Standing there at the lower end of the coffin, his small hand on the smooth wood, the body before him seemed a fallen giant, and Kierk had begun to comprehend the personal momentousness that this should hold for him. Every decision, from moving to America when she was sixteen by taking a leap of faith away from Scotland (lost to history is that she was nearly gang-raped while waiting in a crowd at Ellis Island), to getting a job as a nurse during the war, where she had met Kierk’s grandfather at a hospital-sanctioned dance. He had been a patient at the ward where she had worked with returning veterans, but she had not been his nurse, indeed had never seen him, but he had seen her, watched her from his bed pass across the doorway in the corridor, just a glimpse really, and he had shown up to the dance with a bandage over his left eye and wrapped around the back of his head, which he suspected made him look dashing. So when he saw her again, smiling vaguely out at the dancing crowd, beyond herself, looking brokenheartedly apart as only the world-weary but still innocent can, he had crossed that dance floor—the longest in his life (the music and the dark forms moving, him brushing past them, eyes on his target, he had crossed the sands of Iwo Jima and the tight ambushing forests of Guadalcanal to cross this dance floor)—to ask this girl, this one girl out of all the girls, to dance. Each minor choice seemed to Kierk to multiply and expand, reverberating, sprouting branches and offshoots diachronically, until Kierk had been dumbstruck by the specificity of this woman whom he barely knew, this denser knot of choices to which he owed his existence. It was then that Kierk had begun, in his manners and childish convictions, to confront the problem of choice.

As the bus pulls to a stop and begins disembarking passengers, Kierk steps down onto the pocked underground of the city, breathes it, and is enchanted and disoriented at the same time. He makes his way through the bustle of Port Authority, down the long hot tunnels and veins of motions, advertisements, the clicks of polished business shoes. The boxed tunnels of the subway are haunted by jazz, the trembling notes of a saxophone clear, constant, real. He spends some awkward time standing in front of the big subway map, checking the address that’s written on his hand.