paintings of people marching in a row, holding their hands inside their sleeves joined in front of them. At the end of the tunnel was a chamber with carved rock walls. The carvings were images of women dancing, with long scarves trailing from their arms, while other women played stringed instruments and flutes behind them. This, he said, pointing to the image in the frame hanging on the wall of his daughter’s bedroom, is a rubbing from that wall. I took a sheet of wet paper and pressed it, he ran his hands over the yellow sheet covering his daughter’s legs, against the stone until the shape of the carving was replicated in the fibers of the paper. Then when it dried I painted the image on the paper using the outline transferred from the stone. The colors, he said, looking at the framed print on the wall, may not be the same as the ones they used two thousand years ago. I bought the ink and brushes at a store beside the hotel where we stayed that night. The hotel was across the street from the park. At dawn the next morning, I put you on my shoulders and went into the park. It cost a few cents to buy a ticket at the gate. Once inside, we were surrounded by hundreds of people doing their morning exercise. Groups of men and women were slowly moving their arms and legs in unison, balancing on one foot and then the next. Above us on a group of rocks, several men were swinging wooden swords in the air. We walked around the edge of a small lake and came to a small and squat house beside a grove of trees. A man was standing beside a large tree with his hands on his hips. A group of people were watching him. He slowly raised up one leg, rotated his pelvis with his hands, and brought his foot down to the ground with a violent thump. As his foot struck, I could feel the ground vibrate and the branches of the tree shook. I was amazed by the sheer force the man could produce. I put you down on the ground, so I could take a picture with the camera I carried in the pocket of my trousers.

Here, he said as he flipped through the pages of the book he held in his hands.

It’s here somewhere. He was looking at the images on each page as they went by between his fingers. He knew what the image looked like, the man lifting his right leg, dressed in the same blue trousers and shirt that everyone was else was also wearing. He watched the motion, holding the small camera to his eye.

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Show it to me, she said, leaning towards him.

I’ll find it. Just a minute. As he turned a page, he saw something fall from the book onto the ground. He leaned over from the bed to pick it up. The photograph was very tiny, the size of a postage stamp. Or perhaps his hand had become very large and the picture, which now balanced on the tip of his finger, was a normal photograph.

He looked back at his daughter. Now she was bending over, holding back the lid of her left eye with the fingers of her right hand, pressing the iris with the finger of the other hand. I have to take my lenses out before I go to sleep, she said. The small plastic case for her lenses rested on her lap.

Here, he said, and placed the tiny picture on top of the lens. The image sank into the liquid held by the white plastic cup. You can look at it another time. I have to go now.

Where are you going?

I have to go to my office, to do some work. Sleep tight. He reached across the bed to embrace her. He felt her arms tighten around his ribs, holding him very tightly.

I want you to finish the story. Her arms grew tighter as she clung to his body.

I’ll finish it another time. We saw a lot of things you don’t remember. I’ll tell you about the temple, and the poet’s tomb, and the statues carved in the cliff. Another night. He moved his hands behind his back to pry her fingers apart. She let go and sat up in the bed.

Are you going to die? she said, looking at him.

No, he said, not now. I just have to go back to the office. I’ll be back later, when you’re asleep.

You forgot me in the park, she said.

Her voice had changed. He was unsure now whose voice he was hearing. It was a woman’s voice, he was sure of that. But he was no longer certain what relationship he had with this woman sitting upright on the bed. He could see the curtain moving behind her head in the dark. He put the book down on the night stand beside the bed. He rose from the edge of the bed where he had been sitting and carefully backed out of the room, closing the door.

When he lost something, he tried to remember the last place he had it. It had been in his hand, or in a pocket, or on his finger, or in a bag. He had put it down beside the chair he was sitting in. He could not remember taking her off his shoulders. He remembered taking the photograph. Both his hands were holding the camera to his eye. He tried to remember where he had put her when he placed her on the ground.

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62. The Man Who Carried His Dog Down The Stairs He often passed the man who carried his dog down the stairs. They would be entering the building, the man and the dog. The man might be in the inner foyer holding the door open while the dog stood in the outer foyer, his head cocked to one side, his eye looking up at his master. He would stop before going out the door, offering to let the dog enter first, and the man would insist that he pass, holding the door for him as well.

