Don can no longer sit at this table, no longer sit and admit to herself that she might never touch Hannah. “Relax,” an older sister would tell her. “Step back from the ledge!” But there’s no older sister, and Don is in love, and Hannah is in love, but not with Don, and so begin all wretched stories, so begin weeks that are horrid and have to do with hormones. And

DON

Gets up and looks out the window.

“There’re people out there,” she says. And looks at the tent camp.

It must have been put up in just the last few seconds. Yesterday there was nothing except plastic litter and old rolls of cable. And now there are scrap-wood huts, six of them, seven, and two fires burning in front of them. Around the fire sit a few remnants of men. Nothing worth shooting at. Of the men, there are maybe ten, no idea whether there are others in the sad huts, three are minors; they squat, barely talk, roasting potatoes on the fire and spooning something out of tin cans. No good food, no precious meal of meat.

Their clothes speak of homelessness, their faces of having given up. A little way from the saddest of the tents sits an old man who, with his suit, stands out from the others.

The suit must have really been something. Before it had gotten stained and the seams had ripped. The man must also have really been something before he’d given up.

Like a

PROFESSOR

HEALTH CONDITIONS: depression

HOBBIES: collect(ed) first editions

LISTEN(ED): Mozart

USEFULNESS: 0

That’s what the old man looks like, as he sits on a beer crate and rocks back and forth.

Murmur, stream, the vale along

Without pause or peace,

Murmur, whisper to my song

adding melodies!

Goethe. An echo from before, memory and smell and taste, of the fireside, in the library. Recollection of the time when consumer decisions fulfilled wishes, not needs. Of the time not long ago when coal power plants had resumed operation. And he—