“My name, as I told you earlier, is Jedediah Bailey,” the preacher said, when they had done eating and were drinking their coffee. The coffee was bitter and strong. “I was a wild youth, given to sudden rage and acts of violence which I now regret. When drunk one night I killed a man. It was a fair fight, and he’d swung for me first, but I killed him all the same and he was a judge’s son. The ushers were after me then, and the old man had hired the Pilkingtons to do for me, but I ran, and I ran far and I ran deep into the Doinklands, where even the Pilkingtons wouldn’t go. I wandered, alone. One day I came, starved, half-mad, upon a party of Auguste clowns. Perhaps I was the first man they had ever seen. I tried to speak to them—I begged for food—for help! They looked at me with incomprehension. Finally the boss clown, whether out of pique or pity, I never knew, struck me over the head with a juggler’s club, and I lost consciousness.

“When I awoke, they had gone. Only the marks of their giant feet were left in the ground. But I saw, then. I had been reborn. It was as though a tiny window had opened, and the light poured through into the cell that had been my life up to that point. After days of walking, I reached a monastery on the Maskelyne range. They are snow-peaked mountains above the Copper Fields, far to the east. There I became a novice.”

The Stranger listened for other sounds, but there were none. He heard no birds outside, nothing living. The man finished his coffee but was reluctant to get up from the stool. He stared out of the window into the night. He could see the city skyline beyond the river. The radio was on somewhere in the background. He felt both tired and alert. He couldn’t face going back up to the room, he could not face to see the boy just lying there. He got up, walked past the water fountain where the same lethargic janitor was moving the mop back and forth, back and forth, with a listless determination. Through the revolving doors, and into the night and a blast of cold air. It didn’t revive him. Traffic on the road, the lights moving slowly, like so many eyes of so many buffalos in migration. The man lit a cigarette, drew bitter smoke into his lungs, exhaled. He coughed. You can’t keep going on like this, she’d said the night before. The drinking and . . . this throwing yourself into oblivion. You have to be strong. For him, if not for me.