At first I tried to imagine it as a simple walk through the city but then I had the impression I was being chased, but I couldn’t see who was behind me, couldn’t tell whether I was being pursued by one person or many, or even whether it was a person or a thing. I just had the feeling that people were out there and that they were hostile to me. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, I knew that on my imaginary trek I wasn’t being hunted. I was looking for something, following something and I realized it was you. I wasn’t just looking for you but I started talking to you and I wondered whether it made any sense for me to talk to you, whether you existed outside my mind and the minds of people who knew you. Was some remnant of you somewhere in some darker dark than the dark in which I was lying? If I didn’t believe you were out there somewhere—and I didn’t, not really—it didn’t make sense for me here, in the dark, to talk to you, and you were “him” again, Greg, a thing, something past and gone.

Suddenly the temptation to yield not only to sleep but to death felt irresistible, leaving the harsh noises and bright lights, the jabs, pains and torments of life for the absence, for the nothingness, to join you, to be with you, or at least to share nothingness with you. For a time, as I lay there, listening to sounds from outside, watching the beams of headlights crossing the ceiling, I felt that anyone who killed me would be doing me a favor.

I lay in bed, peacefully, stolidly awake, for what must have been hours, waiting for the curtain edges to grow light, and then I realized that the shortest day of the year had only just passed and that daylight was still far away. I fumbled for my watch on the bedside table, knocking a lamp over. It was just after five. I got out of the bed, pulled on jeans, a shirt, a sweater, a thicker sweater on top of that, walking boots, then a bulky jacket of the kind you might wear on a trawler and a woolly hat. I left the house and started to walk, not as I had in my waking dream but northward.