Beans’s face, indistinct since distant, appears mild. The mouth is turned down. He isn’t saying anything. He just stares up at Harry’s window. And then, with the hand of the unbroken arm, Beans points at the papers tucked between cast and sling. Beans advances, still indicating papers, plus broken arm.

Now Beans beckons. Harry understands that he is meant to come downstairs. As if to confirm the comprehension slowly dawning on Harry, Beans, magically, nods. Beans is solemn, maybe calm. Maybe this is OK.

Harry removes himself from his room and begins making his way down the back staircase, the building’s sole acknowledgment of fire code. He thinks about how, if he goes slowly enough, Beans may just leave on his own. Harry numbly exits onto thawing sod.

Beans is still there and seems to prefer to maintain a distance. Perhaps it has something to do with his injury. “Greetings,” Beans says.

Harry feels like an astronaut who has just clicked open his polycarbonate visor to discover that it is possible to breathe the atmosphere of an unknown planet.

“Thank you for coming down from your, um, hermitage.” Beans frowns more deeply. “I understand that that is not a simple matter for a person like—” Beans pauses. “Like yourself,” he concludes. “However, I have something that may make your psychosomatic risk-taking worth your while.”

Beans is wearing gray today. He has on gray pants and a gray shirt and, somehow, what appears to be a gray jean jacket. His sneakers and socks are also gray. The ensemble gives him a somewhat gentle, avuncular look, lessening the severity produced by the bushy chinstrap.

It must be that Harry has to acknowledge or encourage Beans, but Harry cannot, for the life of him, fathom how. Harry remains planted where he is, as meanwhile Beans approaches, stiffly bearing his broken arm. Beans removes the papers from their secure spot, passes them, with a flourish, to Harry.

It is a new packet.

“I thought,” Beans is saying, “that this might interest you.”

Harry pages through. It’s all almost as usual. There’s the name of the spring workshop on the cover, and the packet has the customary heft. There are a few sonnets and a few experimental things written on typewriters that sprawl across the page. There isn’t anything by him in here. He can somehow sense this, just by touching the pages.

Perhaps concerned that Harry is not picking up on his intended message, Beans, in his capacity as world-altering Hermes, snatches the pages back.

Part of Harry’s mind, the part that is not struggling to work through the non-presence of a poem attributed to T. A. Loudermilk among the verses of the stapled Xerox, reflects that this is becoming quite the interesting pantomime.

“Look at this,” Beans is saying, holding the packet open against his cast. “This,” Beans, hissing, repeats. Beans flicks the page, producing a sound.