THIS DAY AND this night are a coin. Flip it, and in rapid succession first one thing and then the other, in constant, indecisive revolution. I am standing at the bottom of a steep paved road where the eastern edge of the cemetery meets the dirty slate-colored river, the Seekonk River, and it’s a cold day in early May. As a lifelong Southerner, only recently transplanted to New England, that’s a concept I’m still not comfortable with, cold days in early May. Standing here, looking out across the choppy waters of Bishop Cove, across almost four hundred yards to the opposite shore, the day seems even colder than it is, the wind sharp enough to peel back my skin and remind me how terrible was the winter. How terrible and how very recent and how soon it will return. The wind rattles the branches all around, and I reluctantly button my cardigan and hug myself. I look up into the stark face of the wide carnivorous sky, squinting at all that merciless blue, not a brushstroke of cloud anywhere at all. What sort of god permits a sky like that? It’s a question I would ask in all seriousness, were I not an atheist. The trees sway and shudder in the wind like unmedicated epileptics. The new leaves are still bright, their greens not yet tempered by summer and inevitable age. This is the face of the coin, this afternoon at the edge of the cemetery. I’m not alone. There’s a young woman sitting only a few feet away. She sits on the hood of her car and smokes cigarettes and talks as if we are old friends, when, in fact, we’ve only just met and only by the happenstance of our both having arrived at this spot at more or less the same time on the same cold, windy day in early May. She’s at least twenty years my junior, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, not even a sweater, as though this is a much warmer day than it is. There’s a big padded camera bag on the hood beside her.

There are swans in the water.

“You teach?” she asks me, and I say that yes, I do.

“But I’m not a very good teacher,” I add. “I didn’t get into science to teach.”

“You’re at Brown?”

Around us, the trees sway and creak. The river laps against the shore. The swans, hardly even seeming to notice the wind, bob about on the waves and dip their heads beneath the water, foraging in the shallows. I notice that their long necks are dirty from all the sediment stirred up by the waves and the currents and by their hungry, probing bills. Their white feathers seem almost as if they’ve been stained with oil.

I point at the birds and ask the girl, “Is that why it’s called Swan Point?”

She shrugs, stubs her cigarette out against the sole of her boot, then flicks the butt towards the river.

“You shouldn’t do that,” I tell her. “They’re poisonous. Birds and fish eat them. Fish eat them, and then birds eat the fish. In experiments, the chemicals from a single filtered cigarette butt killed half the fish living in a one-liter container of water. Plus, they’re made of nonbiodegradable acetate-cellulose. Every year, an estimated 1.6 billion pounds of—”

“Jesus, yeah, okay,” she says and laughs. “This isn’t a classroom. You’re not on the clock, professor.”

“Sorry,” I say, not meaning it, not sorry at all, but I’m embarrassed, and so I apologize anyway.

This is the face of the coin.

The coin is in the air, turning and turning, ass over tit.

“I don’t know why it’s called Swan Point,” the girl says, and she lights another cigarette. For only an instant, a caul of grey smoke hangs about her face before the wind takes it apart. “I never bothered to ask anyone. I just like coming here. I’ve been coming here since I was a teenager.”

The wind, blowing up off Narragansett Bay, smells like low tide on mudflats, like sewage, like sex, primordial and faintly fishy. It roars across the water, ruffling the feathers of the swans, and it roars through the trees, giving them fits. I dislike the wind. Not as much as I dislike that blue sky hanging above me, and not as much as I dislike the cold, but enough that I wish I’d waited on a less blustery day to wander down to this spot I’ve glimpsed on other drives and walks through the cemetery. One of the swans turns its head towards me, seeming to glare with its tiny black eyes, such tiny eyes for so large a bird. It only watches me a few seconds before turning its attention back to feeding, and maybe it was only my imagination that it was ever watching me at all.

“They don’t actually belong here,” I say.

“What?” the girl asks. “What don’t belong here?”

“Those swans. I mean, that particular species of swan. Cygnus olor. They’re an invasive, introduced to North America from Europe back in the 1800s.”

