When Junot Díaz walks into his apartment, stacks of books topple over and welcome him like pets. The “to-read” pile just inside the door—several stacks wide and several deep, with the tallest reaching about hip height—has collapsed in one corner. After picking up the books, the author, who has been an omnivorous reader since he was a child, lays the latest addition on top, capping it with a history book on World War II that had been waiting for him in the lobby.



Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year for his debut novel *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*, a multi-lingual, multi-generational story of Dominican *fukú*, a curse with a death grip even after the family of the eponymous Oscar has moved to the United States. His prose demonstrates his love of language and an acute sense of how it works—and how it can be pushed, threading hip hop vernacular and Spanish slang in sentences that spit as they sing. Traveling through a multitude of different milieux, the novel circles its protagonist with a fierce centrifugal force even as it encompasses an enormous number of footnotes. Though his first book, *Drown*, a collection of ten short stories that cohere into a nearly novel-esque whole, was a highly acclaimed best-seller, the release of *Oscar Wao*, his second book, eleven years later has made Díaz one of the world’s most celebrated authors living in the United States.



Sitting in his living room with views of Cambridge rooftops and towers all around, Díaz is clad in a black hoodie, jeans and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. The sweatshirt is embellished with a pin given to him by a student of his at MIT, where he was recently granted tenure. The pin is the size of a quarter, depicting a lion in a top hat. “A Dandy Lion. . . Terrible,” he shook his head as the cashier in the Harvard Book Store asked about it earlier in the day, cheerfully bemoaning the visual pun.



Looking at the books around us in the apartment, Díaz warns readers of *Oscar Wao,* with its allusive qualities and encyclopedic erudition in everything from island politics to B-movies*, *“The book obsessions of the novel have only a little to do with my own obsessions. I think that I read more about falconry when I was in sixth grade than I did science fiction.”



After moving to the United States with his family at the age of six, he learned how to read and began to tear through books. While still wrangling with English (learning to speak the language? “That fucking sucked”), the written word became his ally.



 “I just read everything. I think that for me it was just such a comforting rhythm. Words on a page. Me reading those words on a page.”



Though later on his own writing would be a site where the translated life was confronted in all of its complexity, in the beginning he says,  “I found reading to be such a great respite from the daily pain in the ass process of immigration. It was a place I could live in language without feeling my deficits. There’s nobody in a book that can tell whether you’re pronouncing the words right or not.”



“A typical hyper-lexic kid,” he read compulsively, in particular spending a lot of time with biographies and nature books—“You know, those kid biographies: The Lives of Great Men. And it was *all* men. And they were all white. They should have been more honest: the Lives of Great White Men.”



“I was obsessed with the United States wilderness,” he continues, self-mockingly enumerating their titles, “*The Desert, The Grand Canyon…The Sea Islands of the Carolinas*,” in the faux-soothing tones of advertisements promoting vacation spots.



“I think there was a part of me that was seeking an answer to the question who am I? How did a Dominican kid leave his island and come to New Jersey? And what *is* this place? I think a part of me was reading so compulsively because I thought that maybe there would be some code in one of those books that would explain not only explain this new place but would explain me. What I discovered is that there is no answer. . . It was the process that provided me with what I was looking for. There’s a great quote, which is about Gilgamesh, ‘the quest itself proves the futility of the quest.’”



His two principal linguistic registers (“this kind of crazy Caribbean language and music” and “this sort of African-American-infused American vernacular”) grind against each other along with the many other voices he ventriloquizes in his writing. Much has been made of his ability to stretch languages and idioms by putting them together, an ability that Díaz says is, at its root, the product of a certain shamelessness. “Shame more than anything interrupts your ability to learn. If you feel shame when people mock you or look crazy at you’re less likely to practice it. One of the things that’s helped me is that I have a particular amount of shamelessness around these different idioms that I love. I’ve grown up with hip hop my whole life but I’ve never felt any shame of misusing the language that I grew up with. I feel no shame using this discourse which is basically my English jammed against things that would be anathema in the larger hip hop culture, you know, mashing all the intellectual nonsense that I learned in graduate school with it. . . .



“It takes so much more energy keeping these things apart.”



Emphasizing the difference between the daily multilingual practice of a community and its reconstruction on a page, he maintains, “One lives in English organically and then one has to represent it artificially.



“The artifact of the fiction requires an enormous amount of work. There’s stuff that exists perfectly normal life in conversation—no one cares if you fuck something up, it’s felicitous, people enjoy it—it doesn’t have to be necessarily literary, but, yes,  [writing is] an enormous amount of work, an enormous kind of stupid work, which means that there’s a lot of just the basic experiment of adding a drop, tasting, nope, adding a drop tasting it, nope. That’s a pain in the ass, you know; my students know all about that, my students run through a million models to get to the right thing.”



The translation of the book from Spanish-speckled English into English-inflected Spanish required its own experiments (though, he argues, “If you think about it, it’s a piece of cake”): “What’s really driving the book is code switching. I can’t control all the other languages but I can certainly control English and Spanish, so that all I needed to find with the Spanish translation was find an entirely different code to switch. So what we did was we translated the entire book into Spanish and then went through the entire book matching English and Spanish looking for a set of codes in English that worked really, really well in Spanish to preserve that sort of multilingual madness. For example, the word ‘feeling’ is an English word that’s very, very common in Spanish and it means something completely different. If you say someone came at you with feeling it speaks of a deep sincerity, but it has a very particular cool resonance in Spanish.” He adds that you can never go wrong with a word like “cool.”



As for those translations into languages which he can’t control, he says simply, “In translation signal noise is a given.” He gestures towards the bookshelves to our left, “If you look up here, at least 10% of these books are in translation. . . In the U.S. we have the lowest rate of reading in translation of any country in the industrialized world. And yet there’s more complaints, or more reservations around translations than anywhere else.”



Ultimately, “I think the more that you actually spend a translated life, the more you realize that it’s a minimal charge to be able to engage yourself in another world.”



And, in fact, though Díaz began reading as soon as he came to the U.S., attempting to find some sort of life logic in the pages of books, it wasn’t until he was much older that he began to write. When he was growing up, his brother came down with a brutal form of Leukemia (“It was a big part of my childhood,” he says. “He’s fine, he’s in remission, but he spent ten years in chemo. That’s a fucking long time, man.)



In an attempt to communicate his world to his brother, he wrote twenty to thirty page letters to him during his long stays in the hospital.



