Out in the woods near my house my neighbor built a swimming pool and even after his grandkids moved away he cleaned it religiously. The clear water gleamed in the sun all summer and wasps touched down on the surface to drink before buzzing on. I walked to the pool almost every day because I liked coming to the clearing out of the cool woods and hearing the pool pump heave and cough in its tar-crusted cedar shack. Whenever my neighbor saw me, he saluted me as if glad to see me but then turned to walk through the tall grass to his house. Even when he was inside I liked to stay at the edge of the woods where I could see the wavering reflection of the water on the trees and tall grass and where I could hear echoes of the water boiling from the force of the pump.

One Saturday I saw a baptism there. Everyone was dressed for church except for the girl being baptized. She wore a white robe and her hair was tied in a thick ponytail. The crowd gathered on the side of the pool and she stood in the water next to a preacher in a dark suit. She doubled her arms at the elbow and clutched her fists next to each other just below her throat. The preacher kept a hand spread on her back and waved the other hand in the air. He talked about anointing and blood and clean account books. Some in the crowd nodded. Others stood still with their arms folded. One woman with her hair tied in a bun waved a Bible above her head. Even over the preacher I could hear her say, "Oh, help us, Jesus."

Over the crowd the sky was high and clear and the wind rushed around as if searching for something. A buzzard circled over the trees behind the crowd. He flapped once and then turned to circle in the opposite direction. The trees roared with the wind and brown pine needles fell in spiraling slants. Ripples blurred the surface of the pool.

The preacher held his hand up as if to pluck an orange and made a final pronouncement. Some in the crowd held their palms toward the sky. Then the preacher put his hand over the girl’s mouth and lowered her into the water and when he brought her up she was slick and blinking and her ponytail snaked heavily around her neck. The white robe was heavy with water and clung to her belly and thighs and showed her dark bikini underneath. The girl’s salvation went through the crowd in a sigh as she walked up out of the shallow end of the pool dripping and wiping at her eyes. She left little stains on the people that hugged her. Everyone in the crowd moved to touch her. The woman with the Bible said, “Oh, help us, Jesus,” and kissed the girl on the cheek while the girl stood shivering and curling her toes on the wet concrete.

Watching the crowd swallow her made me feel both jubilant and lonely. I married the girl in a blur in my mind and when I pushed the robe past her belly and breasts it was still heavy with holy water that ran down across her pale body and delivered me.

A few years later my neighbor died and they knocked down his house with a bulldozer. The crowd never came back and the pool pump rusted over and the last of the water gathered at the deep end in a brown slime. That spring I sat on the edge of the pool every day and watched the slime squirm with tadpoles. They had to fold their tails against their sides to make room for one another and they moved like polished stones boiling in a pot. When their legs came, the frogs bounced up the slant of the pool. Crows took a few but some made it to the high grass and disappeared. All that summer their shrieks for salvation echoed through the woods and into the bottom of the pool where the brown slime waited to feed another redemption.

I waited for Corey at the bar for an hour, reading an old book of short stories. The pages were dry and starting to brown but the low light of the bar suited them somehow and I could see the words quite well. And anyway it kept people from talking to me. So I held my chin and stared at the words even after I was tired of reading.

The bar was full of loud men, most with their ties pulled loose and hanging sideways as they drank. A lot of them were laughing and slapping each other’s arms and backs but when I looked around more carefully I saw that their faces were tense with anger. Some of them seemed to be expecting and maybe even hoping for a confrontation with a stranger. I watched a few of the men for a long time trying to confirm what I thought but the more I looked the more it seemed I had imagined it.

I read another passage from the book and enjoyed being hidden in the raging noise of the bar. The paragraph I was reading described a rain storm and reading it made me want to be in the rain or at least to be the man who had written about it.

For a while I felt imaginary rain on my hair and face. I imagined it sinking into my clothes and dripping from my fingertips when I moved my hands. It had a metallic taste and the cool, ancient smell of all the other rain I had known. I was looking at the book intently but the words had become blurred lines and when I thought of the book again I lost the smell of the rain and tried to figure if it had come from the book or from inside my head.