“Yeah,” the girl says without looking at me. “Well, they don’t hurt anyone, do they? And at least they’re pretty to look at.”

“They’re that,” I agree. “Pretty to look at, I mean.”

“Someone murdered one last fall,” she says. Not killed. She says murdered. “Broke its neck, then nailed it to a tree.” And she points to a large red maple not far away. “That tree there. Drove a nail through the top of its skull, and one through each shoulder. Wait, do swans have shoulders?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Swans have shoulders.”

“Okay, well, that’s what they did, whoever killed the swan. Almost like they were crucifying it, you know. There was a reward offered by the cops or the SPCA or someone like that. Two thousand dollars to help them catch the person who murdered the swan. The reward started off at fifteen hundred, but went up to two thousand. I gotta tell you, I could have used that money. But I don’t think they ever caught the person responsible, the swan murderer. Who the fuck would do something like that? Who the fuck is sick enough to nail a swan to a tree?”

I didn’t have an answer for her, and I didn’t offer one. The sky had been bad enough without the mental image of a swan nailed to a tree.

“You know about birds,” she says, then takes a long drag off her cigarette.

“It was just the one?” I ask her. “Only one swan was killed?”

“As far as I know,” she replies. “Of course, who’s to say the sick fuck didn’t kill more of them, and all those others were just never found?”

“What an awful thing,” I say. “What a terrible, awful thing.” And I’m wishing that she hadn’t told me, that she’d kept it to herself, wondering why she felt the need to tell a stranger about a murdered swan.

She shrugs again and exhales smoke. “I hope it was senseless,” she says, “because I’d hate to know the logic that would lead a person to break a swan’s neck and then nail its corpse to a tree. I’d prefer to believe there was no reasoning at all behind an act like that, that it was completely fucking thoughtless.”

The coin that is on one side a day and on the other a night flips.

I close my eyes and rub at my eyelids, at the bridge of my nose, wanting to change the subject, but at a loss as to how I can do so.

And the tumbling coin turns its face away from me. Tails. So, I’m camped out on a settee upholstered with sky-blue velvet that, like everything else in this house, has been worn smooth and threadbare. The very floors beneath my feet are threadbare, having been so long trammeled by so many feet and with such force that the varnished pine boards seem to me exhausted and ready to shatter into splinters. The only light in the room, way up here on the third floor of the house, comes from tall cast-iron candelabras spaced out along the high walls, but it’s plenty enough that I can see the dancer. The heavy drapes have been drawn against the July night, against the moon and the prying stars. In one corner of the room, there’s a quartet: cellist, violist, the two violins. The air is thick with an incense formulated in accordance with Ayurvedic principles; in this instance, a hand-rolled tattva incense from some nook or cranny of the Himalayas, herbs, resins, gums brought together in the service of air, and my nose wrinkles at the almost overpowering reek of patchouli. I’m drinking beer. I don’t even know what brand. It was placed in front of me, and I’m drinking it, and I’m watching the dancer as she whirls and swoops and bares herself for unseen Heaven beyond the ceiling of the room, beyond the attic, the roof of the house, the shingles. The beer is flat and going warm and tastes like fermented cornflakes. But that’s okay. No one comes to this house to drink, this house hidden deep within the squalor of Federal Hill. My head hurts, and I pop two Vicodin, washing them down with the flat beer, and I wait for the tall, dark-complexioned man sitting beside me to say something. To say whatever it is he’s going to say next.

That turns out to be, “So, does Providence agree with you? I trust you’re settling in well?”

“I am,” I reply. “As well as can be expected. I miss Birmingham.”

The man sips his whiskey and bitters and nods his head. “I’ve never been so far south as that. Fact is, I’ve never been any farther south than Pittsburgh.”

“You should remedy that,” I tell him and smile. Despite my headache, I’m in good spirits, my mood buoyed by the dancer, by the musicians as they draw the strains of the second movement of Bedřich Smetana’s “Z mého života” from their instruments, and by simply being here, in the house. The house itself is a tonic.

