fugue

Pigeons. Pigeons everywhere, strutting back and forth, cooing at one another. In amongst the pigeons dart swallows, sharp-eyed opportunists whose heads are held at a precise angle, asking after the mysteries of the universe, requesting a moment of attention, a kind word or a sunflower seed, before darting back to the games they play in bushes and the boughs of trees. Every so often there is a morning dove or a crow, but these carry the mark of outsiders, not belonging in the gathering of birds in front of the fountain.

The note which brought me here was precise, succinct. I didn't recognize the handwriting; but then, I didn't need to recognize the handwriting. I had taken that which was not mine, and for weeks, now, I had anticipated just this summons. Would it be a matter of reparations, of indentured service, of some more obscure but equally effective form of payment? Would they be prone to things having gotten innocently confused, a crime not of intention but of crossed paths? Would they question my motives, my knowledge? I was not worried; there did not seem any immediate cause for concern, as my presence, though undoubtedly inconvenient, was likewise inconsequential. I would apologize, return what belonged elsewhere and continue forward with my plans for the immediate future. Purely an innocent mistake, no harm done.

The man who sat next to me on the bench was reading a well-worn paperback of a lesser Hemingway, wore a woolen hat, the type one associates with aged chauffeurs in British period dramas, seemed to have no intention of leaving the bench anytime this afternoon. While I had no desire for there to be witnesses to the return of the items, all of the other benches were occupied by au pairs pushing strollers or the obviously homeless and potentially schizophrenic, and the message specified the benches by the fountain. I looked about at the walkers in the park, curious how many would be arriving, what age, ethnicity, gender, and shrugged at the unimportance of it all. Who they were wasn't my business; who I was wasn't their business.

A few teenagers on skateboards came through the plaza, temporarily scattering the pigeons, working on jumping with the boards, having them flip in mid-air before landing. None of them were successful, though only one actually lost contact with the board, had to flip it right side up before continuing with the group. He seemed unperturbed at the failure, none of the other kids gave it a second glance; they just circled the fountain, once, twice, every so often adding a jump or a flip, before leaving towards the other walkway.

A group of kindergarteners all in uniform, holding hands in long lines punctuated by colorful galoshes, gathered, became a swarm, swelled in number as they waited by the fountain for one grown up or another to verify their destination, their timetable. Kindergarteners live in an inner world where timetables do not make any type of sense; they are pushed and pulled to fit the schedules and itineraries their lives are choreographed to, accept the dictates without ever comprehending a tense other than the present. One of the girls has pigtails, carefully curled, and in a moment of oversight lapse she is in the fountain, with yellow galoshes marching towards the figure of a rabbit in the center, pandemonium among the other children who think this is a very good idea and panic from their guardians who are unsure how to prevent the entire class from going wading.

I am blocked from seeing the outcome of this field trip by the arrival of four perfectly matched burly men in blue striped suits. Everything about them proclaims brawn over brain; they could not have been more coordinated without undergoing genetic therapy or plastic surgery. Some Hollywood talent agency would be ecstatic to have access to such a quartet, and in all likelihood if they looked less central-casting and more man-of-the-street I would have been more nervous. As it is, I struggle not to laugh, then and there, at the stereotyping of the scene, but am equally certain none of my sudden companions would appreciate the joke. The Hemingway acolyte glances over, raises an eyebrow, returns to his story.

A grunt seems to indicate that I am to accompany the men to some other destination: perhaps the coffee shop in the converted greenhouse, or towards a part of the park with fewer children, or perhaps I am delivering the package to someone in a wheelchair or with crutches or with some other mobility impairment. Regardless, there's no reason not to go, the children are screaming for all they're worth at being taken out of the fountain, and I could quite do with a cup of coffee. It seems strange that none of the men attempts to take my delivery, but this also confirms that it could not possibly be of particular importance, as they are in no rush to relieve me of the burden.

We walk, two forward, two behind, and though it feels like overkill there is no sense of aggression or threat. Neither do I feel protected: more, it is like marching band formation, all together but only a distant leader, tracing precise steps forward across the field. That I do not match the foursome is unfortunate, it throws off the aesthetic of the promenade. The march they have internalized owes less to Sousa and more to Vivaldi, the steps are quick and short and light, not heavy and measured. If they were svelte instead of burly, if they were wearing royal purple and crimson instead of pinstripes, I would say they were hand-picked members of the Swiss Guard, flown over specially from Vatican City, so gently do they walk. Instead, their footfalls reinforce the cinematic quality, the choreography of a Fred Astaire or a Fellini preventing a situation from becoming Hitchcockian or noir.