That was when Corey appeared at the bar and punched my arm. He wore a tattered overcoat and a day’s worth of dark stubble. His head was shaved clean. He nodded and let an eager grin stretch his mouth. “Only bastard I know goes to a bar to read,” he said, motioning to the bar. “Buy me a beer, will ya?”

But when the beer came he paid with crumpled bills from his overcoat and then sat with his back to the bar so he could watch the room while he drank. He kept licking his lips and showing his teeth after each sip. I leaned on my elbows and drank with two hands. The beer was cold and sharp with flavors and after drinking about half a glass I felt much better.

We were silent for a long while. I watched Corey drink and wondered if there was any way not to talk about what had happened. But then he said, “So, what happened? I know things have been shaky there.”

I looked around to make sure no one was listening and then said, “The hammer fell today. No surprise, really.”

Corey looked intently at me and touched his chin with two fingers. “No shit,” he said quietly. “No warning or anything? They just let you go?”

I nodded and drank beer, looking out over the bar and not at Corey.

“Jesus, man, that’s a crock,” he said, looking at me wide-eyed. Then he leaned toward me and spoke more quietly. “They gave you a little something for the road, right?”

I polished the beer glass with my thumb and shook my head, feeling heat on my neck and face. “Not enough to do any damage with. Lotta people got the axe and it was the same for most.”

I looked up at him for a moment and he looked at me with a pained expression. He scrubbed his mouth with his palm and cringed as he thought. “Geez,” he said very slowly, “what are you going to do?”

I turned my glass half a turn and drummed the bar with my knuckles. “Right now, I’m going to tie one on, but to be honest I haven’t thought much further than that.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and wiggled his elbows as if he were cold. “Well, look,” he said. “This is all on me. You need to conserve funds, so let me take care of it.”

After that he flagged the bartender and told her to combine our tabs. She looked at the two of us steadily or a moment – maybe figuring the tip – and then took his credit card from him and piled our receipts under it. Then she edged down the bar to take another man’s order and as she moved by me I had the urge to explain things. I even took a breath to speak but there was nothing to say that wouldn’t make it worse. Anyway, she most likely had heard it a thousand times.

I picked up the beer and let the cool foam at the top tickle my lip before I took a long drink with my eyes closed. I concentrated on swallowing and on tasting the beer and tried not to think of anything else. I let the noise of the bar roll over me and through me and I could feel bar smells weighing down my clothes.

Corey was quiet and kept watching the room as if he expected someone. Every now and then he cracked his knuckles and then laced his fingers to stretch them. He waved to some people at the back of the bar and raised his glass but no one came over. We both emptied our beers and ordered another before either of us spoke again.

“How’s the newspaper thing going?” I said finally. “You running the joint yet?”

He cringed and shook his head. “I still got the city council beat,” he said, “so it’s a yawner, mostly. But the crime editor wants me to follow up on his casino boat story. That could be fun.”

I nodded and uttered a cynical laugh. “Scribes and hypocrites,” I said, not sure of the biblical reference but liking the sound of it all the same.

“Vice in the big city,” he said. But now he was leaning on the bar and looking over the room again.

We fell silent for a while and concentrated on our drinks. Light from just below the bar filled crevices in the wood underneath my hands and made tiny white crescents in bubbles on the head of my beer. Nestled at the bar with nothing to say, I could feel time slow down a little and knew I would have a little space to think. I settled myself for a moment and emptied my head, only the space turned out to be more comfortable than thoughts, so instead of filling it I let it be.

Corey and I talked in spurts about things that didn't require any thought. He kept stabbing at humor and pointing people out to me, after a while noticing only women. "White shirt," he said, wagging his thumb without releasing his glass. "She's in accounting," he said, almost to himself. "I'd like to run the numbers."