“You miss the heat?” he asks.

“I miss the heat,” I reply, nodding my head, “and I miss the fieldwork, getting my hands dirty, the grit under my nails, the sweat, all that. But I have a good job here. I shouldn’t complain so much.”

The dancer comes very near the sky-blue settee then, and her white hair, plaited into a single braid that hangs down past her ass, swings like the tail of a beast. Her eyes meet mine, but only for an instant, half an instant. They are such a vivid, unreal shade of blue, lapis lazuli, ultramarine, that I know they must be contacts. Her bare, callused feet hammer the boards, and then she’s gone again.

“She came to us all the way from Amsterdam,” says the man, and he nods towards the dancer. I don’t know the man’s name, but I know better than to ask. “She’s quite talented, yes?”

“Very much so,” I say, knowing that the time for small talk is passing. The coin is turning, rotating as it’s carried up and away from the surface of the world, vainly seeking escape velocity. We’ve sat here almost an hour now, me nursing my beer, him drinking scotch after scotch. For a time he talked about my work, in such a way that I could tell he wanted to impress me. He’d even read the papers in Nature and the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and he asked specifically about the fauna from the Tuscaloosa Formation, about the basal hadrosauroids Eolophorhothon progenitor and Tuscaloosaura psammophilum, the tyrannosauroid Phobocephalae australis, and the little nodosaur, Heliopelta belli. However, he wasn’t especially interested in what these discoveries from the Alabama Black Belt meant to paleontology and our understanding of the Late Cretaceous of the Appalachian subcontinent; he was, instead, fascinated by the nomenclature, the meanings of the binomina, the process of choosing and publishing names. Regardless, it was honest interest, and I appreciated that very much. There are few things I find more tiresome, more entirely exasperating, than politely feigned curiosity.

The book is resting on the settee between us, a small antique photo album that was already a century old when I was born. I gently touch the flaking red-leather cover with the fingers of my left hand.

The dancer passes very near again, naked except for her borrowed feathers.

The man glances at her, then me, then at the book.

“We all thought it was lost forever,” he says. “We had every reason to believe exactly that after the fire, after the purge, what with all the years that came and went with no one having heard even a rumor the book might have survived the flames.” He doesn’t yet touch it. That’ll come later, when it is finally no longer my burden.

“Your mother would be proud,” the man says. “She was a strong, fine woman, a brilliant woman, and it is a crime she was denied her time as the book’s keeper.”

“When I was a kid,” I say, not exactly changing the subject, “when I was very young, she would tell me stories of Providence. She’d tell me stories of this house and of the city, and she’d tell me stories of the swans and the river.”

“I wish I could have met her,” he says and smiles. I dislike his smile. His lips are pale and thin. One could look at his smile and be forgiven for thinking that he has too many teeth. “But, as I understand it, she never traveled, and, as I’ve said—”

“—you’ve never been farther south than Pittsburgh.”

“Exactly,” he says. “Now, please, tell me again of the day you found the book.”

I’m wishing the Vicodin would kick in, impatiently waiting for the opioid rush to wash away my headache. I’m not exactly in the mood to repeat that story, how I found the photo album. I would far rather simply hand the book over to this man with too many teeth, this man who will be a proper guardian, and then watch the dancer and listen to the music. But I am a guest here, no matter my pedigree and no matter that I’ve come bearing so marvelous a gift. For now, I am a guest. And it would be a breach of etiquette to beg off. The observation of proper etiquette is very important here. It’s only a story, even if it really happened, and it’s a small thing to ask of me to tell it again. I have another sip of my flat beer, thinking back to how I told him the story before and trying to decide if I want to tell it the same way the second time around.

“It’s not actually a random phenomenon,” the man says.

“What isn’t?” I ask him.

He leans over, depositing his empty glass on the floor at his feet. “A coin toss,” he says as he sits up again. “So long as the initial conditions of the toss are known—velocity, angular momentum, position, etcetera—then it’s a problem that can be modeled in Lagrangian mechanics. If you are intent on burying yourself so deeply in this metaphor, you ought to understand its limitations.”