We walk straight past the coffee shop, I notice with disappointment, then past the ice cream stand, then past the entrance to the aviary. We are headed further into the park, into the territory of the picnickers and the bocce players and the frisbee games, and up ahead some type of youth group is setting up a volleyball net. Our pace stays consistently light, unhurried, and a yellow lab breaks through the formation in pursuit of a tennis ball. More dogs have gathered in this area, an impromptu dog park, lacrosse sticks used to play fetch, all manner of breed and owner gathered together in the late afternoon sun.

A German shepherd has started keeping pace, precisely twenty inches to my left, matching our progress, and as none of the four seem either surprised or bothered by the growing entourage, I don't pay particular attention one way or the other: dogs are dogs, and this one, though beautiful, doesn't seem inclined to aggression. As we leave the field of dogs behind, I realize a puppy is tagging after the shepherd, who is too well behaved to notice it; the men likewise act as if the puppy isn't there. It joins the procession, which I begin to feel must look ludicrous, but no one in the park is paying us any heed.

Up ahead is what can only be a family reunion, all matched noses and oversized ears and a flurry of mirrored hand gestures, ways of holding cups, that separates blood relatives from those who married into the fold. There is no similarity between my four escorts and the group we are approaching, but something indicates that this is our destination, that I will here be able to return that which is not mine before returning home. The crowd parts, we approach a woman with carefully coiffed hair, a cane, and I hold out the bag. She gestures for me to set it on the table, but not to open it: no one checks its contents. Suddenly I am being handed a glass of wine and welcomed to the event, and it is just as obvious that I will not be allowed to leave before the party has disbursed as it is confusing what I am expected to do during the interim. The four men station themselves at the corners of the tent, and I make social chitchat with these people I do not know, waiting for the explanation of why I am here, now, and for what purpose.

---

weather
tornadoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes? In rural western Massachusetts?

reading
Les livres ne se font pas comme les enfants, mais comme les pyramides, avec un dessein prémédité, et en apportant des grands blocs l’un par-dessus l’autre, à force de reins, de temps et de sueur, et ça ne sert à rien ! Et ça reste dans le désert ! Mais en le dominant prodigieusement. Les chacals pissent en bas et les bourgeois montent dessus, etc., continue la comparaison. (Gustave Flaubert, cited in Albert Thibaudet’s Gustave Flaubert, 136)

Translation from Flaubert's Parrot / Julian Barnes:

Books aren’t made the way babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

reckonings

We left at dawn. The car had been packed the night before, bags each labeled and organized for future utility and ease of access, small necessary items all together, pinning down the large emergency use only items that we had no intention of using. Like the spare tire, which nestled together with the jack and the tire iron and the emergency keys at the very base layer of our possessions, the presence of the spare tire in itself a notice of unflagging optimism. For neither of us had ever changed a tire before; where we were going a flat tire would be the least of our concerns, as the long minutes of installation could almost certainly lead to death or injury.

We didn't think about this, for thinking could have done no particular good; we merely followed the advice of generations of explorers and packed what we might need. More noteworthy were the rifles that we kept in easy reach of the front seats. The truth is that there aren't that many places to keep a loaded rifle in a car. If it is a pickup truck then there are gun racks for the rear window. If it is a 1930s coupe then hooligans in the back seat with machine guns dispense with the need for rifles altogether.

Traditionally, two people in a sedan will use handguns of the semiautomatic variety, but even a 9 mm would prove useless where we were going. The strength of the rifle was the only thing for it, so I commissioned a set of quick release gun racks that went along the ceiling of the cab, trusted they'd be held well enough in place and could be brought to work with no hesitation. Spare ammunition fit in the pockets of the doors, the cup holders, the glove box, those cubbies usually filled with maps, gas station receipts, styrofoam cups with perforated sippy lids.

There wasn't going to be any easy access to the outside world, so if something would be needed it had to be on hand: water, beef jerky, sleeping bags; but also tourniquets, suture kits, venom extractors, penicillin, narcotics. There were plenty of situations for which we were woefully unprepared, the spare tire being the tip of the ignorance iceberg, but we had faith in our quest and our ingenuity and decided that that which could not be handled thereby would just have to be dealt with on its own terms.