I looked up and saw a new vacancy in his face and when I saw it I started to talk more. Between sips I made pronouncements about shrinking the government and every time I said more Corey nodded as if he had just been thinking the same. At first my ideas made sense to me but the more I drank and the more I talked the more they reminded me of loose strands trailing from a hopeless knot. Now Corey ran with the ideas, none of them like mine, really. But I only had energy for agreement so I kept nodding and flicking up my eyebrows while he spoke. We talked on and on about unconnected things and new glasses of beer kept bonking the bar in front of us.

At some point he leaned into me with his shoulder and stared at a space above my glass.

"Beer special," he said, nodding once to confirm the good sense of it.

Somehow during the course of the evening I wound up with a cigarette in my fingers, so I lit it with a soggy match and smoked while I talked. Beer seemed to slosh in my head as I spoke. None of my ideas had endings. Corey laughed and kept drinking and after I while I saw him smoking too. He blew thin streams of smoke while he listened and thumped the cigarette nervously. "That's it, man," he kept saying, "that's how it is." Sometimes I couldn't remember the point I had made but even when I didn't I would say, "I know, I know" with a smug nod.

Whenever there was a space in our conversation I could feel a hot metal band tighten around my head. I could only ease it by dipping my nose into the glass and pouring small sips of beer onto my tongue. Corey drank too, gulping more and sighing a lot. Finally, he grabbed my arm and pulled me toward him.

"This is your signal, man," he said very seriously. "It's time for you to do it."

I blinked away the fog in my head and tried to think and then realized he was talking about the book I had tried to write. When I thought of it the pressure left my head and a strange energy ran through my body and down to my feet. I had the sensation of finding money in the pocket of an old jacket.

I took another small sip and looked at Corey. "It's not like I won't have the spare time," I said.

Corey stopped blinking and I could see him breathing a little more deeply. After a few drinks he was always stricken with conviction but now his gaze had the weight of prophecy. "Seriously," he said. "You're half way there already. You just lost your footing."

His certainty swirled around me with the smoke of the bar and before long it was into my clothes and eyes and coarsening my throat. I relieved the scratch with a sip of beer and then felt it inside me like the warmth of a finished meal.

"You always see things so clearly," I said. "It just seems to leap up at you."

Now he was staring at his own beer and the muscles in his face seemed to slacken. "I'd love to have what you have, buddy. You have the gift. You just lack momentum. But I think even you can see you've been freed up, at least for a while. You got no family to support, no real obligations and now you've got spare time. It's not like you're gonna find a job tomorrow. Take the first half of your first day off to get part of it done."

For some reason I felt like a hand puppet. Everything I thought to say sprang from his idea. I watched the bartender for a while, feeling in my guts a future where she came home to me and brought the smoky comfort of the bar into our bed. Corey drank slowly, his eyes vague. I snatched a napkin from the stack on the bar and used a pen from the tip gutter to scribble the words, "smoky comfort of the bar." Then I adjusted myself on the stool, folded the napkin into my pants pocket and started to feel an indefinite surge, as if leaving the edge of a storm on the highway.

I could feel a lump of determination in my chest. When I spoke, I jabbed my finger at the wall. "I been talking all this time," I said, "but this time, I'm serious. I'm going to do it."

Corey nodded as if he had known it all along. His eyes were half closed and he held the beer close to his chest to keep it from spilling. "Just got to do it, man. You've had it all along. If this isn't motivation, what is?"

I nodded and poured beer into my mouth. There was no taste anymore, just a watery splash with bubbles and then a bitterness afterward. I snatched a pretzel from the dish and crunched it with my mouth open, thinking vaguely of action and feeling certain it was coming. "I'll have time," I said. "I won't have that excuse anymore. I'm probably better off, really, when you think about it."

"No doubt, man." Corey said. "Play the card." He sounded certain enough, but when he looked out across the bar again his face showed a shadow of another thought.

"Look, man," I said, "don't wait around on me if you got somewhere to go."

