I watched the land flatten out into a piebald mat of inky blue rock and phosphorescent snow, lone naked trees studded with black birds. Fewer and fewer red faces. I had a book called Syntax for Personal Narrative in my lap; I can’t recall reading it. “The responsibility of those who preserve events in language must be to ...”—to something something. Something about narrative grid of the weft of the archive to creative intuitive form, a slot-rhythm ingrained into writers, reciters, and listeners until even those events observed firsthand are experienced as if they were already written and being read back. Flatter and flatter the land, mountains always in the distance growing lower smoother and more rolling, taking me away from the land of Mnemosems maybe once and for all. We dropped out of the snow and the ground turned brown, then grey and pale gold as we dropped into the desert.

Festive music warbles in the cafe behind me, but I am the only customer here. The wind is moving trash in the empty street. I imagine releasing the lot I hold in my hand and permitting it to escape along this street. The trembling stars shout down to me, and the life that is in me shouts back. That I know I’m living goes up levels in me like surf rising against the tide marks. I’ve never been to the ocean, never seen it. How can I use such metaphors?

“... I’m sure it’s all very amusing,” says a woman’s voice going past in the dark.

You aren’t on your way to death, and I am; this is my moment—you get out of it.

I put the money on the table and go inside. The counterman’s doughy face makes him seem older than he is.

“Is there anywhere I can stay around here?” I ask in Cvaivrenew.

“Spare room upstairs I could let you have.” He holds up three fingers. I put three coins down on the counter and he waves me along behind him, points me up the stairs to the door. The room is tiny, without windows but not close, because the roof is nearly half gone; an irregular, round hole shows bare timbers. Warm air eddies around the room softly, there are stacks of boxes, ladder against the plaster wall, a hammock strung beneath the gap in the roof. I spin in place a little, back and forth—not much chance, I decide, of rising sun shining on me here. Huddle under a thin felt blanket in the hammock, head down on my chest. Sound of the wind lightly dragging its fingers over the city. Tears spill from my eyes in silence. Over me is pulled a cap of vigilantly staring night.

*