Anton Beans frowns. He needs a change of scene. There is a white-hot feeling in his gut. For some reason Beans’s thoughts turn to Chelsea Clinton, who has just graduated from Stanford. He thinks of the decade of brutal magnification of what is probably in fact a very slight asymmetry in her face by candid photography. The American media, if not the world, is cruel.

Beans recalls a section from Marta Hillary’s interview with the Paris Review of three years ago, an article he had savored and virtually memorized. Marta (b. 1957) narrates her childhood. It was peripatetic, partly continental. Installed in West Berlin with her free-spirited American mother, Marta had traveled, after 1971’s Four Power Agreement, between East and West with some frequency. She made it sound like a spy novel. “It was an object lesson in contrasts: the sick glamour that seemed to have come from the Americans, the austerity of the other side. We had next to nothing so I was sometimes glad to be out of that, the Ku’damm and this aggressively good life that was pumping through the West. There is a way in which everything I’ve done comes out of the experience of standing at a checkpoint, feeling the presence of that faceless power. You have to have something that no one can take away from you, that you can do even if you are in prison. That is what poetry is.”

Though calculated, it was adroit, nearly seamless. Marta is someone who can teach him how to move between worlds.

Anton Beans decides he will go for a walk. He sets out for the center of town, noting that he will refresh with a wheatgrass shot as necessary, but he ends up following Chapel Street all the way to its intersection with Van Veldt. It’s not until he comes to the intersection itself that he stops and realizes what it is he is doing.

Beans recalls a conversation he’d overheard on the first day of workshop, when Loudermilk had admitted his allegedly strategic choice of residence to two eager members of his cohort. Beans recalls Loudermilk’s slick little bad-boy prepster, nouveau Bret Easton Ellis ensemble, the haze of Axe body spray and suggestion of a scandalous succession of boarding schools that surrounded him, his bland homosocial banter and early provocation of Don Hillary.

It is getting to be dusk, and Anton Beans recognizes what must be the Loudermilkian shanty among Greek edifices. Sadly for Loudermilk, his early citation of the intersection gives him entirely away, since everything else around here is an enormous manor inhabited by upper-middle-class thugs. Beans slides into a stand of trees bordering the run-down property and approaches the shelter, such as it is, without much difficulty. There is one light on.

Obligingly, the sky continues to dim. Beans scuttles across the snowy lawn and gets below the illuminated window. He waits.