He shook his head and nabbed a handful of pretzels. Then he said, "No, forget it. I'm just waiting on someone." Then he straightened himself, shrugged as if to loosen his shoulders and took another long drink of beer. "I was hoping you could meet her," he said in a quieter voice, popping the pretzels into his mouth, one by one.

A roar from the bar rose around us and we stopped talking for a while. I let the light and movement around the bar dance in my eyes and didn't worry about speaking. Somewhere in a corner a woman kept saying, "Ohmygod, ohmygod" and then laughing shrilly. The bartender moved back and forth, leaning over the bar toward customers and then turning to lift heavy bottles of whiskey from the shelves behind her. Once she stopped and mixed a drink in front of me, pouring the whiskey through little metal spouts and watching the people at the bar without speaking while she did it. Then she winked at me and took the drinks away.

I turned to say something smug to Corey and when I did he was already gripping my arm and saying, "Hey, look, this is Melinda, the girl I was telling you about."

Melinda was short and thin with black straight hair and a half smile on her lips. Her eyes were sharp and focused and brilliantly white around her almond colored irises. I shook her hand and told her I was glad to see her and she let her smile widen but didn't speak.

Corey leaned toward me to speak, blowing sweet whiffs of alcohol into my face. "Melinda and I are going down to the riverfront tonight to see what's going on. You should come with us."

I waved them off, watching Melinda as I spoke. "Nah, I don't want to cramp your style. I was just going to drink a few before I headed home. You guys go do your thing." Melinda never flinched and even managed another small smile.

Corey nudged me and looked around. "Come on, man, don't stay in here all by yourself. Let's go do something." I looked at him and at Melinda. Her face was neutral and her mouth moved as if she were sucking candy. Suddenly, I wanted to get to know her and to hear her story. But when I thought about going with them, I felt trapped in a wet sack. I shook my head and motioned toward the whiskey lined on the shelves.

"Look, I don't want to horn in. Y’all have fun. I got all the company I need."

I thought I saw a little smile on Melinda's lips. Corey appeared to have taken a breath to speak but didn't say anything. We fell into a silence that might have been awkward but I wasn't sure because my mind kept tumbling like a hot dryer. We didn’t speak for a while.

Corey ordered a drink for Melinda, something pink that smelled like chocolate. She drank with her lips tight and kept clearing her throat, a gentle sound with a wet scrub in it. I wanted to smile at her and say something but my mind was blank. After a while, Corey started to tug at my arm again and talk about leaving as if we had agreed on it. I kept shaking my head and scrunching my mouth against the idea but the more he talked the harder it was to remember why I didn’t want to go.

Corey leaned on the bar, practically hanging over my drink. "Look, he said. "I'm not a shrink or anything, but this is the thing you do. You talk yourself out of doing things based on what you think other people want. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't okay. You had a rough day. Let's go have some fun."

My mind was swollen with indecision. I pictured myself alone at the bar and felt a stir of satisfaction. But the riverfront held smells and mild sounds that might distract me, too. I imagined doing one and then the other, almost forgetting that Corey and Melinda were waiting until Corey rested an open hand on my forearm.

"Come on," he said. "Break this habit. There is no real reason not to go."

"I don't know," I half whispered, holding my glass with both hands and then taking a slow drink to make time to think. I didn't want Melinda to see him wear me down but I could feel the pressure of his silence all around me. I looked at the two of them. Corey's face was rigid, his eyes darting to different points on my face. Melinda watched me too and when our eyes met she let a playful smile soften her expression. I knew then it was settled and waited for the right silence, my fingers lightly touching the bar and my eyes measuring the beer I was about to abandon.

"Ah, what the hell," I said. "Let's go. What's the difference, anyway?" I had momentum in my head like the weight of water and some small tilt had sent it in the direction of Corey's idea. I took a final drink of beer and looked at Melinda and Corey with a level expression to show them I was serious. Melinda shrugged to adjust the fit of her coat and Corey made a signal at the bartender and then paid her. I leaned over when she came by, wanting to say something clever, but when she looked openly into my face, concentrating for a second on my mouth, I was unable to speak. I left the bar with only one arm in my jacket, still thinking of the bartender's gaze. I tried to solve the memory of her expression as if it were a math problem but no answer would stick.

