I need to find my unit, to get some sort of documentation renewed or acknowledged, not that I can recall now ... I gather my courage and duck into one of the many small offices on the lane. The officer is brisk, smartly filing and typing, with a funny little smile on her face. The need I fling out to her like an open hand slides back and falls to my hip, as though she were on the other side of a pane of glass, too thick to shatter. She is humming away to herself inside her glass barrier, asleep even as she politely answers my questions. The barrier answers me: give up, give up. “Happiness is the intensest sort of prosperity and all Prosperity, I find, hardens the Heart—and happy people become so very prudent and far-sighted ...” She sees far past me.

The light seems to change (where did that voice come from?) its place of origin, shining now from down low, as if the world had flipped, and the deputy’s face has become a mask, not a lineament changed. It is the face of a corpse exhumed from permafrost ground I saw when I was a boy. The eyes stare at me, and a voice inside them says, directly to me, “It won’t be hard to break you, either.”

I leave the office without a word, and without taking my eyes from the sidewalk I feel a burden in the air, like a boulder rolling down the street behind me. I turn into a narrow alley, take two or three steps and a cold fist lodges in my stomach and dissolves there. This is the wrong way. I turn slowly, without wanting to, and face four deputies who are striding toward me down the alley like a human wall. I know they are supposed to seem solicitous and concerned but I can see black crumbling leers rending their dead soap faces, and I smell their breath of decaying bogs thick with frigid scum. Chuckling thickly in putrid scum they are coming for me. I try to turn with a body of lead, pushing out my heavy hand for a door standing ajar in the opposite wall, and I know I will grind to a stop and be caught and lost there forever in that hopeless moment turning to run from these deputies. It’s royal power, flowing from the capital through them. What do they want? Unbuckling their belts. Dry finger tips brush the wrinkles standing across the back of my shirt.

The handle of the door is rebounding from my hand, the hallway flies around me as though I were falling headlong. Out of control I burst through a flimsy door and nearly tangle myself in low washing lines. But I manage to bend and avoid them, the shapeless woman hanging these clothes stares at me too shocked to curse, stares after me, I can feel it, as I run away.

*