It isn’t that he doesn’t know where he has found himself, after the circuitous ride on the volunteer bus, through increasingly less familiar two-lane highways and cliffside roads. They have passed by dozens of similarly disused compounds—clusters of small dwellings, cabins or sheds, the occasional yurt—some with halfdefoliated vines spilling from their paneless windows, a preview for the arriving season’s show. None of the compounds seemed occupied, but Pablo knew they may be; he had been an invisible resident more than once in his life. People are easy to fool.

Now, alone at the white plastic folding table, a paper cup of cold coffee in front of him and a paper plate of peanut-butter cookies to his side, beneath the canvas roof of a canvas tent insufficiently heated by three upright propane torches, he buttoned up his jacket and pulled a notebook from its pocket. His ambivalence about where he’d landed was almost too much to bear. At least he would record the day’s events.

ANOTHER ORIENTATION

The woman with the short silver hair—“my brief haircut,” she had taken to calling it, since she gave it to herself every few days with a pair of manual clippers she carried in her bag; the whole operation took less than ten minutes—tilted her head away from the morning sun she’d paused to take in full-face, opened her eyes, and saw, down the path, the canvas tent she’d been expecting. She glanced again at the note in her hand: If you see the translator, make friends. He might let you share his table.

On the tent’s aluminum-frame door was a small paper sign legible only from a close distance, typed in all caps on a manual typewriter: PERSONAL REPAIR CAFÉ. The silver-haired woman put the note back in her bag, alongside the clippers and an unbound photocopy of the Manual, and turned the handle.

To say, as E did once, that Pablo left because he was needed was a kind of shorthand, a bluff. To say It wasn’t that he didn’t know where he’d found himself was also shorthand: he had been told where he was—he’d also read the sign on the door, coming in—but his role there was unclear. He knew, or rather he sensed, that his job, if it could be described as a job, would have something to do with translation, but that was it.