If this is a News Report, it must mention a book, and if it must mention a book, it should be The Desert—a poetry, a research, picked up by E and S from the stack that first night and read aloud to each other, rapt—

People are snakes

Swimming only

To keep moving

—and to which we may, explicitly or not, return—

/ end of Report

&

They were city people, S and E. This doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, but it seemed to mean something similar to S and E: that they recognized they had been formed by grids and laws and the application of power to land; by climate control and light control and the anarchic organization of pedestrian life; by streets named for digits, politicians, artists, and states; by bars spilling into streets and the other way around; by the beautiful violence of millions of bodies navigating daily proximity; by the moments of excess—blackouts, heat waves—when difference fleetingly recedes; by the moments when instead it gets cruelly amplified; by the minute calculations needed to balance witnessing, action, and survival; by implication and exploitation more generally.

They were also linked by their exposure—S’s irregular but longstanding, E’s increasingly committed and durational—to the noncity and to what it had begun to teach them: about seasons, about autonomy, about vulnerability, about collaboration, about time.

In this moment, they were city people or former city people walking a dog through fields of flagging goldenrod, expired late-season blackberries, yellowing birch and reddening maple trees. They pointed at things and named them when they could: lion’s mane, self-heal. Splice ran after a rabbit and nosed some bear scat. They came upon a dead rabbit and had to drag the dog away.

Recognizing things did not mean understanding them, and this was why S and E’s first in-person conversation consisted almost entirely of questions answered by questions.

S: Do you think time will ever feel the way it did before the internet?

E [laughs]: Do you think I’ll ever finish reading another book?

S: What if I write one for you?

E: How long will it be?

S: What’s the right length?

E: Haven’t you noticed that all the books in my piles have book-marks between pages twenty-five and one hundred?

S: Haven’t you noticed that there’s a lot for me to notice right now?

E: What if I write one for you?

S: What if I hold you to that?

Splice barreled down the hill from behind E and S, having made the loop around the field without them, and plowed between their legs, then skidded to a stop, turned, and waited, wagging, for them to show their love.

A LONG NIGHT

In the kitchen, Splice lapping at its water bowl, E and S turned serious. First about eating—the early fall of night had made them hungry—and then about coffee.