“A part of the way I stayed connected to my brother was writing these enormous, ridiculous letters about what was going on about our lives, about the neighborhood, and in some ways my complete love of reading had prepared me for the moment that my brother’s illness provided, which was an excuse to now participate in the form I loved so much. So that’s how I started actually, writing letters to someone in a hospital.”



(He no longer maintains his art by writing letters, though, “I’m as much a traitor as the next person, I’ve given up the form…You should see I have boxes of the letters I wrote and the letters I received when I was in college. My god! I can tell the loves because of the stacks of letters. We wrote each other like crazy.”)



His family continues to be a strong presence in his writing. The fantastical elements of magic realism have been one of the most widely recognized aspects of Latin American literary canon, evolving in more recent years into the Macondo vs. McOndo debate. Seemingly counter-intuitively, the moment in which magic realism is most present in *Oscar Wao* is also the part most derived from real life; towards the end of the novel, a mystical mongoose comes to Oscar’s aid, a creature which Díaz explains comes directly from family lore.



“My mother got lost when she was young in a coffee plantation (my father used to grow coffee) and she was lost for like three days and everyone thought she died and by the third day they just went and bought fucking—I mean, it shows you the difference, if a child were lost for three days today, we would still have hope, we would still be looking, but in the DR they were like ‘Three days? ’That kid’s fucking dead man’—they went out and bought funeral clothes, they were going to bury this little outfit and then my mother shows up. And my mother tells this story and she was like I had gotten lost and was just desperate and this mongoose came up and was like ‘you lost?’ ‘Well, I’m tired right now but I’ll come back tomorrow and lead you out.’ So he did and my mother arrived home the next day.”



Given the presence of magical mongoose in *Oscar Wao*, one might think that they are some sort of national animal, a kind of mascot, in the Dominican Republic, yet Díaz says, “Most Dominicans don’t even know we have mongooses. . . . If I can claim any fame, it’s singlehandedly reminding the *pueblo dominicano* that we have mongooses.”



The brutalities of the thirty-year tyranny of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which pervade the action and atmosphere of the novel are another outgrowth of Díaz’s family life. “I was deeply allergic to the kind of insane fascistic militaristic craziness that was present in my family through my father’s military ethos that came directly from the Trujillo regime.



“It was nothing personal. It doesn’t make a difference what your opinion is if the house is on fire, the house is on fire. Probably the only thing we’re [Junot and his siblings] all completely in agreement on is that that family structure was just toxic. And everyone had very different reactions to it. My older sister ran away. My brother checked out. My little brother went and idolized the absent man and he joined the military. The effects are everywhere. And even my sister who ran away married a military guy; she spent years in a military base in Berlin.”



The extremities of evil in the novel, in particular those presented by the dictatorial regime, are at times distilled and allegorized according to science fiction and comic book archetypes as Trujillo is put in apposition with Sauron in *Lord of the Rings*, for one*.* Originally, Díaz wanted to include actual images from comic books in *Oscar Wao*, making these ties and the narrator’s interdisciplinary wanderings all the more palpable. But in execution, the postmodern project failed: “It was not working. It was just garbage. It was like eight or nine kinds of bad. It felt forced; it felt pretentious. And your mind is like, dude what you’re trying to build is like a jet engine, but what we have here is like a go-cart. It’s a go-cart.”



He describes a plan for the first page that was meant to the open with an image of the apocalypse from Katsuhiro Otomo’s famous manga *Akira*, rays of destruction extending to the leaf’s limit and folding over to the next side to point to the Dominican Republic. I ask if the comic book panels  he had in mind were all found or if he had drawn some by hand.  “Darling,” he says, “if I could draw, I wouldn’t be in this business.”



It is in large part the social function of visual art, he explains, that appeals to him. “I’m sorry, but look at that painting someone sent me,” he says, gesturing to a painting, sitting across the room unhung. Red, beige, blue, it demands attention with its bright hues and dynamic, cartoon-like shapes—brown bald stylized figures with triangle teeth, a grey creature with blue on its head, a blue line through the middle to the painting.



“Somebody saw me at a reading in Seattle and just fucking sent to me. And, I’m sorry, but that’s kind of a cool painting. . . The thing is that for me writing is so personal and so deep and so private. This is so social, you know.”



Díaz describes the immediacy with which visual art can be shared in contrast to the delayed reaction time engendered by writing. If you give a book to someone, they walk away with it alone and then come back later, sometimes delaying weeks. “There’s something pre-modern about writing. It’s not so much that I’m waiting for a response as I want to be involved with that person and have my art form some sort of community with them. With this, someone walks in: instantaneous. I love that we’re in a community there.”



 As if to prove the point, he logs onto Facebook, where we watch a video a friend posted on his wall. In fact, of the favored artists he mentions—Tony Capellan, Jacob Holdt, Pipilotti Rist, Piero Manzoni—many work with video. Perhaps given the cinematic preoccupations evident in the novel this comes as no surprise, even with Díaz’s warning  of the differences between Oscar’s taste and his own.



I ask about film and look over at the DVDs beside the television. Some of the DVD boxes are still shrinked-wrapped because “I keep losing them, so then I have to keep buying them,” which is to say he keeps lending them to friends, so then he has to keep buying them. While the selection is not all about the apocalypse—he recommends the Japanese film *Ping Pong, *calling it* *“One of the greatest fucking movies I’ve ever seen,” the presence is strong, as is further evidence of his love of the social nature of art. Above the TV set is a cartoon, marker on paper, that his friend Petey just rolled in and put up one day; it has hung there ever since.



In the DVD pile there is an old British miniseries called *UFO*; *Threads*, a BBC documentary from the 80s about the atomic destruction of England (“fucking terrifying even today”); *Planet Terror*;*The Last Days; Appleseed; The Last Blood*.



 “This is just a *small* selection,” he reminds me as a lists them. A central theme in his work, made clear by his description of layout from *Akira* with which he had wanted to begin *Oscar Wao *and the reverberations of the now invisible image of destruction extent in the text of the novel itself, is manifested here as well: dude’s obsessed with the apocalypse.



“I’ve been fucking fucked in the head by the apocalyptic eighties.



