He said he understood. I wanted to say, No you don’t, not everything, not the part that makes me interesting. I’d been following the promising leads all along and had no choice but to keep at it, wondering now and then if I’d become obsolete. In the street, on a bus, within the touchscreen storm, I could see myself moving autonomically into middle age, an involuntary man, guided by the actions of his nervous system. I said something about the job to Emma. Wasn’t what I wanted, didn’t meet my needs. She said even less in return. This was not surprising. She took things as they came, not passively or uncaringly but in the spirit of an intervening space. Him and her, here to there. This did not apply to Stak. Her son was what we talked about in one of our rooftop intervals, cloudy day, our customary place at the western ledge, and we watched a barge being towed downriver, inch by inch, discontinuously, with a few tall structures fragmenting our view. “This is what he does now.
