That morning we drove into town to shop at some factory outlets, hoping to be swimming in the lake with the afternoon sun. We stopped at a shirt outlet. The little shop was a converted room on the second floor in the front of the shirt factory itself. As our friends started sorting through piles of bargains, I drifted back into the factory looking for a phone. Everything darkened. There were fewer windows. The path between machinery and workstations was white-lined and zigzagged further into the musty place where shirts begin. There were older men running odd-looking machines that stitched collars and young women sweating at large press-like units that steamed the uncut linens. Finally, I found an old wooden booth near what must have been the office. I closed myself in from the noise and dialed.

Robert was at work. I told him of my dream. He told me that Gene the Source had died in the night from cancer. Among those in recovery, he was a sage. Robert’s voice had a puncture. His sail was flapping. For here was a lost kinship, a mate standing the same watch on the same deck, and suddenly a wave of storm hit them both, and when he wiped the water from his eyes, Gene was gone. It all happened quickly. This man who was sober for fourteen years, who now knew the cost of a moment’s true peace, who treasured that peace—within five weeks, he had been diagnosed and perished. He seemed a living alchemy of us both: recovering, cancered, treasuring peace.

The day before Gene died, Robert saw him in the VA hospital, among the wandering legions who never seem to heal. He was on Demerol, spacey, half-dreaming, half-babbling, and Robert gave him a kiss on his forehead as he was being wheeled away.

That night Robert randomly read from Blake and Neruda and from the Old and New Testament. And now, while young women were sweating at their press units, while old men were squinting in the half-light at the stitches pumping up and down into empty collars, while Ann and our friends were rummaging through irregulars, I sat in the wooden phone booth at the end of the white-lined path, buffeted by the incessant noise of machinery as Robert began to tell me a story in the book of John . . .