“Look, I was fucking generation bomb. It’s the most hidden thing. what separates me from my students is not the fact that they’re eighteen and even their cells are new—you guys just fucking glow with your newness—and the fact that I don’t know any of your music or any of your culture, part of it is that the apocalypse was fucking real, man. I mean part of why *The Watchmen* the movie the doesn’t work is that Alan Moore in the comic book didn’t have to do anything to convince people that the end of the world was this far away.” He illustrates the extreme proximity of the end that he felt with the inflection of his voice and two almost touching fingers.



“We’re deeply apocalyptic now but it’s not on the skin in the same way.”



As a self-described sensitive eleven-year-old, watching the news at night outline where the atomic blasts would hit—and seeing his town in New Jersey in the black—it’s no surprise that with every movie, every TV show, every*thing* touching on the apocalypse, it started to eat at him. “The whole world was tearing itself to pieces; South Africa was in place; the entire economy was dumping. And that really fucking fucked me up, so I’ve been trying to write something about the end of the world.



“I’ve got to do something to channel this apocalyptic madness of mine.”



Díaz is currently doing just that, reviving work on a book he has described as his Black Akira novel. He began work on it before *Oscar,* which rose from its ashes in the wake of 9/11.



For the moment, though, he is off to see some friends, who have been calling him over the course of the past hour, taking advantage of the little time he has in Cambridge these days.



And so, with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, the door closes.

It is a hot day in the city on the edge of summer, the sun shining clear and crisp like a giant overhead lamp. Two boys sit on a bench. The first is tall and thin, with masculine shoulders and hair made of the straw he used to roll in and that his mother eventually gave up trying to remove. His face would be almost perfectly formed were it not for his nose which hasn’t been even since an older boy smashed it in grade school. He leans with elbows jutting outward and hands cupped over kneecaps, his eyes idly following the motion of the street but not focused on anything in particular. Later that night he will meet up with his girlfriend from the state college across town because someone cut her bike lock the previous weekend, which means for going all the way out to see her he should be able to expect at least a blowjob. He exhales and runs his hand through his hair. These thoughts occupy his mind as he turns to his roommate who is busy watching people on the street. He has narrow shoulders and wears khakis even during the summer because he’s embarrassed of his thin legs. His frame is slight, his height concealed by a mild hunch. He breathes loudly, as if he thinks his brain needs more oxygen than other brains. Later that night he will go for a long walk across town and through the park, alone, hoping to find a way to clean out his insides before returning to the apartment where he will lie in bed all night, trying to stare through the ceiling into the room above him. He taps his fingers against the table.

‘Hey, Davey.’

He turns. ‘Jake?’

‘You hear about those two dudes and that nun got run over by the state college?’

‘What?’

‘Swear to God. Girlfriend told me this morning. These two dudes were walking this old nun across the street when this big U-Haul with no driver’s side door and a dinosaur on the side shot out the dorms and run them over at a crosswalk. Saying it was a drug deal gone bad but they didn’t find nothing on the bodies.’ He pauses to let this information settle, but in the thick spring air the words just hang uncomfortably in front of them, so he adds: ‘Seems stupid, though, go to the effort of dressing one up like a nun then doing the exchange in the middle of the street and all.’

‘They catch the guy who was driving the truck?’

‘It wasn’t a man. Heard it was this woman with a crazy beehive and sunglasses. At two in the morning. Girlfriend told me she’d seen her driving that U-Haul around campus a couple times before so it must have been going on for weeks, but she figured it was just someone’s mom helping move out early. You never think someone’s mom’s going to be in on distributing but I guess anything’s easier if you can turn it into a family business.’

‘You think they’re going to find who did it?’

‘Doubtful. I imagine now they’ve run afoul on one deal they’ll change cities and start over. Lay low for a while. Maybe find a new school, repaint the truck. That’s how these things usually go.’

‘Huh.’

Weird shit, Davey.’

They pause for a moment, let Jake’s words linger. Davey goes back to watching people on the street. He squints his eyes, trying to imagine the terrible things going on in the minds of others.

‘Hey, Davey.’

‘Yeah?’

‘When did Phil get a bike?'

‘Phil doesn’t have a bike.’

‘Well he’s got one now.’

Davey turns to see their roommate Phil, with his fixed grin, bouncing down the sidewalk on a cherry red bicycle. The bike screeches, halts in front of the bench. Davey can’t help but stare at the chrome fenders which reflect little suns straight onto his retinas. He looks down, closes his eyes. When he looks up again, a pulsating purple blob hovers where Phil’s head should be.

‘How you boys doing?’

Jake slides off the bench and moves toward Phil. ‘Mind if I take a look?’

‘Be my guest.’

Davey’s eyes clear and he turns to Jake, who proceeds to examine Phil’s find with a mechanical scrutiny particular to boys from the state’s far-flung counties. Davey attributes a certain mythic quality to this phenomenon which, he observes, touches boys of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. He envisions the eastern state as a sepia-toned expanse of dirt and uncut grass, dotted by the rusted remains of Fords and John Deeres, around which county boys congregate daily, as if observing an unspoken — perhaps unspeakable — ritual. They scour their machines with the reverence of scribes, contemplating the subtleties of rust spreading over an engine block, or picking at the meaning behind a piece of leather flapping in the wind with their pocket knives. Surely, they posit, some secret waits anxiously beneath infinite layers of minutia. Their efforts do not go to waste. When they emerge from their ancestral homes, the boys of Pike, Bourbon, and Hazard counties possess the arcana of the mechanical that well-dressed city boys, foppish dandies by comparison, secretly covet. Jake finishes his assessment. The first hints of rust begin to creep outward from behind the fenders. The chain needs oil. The back tire sags a little too much.  ‘Still,’ Jake says, ‘it’s nice. Where you find it?’

Phil’s grin widens. ‘You know Jefferson Street?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, there’s this guy there, sitting in front of a house, completely crazy, but he’s got all these bikes, you know? Just sitting out in his yard. So, I’m going by there earlier today, you know, and I stop by and ask him how much he wants for one and I pick up this little honey for twenty-five dollars.’

Jake’s eyebrow rises. ‘Where’s he get them?’

‘Well, man, here’s the thing,’ Phil lowers his voice, ‘I hear he gets them around the neighborhood.’

Jake looks skeptical. ‘That for real?’

