A few times I managed to get her up, and we limped her out to the chain-link fence, beyond which you could see the barbed wire and the military trucks, but beyond still those a patch of listless gray sea. It reminded us that there were still beautiful places left. From there we couldn’t smell the plastic people burned for warmth that hurt the lungs to inhale. Someone had dragged a busted easy chair out there, the fabric shredded and the crumbly yellow foam exploding through. But it was wide enough that both of us could get into it and sit shoulder to shoulder, and, looking out, we sometimes picked up this or that jumbled, unassembled thing that had happened to us all those years ago, and looked at it for a while without the hope of using it for anything or returning it to any rightful place. Not unrelatedly, there was a lot of trash blown up against the fence or lodged in its holes, plastic bottles and bags and so forth, and fifteen or twenty feet away from where we sat there was a large piece of torn black plastic that the wind had flung against the fence and arranged there in a shape that looked exactly like a coat. A long, wide-collared black coat with flowing folds that seemed to have been hung there as deliberately as one would hang it on a hook in the cozy entryway of a house, to wait until the owner was ready to go out again. So much did this piece of plastic sheeting resemble a coat that we watched first an old man and then a burly woman in a sailor’s hat hurriedly approach it until each got close enough for the illusion to reveal itself as just a piece of trash.

That coat—Sophie said, after the woman had gone off, slumped and sheepish—it reminds me.

The wind was playing in the hem of the thing.