This was my first expedition, and, in the manner of all novices, I had researched and trained thoroughly, but for all the wrong things. In addition to hours spent at the shooting range and every first aid course offered by the Red Cross, I had enrolled in courses at the local college the previous semester, on natural history and folklore and literature and language for the region we were headed into. Something nagging at the back of my mind suggested that I had missed the most important considerations. There's always an annoying little voice whispering untimely reminders, and I just stopped listening to it at one point, turned off my inner ear to the pleas of the inner voice.

What good would it do to have yet another cause for worry? I could tie twenty two different knots and had a flashcard set for the flora and fauna, the poisonous creatures and plants carefully depicted with red hazard borders. I could use a compass and light a flare and start a fire with flint or a magnifying glass. Deep down, I knew none of these would do any good at all. When you accept the mission to go on the hunt, you accept that there is no way to be anything other than woefully unprepared.

So when we left, rifles accessible and still bleary eyed from farewell toasts and dreams of alarm clocks and phantom aches in the night, it was with the knowledge that I could have spent the past six months taking voice lessons and figure drawing classes, that I could have skipped each and every first aid class, and still been just exactly as prepared as I was at that moment. My companion, a veteran with three previous assignments, had taken that to heart, studied qi gong and puppet construction and haiku poetry and American sign language, knowing that we would be rendered all but inept by the course of the journey.

Still, to have been on three assignments and to have survived -- even if all three assignments were absolute failures by all other reckonings -- still, that was something. That was seniority, and at the academy I had aspired to having two assignments in the course of my career, felt three to inhabit a super-human space of achievement against the odds. When I thought about the various ways we could fail, the very real, very present fact of constant imminent death due to the nature of the job or to user error was actually a lower consideration than not fulfilling the parameters of duty, and my companion's obvious preference to remain alive and fail to complete missions as assigned cause me to shake my head, consternation at the selfish cynicism of my elders.

That we would undoubtedly therefore be at odds over the details of our mission, that I was willing to risk charges of insubordination and eventual court marshal, speaks more to my naive sense of purpose than to an inherent disrespect for authority figures. Regardless, I had packed the car; I had commissioned the ceiling mounts for the rifles; I had pored over maps and specification charts and other identifying details; and I was as ready for our mission as it was possible to be. We would drive until the road ran out, and then we would drive until the fuel ran out, and then, backpacks, machetes, rifles, we would scramble and tussle into the deep wilderness of the other.

In training lectures we had read the memoirs of Dr Livingstone and the diaries of Ernest Shackleton, we had pored over Gulliver's Travels and the case studies of the subconscious by Freud and then by Jung. We had taken opiates and LSD and mushrooms and concoctions that didn't have official names but were referred to by color: the crimson cocktail, the vermillion Kool-Aid, the not quite absinthe (which was rumored to be actual absinthe with a higher percentage of wormwood). We had studied meteorites and lunar landings and ways of communicating with non carbon based life forms, and through it all the lectures had echoed: there is no way to be prepared.

Privately I felt that if we had less of the Carlos Castañeda and the peyote and more actual science labs it would stand us in better stead. One of my teachers must have seen the flicker of disdain in my eyes; the principal dean called me in to discuss my secret, frantic reading of National Geographic, of Science, and, in the kindest way possible, advised that I set aside my youthful fairy tales and prepare, heart, soul, and mind, for the reality that would be present in my future. I would have to learn to see with more than just my binoculars if I wanted to succeed.

Chastened, I returned to class, embarrassed that others might know about my contraband reading habits and too materials based mindset, but there were no averted eyes, no taunting, no jeering. They indulged my classes in Red Cross emergency preparedness, my knot tying, and only the companion that I was assigned to my first mission with raised an eyebrow in skeptical disbelief, although nothing was said.

Soon I realized that where, on my side of the vehicle, were spare rounds of ammunition and energy bars, on the other side was a dog eared paperback on the transience of reality, and a book of visions from a long deceased Catholic saint. This was no way to succeed in an assignment defined by its very real physical dangers, but there was nothing more I could do, except keep driving until the road ran out and the gas ran out. Then we would be there, at the beginning of the world, and our tasks would begin in earnest.

