S joked about the fancy coffee grinder and E self-incriminated—“I’m part bourgeois, never said I wasn’t”—which prompted E to tell S in detail about the imagined playground scene with the capitalist, which prompted S to tell E about a hundred tiny similar scenes, some true and some only fantasized, which prompted E to tell S about the long-ago sessions with the bookstore clerk with the cherry-red lips, which prompted S to say to E, “I feel strangely at home in your presence,” to which E responded, “I know what you mean.”

And with that, so many questions and expectations fell away—the anarchist of anti-Science would approve—that S and E began to feel, each in their own way, which they took turns describing to each other, the appearance of a clearing or a field (whether it was the same field or two separate fields, they didn’t wonder at) into which appeared, or began to appear, figures, leftovers or remainders, ruins, like the undone architecture and spent debris that persisted on the sites of the houses in the town neighboring E’s, the place Ezekiel had injured most.

“What are these figures?” S asked E, stroking E’s arm on the downbeat of each word.

“I don’t know what they are,” said E. “Let’s count them. That at least will give us something sure.”

They closed their eyes and counted. An observer would think their lives depended on it: wrinkled brows, puckered lips, eyes roving behind their lids.

Then they opened their eyes at the same moment, smiled, and opened their mouths. “Twenty-seven,” they said in unison, and Splice barked at the post-silence noise.

“Twenty-seven whats?” said E.

[Pause]

“Twenty-seven Figures of Concern,” said S, fake-serious (but also serious).

“What should we do with them?” said E.

“We should address them.”

FIRST FIGURE

S: This one I see clearly, like a line drawing that is somehow also three dimensional. It might be a mountain, or a nipple, or a wart, or the nose on the face of a person lying on the beach and staring at the sky. The strange thing is how I can feel, in real time, right now, how that list of associations reduces to two, and how those two reduce to a challenge in scale and in perspective. Nose. Mountain. Nose. Mountain. Whose nose is it? Whose mountain? I look out your window and I see: a mountain. What mountain is that?

[At this, S turned to face E, causing a replay of the first shock of recognition: an aftershock. E felt S’s gaze but didn’t meet it, looked instead out at the mountain.]

E: It must have many names, but the internet calls it Johnson’s Nose.

SECOND FIGURE