There was not a breath of air. The flag seemed to grasp the flagpole like a flaccid hand until the birds, curling up around it, fanned it with their wings, uncoiled it slightly on their living wind. Thanakar caught a glimpse of the design.

“They’re celebrating the new saint,” said the pervert. “Adventist pigs!” He stood picking his lips. Then he walked away without another word, down the concrete steps, hands in his pockets, and Thanakar had to run to catch him. It was difficult. His leg was hurting him. He had worked it mercilessly for days, and now his kneecap had dried out. The joint worked mechanically, without strength, and made a strange clicking noise. Hurrying down the steps, he almost fell. “Wait!” he commanded, but the shadow in front of him flickered up the street. Enraged, he hurried on, his kneecap clattering.

He paused to rest under the facade of a broken building. The sky burned redder here. The alleyway ran uphill to Beggar’s Medicine; ahead, the pervert stopped under a streetlamp and leaned against the pole.

For almost an hour the man mocked him, far ahead, out of sight, hurrying onward when Thanakar hurried to catch up, stopping when he stopped, exhausted. The streets were echoing and empty, and sometimes Thanakar would recognize the same configurations and realize that the man had led him in a circle, but still the doctor kept on, muttering imprecations and promising cold murder. In the end, the pervert waited for him under a row of houses, and his face, as Thanakar limped up, was so empty that the doctor found himself doubting any motive in him but stupidity. He sat down on the gutterstone to find his breath. The pervert leaned against a wall. He chewed gum and threw the wrapper into the mud.

There was life here. Men sold food from wheeled stalls under a cluster of acetylene lamps: messes of noodles and artificial cabbage, cakes of edible plastic developed by the bishop’s council. In a vacant lot, people lived under tarpaulins or in huts made of burlap and corrugated iron. People sat on plywood laid over the mud. Their bones showed, and they shivered in the warm air. Near Thanakar, some crippled women begged, their faces wrapped in white gauze. But most took no notice of him. Instead, they stared at the pervert with dull intensity, as if they were trying to remember why they found him interesting. He was an important man here with his black uniform, his cracked lips.

Across the road, another celebration had started. A barrel of gin had been broached in front of a dilapidated tavern, while the barkeep ladled out smoking dollops into cardboard cups under a red-and-white painted sign of doves copulating, their beaks twisted into leers. “Come, gentlemen,” he called. “It’s free tonight, in honor of the festival. Free tonight, while it lasts.” On the corner under the lamp, a man vomited into the gutter.

“That’s not a very good advertisement,” remarked Thanakar.