---

reading
a brilliant brisk book with undertones of warm and fuzzy
How to keep your Volkswagen alive : a novel / Christopher Boucher.
paired with an acidic diversion
The Trip (Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon)

weather
in the five elements system, there are also five seasons. This is the extra inning: late summer, the melancholy ripening and cool calm evenings

under the table

She poked at it with her fork. It edged away, closer to the far edge of the plate, and she tried to screw up her courage to stab it once, hard, breaking the spinal cord, as she'd be taught. Failing that, she sought out her knife, determined to behead it in one graceful slice, the coward's way out, but better than failure.

This was her first meal at the grown-ups' table; she was wearing the embroidered smock her aunt had sent from her travels to Portugal; her lessons with her governess prior to this meal had been thorough and uncompromising; her hair was set in curls; and she knew what to talk about and what to never, ever mention. But for all of her lessons in the dextrous use of the fork or the determined coordination of the knife; all the history studies of the culture of food; all of the practice sessions; still: she hesitated.

She prodded at it with her fork, from the other direction, watched it move closer to the potatoes, glanced around the table to ensure no one had noticed her distress. To not only fail at her first public meal, but to be publicly disgraced would have repercussions beyond the dinner table. Not only had she been so warned, but she herself knew the stories of others who had been humiliated at their first meals, knew the stories to be true and not apocryphal.

There was a boy who had grown to be a man, never leaving the nursery except for his brisk twice daily strolls around the gardens, still eating only egg puddings. He had received the schooling to be a great pilot, but his first and only appearance at the adults' table had been so dire to not only send him away for life, but to even exile his parents from social dinners for over six months. She thought it had been the soup that was his failing, being raised to see through the clear skies and faltering at the turbulent depths of the soup tureen, but she wasn't really certain what had transpired next.

She wanted to ask him, but wasn't sure how to meet him, or where he precisely resided. Her governess was no help; when the boy had been exiled his own governess suffered even more cruelly, was deemed a failure and a travesty to her profession, was transported to Australia where, it was felt, she couldn't do any particular damage. When her governess told her of this, a terrified look in her eyes, the girl had understood something of the responsibility she herself had, to not punish her governess in such a cruel manner.

Potatoes were no difficulty; they had been practicing potatoes for over a year, she nibbled delicately at the spiked leaves and crunchy cubes, poking again at the entrée, wondering what she could do to embarrass neither herself nor her family. It wasn't really death that intimidated her; she had crushed houseflies and wasps and grubs with the cheerful indifference of youth, and watched the life cycle of any manner of bird or beast unfold in her life. While she had spent her early years in the pudding and stewed vegetable stage that all fledgeling children experience, she had no desire to remain in the infantile vegetarian state, she was ready to branch into the world of the alive and the raw.

It was the next stage of her own life cycle, the stage that was accompanied by advanced lessons in her own assigned skill of aeronautics. If she was not passionate about aeronautics, she reflected philosophically that her family was not yet of the deep sea diving caste, but at least they were not confined to the forests, the ground, as so many less fortunate were. She would be content enough in aeronautics. And graduating from the nursery brought with it so many other benefits, of being allowed into other people's houses, of being permitted to speak with those outside the family circle, of helping her own governess find a new child, one whose place in society may even be fractionally more commendable, if only she herself could rise to the standards expected of her.

She prodded her dinner again, wondering if the graduation dinner would have been less difficult if it were a different color or texture. If the adults at the table had noticed her hesitation, her delay, their own exquisite upbringing meant they had not mentioned anything, had not allowed their glance to linger on her plate, had not raised an inquiring eyebrow or shot a scorching look of anger across the table. They continued to converse, just as she had practiced, with almost exactly the same words that were recorded in her lessons, with actors reading the lines of her family members, and pauses left for the expected responses. It was hard to concentrate on staying in the correct place in the conversation and work through the culinary barrier, but she had not misspoken or caused offense or insult.

If her voice was not as well paced or as softly spoken as she water to hear in her mind, at least she hadn't made the mistake of forgetting the lines altogether. That had happened to one girl, only last year: she had respectably slurped down the turbulent soup, she had snapped the spinal cord briskly and cleanly with her fork, she was just about to light the match for the dessert funeral pyre, when there was a pause in the conversation, that stretched on, became expectant, then awkward.