‘Yeah, man. Old woman at the convenience store told me he and his brother and wife or girlfriend or something get them from kids. Like I hear they wait until it gets dark and go out wearing big heavy work boots and animal masks. They walk up and down the street shoulder-to-shoulder. Barn animals with baseball bats, like they’re on patrol. You know? When they walk abreast like that kids can’t get around them. They just sweep the neighborhood, up and down every street, real methodical, like a pattern. And if that doesn’t work, I hear they crouch in bushes or hide in trees and then come down on kids when they ride by. That’s how they get the bikes. Think about that. You’re just riding home with some milk from the gas station and then this guy with a cow’s head jumps down from a tree and goes to town on your legs with a baseball bat.’

Davey keeps his eyes trained on the ground, hears heavy boots pounding pavement, the sound of bones snapping like dry tree limbs after a storm, the sound of a sack of flour hitting the floor hard. Then human sounds, moans, while the whirr of bicycle wheels and the tenor tremble of a little bell fades with distance.

‘That’s fucked up.’

‘I know, man.’

‘Wait. How does that even make sense? Why they got to break the kids’ legs? Why don’t they just take the bikes?’

‘I don’t know, man. They’re crazy, you know? Maybe they don’t even care about the bikes that much, maybe they just do it for kicks. Or maybe they got crutches for them or something.’

‘That story don’t make any sense, Phil. Does everyone in the neighborhood know these guys are doing this shit? Why don’t they call the cops? Or why don’t they just go over to the house with a shotgun and get all the bikes back if all these guys got is some baseball bats? Where do you hear this shit, man?’

‘Shit, man. You know. Sometimes there are just stories. You find them somewhere and then you tell them.’

‘So what happens when the neighborhood runs out of bikes?’

Davey jumps in. ‘Or they run out of crutches.’

Phil only addresses Jake. ‘Come on, Jake. Who knows? Who cares? Maybe they go to different neighborhoods, I don’t know. I was just telling you this thing I heard because I thought you might be interested.'

Jake pauses. ‘Girlfriend just got her bike stolen.’

‘You do anything dumb lately you should make up for?’

‘Not that I can think of, but it might be good to give her something just in case I did something I didn’t know about.’

‘That’s fair.’

‘You think he’s got anymore like that?’

‘Probably. You ought to go out and take a look. Maybe find something for yourself, too.’

Jake stares ahead for a moment, his eyes blank, making calculations and value judgments in rapid succession. He nods, slow and slight at first, then more emphatically. He turns to Davey ‘You in, man?’

Davey pauses, looks down. He doesn’t like the feel of wind against his face and besides that can’t will away the onslaught of images: men with animal heads carrying bats, children with limbs twisted in unnatural directions, a single bicycle lying on its side in the grass, the front wheel still spinning and clicking softly. He shivers and the hair on his arm stands up. In his brain he feels like he shouldn’t go which is how he knows he should. He raises his head and nods slightly to Jake.

Jake returns the nod and turns to Phil. ‘Good. You going to show us where this place is?’


‘Down on Jefferson a few blocks north. I’ll take you over there.’

Jake rises and Davey follows a moment behind. They cut across the park, through the buzz of inane conversation and neglected burgers sizzling on grills and country music playing from blown Jeep speakers, to the sidewalk along Fourth Street. Phil follows behind at his leisure. Fourth Street is lined on the side opposite the park by a series of apartments, urban jungle trees forming a dense canopy of satellite dishes, antennae, and rainbow umbrellas. Revolutionaries and rock stars fill the window frames. As the boys move away from the major roads, buildings slowly decrease in height, reduced to empty lots of cracked concrete punctured by patches of grass and chain link fences which terminate at the corner, unmistakable for its stop sign mangled by years of impaired driving. The boys pause at the corner. A black child in an enormous leg cast hobbles across the street. The rubber thud of crutches followed by the sound of plaster grinding across the concrete makes Davey wince. Jake and Phil politely avert their eyes. After the thudding and grinding fades into the background, they cross the street.

Jefferson Street looks like a permanent yard sale. Families spend entire days in empty houses, watching their furniture and appliances on the lawn. They patiently await the arrival of their creator in the form of an ethereal auctioneer, big mustached, who will come in checkered suit and tie with golden gavel in hand to relieve the men and women of Jefferson Street of their worldly burden, allowing them to rise, their cornrows and nightgowns fluttering gently, into the soft and breaking clouds. For now, however, their earthly goods, subject to earthly elements, fade and mildew and rust, while they creep behind windows of empty houses. Houses, themselves in various stages of dilapidation, the most distinguished among them adorned by small pink placards like prize-winning produce, awarded not by the ethereal auctioneer, but the county building inspector, who recognizes distinguished entrants based on a bureaucratic calculus of many variables: number of broken windows, crooked door frames, missing shingles, dead grass, dead dogs, live dogs, dogs tied to fences, children, children tied to fences, missing house numbers, rusted lawn furniture, 40 oz cans on lawn, etc., etc. As he passes by, Davey keeps his head down; he knows what the neighborhood looks like and doesn’t need to be reminded. He hears Phil pull up alongside him and Jake and sees him gesture toward a house that looks at least an Honorable Mention.

On the sidewalk, Davey sees four young black boys flicking bottle caps on the pavement. One sits in a wheelchair, too high to participate, leaning over the other boys sitting Indian-style. They play without joy, their expressions blank, detached from the movements of the game. A pair of rusty bicycles lean against the chain link fence. Davey attempts to wave at them, but his arm refuses to rise above his shoulder, and the gesture comes off as somewhat aborted.

‘Davey, we’re here.’

Davey stops, finds himself standing in front of a house overrun by bicycles. They spill out into the yard of tall grass, dozens, chained together against the house, lying sideways in the grass, or propped up by unreliable kickstands. Many lack chains, others look like cannibalized pastiches on dry-rotted tires, rust the only consistent feature among them. Amidst these, the owner of the house, Phil’s man, scours the boys through jaundiced eyes, the only clearly delineated features on an otherwise dark and bald head. His skin is a deep black, almost purple to the boys, and he wears a white t-shirt plastered by sweat to his chest. On the porch directly behind him sits a woman, hunched forward in a kitchen chair, her features largely obscured by the shade from her towering hair. She keeps her knitting in her lap, turning the needles over in a methodical way perfected through countless afternoons like this. A discarded car door, white with a red stripe, leans against the porch, the rearview mirror cracked in the grass around it. The man rubs his raised chin with his thumb and middle finger, stroking outwards, as if indicating the direction he plans to speak. For a moment, the boys remain in front of the man, hands in pockets, stiff with the awkwardness of a first date. Finally, Phil cocks his head back and says ‘How you doing, man?’

