Ernesto, postulating himself at the top of his crane, lowers the empty container into the bay. After a few minutes he brings it up again and hurries down the ladder to look for the fish. Today he finds he’s also brought up the front cover of a Bible, which he places in the pocket of his army parka because it amuses him. He selects a number of fish, turns off the crane, and walks to the nearby bus stop [the fish stop, as he calls it] on Park Row. He takes a seat under the shelter and it isn’t long before the fish pulls up. He boards and even the sound of the 2 hydraulic doors shutting reminds him of gills. He and the driver are the only people on board and as they cross the Brooklyn Bridge he remembers how he always used to think that someone should build a bridge between Alaska and the old Soviet Union, barely 100 kilometers across the Bering Strait. When he was 9, Pegg, the first girl he fell in love with, went out fishing with her father and, in spite of the forceful prohibitions of maritime law, made it across to Provideniya, Russia. No one ever found out why, but the pair did not come back. He turns and looks back at the high-rises, the illuminated lofts, before focusing on the sea, whose darkness penetrates the darkness of the sky. Arriving back at his apartment, he greets the old woman who lives on the mezzanine floor—she is out throwing away some trash bags containing empty sacks of pig fodder. She has kept a pig since the day she saw a program about them: apparently their body tissues, and especially the heart, are the closest to those of human beings. In her solitude, she says, the creature gives her the feeling of being understood. His apartment is damp, he puts the heating on, dons an ATLANTA ’96 tracksuit he bought at the same time as the sports bag, and checks the mail. His parents have written, how’s everything going, et cetera. He turns on the TV and mutes the sound; he likes watching these silent images pass, like those outside the window of a train. He unwraps one of the fish and places the rest in the freezer. Scaling it, he feels something solid inside. Opening along the belly, he finds a dice: it has a pearlescent plastic finish, black dots for numbers, and the 2 and 6 sides have been partially rubbed out. He places it in his trousers pocket, fries the fish, and sits down to eat in front of the television. Looking up from his food intermittently, he catches a silent advertisement for tires, images of Marines in Iraq, an advertisement for a rerun of The Bionic Woman, which he keeps on missing. Afterward he sits down at the computer to work on 2 architectural projects, remakes of two already well-known buildings, the Suicide Tower and the Museum of Ruins. Before climbing into bed he looks at the sheets. Though he changes them quite often, and he does not know why, they constantly become dirty, his body prints a diffuse grayish silhouette on them—larger than the size of his actual body—like the tweed jacket of some vanished giant. And no one even knows exactly where the border between Russia and Alaska lies, he thinks.