Now we were moving through the crowd and cold air toward the riverfront, which was pinpointed with light and thick with smells. I pulled my jacket close as we walked, sensing a new set of possibilities and trying to give them shape as we moved over the glistening pavers toward the uneven shadows of buildings near the water. Melinda walked with her arms crossed and scowled against the cold. Corey kept sliding his palms together and whispering, "Yessir, yessir," to himself as he walked.

We had a late dinner in a dark crowded restaurant that faced the river. Ships of containers glided past as we ate and an elderly man with thick fingers played Irish songs from a small stage. Melinda ordered a bottle of wine and we all had some. After a while, I noticed a second bottle even though I didn't see it come out. I sipped wine and ate little rubbery bites of shrimp. I had a strange elation bubbling somewhere in my chest. I kept falling in love with Melinda and wanting to tell her. Corey propped himself on the table with his elbows and pointed at us vaguely.

"This is a turning point," he said. Then he sort of looked away at the ceiling. "Everything's a turning point, the start of everything else."

Melinda toyed with a bite of shrimp and took a small sip of wine. The beginnings of a smile played on her lips and she finally spoke. "So what are you going to do next?" she said. Her voice reminded me of delicate wood.

Corey looked around the ceiling for the answer.

"That's it for me," I said finally. "I'm going to do it. I don't need another wake-up call."

Corey leaned toward Melinda but threw a limp hand in my direction. "This guy here writes like Hemingway and thinks like Voltaire. But he's been doing laps on the corporate treadmill lately. Going to waste."

Melinda nodded and said, "hmmm" while she chewed. A light sheen of grease glistened on her lip. I wanted for her to believe him. I felt like reciting something. Instead I smiled at her and took another drink. I felt safe with my nose in the glass, concentrating on breathing.

Corey looked at me earnestly, shaking his head lightly. "This is it, man," he said. "Don't waste another minute."

"I'll start right now," I said and we all laughed.

After that we stopped talking about it for a while. Melinda told about some things that had happened to her and I nodded a lot while she talked. But my head was full of silvery fog and most of the words were getting by me. Corey kept pouring wine into my glass and winking at me. He smoked and talked about a lot of things, holding the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and closing his eyes when he inhaled.

"We were halfway down the condo with the stolen drink machine," he said, finishing a story from earlier, "when the belt broke. The machine went down eight flights before it wedged against a door and stopped itself. Luckily no one was coming up, and luckily it cracked the sprinkler main and cleared the building. We just exited with everyone else and then walked home."

Every time he told the story, the drink machine fell further and after hearing it for a few years I found that my smile had become a tense mask.

I tried to tell a similar story, framing the air with my hands. But as I talked the people in the story turned to haze. "Anyway," I said at some point, but then couldn't finish. Neither of them seemed to care and I even saw Melinda smiling at me.

After a while I realized we weren't in the restaurant anymore. Now we were out next to the river moving through the crowd and the cold wind. Somehow I had gotten out of the restaurant with my wine glass. I kept performing a small miracle, turning the glass up and milking a cool, oak-flavored drop every time.

In the wind and noise, I felt a surge of warmth in my chest. I knew something big was moving toward me and kept wanting to tell Corey and Melinda but there were no words for it. We moved around through the bars near the river. The quiet singers had gone home and in one place we went a rock band was shrieking and glinting under a set of hot lights. We wedged ourselves into the crowd and for a while Melinda and I had to stand facing one another. Cool feathers of her breath kept brushing the bottom of my throat. When I leaned to give Corey my drink order I had to hold her shoulders and her forehead left dew on my neck.

People spilled into the bar in fitful knots. The crashing noise of the band thrummed through the floor and left a tickling vibration in my sternum. The crowd started to move as one drunk being but then a fight broke out and somewhere I heard a bottle break. The band stopped playing and left a harsh ringing silence in the room that drove some of us back into the darkness of the riverfront.

