I tail my replacement to an alley that climbs to a stairway. He’s shirtless; his massive torso is covered by square green scales like crocodile hide and he smokes a huge cigar whose weight makes him walk faster. Shadowy figures fold into each other and roil obscenely. I wonder if I’ve stumbled into a neighborhood orgy, body grinding against body. I want to wash my face and piss to simplify my congested feelings. I realize I’m wearing a veil—it’s a dark threshold I step across into a town meeting. Citizens perch in tiers, the steps are bleachers. A woman complains, “When my boyfriend and I try to talk—”

I cut her off; I become the entire map of a problem from the slightest hint. I fall easily into the mode of telling them what to think and stand with my hands raised as though conducting an orchestra. Romantic dissatisfaction is the music. I remind the woman that talking reenacts gender and class codes. Her boyfriend wants a shared verbal rhythm, indifferent to content, while for her it’s shared observations that cement a bond. I had a similar problem at dinner last night when—

An old man flings his arm into space and cries, “Give up the dream of romantic ecstasy but believe it belongs to others with more luck. Twist your longing into nostalgia for what’s under your nose: a glass on the sill, geraniums in a pot.” He’s so old his head is horizontal. His hair and beard are too long and he wears his gown unbelted with the huge buttons popular thirty years before. “Be old and yearn for the visible which will not love you back. A day at a time, an hour at a time. Can you afford physical joy?”

My open palms retain their hope but nothing comes out of my mouth. His leathery face is hostile, closed. A woman in front wears a headdress that spreads above her ears; she turns in her seat and says to the group in a taut voice, “My husband is only sorry when I’m crying. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you stay in the relationship.’”

Jesus’s new lover brushes against me as he climbs. Now he’s as young as Jesus, with soft brown curls and Jewish features as aquiline as an arrowhead. He’s serious, rich, more troubled by my pain than Jesus is. He arouses me; I can’t breathe thinking of them together—the intaken breath as a palm sweeps from armpit to thigh. Once sex is entered they will divide between them the entire universe.

The old man climbs to his feet; every movement must be planned in advance. He whinnies, “How can I forgive the world till it says it’s sorry?”