Then after he passed, he would turn to see the dog waddle on its short legs, navigating through the glass and wooden doorframe. The man would bend over to take the dog in his arms and, cradling the animal, step slowly and deliberately down the stairwell to their unseen apartment on the lower floors.

He was walking up the street in the late afternoon when he saw her, the woman who lived in her ground floor window. Madam, he called her, often saying, hello Madam or good evening Madam when he passed her. Now she was speaking to a woman with three children, one in a stroller and another in her arms, while a third stood by and listened to the conversation. He didn’t hear their discourse but as he approached she shifted her attention towards him and walking along beside him, quickly asked, And how are you feeling?

Oh, I’m okay, he said, shifting the bags of groceries to the other hand, but my nose, he gestured with his free hand towards his face, is stuffed. A cold. The weather had turned from hot to cool and the daylight was failing early in the evening. He had seen her, the woman who lived in the window, that morning when he left his apartment. She was singing, seated on the windowsill overlooking the stairway that led to the lower street, staring at a small notebook she held in her hand, singing not the words recorded there but some song present in her memory. Her voice was very lovely as it passed down the stairway towards the car and bus traffic below.

That evening as they approached the building, there were children playing on the sidewalk outside her window. Have you been on holidays, she asked.

Sometimes when you return from holidays, you get sick.

I had a dream last night, he began. But now he was speaking to no one in particular, as she had moved away from him to join the children and was asking each of them about their first days in school. He recognized a young girl who lived in the building balancing on the pattern of grids made with chalk on the sidewalk.

I dreamed I was walking on a beach with my dog. He was a very old dog, small and stupid, and as we passed an old abandoned car I thought the car was too close to the sea. The car was sitting on a road made from cobblestones and sand. Its windows were gone and most of its iron rusted, but it still had tires on the wheels.

I walked along the beach with the dog following me, running ahead and coming back, and then I turned back as I saw the tide was coming up. The waves were moving up the slope and the beach was disappearing. As we approached the car again from the other direction, I saw the waves had reached it. A wave was pushing the car towards us. The force of a wave would make it roll along the cobblestones, and as the wave receded, the gravity of the slope would pull it back to where it started.

The dog saw the car as it rolled away and started to run at it, barking loudly, chasing it away, as stupid dogs will do. I remembered thinking – that’s a dangerous thing to do – the waves will return in a moment. And even as I was

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listening to the barking and thinking it, the next wave came up the beach and struck the car, pushing it into the dog. I saw the fender of the rusty car strike the dog, and the dog went under the car, as if it were in slow motion. His body caught on some exposed metal part and was dragged along as the car rolled back the other way.

Immediately I ran over and pulled the dog out from under the car. He was whimpering and broken, but still alive. I felt him twitching in my arms as I picked him up. I knew I needed to get the dog to a doctor as quickly as possible.

He walked to the nearest house. He had stayed in this house once, he knew it.

But now there was another family staying there for the summer holiday. There were two cars parked under the overhanging roof by the front door. They were parked tightly together, parallel to the wall of the house. He could not imagine how to get them out. Then he realized he didn’t have a key to either car. He was thinking about the wrong problem. He had to find someone to take him to a doctor.

Shifting the dog in his arms, he knocked on the door. He explained to the man who came to the door what had happened. The man’s wife stood behind him.

Beyond the doorway he could see two children in the room. They were fighting with each other. The man invited him inside and he stood in the living room, holding the twitching dog, as the children ran around and the man and woman tried to control them. No one offered to drive him into town to find a doctor.

The woman gave him a clear plastic bag to cover the dog, to prevent the blood from getting on the rug and the furniture. They all could see the dog’s tail moving.

A teenage girl appeared at the door. The man and woman continued to be distracted by their children, who were racing from room to room, taunting each other. He was giving up hope of getting the help he needed, when he realized the teenage girl standing in the doorway understood the situation. She offered to drive him into town right away. Right now. She had a car key in her hand. It was time to leave.

As he started to move towards the door, he realized he was no longer holding the dog. His arms were empty. He looked around the room, at the rug on the floor and at the couch, at the chairs and small tables with magazines and candy dishes. He couldn’t remember putting down the dog, but he couldn’t see it anywhere. He hadn’t been in any other room in the house. The girl was standing in the doorway, waiting to leave. His eyes went repeatedly over the same empty surfaces. The most difficult thing to find, he said out loud, is something in plain sight. But he couldn’t find his dog. It was then that he woke up, pulling himself up to a sitting position in the bed.