Outside the bar something broke loose inside of me and stories started to spill out. Corey and Melinda laughed and stood apart from me. At one point I mounted the base of an antique streetlamp and sang part of a song, my voice tainted with smoke. Standing above the crowd like that I could sweep my eyes across the riverside crowd and see twinkling boat lights on the river. A profound vision of humanity swirled in my head and I knew if I could find a sturdy desk and a pool of pleasant light I could get it all down. I touched the outside of my pants pocket to feel the folded napkin and the phrase I had written burned through to my fingers.

As we wandered the riverfront the sidewalk started to tip unexpectedly and I kept finding myself in other people's way. I spilled someone's drink while making a wild gesture but when I patted his arm and offered to pay for another he just wagged his hand and winked at me and then moved away into the crowd.

The riverfront started to sway and shift in strange ways. I was one place and then another without wanting it to happen or even thinking about it. My voice seemed to leap out of me when I spoke. "They can't fire me, I quit!" I shouted, hitting my chest like an agitated boxer. People around me laughed and pointed. I remember telling a stranger about the pool where I swam as a kid, a man so drunk his eyelids were betraying him. Without knowing why, I stood on a bench and watched the crowd again. A cool wind moved off of the river to touch the sheen of light sweat on my forehead and neck. Most of the boats were gone now and the river cut a dark silent space throught the lights on either side. No one seemed to notice it but me. Suddenly I was down from the bench and moving toward the water.

"Old Man River," I said, half singing. Behind me, Melinda laughed louder than before - a gentle liquid sound like the tiny waves on the edge of the river.

The crowd buffeted me as I went and now the sidewalk was tipping again. I half fell on the sidewalk, laughing. Corey tugged at me and almost before I knew it I was standing upright in the slanted noisy world again. I felt as if I were watching everything through curved plastic. But as I watched and tried to keep up, a confused peace moved around me like smoke. The blur and jangle of the night had made everything clear. On the invisible horizon I could sense the possibility I had wanted all along. If I concentrated, I could send myself in that direction, at least in my head, and feel it growing more real just from my thoughts.

I shook my head with determination, grabbing Corey's overcoat and holding him steady. "No shit, man," I said. "This time I'm going to do it."

"I know," he said quietly. A knot of capillaries bloomed at the corner of one of his eyes.

At the river I reached into the water and watched my hand under the surface. It was pale and wavery and underneath it the rocks near the bank shone like half buried armor from an impossible past.

"It's funny," I said, not knowing if they could hear me. "It's the same water all the time. Up, down, and past - for all time. Dinosaurs check out, mountains pitch camp, Jesus suffers, Rome falls, Nazis rampage, satellites gleam. And still here it is, same as it ever was. Off the hills, into the forests, through the villages - sometimes in a rage - locking itself on the caps for eons. Up, down, and past. Always, forever, and again."

The river seemed to be giving me its secrets. With my arms hanging I turned my palms toward the water and let the wind move through my open hands. I forgot there was anyone around. Diffused light in the haze above the river had taken the stars. The black sky hung behind and over everything and left its empty reflection all along the surface of the water. I closed my eyes and waited for a revelation - and there in the darkness with my head roaring and lightning streaks behind the lids of each eye I saw it as clearly as ever, felt the future that was coming. If I took a deep breath and steadied myself I could feel the certainty of everything I wanted anchored somewhere in the folds of my brain. I wanted to tell someone but the surety was too heavy for words. So I knelt on the wet sidewalk near the river and watched it, lived in the house by the mountain and listened to the old chrome coffee maker tell stories to the empty house. I passed by the writing desk, so like Hemingway’s, on twist-carved legs in the corner and smiled wryly at the typewriter with its smudges and its pile of finished pages. And I touched the heavy wood on the walls and some of the low beams. I may have even said out loud, “low beams,” though no one heard me if I did.

