The world continued to act upon me. I influenced events very little. Unlike in literature, character was not fate. Fate was unbelievably itself. Staring out from the unlikely present I found each possible future equally implausible, though one of them began to take shape along the Canada-U.S. border where, under a concealing canopy of maples, I rented a house in a woods. I lived off a small sum Dominic advanced to me from his will. In early November came the days of first snow. The place had a busted furnace and a woodstove. I burned firewood and sawed and chopped to replenish the pile, a daily routine in my unpeopled life. In the mornings and late afternoons I handwrote stories I found hard to believe, including the one you’re now reading. To protect the vulnerable, I changed details and names, including my own. Amanda is not Amanda, Durant not Durant, the poem “August” not “August,” and so on. These measures are acts of delusion or faith in the idea that an audience awaits and some reader somewhere will see what’s true.

Amanda and I didn’t get our Italian reunion. From Istanbul I flew to Rome but never left the airport. A man with aviator glasses peeking out of his shirt pocket seemed to be following me through the Fiumicino terminal, or at least he was always behind me as I detoured, ducked into a washroom, stood a distance from the screens listing baggage carousels. I left my bag unclaimed for several minutes, waiting for him to claim his and leave, until finally we were the last two waiting, pretending the two last bags weren’t ours. I claimed mine, went through security, headed straight for an Air Canada desk, and booked a flight to Montreal.

For six hours I camped out near the gate. Nothing that could be called my state could also be called stable. In a wi-fi lounge with free stations I wrote to Amanda and Durant, explaining nothing in detail. I wrote of a change of plans, of “forces able to inhabit our obsessions,” and sounded unreliable to myself, knowing I couldn’t explain the further intricacies of what I knew or how I’d come to know it. In my bag was the fugitive hard drive. “Reality and paranoia both present a seamless fabric of truth and fantasy,” I wrote. “Implausibility is no longer a measure of anything. If it was the Poet whom I met in Istanbul, his presence there was like his presence in the poems. I have to believe that he communicated to me, though I can’t know the full meaning of the communication.” He had broken some protocol and taken a risk to make contact. He had wanted to be known, or for me to know that I was known. And he’d succeeded and paid for it. Under the cover of riot control, using police thuggery, the Shadowy Apparatus (I used the term ironically and not) had reclaimed him and had tried to claim me.

Half a day later I was back in Dominic’s house, helping him organize, pack boxes, and decide what to do with the materials of his life. My last email exchanges with Amanda and Durant were written and collected on Dominic’s laptop. I learned that Pierluigi and the Keyholers had gone dark, fearing reprisals. No one else took cover. Amanda was looking forward to The Hague. A friend who worked on political killings in Guatemala had promised to give her access to secret records. She still hoped to learn who’d killed her brother. I said I was getting off the grid, and wished her well, and asked her to imagine a day when we could meet again. Just picturing this day, I said, would bring it closer.

Durant decided to stay where he was for a few more weeks, dismissing my direct warning that he move out of Carlo’s building and return to his life in California. “But I need a new point of focus, James. I’ve decided to resume my work on genetic transferences. The unknown world is endlessly interesting.” Without prompting, he confided that, in his quiet times, he hoped his daughter would return to him.

I understood hope, the need to believe in whatever thin evidence of fixed meaning could connect the future with a past that seemed to go on forever.

In the woods I lived bookless, offline. With no cellphone or computer I sent my mailing address to Durant via Larunda College in an unsigned, handwritten letter, glued and taped at the seal. At random intervals I checked the mailbox I rented in the second-nearest town, where business was slow and I could see if anyone was watching, but there was no reply.

In time the work of writing prose and of pre-grieving Dominic, whom I knew I would never see or speak to again, changed my imagination. I was no longer subject to cha-chas, or at least their character matured. My lateral thoughts seemed to fire to more purpose, as if they’d finally left their youth. And living alone without human contact for days at a time, with no screens, no voices but those from a radio I seldom turned on, set my brain waves into a pleasing rhythm as they formed and rolled and broke upon the shore of my new world.

At night I walked along the edge of a ravine behind the house, then into woods and fields. The stars, if not the satellites, hung above in a trusted disregard of me and my little world. At their unimaginable distances they offer a picture of a cosmos that could never have been. Some stars are already long dead, others extinguished more recently, all have shifted, but there they all are, seeming present. Knowing of the lie inside the heavens (knowing not the specific lie but of the lie’s existence) layers the simple amazement of stargazing, one of the few things we have in common with the earliest humans who, if they believed anything could be told from the stars, saw in them not the past but the future.

And yet when I got turned around in the fields one night I used the North Star to mark my direction and find my way home, an experience that reminded me of navigational poetic images and recovered something of those readings at Three Sheets—the site’s very name used seagoing imagery—that had drawn me in the first place. I thought of Dante’s story of Ulysses’s last voyage, into the unknown world, and of canto XX of The Inferno, where Virgil leads the poet through a treatise on seers and diviners. For Dante a prophet was above all a great reader, someone for whom the book of the future, the magno volume of God’s mind, lies open. All these challenges to God and His knowledge landed people in one or another circle of hell. I understood something of the dumb vanity of those who seek omnipresence and all-knowingness. Not that I believed in Dante’s God, or even that of my parents, but some otherworldly dimension had been added to my pre-existing sense of wonderment. I had always found my transports in the physical and experiential world mediated through arts and technology. Now as I wrote I felt the company of distinct presences. These can’t be described as angels or demons because the presences weren’t divine or diabolic. They had no designs on me. The closest word might be drawn from that set of terms for ghost, except these beings weren’t supernatural, but supramaterial. The phenomenon eludes direct description.

I came to believe in the there/not-thereness of invisible beings. They were with me all day and began to appear in the stories I wrote. I chose not to think of them any differently than I did the people who had been visible to me, and to one another, Durant and Amanda and others, or than I did my mother and father, still near me in the dark.

And in spite of myself and of Dante, for weeks while writing I began to see scenes from the future in vivid, waking dreams. In one of these I was in the parking lot of a diner somewhere in the west of this continent. With me was Amanda. It seemed we’d just met up. As we approached the entrance, the glass door opened and a woman about our age, maybe older, stepped out. She and I looked at each other and she hesitated for just a second in a moment of recognition or false recognition—we both felt it—and then passed by. I didn’t turn but watched her reflection in the door as I held it open. In the parking lot the woman looked at me briefly, then got into her car. I joined Amanda inside and she gestured with her head and eyes to the end of the diner. There, in the last row of red-and-chrome booths, Durant sat not just by himself, but existentially alone, his face barely familiar for being totally open. He looked at us the way the woman had, and again a recognition sparked and died. He didn’t know us, or didn’t know how he knew us. Moment to moment the dream formed in front of me as I followed it in prose, but it stalled there before we approached him and, while other waking dreams have since come and gone, dreams in which I am absent except as the engine of them, and that suggest possible worlds strangely connected to one another through me, it all ended in that place, and my two American friends never appeared to me again.