—“Who are you calling cynic?”

—“You talk like one.”

Who am I talking to?

The air is settling like a pond after someone threw in a rock. Who was talking?

It might be the cemetery up there. Now I’m alone I can feel it pull me in. The others were the only ones keeping me from being pulled in. I don’t want to go. Where’s out?

I’m struggling, moving this way and that like a dog straining on his leash. I know where the mountains are—thinking all mountains are the same chains you enter here you can come out anywhere in the world there are mountains ... mountains are mountains. All I need is snow to feel at home, but here there’s only this white ashy ground that’s a pretty poor counterfeit.

I’m alone, but someone in an identical clearing only a few yards from mine is imitating my movements as precisely as a mirror would, although his jaw whips and snaps in the air with his more abrupt movements in a way mine never could.

*

A place like the cemetery—the light here seems to ebb and flow with the air, and my breath, which at times is so thin I feel my lungs grow heavy through their emptiness and drag me toward the ground and at other times is so full I feel buoyed up with its glassiness and freshness. I came in, in a dream of mine, shared at the same time with some others, but now the dream has sprung free from all of us. It’s rioting now all on its own. It has turned into a disembodied insanity, that can touch down in souls like lightning. The flash already passed off, stand and look at the devastation on all sides, and then a deafening crash breaks on the air, spreads unhurriedly in all directions, resounds with morbid deliberation back from the landscape.