On the shore of the Seekonk River, a city of narrow houses at my back, I’m listening to a young woman who hasn’t introduced herself talk about dead swans. In the house on Federal Hill, a man who can see my thoughts is asking me to tell him a story he’s already heard from me twice.

“A practiced magician,” he continues, “an accomplished illusionist, he can control a coin toss with a surprising degree of precision.” And then the man laughs and taps the side of his nose. A word to the wise. Just between you and me.

The girl sitting on the hood of the car lights another cigarette.

The dancer spins.

“Please,” says the man sitting beside me on the settee. “I’d love to hear it again.”

I almost ask him for something stronger than the beer, but only almost.

“Well,” I begin, “there was this one fellow kept stopping by the site. That pretty much always happens, the curious locals. If you’re lucky, they just want to have a look at what you’re up to, find out why someone would be rooting around in Farmer Joe’s back forty or what have you. If you’re lucky, they don’t start in about Noah’s Flood or the evils of the great lie of evolution. When they do, of course, you have to be polite and listen, nod your head, not get into arguments, because you never know who any given ignorant redneck might be related to. He could well be the first cousin of the guy who’s given you permission to dig on his land. Anyway, this one guy, he wasn’t like that. He’d studied some geology at Auburn, and he asked intelligent, thoughtful questions.”

“And he told you about the train?” the man asks me, as though he doesn’t already know the answer.

“He did,” I reply. “He told me about the boxcars.”

The dancer pirouettes, making three full turns on the ball of her left foot. The feathers along her arms and shoulders rustle like dead leaves, and I’m surprised that I can hear them over the music. I wonder if it’s some trick of the room’s acoustics, if it’s a happy accident or by design. And, for the second time, I begin telling the man about the abandoned railroad cars and the dead crows. He seems to take great delight in the tale. I can’t help but feel, now, that the coin has risen as high as it possibly can, and all of its momentum has been spent. At any second, I think, gravity will reclaim it, reasserting its primacy, and the coin will begin its rapid, inevitable descent.

Call it.

Kopf oder Zahl.

“Heads,” says the girl at the eastern edge of Swan Point Cemetery. “I always hated the way that Granddad would cut off the heads of the ducks he killed and nail them to the boathouse wall. But it was how he kept up with what he’d shot over the season.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone doing that,” I say, and I check my watch. I have a four o’clock lecture, and it’s already a quarter to three.

“Well, he’d do it every year,” the girl says. “It’s how me and my sister learned to tell mallards from mergansers, eiders from wood ducks, sitting out there with my grandfather’s grisly little menagerie. Swans, they’re not ducks, are they?”

“They’re in the same family,” I tell her, “but they’re more closely related to geese than to ducks.”

An especially strong gust of wind rolls off the river, and I turn my back to it. To the river and the wind. My ears are beginning to hurt from the cold. How can this be May? I think. How can this possibly be May? For a dizzying moment or so, I have trouble recalling the last time that I was truly warm.

“Can I tell you a story?” the girl asks. The wind doesn’t seem to be bothering her the way it does me, or not bothering her as much, which, I admit, makes me angry.

“About your grandfather’s boathouse?” I ask, turning up the collar of my cardigan and wishing I had a wool cap with me.

“No, no,” she says. “I told you all there was to that. This is something else. But, I don’t know, maybe they’re connected somehow. At least, they seemed to be connected in my head.” And, as she talks, she unzips her camera bag and takes out a Pentax K1000 35mm. It’s refreshing to see someone as young as her using film instead of digital. She slips the strap around her neck, then checks the settings and peers through the viewfinder, aiming the camera nowhere in particular.

“Doesn’t the wind bother you?” I ask her.

“I don’t mind. It’s not so bad today. It was worse yesterday.”

“You were raised here?”

“No, I’m from Maine, not far from Portland.”

