Beneath the stands he could see everything that the men and their girlfriends with the blue eye shadow threw down through the gaps between the benches. He studied the objects piece by piece, and if you walked all the way to the left or the right, you came to one of the places where the ice stuck out under the boards, at the round corners of the rink. On the small triangles there he could slide and skate in his sneakers without getting in anyone’s way. A little triangle of ice up against the boards and swoosh he glided forward, swoosh he glided back, while they thundered against the plexiglass: lumpy gloves and visors, jockstraps and shoulder pads, spitting, sweating, and swoosh he’d disappear beneath the bleachers.

It feels curious to picture himself standing so close to Lord Nelson. That he’s lying in there, one-armed and one-eyed. He read up on the Battle of Copenhagen at home. He knows that Nelson sailed south of the Middle Ground shoal on Maundy Thursday in 1801, and that the ships of the British fleet had marvelous names: Elephant, Defiance, Ganges and Monarch, Agamemnon and Désiree. He built models of Nelson’s ships as a boy. In the kits, the cannons were so small he had to use tweezers. Once he lost one of the tiny cannons in a glass of fruit drink and got the notion to swallow it. So that’s what he did. It was such a tiny cannon that he never felt it in his throat, and if it didn’t lodge in his tissue, he must have passed it in the bathroom. He didn’t tell her, out on the square, the bit about the fruit drink, though he did rattle off the names of Nelson’s ships. She wasn’t interested. He nudged her a little, asking her if she’d heard about the time Nelson put​ 96the telescope to his blind eye. Then she looked at him, and he raised his fist to one eye, adjusting an imaginary spyglass. “I do not see the signal,” he said.