Where are Kathy and Emma while it’s happening? I know nothing of anything but the vivid light and the corner of the ceiling, the feeling of the pillow being half under my head, a ledge of cheek unsupported, the rich blanket wrinkled uncomfortably below a shoulder, the fact of the door being locked far, far away, across the continent of the marble floor. They went to visit a poet, I think, in a pedicab, and I see them—my friends in a small compartment being ferried through the streets, the monkeys with their leathery hands reaching into their pockets, the bouffanted widow with her composed smile and her stewardess scarf, the children pushing and shoving each other’s hands out of the way to put theirs on top. The driver pedaling and pedaling, sandaled feet pushing down and riding up and pushing down again, the spokes, and then suddenly, a procession of bright shops, open to the street and filled with spangled wares, their owners smoking and calling out to the tourists in the pedicabs, the cows wandering slowly, not following the stream of traffic but weaving and halting, looking for anything, the scooters and motorcycles barely missing them, and then the pair of dreamed elephants with their empty box saddles, like the horse in JFK’s funeral procession with the boots turned backward in the stirrups, the empty saddle carrying everyone’s grief like a ghostly rider. The poet they were visiting was elderly and wise, a man on top of a mountain like in a New Yorker cartoon, and they were climbing the mountain—Kathy-ji crutching and crawling and Emma everywhere, behind her pushing and ahead of her pulling, and at some point I managed to roll over, away from the light, with my face turned toward the locked door and the window with its dark shade, around which was a halo of late afternoon light. A big, lit square that looked like neon at first and then faded into something less, by evening a pale frame around darkness. The room too was being uncreated along with me.

I saw the funeral procession with its horseless rider and its back-turned boots when I was eight, in the living room with my mother, who had set her ironing board up in there to watch and cry into a series of wadded Kleenexes. In memory it’s all black-and-white, the woman in the veiled hat, the boy with his locked knees, saluting, my mother poking the iron into the corners of blouses and pleats, my canary in its cage, not yellow but gray. Everything gray. The light is gone now, the frame is no longer a frame, it’s a shade and the room is an interior gloaming with just the puddle of lamplight now behind me, warming the back of my head.