The man doesn’t turn to face Phil specifically, instead addressing the boys’ general direction. ‘Good.’

‘Brought a couple of friends of mine to look at your bikes.’

‘Tell them go ahead.’

Jake glances at Phil and then advances toward the bikes. Davey looks the man over, head to toe, once, twice, before heading to the closest bike. Phil lays his bike down on the sidewalk and comes up alongside Jake. Davey sticks close to the boys, partly because he fears being caught alone in the man’s field of vision, and partly because he doesn’t know a thing about bikes. Jake runs his hand over frames, trying to detect subtle defects in welding or alignment, squeezes handbrakes with his ear between the handlebars, his eyes sliding side to side each time he applies pressure. Phil squats and examines tires for punctures or signs of dry rot. This ritual continues for several minutes. One bids the other to come, look here, waiting for the other to find a defect noticed by the first, which when discovered, prompts the other to confirm, yeah, he saw that, too. They find most in need of repair before riding can begin, and all too small for Jake or Davey. The man stands to one side with his arms folded, watching the boys sift through the tangle of metal and rust. He tosses a question among them: ‘Y’all boys from the state college?’

Jake turns. ‘No, man. We just live nearby.’

‘Ah. I figured y’all for college boys. At least that one,’ he indicates Davey, ‘You met my wife?’ he gestures to the woman on the porch, still enmeshed in her knitting, ‘She spend lots of time at the state college nowadays. She likes to check out books from the library. I tell her she keep it up one day they going to make her pay tuition!’

‘That’s cool.’

Jake tosses another wreck to the side. He turns to Davey, who is still looking thoughtfully at a flat tire. Then, visibly dissatisfied, scratches his head and says, ‘Hey man, this all you got?’

‘You looking for something else?’

The man’s response makes Jake pause. From his angle, Davey can see Jake’s eyes shift quickly, as if searching for support in the eyes of his friends. ‘Just a bike. But something that my girlfriend can ride.’

‘These is all twenty-five dollars. But I got some other ones if you’re interested.’

Jake and Phil exchange curt nods. ‘Yeah, we’d like to see those.’

‘A’right. Come on, then.’


The man uproots himself from the center of the yard and walks to the house next door, a two story house the color of old mustard with a partially collapsed roof and boarded up windows. On the porch next to the padlocked door rests a faded pink placard, which reads: ‘This house has been declared UNFIT for human habitation by the Magnolia County Housing Commission’ followed by an illegible date and signature. Davey turns to Jake, whose eyebrow hangs high on his forehead. Phil gives them a quick nod and motions with his hand that everything is cool. The man stops on the porch and reaches between his shoe and sock, producing a small key which unlocks the door. He tugs at the door a moment, one hand gripping the handle and the other the decaying frame, prying it loose with a creak that releases a gust of cool, musty air into the faces of everyone trying to look in. The man steps from the doorway, his stony hand resting on the frame.

‘OK. Go in.’

They go in. On the wall facing the entrance hangs a stuffed boar’s head that Davey almost stumbles into upon entering. It has begun to peel around the snout and looks short several tufts of fur which have drifted down and collected in a neat pile on the floor below. The man pulls Davey by the shoulder and directs him further back in the house, where the other boys move through a narrow hall lined with nails where portraits of dour matriarchs once hung. On the floor lay discarded rims, bike locks, and fenders which groan and crack as they walk over them single file. The hall spills into a larger room — perhaps a former dining room or kitchen where the dour matriarchs received their dour guests — which houses four pristine machines resting as if on permanent display. Jake and Phil’s expressions brighten.

‘These is all forty dollars if you’re interested,’ the man says, then, indicating a solid black bike in the corner nearest the door, ‘except this one. Y’all boys can’t have my Harley.’

The man erupts in laughter, his teeth the same color as his eyes, gesturing toward the letters h-a-r-l-y scrawled in white across the bicycle’s frame. Jake and Phil manage weak chuckles, and the man exits without sound. The boys move toward the bikes. Jake mounts the white one along the back wall, gets a feel for it. The joints might need a little oiling, but everything else feels nice and smooth. It’s a little big for his girlfriend but it fits him just fine. Phil looks over and whistles his approval. There’s a mount on the back where they envision a boombox fitting snugly, spilling punk rock anthems with bass-boost all over the sidewalk on trips to wherever they feel like going. With these bikes, they will become marauders and highwaymen. They will descend without warning. They will ride in formation all around the park and to the record store everyday. They will ride while listening to ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ They will ride shirtless. They will ride to the park near Third Street and get high in secret places. They will ride circles around friends who are trying to get someplace on time. They will write rude things on the sides of restaurants that ask them to keep the noise down. They will ride at night, and challenge other established bicycle gangs that rise up against them. They will do battle in the parks and in the streets, in abandoned churches where the moonlight spills through fragments of stained glass, bathing the combatants in rich blues and reds and greens like court jesters while they pummel one another with arm rests from broken pews. They will become renowned for their prowess with the stretch of pipe and broken bottle. They will establish territory, and it will stretch from Fourth Street to the Walgreen’s on Broadway and west to the park. They will collect tribute from defeated gangs and the police, whom they will allow to continue operating only in designated areas and at designated hours.

While Jake runs his fingers along the spokes of his find, Davey realizes that he has no business here, in this house, around stolen bicycles, with the boys. He stands up and walks back through the narrow hallway. He hears the faint buzz of a television in another room. He waits a while longer for Jake and Phil, sure now that he will never be the kind of boy that can ride a bike and look cool or make girls want to sleep with him based on force of personality. He imagines himself the conscience of his generation, the one who will list the evils he observes on a long roll of paper that unfurls from where he writes and forms a huge pile in the corner of his room, where he will meditate on them in his room, in hopes that his creator will notice Davey in his quiet vigilance and tell him that he is his faithful servant and seat him at his right-hand side, where they will meditate on the failings of man together, forever.

Then from the other side of the house, wafting in from the open window, comes a sound like metal clanging over men’s voices. The buzz of the television increases. Davey moves back down the hallway, careful to avoid the broken fenders and bike locks, and past the ancient boar’s head. He follows the lingering clanging like a scent hanging in the stale air. He becomes a tangle of contradictions. He becomes aware of the inside of his body for the first time. Outside he remains still, cool, motions steady while his organs revolt. His stomach coils and twists, attempting to swallow itself like a suicidal snake while his brain screams and pounds and throws itself against the inside of his skull. He sweats anticipation and dread, secretly fearing and hoping that someone is watching and taking note.