She was sitting on the window ledge, her knees up and her feet pressed against one edge of the window. She held a bowl in both her hands, sipping from it as she continued her conversation with a man standing on the sidewalk. He was coming up the steps, having passed her a few minutes before on his way to the bakery to get fresh bread for breakfast. And do you know who built the highways, who built the roads of France, she shouted to him as he approached. She saw the puzzled look on his face and quickly repeated her question in a language he understood. Do you know who built the highways, who built the roads of France?

No, I don’t know, he said as he approached the window. He knew he appeared solemn, even severe to people who saw him, his mouth pursed and twisted as if in thought, his eyes tired and downcast. He carried a burden of anxiety, centered between his chest and eyebrows. This burden would occasionally dissolve into a warm flood of well-being as he turned a corner or crossed a street and saw the

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light filtering through the leaves of a tree or a shadow cast against the surface of a building.

The Algerians, she said, her voice a mixture of triumph and indignation, gesturing with one hand towards the cobblestone street and beyond to suggest the invisible highways that led from one city to the next. The Algerians, she repeated and returned her hand to the bowl, sipping from one side as she looked down at the two men standing on the sidewalk below her.

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63. Monologue After three years had passed, I had to admit to myself I had no plan. You can pretend for just so long, I said to myself, balancing openness with precise technique, a wakeful eye with a inner sense of balance. In the process you will begin to notice the leaves fall from the trees, are swept up into piles, scattered by the wind, and appear on the branches again. Things repeat.

When I first came to the island, my motivations were easy to explain to others. A man of my appearance in a place like this was more than expected. People had done it before and it had been recorded in books, in photographs and in movies which we had all seen. At least I had seen and read and looked at such things most of my life. And when you look at these things, when you pay attention to the drama and the artifice of one form of narrative or another, getting drawn into a character or a point of view, you identify, or at least I do, I put myself in the place or the picture and wonder what it would be like, could I do that, if I were standing on the bridge and saw that girl jump, what would I do?

In the movie, the guy jumped in after her, and that’s when his troubles began.

Of course, you got the impression that he was looking for trouble, that his whole life had been trouble of one sort or another. Trouble is chance because chance is just what it claims to be, the chance to win or lose, and chance was what he lived by. This was not really stated. There was no exposition. It was implied by the opening act of standing on this bridge at night and noticing the girl who was sitting on the railing dangling her feet over the river below. We could ask what he was doing there at that time of night and we would have to assume he was looking for something. As I watched it, I didn’t recognize the actor who played the guy the way I do now. As I remember him now, I can see him playing a dozen other characters in other films, two hours of being this man trapped in an unhappy marriage, this peasant farmer longing for a wife who owns some fertile land, this divorced office worker trying to remember when to pick up his children at the train station. What a job. In the end you must be nobody at all, a spirit moving in and out of characters’ lives. In the industry they call you talent.

You have to read a treatment and say to yourself, I can do that.

And so I did. I arrived on the island. The weather was mild, milder than where I had come from. I knew that. I had been visiting for some time. I didn’t really count at that point, I didn’t have a series of marks, one for each visit, marking them off in groups of five, four vertical strokes and then a fifth stroke across the four so that it would be easy to count them up by fives when I’d covered a page or the part of a wall in my cell. I didn’t count the visits but I do recall when it occurred to me to move. I had spent the weekend there, I mean here, I had been here and then got on the first train Monday morning. Really early, each stage of the journey was the very start of some process, the first subway of the morning, the first coffee served at the just-opened bar, the first newspaper removed from the pile wrapped up in string. It was the first train through the tunnel and when it came out the other side it was still early morning, the sun was just coming up.

Time goes backwards in that direction. You can get the first train and travel for hours and still get to the city early. And I remember getting off the train, piling into the tube, moving up the escalator, walking down the street with cars whizzing by and rain starting to seep through the leather of my shoes and thinking, what the fuck am I doing here?

