It was always the walk-ons who gave me the shivers— the woman at the end of the subway platform; the boy planted at the exit door I had to get through; the lady asleep or dead on the restroom floor.

The man in the yard moved.

I stumbled to the stairs wanting water. Raf sat at the base, lacing up his shoes for his morning run. I told him about the dream. My heart was still whamming.

“Damn it, I need one of those,” he said.

“Just a synaptical shortout probably, like a hiccup or a muscle spasm. But in it I had memory, every thought I’ve ever had. . . . Do I look any different to you?”

“Only because of the pentagram on your forehead,” Raf said.

For the rest of the day the dream lingered with me.

That evening, on the porch, Raf told me there are five billion people on the planet—about eighty-six for each square mile.

Dusk and rain had turned everything olive green and shiny.

I said writing poetry would be impossible, knowing such statistics.

“Or the other way: why not write?” he said.

I thought for a minute. “The turkey facility,” I said.

He nodded.

“What happened to Raymond?” I asked. “He’s been by only once.”

“Haven’t talked to him. You want me to?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“You’re suggesting we should see other people?”

I said, “Raf, sometimes your mentality’s straight from Teen Beat. This morning I see God, tonight I’m in some sock-hop situation.”

“That is the variety of the life experience,” he said.

From here I could see into the strange house, into the dining room, where there were four chairs now, and a round-topped table, a corner cupboard with a stack of brown-patterned plates, a pewter coffee service Raf had bought secondhand. There were floor lamps flanking the table, their bulbs burning gold under manila paper shades.

“I’ll call Raymond,” he said. He gazed off at the boat docked in our driveway.

Raymond had his wicker chair tipped on its hind legs; his boots resting on a vacant seat. With a bone-handled knife he was skinning a green apple. He said, “At Princeton, everybody took Raf’s low moods serious ’cause he was a philosophy major. So if you were havin’ a good day and you forgot all about your ontological center, he could make you feel like a bunny-fucking moron.”

The restaurant was sunny, done in whites and reds. Paco’s Cantina, it was called.

“Spreads joy, don’t he,” Raymond said.

“Like a stain,” I said.

Raymond wore a frayed denim shirt and, against the room’s brightness, his dark glasses.

I said, “It’s why he left Oxford, why he never finished his dissertation. He thinks recorded philosophy has no value because the act of composing a text or an essay or tractus means the philosopher wasn’t deranged and despairing enough.”

“Whoa, big catch-twenty-two,” Raymond said.