Late in the summer, Jen took David to the mountain to visit a waterfall she knew. By then they had been dating for a few weeks, and they had even begun calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend on occasion. They drove in her car, an old Toyota van, and piled the back with sleeping bags and a cooler full of beer just in case they found a nice spot to stay. On the way out of town, the mountain gleaming on the horizon, they listened to Motown tapes, passing a bottle of water back and forth and sharing a bag of Fritos like old compadres.

“I read your book,” Jen said. David was picking through the tapes in the glove box, lining up their next hour’s listening. A few days earlier, he had given her a copy of a book he had written, a collection of essays about a single photograph by some obscure photographer. The essays were archly academic and cantankerously opposed to each other, and they argued passionately for a series of mutually exclusive interpretations as to the photo’s ultimate meaning and importance. The trick was that all the essays were written by David himself, under various pseudonyms, and the photograph was just a snapshot he had found at a thrift store. The book was almost a hundred pages long, and he had published it himself at Kinko’s.

“I liked it a lot,” she said, even though she had ended up skimming the last chapter or two.

David murmured noncommittally, waiting for more.

“It was really interesting,” she hazarded. “I thought it was interesting how the essays kind of wore away at the picture. You know what I mean? By the end I could barely see it anymore.” This was a kind way of saying that the image, a pleasant, yellowing picture of a man at a podium in a Shriner’s hall, had become cloudy and opaque the longer she read. It had become so burdened with interpretations its surface had seemed gouged and scratched with words.

David brightened! “Yes, exactly!” he said. “You get it. That’s great.”

Jen found this intriguing. His strange, indirect ambition for his art. She reached over and touched his leg.

“I really liked it,” she said again, which was becoming more and more true, and they drove silently toward the looming mountain. On either side, the hops fields stretched toward breaks of parched poplars and maples and birch trees. Rounding a turn, the sunlight slanted at an oblique angle, diffusing in the white film of the windshield like a spiderweb. Two brown leaves swirled on the road. All at once the world had rolled into autumn. It was a subtle movement, just a degree of change, but Jen believed some profound axis had been crossed.

“Did you feel that?” David said. “It just became fall.”