The light changes and the flow begins. A moving truck halfway down the street is blocking cross-street traffic, which is backed up as far as the crosswalk, where a turbaned cabbie flinches and shrugs in apology at the mob rushing around his cab, some of them banging the hood or the trunk of the taxi with their fists as they pass, as if the cabbie has put himself intentionally in their way. Wilson takes a breath and joins the flow, no longer bothering after all these years of living in the city to excuse himself if he bumps shoulders or steps on a heel. He keeps his eyes lowered. Everyone wears galoshes.

It is only a few blocks to the bookstore. Inside, he pulls off his gloves and scarf and unbuttons his jacket. He scans the signs hanging from the high ceilings above the various sections of the store: FICTION, COOKING, PHOTOGRAPHY, SELF-HELP, TRAVEL. This last is the section Wilson is looking for. He tucks his gloves and scarf into his pocket, takes off his jacket and slings it over his arm, and takes out from his breast pocket the piece of paper on which he has written the names of several books on Africa recommended by the travel agency. He locates four of the seven of them, which is more than he would have even hoped for; it seems to him that whenever he goes to any store looking for something specific, whether a book, an album of music, or a shirt in his size, it isn’t there. That four of the seven books he was looking for presented themselves, and that he didn’t have to ask a salesperson, or place a special order, seems to him a good sign—or what someone who believed in signs would take to be a good one about Africa.

Wilson brings the books to the bookstore café upstairs, where he buys a coffee and settles in at a table by the wall of windows that faces the street. From above, the crowd passing by on the street below looks somehow more orderly than it did from the ground; the sets of heads and shoulders, which is what the people look like from up here, flow against one another smoothly; there are few collisions, and all seem to move at a uniform pace. For just a second, he thinks he sees a head that might be Ruth’s, and his heart quickens with the desire to knock on the window, to somehow get her attention from up here or to run outside to meet her, though by the time he’d make it downstairs and outside he knows she would be gone, swallowed up by the crowd. His feeling of desire transforms into one of helplessness, and then into relief because he knows, and has known all along, that the passing head does not belong to Ruth. Ruth, he knows, is probably at the vet, or maybe home from the vet with Maggie, presenting her to Isabelle in the hopes that the dog might get her to speak again, or at least to smile. Something that Wilson himself should be able to do. Something that he will do, he thinks, opening the first book in his pile.