I went on that way for a while. Words moved out of me without effort and I felt at times as if I were floating along the edge of the water. Once I stopped and settled into myself, wriggling my fingers and toes to work out the tension. Suddenly and for several moments afterward I absorbed everyone and everything under the black dome of the sky.

"What are you doing?" I heard Corey say from afar.

"I'm just being," I said, holding my mouth open for an extra second to catch the stale taste of the air. It went into me like water, carrying a cool sensation through my limbs and into the pit of my stomach.

But then something changed. Something inside of me tumbled and I opened my eyes. The river moved slowly by, catching scoops of light in its ripples. I watched a spot on the surface as it moved along and after only a few breaths it left me hopelessly behind and made the big turn toward the ocean. I concentrated and gnashed my teeth, trying to freeze things, but I had no magic left. The world had moved on and the delirium from before had condensed on my skin in a polluted wax. There was no hint of morning but I could feel the new day creeping along the earth as if it were a strange plague of light.

Corey appeared beside me at the river with his hands deep in his overcoat pockets. He wore the grim smile of a stranger at a funeral and kept looking from me to the river, giving up after a while and letting his gaze settle on the water. He flicked his eyebrows up and moved toward me. He seemed to be holding liquid in his mouth and wondering whether to swallow.

Then he looked at me steadily and gripped my arms for a second. His face stiffened. "Look," he said gently. "I don't want to leave you hanging here, but Melinda wants to go back to her place." He swallowed deeply and blew a long breath through his nostrils.

Somehow, the weight of his determination settled on my chest. I could feel a whole set of expectations dying somewhere in my head. I punched his arm and built a hard, fake grin with my lips. "You damn dirty ape," I said, a little too loudly. "Of course I'll get lost."

Suddenly, Melinda flared in the corner of my vision. She stood near a streetlamp with her arms folded and kept kicking a trash can as if to ensure it was real. Before, I had had an idea about her and now it was dead. As I watched her thin form against the bright reflection on the sidewalk my skin felt cool and heavy, as if we had just parted in anger.

"You're a good friend," Corey said, moving away from me. "We're gonna figure this whole mess out; don't even worry about it."

We stood silent for a moment, not sure how to move away. He touched my shoulder and looked at me closely, but now he reminded me of an earnest salesman.

"We can stay if you want," he said in a limp voice. "It's just that she brought it up..." Stumbling into silence, he looked around for a moment as if he had lost something.

"Don't worry about it, comrade," I said, calling on our old pet name to ease the tension. "I'm a third wheel here. Anyway, I need to go sleep this off and get some things done tomorrow."

The sensible talk dried my mouth and sent a hot flush out of my shirt collar and up over my face. I pictured myself at the bar where we had started and wondered what was happening in the space I had filled there, who was staring into the quick open smile of the bartender. The shrimp and wine had gone sour in my gut and my eyes burned at the rims.

"I'll call you tomorrow," he said, moving away toward Melinda. "We'll get started. Meanwhile, go write something. Don't let this one get by you."

I didn't like his implication and dismissed him with a wave. "Go!" I said. "Forget it. You're acting like we're breaking up."

He laughed and kept moving away, turning his back to me as he went, readying his face for whatever expression he was going to offer Melinda.

I shouted goodbye to Melinda but the crisp wind and noise at the river tore my voice to shreds before it could reach her. Melinda didn't say anything or look at me as they walked away.

I turned away from them to face the thinning crowd by the river. People were further apart and quieter than before. Lone drunks cracked echoes of profanity against the water and the low dark sky. The smell of fish and river gunk moved with the air coming off of the water.

I trudged along the edge of the water imagining the solitude of my unlit apartment. My head throbbed with vague thoughts and I had the sense of being in a looping dream where even the hardest certainty led to another baffling stumble. Scowling strangers wandered the riverside. A cold mist invaded the air by the water. I could see it swarming in halos of light around the streetlamps.

