On entering a tunnel and facing his reflection in the window, Kierk realizes he cannot remember the last time he shaved—has it been three months, four? He reaches down in the darkness and fiddles with the zipper of his bulging backpack, then forces the notebook between a tangle of boxers, socks, books, and crumpled paper. Everything he owns is either in this backpack or a member of the flock of books en route to New York in heavy cardboard boxes that he had packed early yesterday evening back on the cold concrete floor of the storage unit he had been renting in San Diego.

The bus shakes and something, some arrangement of perception—the familiar angles of looking out a window beyond the frame of a seat—had unlocked something inside him, a shuddering click that is felt as déjà vu. What about? His earlier dream? No. A memory. Another bus ride in New England, also in the summer heat, and then he is suddenly on the way to see the body, the corpse left when the grandmother on his father’s side had died. He had been eleven and Kierk’s mother, all hands bundled up in urgency, had rushed about stern-faced trying not to let Kierk see exactly how much of an inconvenience this all was. Then the two clamored, all in silent black and under the eyes of the other riders, into another hot and sticky seat, and then the shaking and grinding bus headed northward to Maine.