That evening, the light stole into my hotel room and covered everything evenly. What it all seemed to require, I thought once again, was a mutation in the grammar of looking. If one could only reset it all, the order of things, break down the systems that defined one’s vision, that regulated one’s course of action. Undo everything, learn to see things clearly, to speak again, to be intelligible to one another: to make plain. Love was fugitive, and faltering; it was not faith, it was not promise. We met each day as strangers. What basket could be woven that would bear this weight? Light as a feather, stiff as a board. There was only so much I could have done, I saw that now. I had acted, if not well, if not even decently, at least without any malignant intent. I lay back on the bed and watched television, a group of people in business attire engaged in busy explanation. They were floored, they said. Democracy in America and so on. Not there when we needed them most, they considered commitment to be both the answer to the problem posed and the problem itself. I began to doze. Had we seen their urban chickens, asked one of the people. Had we seen their bicycles. Someone had stolen their bicycles. I woke suddenly. Why had I come. The world and its vice-like grip around my chest. One was free to go for a restorative walk in the woods, by all means, but more often than not, it seemed to be the case that there one would find a body floating belly-up in the creek. One’s closest friends and relatives saw one off, wishing one good luck and a slow ride up a long hill. On the television now, a seagull snatched a baby bird from beneath its mother and swallowed it whole. I had never bothered to learn about birds, even when owls seemed to be having a moment I could not bring myself to find out why. One bird was the same as another, as far as I was concerned. A second chick hid underneath the mother, who pretended to ignore the gull’s continued incursions. The gull pecked in the air around her and she remained immobile. I rose to open the window. A few streaks of cloud hung in the pale sky. In the street below, a group of people of about my age wended their way towards the river, each with his or her arm draped around the shoulders of the person on either side. After all, they seemed to be enjoying themselves, these people. They had had a bit to drink, perhaps had gone dancing. One shrieked as the heel of her shoe broke off. Laughter. Another carried her on her shoulders, staggering slightly. I yawned. I had never been able to make out quite what it was all about. I wondered if they were going to swim in the river. I had always liked that, swimming in a river, in the summer, early morning, the cold water combing through my hair as I swam upstream. There were seasons for everything. The rapids too dangerous at a certain time of year. So many rules it was so easy to transgress, unknowingly, and at great personal cost. And still there were people out in the early hours, laughing; still one was cajoled by the deep whirlpools to swim in the river too early in the spring. It was so short a space of time in which the days were long and getting still longer, so quick for the nights to lengthen by a few minutes here, a few minutes there. One walked out of the front door on any given spring evening, feeling this inside of oneself, how brief it all was, how there had not been enough time, all the tasks left undone, tasks one had barely begun before it was too late, how one ought to have been better. There was something in the way the trees moved at this time of year, the way the leaves tossed in the street light at night, a lushness. But it does not have to be like this, I thought. At last, I slept.