That question really hasn’t occurred to me since. Here I am and the sounds of airplanes overhead and pigeons moving from one ledge to the next are more or less equal to the sounds of buses and motorcycles, the sound of phone

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conversations and kitchen activities drifting through the porous window spaces that grant each of us a portion of the light.

Once you stop moving, the question is not what am I doing here but what am I doing at all. If the answer is living with myself, then why isn’t it living with her or him or them?

The island was new and strange when I arrived. Despite many visits, it was unfamiliar as a place to live. Someone once told me you can divide people into two types, those that stay and those that leave. I can divide places into two kinds, places I’ve visited and places I’ve lived. When I arrived, I could see but I could barely understand what I was looking at. Each corner was famous. Each building had a history I did not know. I learned to recognize the difference between a stone that had been shaped and placed in a wall during this century or that one. I learned to recognize the difference in the curves and the edges, the way the shape of eyes in human figures changed over the years, faces looking back from the stone walls or jutting out from roofs to disgorge the rain.

The signs of chronology helped me fabricate a linear past. The sides of buildings were covered with stories and I began to read them into a language none of their creators ever knew. They carved their stories into stone not for the present, where their intentions already existed, but for the future, where they wanted them to be. And I was there receiving as many tales as I could fabricate.

The Woman who married the Evening Star was gathering roots on the prairie one summer evening when a man appeared on the horizon walking towards her from the west. He was beautiful and offered to marry her. She looked at his face, so bright and warm, and she agreed. He took her back to his home in the sky where she became his wife. His light entered her and she gave birth to a child. She cared for the child each night while her husband wandered across the sky. She sang songs to the child she had heard people sing and this reminded her of the village she had left behind.

One night, the wind was still and the smoke from the cooking fires came up through a hole in the clouds. The scent of the cooking meat overwhelmed her senses. She realized she had not eaten since her husband had taken her to his home. She held the child in her arms and fell to her knees. Slowly she pushed herself towards the edge of the hole. Clutching the infant to her breast, she bent over and peered through the hold in the clouds to the earth below. She could see the home of her family beside a stream sheltered by a grove of trees.

When her husband returned the next morning, he found her crying on the floor of their house. What have you done? he asked her. I smelled the smoke from the cooking fires, she said. I want to go home.

I can see the evening star from the terrace of the apartment. It is a bright steady light above the rooftops at the end of each day. Small blinking lights move past its round white constancy, airplanes on the way to some distant land.

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64. The Immigrant Excuse me.

He struggled to get the words out of his mouth. He could feel his jaw working slowly, his tongue fumbling against his teeth as he tried to make the sound of these words emerge into the room he saw around him through his eyes. The room was there. He was there in the room and there was a doorway connecting the room in which he was sitting or standing in some relationship to a bed.

Perhaps he was standing beside the bed. He had been spreading a towel on it, gathering the things he found, the things he had been looking for, trying to gather them in some fashion so he could take them away. The towel seemed like a good solution, something he knew he would find in the bathroom. As he rolled up the earrings in the towel, he saw the woman relaxing on a couch in the adjoining room. Both rooms were dark. There was no light turned on, but still there was enough light coming through the windows for his eyes to distinguish the forms of the furniture, the walls and opening between the two rooms, and the figure of the woman with one leg up on the couch, reclining against the cushions. Despite the fact that he could see her, he assumed she had not see him. He sometimes saw a person through a window in another apartment below or above his own, or sitting in a room exposed to the street. She was lying back, gazing at the ceiling. Perhaps she had just returned and this was her room. He did not want to disturb her and most of all he did not want to surprise her. He had decided to leave as soon as he wrapped up these things, rolling them in the towel, being careful not to get any of the papers wet, the documents he had found on the bed. But to leave, he would have to go through the other room.

He was about to leave the social hall he had wandered into, where people were dancing to music playing from speakers on the walls. Other people sat on bleachers, risers that reached up towards a balcony along one wall. These people were watching the dancers and talking or simply staring down at the floor. He had wandered in with no intention of being there, attracted by the colorful design on the grass outside the building complex. As he dragged his feet through the grass he was surprised to see bits of the color coming off the grass and onto his shoes, bits of plastic sprayed onto the living plants. After he crossed the lawn, he was on a concrete sidewalk and then he was entering the building. He pulled open the glass doors leading directly into the social hall where the music was playing. The event had been going on for some time.