The match just caught, her cheeks red with shame, and nothing but an utter void where her elocution lessons should have been. Her early childhood prognosis had been exceptionally promising; she had anticipated a career in submersibles; there had been talk of fast-tracking her to the position of head of the fleet. During the great silence that welled up where her contribution was supposed to be, she suddenly regretted the hours carved out of lessons to study butterflies in the conservatory and to gaze dreamily at the planets in the evening.

Later, when her governess was being examined by the board for professional fitness, it transpired that the girl had been sneaking out of the schoolroom, hiding in the attic with a telescope constructed out of mirrors and eyeglasses, and that they had never even reached the point of the lesson where the concluding conversation began. It was quite a scandal; no one knew exactly what to do, and the eventual punishment was so harsh that the girl still wasn't quite sure whether it could possibly be true. The telescope had been promptly smashed, its creator exiled to the sub-basement of the house, her governess sent off with no hope for any future position except perhaps that of gardening assistant or bootscraper.

Gently, hesitating only a moment, she finally picked up her knife. She wasn't going to be condemned to the nursery or the sub-basement. She hadn't constructed a forbidden telescope; she had managed the squishy slimy movement of the soup with, if not panache, at least a modicum of speed. She had spent hours practicing her lines with the prerecorded conversations at the model table in the nursery, and she was going to do it. She was going to grow up and get out. She raised her knife, closed her eyes, and brought the knife down to the plate. It wasn't quiet; it wasn't neat; but it was almost done.

---

reading
A place of my own : the education of an amateur builder / Michael Pollan

weather
one day the humidity will drop and the laundry will dry

arrival

The city was empty, vacant, boarded up. There hadn't been any taxicabs at the airport, the trains had stopped running months ago. The few employees at the terminal had shrugged indifferently when asked how to get to town. No one went there anymore, since the outbreak. It wasn't safe, not even for aid workers or the police. Mostly the airport just served departures, and then only for those who had the money to get out, to bribe their way past the quarantine officials.

Everyone else had left as soon as they were able, before there were exit restrictions and a thorough evaluation and reams of paperwork. The expense of skirting the bureaucracy led to a thriving black market in departures, something referred to as unmarked hallways in the language of the street, and when anyone realized my intention of heading into the city, they backed away, gave me a wide berth, thinking: disease, insanity, something unwholesome, maybe the mob. I didn't change their mind, they could think what they wanted to think; neither their disgust nor their approval would affect my plans, and they were too fearful to try to interrupt me.

Finally, there was a bus, an old, wheezing behemoth, rattling apart and without shock absorbers, driven by a man in a haz-mat suit with a gun at his shoulder, filled with what could have been ghosts, beings so vacant, detached, and fearful that they were scarcely human. The bus stopped every few miles at unmarked intersections; there seemed to be an unwritten code of where and when, since even through the randomness of the times and locations there was always a person or two leaving or arriving on board, not speaking a word to the driver, not signalling for other stops along the route. They treated each other with the same wary skepticism I was subject to, there were no alliances between riders, no camaraderie or conversation. Everyone carried the appearance of the forgotten: mismatched, worn, dirty clothes; matted hair; often barefoot; covered in bites and scratches originating from a source I could not even begin to imagine.

I had been briefed before departure; I had seen news footage, photographs, read first hand accounts of life within the borders, but even so the devastation was beyond the images I had seen. Obviously the city was beginning to crumble, the infrastructure unsupported by civic maintenance, pipes clogging, sewage water not treated, electricity no longer provided, or only in fits and bursts. Had this been my first assignment I may not have continued in the face of such bleakness and desertion; even with twenty years in the field, it was hard to swallow my bile and remember my duty.

With the mass exodus of the citizens and the police, an apocalyptic scene of arson, theft, looting, casual violence, all as depicted in Hollywood blockbusters but without the special effects, was held in check only by the all pervasive fear. No one knew when they would be next. No one knew how to prepare. No one knew how to get out. No one knew what the rules were. Various gangs would loosely organize and form, breaking apart within days or weeks, members affected by the scourge of the city.

We arrived at what had been the central bus station, the driver indicated we were at the end of the line, and so I walked. The city was fetid, claustrophobic, populated as densely by rats and raccoons and coyotes as it had once been by people; I was unsure if my obvious status as an outsider offered a form of protection from attack, or if any interpersonal contact was thought too risky to make muggings or theft worthwhile. Regardless, I walked quickly, held my hand loosely near my holster, listened for sounds that didn't belong in the empty streetscape.

