“Then didn’t you—”

“I didn’t do anything. There was a change.”

The colors in here—stone facing, flowers worn by guests, the strange chalices on the tables— carry an underbreath of blood spilled and turned black, of gentle carbonizing in the blank parts of the cities at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon… it makes crisper the outlines of Tantivy’s suit, rather a gigolo suit of unspeakably foreign cut, certainly nothing he ever would have thought of wearing… .

“I guess we don’t have much time… I know this is shitty, and really selfish but I’m so alone now, and… I heard that just after it happens, sometimes, you’ll sort of hang around for a while, sort of look after a friend who’s ‘here.’ …”

“Sometimes.” He is smiling: but his serenity and distance are the stretch of an impotent cry past Slothrop’s reach.

“Are you looking after me?”

“No, Slothrop. Not you… .”

Slothrop sits in the old weathered rocker looking out at a rolling line of hills and the sun just come down out of the last of the rain-clouds, turning the wet fields and the haycocks to gold. Who passed by and saw him sleeping, his face white and troubled nodded on the breast of his muddy uniform?

As he moves on he finds these farms haunted, but amiably. The oakwork creaks in the night, honest and wooden. Unmilked cows low painfully in distant fields, others come in and get drunk on fermented silage, barging around into the fences and piles of hay where Slothrop dreams, uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them. Up on the rooftops the black and white storks, long throats curved to the sky, heads upside down and looking backwards, clatter their beaks in greeting and love. Rabbits come scurrying at night to eat whatever’s good in the yards. Trees, now—Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. “That’s really insane.” He shakes his head. “There’s insanity in my family.” He looks up. The trees are still. They know he’s there. They probably also know what he’s thinking. “I’m sorry,” he tells them. “I can’t do anything about those people, they’re all out of my reach. What can I do?” A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, “Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That’s what you can do.”

Partial List of Wishes on Evening Stars for This Period:

Let me find that chicken coop the old lady told me about.