As he turns a corner he nearly trips over a heavy pair of wire cutters. The sound leads him to a room stripped bare except for two metal folding chairs and an old television tuned to a dead channel, the source of the buzzing, paneled in fake wood, sitting on the floor among piles of dust and cigarette butts. On the wall hangs a large map of the city with supplementary maps of the sprawling suburbs tacked onto the corners. Portions of the map are exed out or circled in hasty black marker. Dotted arrows turn off major roads into labyrinthine back alleys all the way back to Jefferson Street. The room is dim save for two windows, open but with blinds drawn. The clanging comes from just outside. Davey walks over to the map, traces his finger around the thick black circle that lassoes the state college across town. He can’t help but feel disappointed, can’t help but feel that the heart of this house should be something more, something less empty. He moves to the first window and pulls the blinds apart and on the other side the enormous yellow eye of an allosaurus stares back at him. For an instant his insides fill with terror, in full-view of something much greater than himself. His stern resolve turns to something like cold oatmeal and he pulls back from the window. Before he can collapse, however, he pauses. The moment’s hesitation makes him reconsider the eye, framed by a high, pastel colored ridge, given texture by a row of rivets. The rest of the face is a single shade of peeling green, locked in a permanent roar, between its jaws a hunk of ketchup-stained brontosaurus meat and below that the words ‘UTAH: The Fossil State.’ The scene feels crudely excised from its natural position, as if set apart for closer examination. It is silent except for the sound of men breathing and rubber rolling across sheet metal which appears to come from somewhere beyond the Jurassic period. The background is lab coat white, except for a red stripe which runs horizontal behind the allosaurus’s head. Davey tilts his head to one side, absorbs what he thinks should be a lesson from the scene in front of him, though not sure what to do with it. After a moment he hears the definitive slam of retractable steel and the sound of a diesel engine revving. The allosaurus and his meal begin to tremble, perhaps with fear of academic scrutiny, perhaps with anticipation at the approach of a meteor they know to be arriving a geologic period too early.

Davey closes the blinds and retreats back down the hall, knocking the side of his face against the boar as he passes it, afraid that evil might just be an empty room in an old house where someone left the TV on. Clambering out the door, he finds himself in the burning clarity of afternoon light. After a moment, the softly focused mass in front of him solidifies into Jake, his back to the door and clutching the white bike by its frame, standing near Phil and the man, who has removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a turban. An Arab merchant in the middle of Jefferson Street. Jake flails his arms, first toward the man, then the bike.

‘You said all those bikes in there was forty dollars.’

‘This bike’s different. It’s a hundred.’

‘What’s so different about it?’

‘It’s an import. I get it from Europe.’

Jake turns to Phil, who looks immaculately composed. He says: ‘Hold on, Jake. Now, man, it’s a nice bike, but that don’t make it worth a hundred dollars, surely.’

The man doesn’t budge. ‘It’s a good bike. It’s the only one like it in this country. I get it from a little Spanish kid with one arm. He know the king of Spain. He save the king’s life and the king give him the bike. This bike a king’s bike, boy. How am I going to sell this for less than a hundred? Look, it even got his seal on it.’

The man points to a chipped white decal of a five-pointed crown, below which reads: ‘Royal Bicycle Co., Cincinnati, OH.’ Phil scratches his head. ‘Well, yeah, man, that’s nice and all, but he don’t have a hundred dollars to spend on a bike.’

‘It’s got a rack on the back for your boombox, too.’

‘Yeah, but he ain’t got a hundred dollars, man.’

For a moment this settles the issue. The man remains as he has the entire time, his arms folded, statuesque. Jake turns to Phil, nervous, and then notices Davey for the first time. He looks him up and down.

‘Where you been?’

Davey responds with a look like the sounds that just came out of Jake’s mouth were in some ancient pagan tongue, if not from some darker, subhuman source. The heat rising off the street makes the intersection look underwater. Davey thinks and sees in slow motion. By the time he forms something resembling an answer, Jake has turned away. The woman on the porch continues to turn her knitting over and over and over in her hands, the sunlight collected in the jewelry on her towering hair, now a papal tiara on a pagan priestess. She could be a tarot card. Her dominion is the front porch, where she reposes after conducting her sorcery, oblivious or ambivalent toward the events unfolding in the yard, which belongs to the Arab merchant. He stands, legs slightly splayed, and flexes his jaw. ‘Make me an offer.’

Phil says: ‘He’ll give you forty for it.’

‘Eighty-five.’

‘No way.’

The man’s eyes narrow, but Jake and Phil can spot the tiny spark that let’s them know this man’s a haggler at heart and from then on they know the bike is theirs.

‘Eighty.’

‘You said all those bikes was forty.’

‘Seventy.’

‘Forty-five.’

Pretense of strategy and subtlety evaporate in the day’s heat. ‘Sixty-five.’

‘Forty-five’s all I got.’

‘That’s an awful good bike and I don’t want to sell it for no forty-five dollars.’

‘It’s what I got.’

‘It’s from Europe.’

‘I’ll give you forty-five dollars for it. That’s all I got and I’m offering it.’

The man works his jaw for a moment, biding his time, as if hoping more money will appear in Jake’s pocket to be laid on the table. After a moment he concedes. Jake and Phil exchange satisfied glances. Davey stands apart, hunched over and pale like a sick thing. Jake digs in his pocket and produces a few wadded up bills. Money changes hands. The man unfolds each bill meticulously and softly counts them, pausing to adjust the t-shirt wrapped around his head, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead with the excess cloth.


The transaction concludes without words. The man’s face returns to its normal configuration and he moves back toward the center of the yard where he folds his arms, satisfied with the day’s trading. Phil takes his bike from the ground while Jake mounts his. They begin to pedal. Davey takes one more glance at the Arab Merchant and his Pagan Priestess and begins walking a few feet behind his friends. As soon as they’re out of earshot, Jake and Phil congratulate one another on their shrewd dealing. Riding high on their shining mounts, they are crusader kings, returning from the Holy Land with treasure liberated from heathen peoples. The buildings along Jefferson Street are the ransacked Constantinople. The whirr of their spokes lingers in the air and follows them as they roll around the corner and disappear onto Fourth Street.

