The world breathed and the sea breathed and we breathed. Time stretched and contracted, part light speed, part glacial, until I lost track of even losing track, and the sun, which had been barely moving in the sky, was burning suddenly low on the horizon and filling that whole stretch of water with flames. It was colder and the beach was empty and there was just us.

“You can stay inside any Now with me,” Novo said. “You can stop and take your time and look around.”

The wind dropped as quick as a ball and the moonless sea was ink-black and punctured with stars.

“I can’t tell where it ends and begins,” I said, speaking for the first time in what could have been centuries.

“Where what ends and begins?”

“Everything,” I said. “I can’t tell without the horizon.”

“It doesn’t end or begin,” Novo said. “It just is.” And then we stood up on the black sand and walked through the pitch-dark ghost of town, back up the hill to our houses.

TWELVE

Up the hill and right at the corner onto our street, I didn’t hear anything until we were almost on top of it. The noise was trapped somehow and didn’t travel, not the way noises are supposed to. Outside Mrs. Midler’s, there was already too much frantic activity for me to get too close, but still, even though I could see all that was going on, there wasn’t one sound. I stood back on the lawn and felt the total quiet at all its edges while the house shed its own skin. I watched as it rid itself of the stuff it didn’t want— carpets, sacks of wallpaper, broken furniture, all sailing out of windows, all landing, more or less, in a massive heap out front. An orchestral sort of hum went with everything—base sander, the rhythm of hammers, the high sharp notes of screwdrivers and drills, so that it sounded like the place was filling up with giant bees. Novo moved ahead of me through the noise and the chaos to the door. I stood watching, and I thought of that film when the front of a house falls down on top of Buster Keaton in a storm and he stands up unscathed in the neat gap left by an open window. I thought of those buildings in war zones, patchworks of exposed interiors like dolls’ houses, except real as can be, someone’s home, and bombed inside out.

Novo turned toward me with his arms out wide, the orchestra’s conductor. Behind him, the windows rattled and a sofa launched itself into the air and landed on the grass with a shudder.

“Do you like what I’m doing with the place?” he yelled, and his half-drowned-out voice sounded like it was coming from streets away. I could only just about hear it.