I angled my steps toward the bar, which was near home. A sour film coated my mouth and just above my belly I could feel a knot of heat starting to boil. I touched my stomach and closed my eyes for a second, imagining a seal above my gut to smother the churn. For a moment I felt hidden in my own darkness and thought I might recapture whatever had pushed me through the crowd earlier in the night. But just as I seemed to be getting close to it I missed a step and collapsed over the pavement of the riverwalk and into the slimy river. The water soaked one leg and gushed for a second over the waistband of my pants. I stood quickly in the shallow muck and my jacket pockets swung by my sides, leaking gray water back into the river. Clouds of dead moss swayed in my shockwave. I climbed back onto the pavement with one leg encased in frigid cloth and both shoes oozing water. In a panic I fished the napkin from my pocket and tried to unfold it. The words were gone. Only a few slashes remained and even they seemed to have been scribbled by a stranger, maybe even a child. I put the mess of gummy paper into my pocket again, half believing it would repair itself. No one seemed to have noticed my strange baptism.

On the way back to the bar the world seemed to empty. I walked with a mild limp, favoring the wet leg, and ambled off of my route a lot to give my clothes time to dry. My head was filled with tattered echoes of someone else's story and when I tried to piece them together I remembered the book I had been reading in the bar. I had one talisman left then, and walked toward it more quickly, again touching the ruined napkin in my pocket.

A different set of people had filled the bar. They were spread around in the dim light, hunched over drinks. One man's empty glass was clouded with smudges and he seemed to be willing it full again. A din of music poured from speakers near the ceiling, a woman's voice wavering in it. The new bartender was a barrel-shaped man with filmy eyes and a faded string of tattoos staining the loose skin on his forearm. He stood in front of me holding the bar with both hands. A tarnished watch bit into the pale skin of his wrist.

I asked him if anyone had found the book I left behind. His face convulsed in confusion.

"It was a book of short stories," I said. "Kind of dusty, with a gray cover."

He looked back and forth under the bar but his eyes seemed to touch nothing. He shrugged and fingered one of his tattoos.

"Nah," he said, almost to himself. "No one left anything like that in here."

Then he turned away and snatched a handful of dripping tumblers from a sink under the bar. The music from the speakers died and left a strange hush all around. A wet cough erupted somewhere in the shadows and I heard a heavy glass bump against a table.

I walked along the bar looking for the book. The dark shadows of the room burned in my eyes. After a while I knew I wasn't going to find anything but had a kind of empty momentum in my muscles that pushed me from one spot to the next. No one looked up at me as I went by. I felt as if I were feeding off of the darkness somehow, or melting into it. After haunting the area near the bar for a few moments I started to think again of home. I pictured the black solitude of my apartment and felt the urge to finally get to it.

When I leaned on the door of the bar to leave, a breath of moist air moved around me and into the room. I looked back once more as I left but didn't recognize the place anymore. Shadows seemed to be leaking from the corners of the room. A harsh smoky current of air whooshed out after me as the door closed and I walked away in the darkness with my thumbs hooked into my pockets. The folded napkin tickled one thumbnail, now just an artifact from a strange past. My eyelids scrubbed like sandpaper and the muscles of my wet leg squirmed and twitched to be released. I watched the sidewalk as I moved, trying not to think. Pretty soon I was able to fill my head with nothingness. So much so that when drops finally started to fall from the sky I moved through them with no feeling except mild astonishment that they had taken so long to come.

The icy water invaded my neck and shoulders and bled through my shirt to my chest and belly. It was, as I knew, all the same water after all – the rain from my daydream, come round at last. Up, down, and past, always, forever, and again.

Walking with no real purpose, I let a weak smile of recognition cross my face as drops fell in a growing roar on the sidewalk and street. As I moved my heavy feet through the water, the rain washed away what was left of the day, rushing down glistening gutters and over the lips of drains by the road. By now the black water under the grate was alive and moving on. I stopped for a moment to listen and thought I could hear it under the road, rolling over itself like a liquid muscle and churning relentlessly through dark pipes until it finally found the open sea.