I tell her that I’ve never been to Maine, and she tells me that I haven’t really missed much.

“Anyway,” she says, “the story, I won’t get into it, not if you don’t want to hear or don’t have the time. I saw you check your watch.” She lowers the camera and looks at me. “It’s just, the thing with the murdered swan, and then Granddad’s boathouse, you know the way shit reminds you of other shit, like dominoes getting knocked over. Free association. Whatever.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know how that is. Sure, I’ve got time to hear a story.”

“Okay, well, when I was eight, that summer, not long after my eighth birthday, there was a whole week in July when I kept finding feathers in my bed. Me and my mom both found them.”

A few feet from shore, three of the swans, moving in what could pass for perfect unison, dip their heads and long necks beneath the dark river.

“Every night, I’d turn back the sheets, and the bed would be full of feathers.”

“You didn’t have a feather mattress, I assume.”

“No, and besides, it wasn’t like that. What do they stuff feather mattresses with? Chicken feathers? Duck feathers? No, these were all different sorts of feathers. Blue jays, cat birds, crows, mockingbirds, robins, even seagulls, and there were some sorts we never did figure out what they were. I’d turn back the covers, and there would be dozens of feathers in my bed. Jesus, it was weird. And it went on for a whole week, like I said. Dad was in Italy on business—”

“Italy? What does your dad do?”

“Did. He’s retired.”

“What did your dad do?”

“He was an engineer, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the story, except that he was away when this happened. At first I thought it was my sister putting the feathers in my bed. She was a year older than me. We had a huge fight when I accused her of doing it, and Mom sent her to stay with my grandparents for a few days.”

“Same grandparents had the boathouse?” I ask.

“No, that was my father’s parents. These were my maternal grandparents. But it didn’t matter. The feathers showed up, anyway, without her being there. Every night, a handful of them, all those different colors and shapes, and my mother kept having to change and wash the sheets, because she was paranoid about birds carrying diseases. My bed smelled like Lysol....”

The girl trails off for a moment, watching the swans bobbing on the rough, wind-tossed river. “What do you call a group of swans?” she asks.

“That depends. If they’re flying, you call a group of swans a wedge, because of the formation they fly in, because it’s wedge-shaped. If they’re not flying, like these swans,” and I motioned towards the river, “a group of swans is called a lamentation.”

“That’s sort of melodramatic, don’t you think?” she says, then lifts her camera again and spends a few seconds watching the swans through the viewfinder.

“So, it wasn’t your sister,” I say, prompting her to continue.

She lowers the camera again and nods. “No, it wasn’t my sister. It kept happening after she left, and never mind there was no way she’d ever have gathered up that many feathers. It really scared my mother. Me, I was mostly just annoyed and angry and wanted to know who was playing such a stupid trick on me. I even thought maybe my mom was doing it and just pretending it was upsetting her. That was even dumber than blaming my sister, of course, but at the time I either didn’t realize it or, you know, just didn’t care.”

I look back up at that insatiable too-blue sky. “But then it just stopped, after a week?”

“No, something happened first, then it stopped after a week.”

The dancer’s bare and busy feet have made a percussive instrument of the floor, and I have the distinct impression that she’s setting the tempo and the string quartet is having trouble keeping up. Her feet are dusted white with resin.

The coin is falling now.

“What was that?” I ask. “What happened?”

The girl takes a drag off her cigarette, then begins fussing about with the lens of her camera.

“I was sitting at the desk,” she says, “the little desk in my room where I sat and did my homework and stuff. I was sitting there after breakfast one morning reading a book—I don’t recall what the book was, I sort of wish that I did—and a raven flew into the window. It hit the glass so hard it was like a gun going off. Bam! Scared the shit out of me, and I screamed, and—”

“It killed the raven,” I say, interrupting her.

The girl laughs. “Fuck yeah, it killed the raven. It even cracked the windowpane. Crushed the poor thing’s skull, I guess. Broke its neck at the very least. Cracked the window and left a smear of blood on the glass, it hit so hard.” And she laughs again. It’s a nervous, uneasy sort of laugh. “How fast do ravens fly?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “But there were no more feathers in your bed after that? That’s what made them stop appearing?”