Farther back, Davey walks through the ruins with his head down, without haste or even an awareness of it. The air is still heavy and sticky and he feels almost too tired to continue, but he can’t stop here. Up and down Jefferson, the children flicking bottle caps stop and watch Davey. With every step his feet seem to cement themselves more fully to the pavement. Nervous sweat runs in his eyes.

High above, a laboratory demonstration is taking place in a brilliant white room proffered by the creator. Principalities and dominions fill the lecture hall, every seat occupied for hundreds of rows, the seraphim in the choicest seats near the front, taking meticulous notes as the creator indicates Davey with a pointer and glides the overhead lamp into position as needed. On the dry erase board, he scribbles an elaborate diagram with equations and flow-charts that lead nowhere. Nervous sweat runs in Davey’s eyes. He looks up, but there’s only bright, clear sky. He staggers to the intersection and turns, not wholly in one piece, but alive enough, and disappears behind the fence, hoping to evaporate and rise above the hot and heavy air, drifting up and dispersing into the atmosphere.

Two men, both shirtless, each holding an axe, and one, a gnarled saw, waded through waist-deep water toward a two-story house that emerged, strained, heavy with each waterlogged board and each rusted nail that pinned it together, from the soggy earth.  When they reached the doorway of the house, the first man laid his hand flat against the front door.  With effort, he pressed against the damp wood, and from the exposed upper hinge a shriek, the spoiled union of iron and air, echoed shrilly down an empty street, piercing the soft surfaces of damp wood and bouncing freely off the dark, swirling surface of the river. 



 



The water had been rising, now, for seven days.  On the first morning, without a sound, the cattle in the fields had begun to walk away from the river.  For three days they walked, slowly, heavily, as cows do, each purposeful step crumpling the grass and pressing down the wet soil beneath it, leaving an ever-growing half moon of pockmarked earth behind.  The townspeople noticed the cows before they noticed the rising water.



On the fourth day, the mill reversed direction.  The water, thick and dark, had risen above the axle of the wooden wheel, and when the swirling surface water overpowered the quiet channel below, the wheel slowed, and creaked, and began to turn again in reverse, snapping gears and mutilating machinery.  Then, when the sullen current licked a final splash up over the churning woodwork, it groaned to a stop, and everything was quiet.



On the fifth day, the doctor could be seen piling armloads of damp clothing into the back of an old horse cart.  Next to the cart, his wife and her four daughters, all barefoot and muddy up to their ankles, stared upward without speaking.  They watched for rain, but there was none to be seen, only clouds, and crows.  Most flew west, with the current, but some could be seen returning, circling and watching the river as it sucked up the land and pulled anxiously at the lowest boards of houses.  When the doctor’s wife drove his horse toward the road, the women clinging tightly to the dripping cargo, the wheels of the cart left grooves as deep as a man’s hand in the black ground.



On the sixth day the water turned salty.  Now, bits of splintered board could be seen drifting down the river, passing through the sunken windows of riverside sheds and picking up thick tangles of weeds.  The water, now spilling through doorways and puddling in dirty circles on the floors of empty houses, had washed away the grooves of a dozen horse carts, and twenty miles west, along the river, hungry donkeys dragged hungry families through thick mud, toward desperate hopes of dry inns and warm meals.  The cattle, which had been migrating steadily, ignored by humans, for almost a week, huddled on a hill two miles from the muddy bank of the river, chewing mouthfuls of muddy grass and blinking dumbly at the flat sky.



Single-story houses, which had once housed small families, looms, and coal stoves, now lilted against the current, until one by one they collapsed gently into the murky water.  Only the drunks and their whores still walked among the heavy, stained structures, checking bedrooms for gold and kitchens for wine.  In the daytime, they huddled together on the side of the hill above town, where the cows had once stood, and where small piles of scrap wood now sat in piles, some of it lashed together in futile rafts, most of it loose and damp.  They drank from bottles and crossed themselves under the grey sky.  Half of the town lay underwater; the other half, void of life, leaned quietly under its damp empty weight.



 



The two men, holding their tools high above their heads, waded through the doorway and into a small room, filled to the mantle with water, and from the mantle to the ceiling with thick, wet air.  The surface of a table drifted slowly on the water, propelled toward the far wall by the rippling progress of the two bodies.  When one of the men swung the head of his axe down onto a corner of the table, it dipped effortlessly down into the black water, lifting another dripping leg into the air.  The leg looked grey in the grey light, and it was lined with veins of green.  The man shifted his weight, lifting an obscured foot to brace against the corner of the table, and when he pulled the axe from the wood it bobbed back up into the air, sending ripples bouncing in patterns off the walls and the bare chests.



Against the far wall the men stepped carefully up a wooden staircase.  As they rose out of the water, green weeds clung to the belt loops of dark brown pants, and dark dripping leather of cracked boots curled down to expose white ankles streaked with straight black hair.  Their heads disappeared, followed by the tops of their pants, their ankles, the soles of their cracked boots, and then they were gone, creaking across the floor above the empty room.



In the single room, into which the men emerged part by part, a single body sat as still as petrified wood on a wooden chair.  It was the body of an old man, with small tufts of white hair growing from his sagging ears, clothed in a dirty white shirt and brown linen trousers.  Its eyes were half open, as still as marbles stuck in mud, and the men ignored it as they moved about the room, testing the softness of the wood of a small bureau, now a square dining table, now a painted cradle, now a small end table, on which a Bible lay, coverless.  The wood was damp but hard, and they took to it with the axes, snapping the legs from the larger table and splintering the flat boards and hitting at the bureau with overhand swings until it lay crushed in a pile on the floor.  They took apart the crib with their hands, and this wood, protected by the white paint, made loud snapping noises as they bent and broke its spokes.  When all but the end table lay in a pile by one wall, behind the seated body, the men lay down their axes and stood, breathing heavily, by the only window in the room.  Through it, they watched the river move quietly through town.  Crows stood on the branches of trees, and now and then one or two would take flight and drift over the black water to another tree to stand on another branch.  There were no sounds for a quarter of an hour, during which the river rose imperceptibly.