Surprisingly, the headquarters were clean, well kept, in a block which seemed to have been spared the ravages of the infestation. There was less graffiti, less garbage on the street, fewer feral animals. I should have been comforted by this awaiting scene of almost-normal, but it was eerie, spooky, out of place too aggressively in that landscape. It would have been more appropriate to find a burnt-out tenement building, leaking roof, broken windows, instead of a hallway that seemed recently swept and a kitchen suspiciously free from grime or mildew. I had accepted the posting expecting to become a part of the city's fabric, and the headquarters implied exactly the opposite.

I left, chain of command be damned, and read back over the Spec Ops sheet in the comparative comfort of an alleyway. It was even more vague than I had remembered, or it had been rewritten in the interval between accepting the posting and arriving at destination, somehow an edited version replacing the original. My initials at the bottom corner weren't forged, though; they were real enough. The usual format of Listen, Absorb, Report, an almost comically reproducible form assignment that was parodied in the lunchroom of the main office, was replaced with a narrative that didn't match my experience in the field to date.

Stay apart, do not speak, do not fraternize, do not listen, do not go out, do not drink, do not attempt to take part in any aspect whatsoever of the local scene. It isn't in the remit of this assignment to go beyond the specific boundaries delineated by headquarters, a radius of blocks marked by shops that were suspiciously still operational. Each day I was to receive a message -- how the message was to arrive was unclear, but I trusted that the organization was obviously more involved and present than anyone had been willing to admit -- and I was to act upon the message without question or hesitation.

Standing there, in the alley, reading the document that I had signed even though I had never seen it before, I flirted seriously for the first time with renouncing the organization, striking out on my own. They had me by the toenails, though; there was no way back to the outside world without the strings being pulled by the powers above, and this wasn't where I wanted to stay.

The first message waiting in the too-cozy headquarters was obvious, no room for incomprehension. I lit the flares on the roof, waited fifteen minutes, lit the second set of flares, waited eight minutes. There was an answering flare and rifle fire from a building a quarter mile away; I didn't know the code, didn't know what I was asking and they were responding, but dutifully made note of the answer. Three shots, four flares.

The next morning there was fresh milk waiting on the doorstep, unscathed by vagrants or animals, and I wondered who in the city had a source of fresh milk, if there was fresh milk how much more might be lurking beneath the rotten buildings. Somewhere there must be a resistance, just as there always is a resistance. That day I raised the flag on the rooftop, at night lit two flares, ten minutes apart, and noted the response, four flares, no shots.

The following morning by the milk was a newspaper, handwritten and hastily photocopied, in a pidgin dialect of which I could only work out every third or fourth word, struggling with dictionaries in languages presumed abandoned generations ago. Nothing in my instructions mentioned the presence of these communications, no mention had ever been made of any population besides that which had been devastated by the epidemic. I wondered who could be recolonizing the city, creating a structure so obscure the organization didn't seem aware of its existence. Perhaps they were madmen, escaped from the asylum, unaware of the dangers of the city, gibberish between one another a primitive form of interaction. Perhaps they were the human equivalent of weeds, encroaching from the outer countryside, outcasts from all social classes, forming a vigilante substructure, without political or social intention.

I had been left without any means of reporting observations or asking questions, and that night the single flare that I lit remained unanswered in the night sky. The moon rose, the wind picked up, and I slept fitfully, in sheets that smelled inappropriately of lavender, dreamt of playing a game of fetch with an iguana, and woke disoriented at daybreak. The milk jars by the door were empty, no indecipherable newspaper lay folded on the doorstep, and from a certain tension forming towards the back of my head, I wondered if I was beginning to succumb, even in my cloistered environment.

Across the street, just as I was closing the door, a boy moved in the shadows, close enough to the light for me to wonder his actual age. He didn't beckon or speak; didn't acknowledge my presence in any way, except by looking. I looked back; there wasn't much to see, under all the accumulated dirt, and as I closed the door behind me, I hesitated, questioned staying, questioned leaving, and sat in the darkness of the hallway, undecided, past nightfall and the arrival of the early dawn, waiting for instructions.

---

reading
The Seamstress and the Wind / César Aira

weather
loss of feeling in fingers from swimming in cold New England water