She turns her head and stares at me. “Yeah, there were no more feathers in my bed after that, and at the time, that’s how it seemed to me, that somehow the death of the raven had made whatever was happening stop. Like, I don’t know, like a sacrifice?”

“But that’s not what you think now?”

“I don’t know. Questions of causation and correlation and what have you, right? But something else happened that same day, the same day the raven smacked into my bedroom window.”

“And what was that?”

The wind blows, and I smell the salty, sour bay.

Drops of sweat fall from the dancer’s naked body and speckle the dusty floor.

“I got my period. My first period. I was only eight, but....” And again she trails off and sits smoking and pretending to adjust the Pentax’s aperture settings.

“You were young,” I agree, “but it happens.”

“Mom, she blamed hormones in milk and beef and stuff, but, like I said, causation and correlation. Who fucking knows? Point is, that day a raven went kamikaze on my bedroom window, and I got my period, and the creepy thing with the feathers in my bed stopped. And that was that. It’s not a very satisfying ending to a story.”

“Usually, the world doesn’t come with satisfying endings attached,” I tell her, and she shrugs and begins taking photographs of the feeding swans.

On the third floor of the house on Federal Hill, I sit with the smiling man on the blue settee, the antique photo album between us, and he listens to me tell my own story.

“I never did learn how or why or by whom all those railroad cars had been moved where they were, but there were about a dozen of them, half swallowed up by the kudzu vines, miles from the nearest tracks. They were all boxcars, except for that caboose.”

“That’s where you found the book?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Is it true what they say about kudzu, how fast it grows?”

“Up to a foot a day, maybe more,” I say. “It was introduced into the US in 1883, from Asia. Like those swans, it doesn’t belong here. Anyway, I think we never would have gotten into the caboose if we hadn’t had machetes.”

“But you did have machetes, and you did get in,” says the man.

“Yes, on both counts.”

…and in rapid succession first one thing and then the other, in constant, indecisive revolution…

The man lays his hand on the cover of the book, so that I can no longer see it, which, I discover, makes it easier for me to tell him about the caboose. I dream about it most nights and suspect that I always will. Knowledge comes at a price, my mother would have said, and often that price is our sense of well-being. Or our innocence. Or our ability to sleep without nightmares.

“I was surprised that the kudzu hadn’t gotten inside,” I say.

“Maybe something kept it out,” replies the man, and he leans forward a bit, watching the dancer intently now.

“The windows weren’t broken out, which is nothing short of a miracle. No telling how long it had been sitting there. Decades. But the windows weren’t broken out, and the rear door opened as easily as if the hinges had just recently been oiled. There was a pot-bellied stove, bunks, a desk. The walls were painted a muddy sort of mint green and photographs of naked women had been cut out and tacked and pasted all over them.”

“Kids,” the man whispers, the smile returning to his thin lips.

“And there were the birds,” I say.

“‘When you have shot one bird flying,’” says the smiling man, “‘you have shot all birds flying.’ That’s Ernest Hemingway. You dislike talking about the birds. I can tell. I’d not thought you’d be squeamish about a thing like that.”

I didn’t reply right away. I wanted to deny the charge, his casual accusation that I didn’t have the stomach for the life that had been passed down to me. But I let the charge stand. He would know my denial was a lie, and, more importantly, I would know it was a lie.

“We counted the bodies of seventy-five crows,” I say, instead. “Some were hardly more than skeletons, sort of mummified, skin and feathers stretched over bone. Others couldn’t have been dead more than a few hours. Each one had been nailed to the mint-green walls with three two-penny nails. One nail through the back of the skull, and—”

“It must have been very hot,” the man whispers. “It must have been very hot inside the caboose.”

“It was late summer. August. Dog days. Yes, it was very hot.”

“But you’re used that that,” says the man.