He crossed the floor and began to climb the bleachers, stepping carefully around the groups of people watching the dance. He saw someone he had known long ago when they were both students in high school. As he approached, they exchanged glances of recognition. The man, for he was no longer a teenager but now a grown man, opened his shirt and smiled. He poked his finger at the man’s exposed chest. This acquaintance had been an actor on television. The man stood up and began to transform into his character, reciting lines from his show. He played along as best he could stepping backwards now down the steps, giving the man a chance to perform as he walked down the bleachers, twirling and repeating a gesture that defined this character, briefly well-known to the television audience who had watched the show every week on Thursday nights at eight o’clock. As they reached to the floor, the man stopped speaking and moving his hands. He smiled as the character evaporated and shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing more he could do, the man seemed to say. He was just an out of work actor now.

He turned away and crossed the dance floor, walking by a familiar couple. They were dancing to the music coming from the speakers. Old friends, they waved at

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him and said something friendly. He waved back but did not reply. He did not like the music. He never liked the music in these situations. What people liked to dance to seemed meaningless. There were other things he liked to listen to. He had seen enough and decided to leave when he realized he had left his papers somewhere. They were no longer in his hand. He must have put these things down somewhere and become distracted. He certainly had the papers in his hand when he entered the building. He could feel them in his hand, the empty hand he brushed against his ear, and then he felt the empty hole where his earring had been. He had also lost his earring somewhere in the room.

He turned around and began to search for his things. He neither spoke nor looked at anyone. He simply looked at the floor. He went back along the path he had taken through the room. He climbed up the bleachers again, but found nothing. He focused on any surface where he might have put them down, or where they may have come to rest. He continued through a door and into a hallway.

He found the earring on the night table beside the bed. The papers were on the bed itself. There was a telephone and a lamp on the night table. He was speaking into the telephone, he had called someone to tell them he had found it. He was holding the earring in his hand when something astonishing began to happen.

The earring began to sparkle and whirl, creating a brilliant cloud. The cloud settled and the stone of the earring had transformed into a different gem, only to begin to glow and whirl again, throwing off vortexes of mist and light, spinning in his palm, for he had opened his palm in reaction to the sudden light and motion.

You’re not going to believe what’s happening. He could feel the words slurring in his mouth, as he tried to express his amazement into the telephone, still watching and feeling the spinning motion in his hand. It wasn’t hot, but he could feel the air moving as the earring continued to spin. He was speaking to a girlfriend from high school. He could hear the voice of the woman’s husband on the line making ironic comments. What he was talking about had nothing to do with his feelings for this woman. He was simply trying to describe what he was seeing, but he could hear that his mouth could not keep up with the words coming from his mind, as if his jaw and tongue were asleep. Even as he tried to describe what had already happened, the dazzling gem erupted again, twirling until it came to rest in the new form of a seashell. He abandoned the telephone, putting down the voices. He could see delicate golden settings at the top and bottom of the shell. He lifted it with both his hands now to see how the shell was meant to hang from a person’s ear. As he placed his thumbs on the edge of the shell, it opened, expelling an enormous volume of water across the night table, onto his feet and the rug covering the floor.

It was then that he went to find the towel, to absorb the water and dry his feet.

Whatever had caused this to happen, it was over now. He needed to gather up his things and leave, and the towel he had spread on the bed seemed like a reasonable way to do it. But now there was a woman in the adjoining room.

When he walked through the opening towards the door, she would become aware of him. Perhaps his presence would frighten her, as he would have been terrified to discover a stranger suddenly appearing in a room of his own apartment. This was not his room. Perhaps this was her room. He had no way to justify his presence other than to say he was looking for his things and he had found them on the night table and on the bed.

Perhaps if he spoke first, before she saw him, if he asked to be excused, she would do nothing, she would let him walk past her to the door and not demand to know what he was doing in this room and what he had wrapped in the towel

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he held in his hand and what those papers were he had placed under his arm to keep them away from the wet towel he held in his hand and she would just sit there on the couch gazing at him as he walked past her to the open door that led to the hallway where he had come from.

He could feel his lips moving as the air pushed them apart, his thick tongue struggling against his teeth.

Echsh kyoosh mee.

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