Both men had coils of wet yellow twine in each of their pockets.  They knotted the wood together in bundles, and when the third bundle was taut one of the men moved over to the small end table.  The Bible felt damp and heavy.  Inside, the inked letters were swollen.  He touched the top of the table again, and then motioned for the other man, who brought his axe and took to it with dull swings.  The man with the Bible carried it over to the seated body.  The floor in front of the chair was dry, and he placed the heavy book at a reverent angle in front of the feet.  Each man then took two bundles, wedging the tools between the twine and the splintered boards, and they stepped carefully back down the stairwell, disappearing part by part, leaving behind, among piles of splinters and small dirty puddles, only the still body in its chair and the wet book.



 



They had not known that he was alive.  The following morning his eyes drifted down to gaze at the Bible.  It had swollen slightly since the previous afternoon when the men had come into the house to take the furniture for futile rafts.  During the night, one of the puddles left in the center of the room by the men had trickled across the floorboards, snaking past sawdust deposits until it touched up against one corner of the book, where it was quickly absorbed by the already damp pages.  Now, in the grey light leaking through the window—although it had been cloudy for weeks, there was a certain heightened color in the room when the sun ought to have been shining in—he watched the book grow.



His name was Levi.  Like the cattle, he had known about the flood, sensed it, before the young and active townspeople.  It had been coming for months, perhaps always, and when his bones began to crystallize he knew that this was how it would end, still, petrified, in the rising water.



At first it was his fingers.  As a boy he had thrown stones and flicked insects, as all boys do, and as a young man he had run nervous fingertips over the laces of corsets.  But when he grew older his bones hardened and began to scrape against one another, until his wife and sister began to feed him, dragging a spoon roughly over the coarse white hair on his chin to catch the droplets of broth that ran down from his lips.



When he stopped eating, after his knees froze and his fingers closed permanently around the arms of his chair, his jaw, too, grew coarse and chipped inside, and his last few words had sent sounds like crunching gravel tearing through his skull.



And, as his bones rusted like the hinges of old doors he began to notice the moistness in the air, the dampening of noises in their wooden house and the sheen on his sister’s forehead as she pleaded with him to eat.



‘I do not need food,’ he had thought to himself; ‘hunger will not kill me, as it will them.’  He had waited patiently as the air thickened in his room, and when the cattle left he was the happiest he had been in weeks.  They would all leave, now, he thought, and when his wife came into his room, weeping, followed later by his sister, to talk in loud sobs about the flood, he had been happy that he could not speak, and hoped that they would not draw out their departure.



When the water finally crossed their hearth the women had already packed their bundles of moldy clothing into the broken oxcart and foraged what dry foods and fresh water remained in the house and the looted storerooms of their neighbors.  He wished for the women to leave, to forget to kiss the damp skin of his forehead and not to promise him that they would return with a boat and food, not to try to carry his rigid body somewhere dryer to die.  He had pretended to be dead, closing his eyes and slowing his breathing for hours until the small purple snakes that always clouded his vision had filled the room.  And then his wife had come upstairs to kiss him guiltily and hold his hand, weeping quietly, while his vision cleared.



They had left dry food in jars beside his chair.  The first time that men came upstairs, he had pretended to be dead, and they took all of the food in wet brown sacks that they tied shut with twine and carried over their shoulders.  That was when the men still wore shirts, when some decent women still lingered, when it was still a sinful thing to go into another man’s bedroom, to stare at a rigid body and be glad it was not one’s own.  He did not need to eat; he felt his end at hand, and with each tired beat of his heart, his crystalline body clenched tighter at the tunnels of watery blood that snaked through it.  The day after the men came for the last of the furniture, blue mold began to creep up the walls.



For two days he sat still, awake, no longer sleeping or blinking.  Each hour brought new growth to the walls, which smelled sour, and though Levi could not turn his head to look out the window, he heard and smelled the flood.  There were fish now, in the room below him, giant ocean fish, with stiff fins on their backs and thick red gills.  As they swam, he listened to the ripples echo off the walls in the ever shrinking cavern between the water and the ceiling.  ‘There are only a few inches of air left beneath me,’ he told himself, and through the window he could smell sea turtles and hear the dipping flight of pelicans.



The nails that held the walls together smelled like rust.  With the first effort he had made since moving to the chair, and with what he knew would be the final shift of bone on bone in his crystalline body, he let his head drop slightly until he was staring straight at the swollen book on the floor in front of him.  As his vertebrae shifted, they made the sound of stones colliding, and he blinked with the sharp pain of friction.  Then, still again, he felt the last of his unfixed joints fuse into place, as brittle now as a sprung and forgotten bear trap, crimson with rust, no longer metal, ancient latticed powder of no use to nature.



‘I will not drown, either,’ he told himself, for he felt, too, that he had ceased to breathe.  The only motion in the room, in which dilated time made a puppet-show of mold and rust, was the growth of the blue streaks on the walls, and the steady crowning of the book that sat wet on the wet floor.



What lasted?  Bone would outlive muscle.  What of fingernails?  He stared at the book.  How long would language persevere, and when would it be forgotten?  He thought of human bodies, and then of other animals, and then plants.  Wood was no better than flesh or bone, or tusk, or tooth.  No living thing would outlast stone; nothing that had been nourished by sunlight or that had coursed with blood would be any more than dust when cool pebbles still lay quietly in piles on mountaintops.  Was life itself the fatal flaw, the dooming touch?  What was bone, or muscle?



‘God has grown tired of men,’ Levi thought, as he listened to the barnacles bite slowly and tightly into the floorboards of his kitchen.



Later, he noticed the first black swirl trickle out of the round pile of pages, into the puddle that surrounded it.  Slowly, the ink was sucked out of the book, and the water darkened, then the wood beneath it.  ‘If I could move,’ thought Levi, ‘I would taste that water.’  The water was dark, and the pages, which had swollen and melted together, had grown lighter, inkless, like a slab of butter.



 



At a certain moment, consciousness itself crystallized into mere architecture.  When the water finally rose carefully over the last step, it entered the room slowly, in a thin, rounded film.  It rolled over exposed nails and joined in quick asymmetrical embraces with the puddles that stood in ruts, and when it arrived at the old book the clean mound dissolved without resistance in creamy swirls.  Levi, too, succumbed quickly to the rising water, and his powdered bones and paper skin swirled about the room, mere pigments, coloring the water as it overtook the blue mold and sucked up the splinters.



The following morning nothing could be seen of the town. Forty miles west, in a similar town, distant cousins and flushed innkeepers ate candlelit dinners on sturdy tables, while their cattle, with a sudden sense of purpose, blinked dumbly at the hills that rose up against the grey horizon.