“The book, it was lying on a shelf above the brakeman’s desk. There was nothing else on the shelf, just the one book. It was dusty, but it wasn’t moldy, which is at least as unlikely as none of the windows being broken out.”

“Maybe it hadn’t been there very long.”

“Maybe not. There’s no way to know, and I don’t suppose it matters.”

“Not in the least.”

I take a small sip of my flat beer, because my mouth has gone very dry. I can taste the incense now, hot and cloying, as much as I can smell it. The music and the rhythmic tattoo of the dancer’s feet on the floor have grown inexplicably, uncomfortably loud. I glance towards the book, mostly hidden from view by the man’s hand, but I don’t have to see the book to see it. The image of it is worked into my mind, tooled there as surely as the grotesque patterns worked into its tooled leather cover, that album with its gilded fore edge and the cracked leather binding stained red and black like dried blood on the feathers of dead crows. There is a single word blind stamped into the spine, and there’s a brass hasp and a staple, but no lock to keep it shut. Anyone can open the book and see what’s inside.

Anyone can turn a page.

Or flip a coin.

“Well, you’ve brought it home,” says the man, “which is really all that matters.”

By the polluted river, at the eastern edge of Swan Point Cemetery, the girl smokes cigarettes and sits on the hood of her car, snapping pictures.

I say that I should be going, and she nods and takes another photograph.

“Do you believe in evil?” she asks me.

“I do,” I reply, without giving the matter a second thought. “I haven’t been left with much choice in the matter.”

“Well, I believe in evil,” she says. “Murdering a swan, nailing it to a tree, that’s evil, pure and fucking simple.”

Before the music began, and before I took the book from my satchel and presented it to the man who seems to have too many teeth when he smiles, before that, the dancer knelt on the floor, and she bowed her head, and everyone assembled in the room watched as the alabaster feathers were inserted beneath her skin. The hollow quill tips of primary and secondary flight feathers, the feathers of swans, had been fitted into seventy-four 22-gauge hypodermic needles, and then the needles were artfully arranged in rows along her shoulders and forearms. I was surprised that the piercing had taken only half an hour. She had not been given wings, but only the suggestion of wings, a shaman’s trick that she could fly and yet still be bound by the same cruel gravity that pulls a coin toss back towards earth.

And now the fourth movement has ended, and the musicians are waiting patiently for what comes next. The dancer has stopped dancing. She stands perfectly still at the center of the room, her counterfeit wings folded modestly across her breasts, the candlelight painting her with flickering shades of yellow and white and orange. And the woman who gave her those wings reappears from the shadows; she carries a ballpeen hammer and three heavy forty-penny nails. She whispers something to the dancer, kisses her on the cheek, and then they walk together to the north end of the room, where a sturdy cross carved of red maple has been erected.

“A shame your mother can’t see this,” says the man, and he picks the book up off the sky-blue settee and sets it in his lap. He has taken the weight of it from me and made it his own, and for that I might almost be moved to worship him as an atheist’s god. “A crying shame,” he says.

The dancer, the evening’s surrogate, never utters a sound. Her whole life has prepared her for this moment and led her here, and she faces her fate with the dignity and poise of a swan.

“You’re an ornithologist?” asks the girl as she stubs out another cigarette on the sole of her boot. This time, she doesn’t flick the butt towards the river, but places it into an empty film canister.

“No,” I say. “I’m a paleontologist. That’s what I teach.”

“But you know a lot about birds.”

“I suppose I do,” I reply.

“Well, maybe we’ll run into each other again,” she says. “I come here a lot.”

We exchange good-byes, and then I turn and walk to my own car, parked farther from the water, and she goes back to taking pictures of the swans. The insistent wind is behind me, pushing me along, urging me forward.

The man with the book in his lap looks away from the spectacle just long enough to offer me a wink and to tap the side of his nose again.

A word to the wise.

He has the black eyes of a crow.

“She was a fine woman, your mother,” he says.

And the world spins, like a tossed coin, moving in constant, indecisive, predictable revolutions, and I hold it in the palm of my hand.