terature on the subject states, is most essential, serving, as it does, to “anchor the event.” Most evocative, for me, of the leftover product I have accumulated, is a heavy power transformer, which was used to run a branding iron, which was used to heat a certain element, which was used in conjunction with several liquids, each of them very expensive and hard to come by. I have other things in my possession which are capable of inspiring in me certain associations. One I carry with me at all times. I have shown it to very few people, as it has elicited mixed reactions. One party said, okay, nutcase. Another said, oh that’s very interesting. Another, quite some time ago now, called it exquisite. I am still not entirely sure how I can describe it. I could not believe that it hadn’t crossed my mind, that morning, to show it to her, although it struck me as altogether possible that she would not remember having given it to me, various things about her seeming, as they had, to have changed. But to return to the second singular incident. There was nothing to do but encourage the horse to right itself. It was an old horse lying on a patch of grass next to a vegetable stand, and I had no idea how and what it had come to be doing there. An old woman figured in the incident, insofar as the horse was sort of lying on her. The old woman, though she was eager to talk, seemed incapable of answering questions or rather of providing answers that seemed in some way to correspond with questions. I had been in this situation before. I knew what to do — when to say yes and when to nod. When I was young my father used to tie linoleum strips around my ankles so that the snakes wouldn’t bite me when we were berry picking, the old woman said. I nodded, I held her hand. She described the handles of a tea set she had once owned. Also she had been a teacher. In her cardigan pocket was a list of the subjects she had taught. I have a list in every pocket, she said. She then told me, pulling out one of said lists as evidence, about her mother’s onion tarts. Here I listened very carefully. It was apparently all in the consistency of the cooked onion. An emergency team arrived, the horse was lifted, shot, and carted away. I went to a computer shop. There I was supposed, also according to my instructions, to acquire a computer, a very small one. The salesperson assured me she had just the thing and demonstrated how neatly her product could fit into, for example, one’s breast pocket. She was very proud of her product and succeeded in imparting a fair measure of that pride in me, the new provisional owner of the very small computer with the illuminable screen. Later that screen was to come in handy, as was the built-in calculator, and one or two other functions. Alas, that item was not one I was permitted to keep. It was held as evidence and played a role at my trial in exonerating me. Then, for the second time, I thought I saw her again. I was leaving the store, small computer in breast pocket, red duct tape and feather duster in a plastic bag. The feather duster was nice, too, in its own understated way. The tips of the feathers had been touched with green paint and one could imagine how nice they would look gliding across oak or cherry or teak. She was sitting in the window of a restaurant across the street talking to someone — someone I couldn’t quite see, someone wearing a hat and sunglasses. It certainly did look like her, albeit with one or two of the somewhat important differences I mentioned previously. Sun was flooding the street. It occurred to me that it was perhaps the presence of so much sunlight that made her appear to have changed a little. There had of course been sun, even bright sun, during those other days, but it had not been warm, or only rarely. Most of the time there had been rain. I tried to imagine I was looking at her through the rain. I squinted a little. It helped. Still squinting, I crossed the street and stood outside the window. It was her all right, I thought. As for her interlocutor, I couldn’t be certain, but it seemed to me that she was speaking with some difficulty, as if, even, she was stuttering, and it also looked a little like she was holding a gun. Such impressions often prove erroneous, however. In fact, the last time I had seen a person who spoke with a stutter and who seemed to be holding a gun, I was wrong, about the gun part. This was following the conclusion of the task I had undertaken at the outset of my recuperation, some weeks previously. I had performed the task and the lights had come on and all present had nodded and we had all shaken hands and just as they were beginning to clean up the blood someone had said, follow me. We went along dark streets for a while then into a building and up six flights of stairs. I don’t mind this, this is great, I said, huffing a bit. Will you please keep your fucking mouth shut, the person I was following said. Then we were at the top and I kind of leaned over and the person told me to kind of stand up and I said hold on just a second and the person gave me a smack. I stood up very straight and we went into an apartment and then into a room and in the room there was a swimming pool lit with golden lights. At the far end of the swimming pool stood the individual with the stutter and the presumptive gun. It’s good to see you again, I said. Jump into the pool but don’t drown, the person I had been following and who was now standing beside me said. I jumped and did not drown. I am actually a very good underwater swimmer, especially in indoor swimming pools. This has been true since my childhood. During that portion of my life, I was often to be seen in the swimming pool at the local hotel. I excelled at all games that involved retrieving coins from deep water. Others would gather around the edges of the pool to watch me swim from coin to coin, often emptying their own pockets to create what looked to my submerged eyes like a glittering rain. At any rate, as I say, I did not drown, although for a time I did sink. The pool was strangely deep, in fact it was considerably deeper than it was wide, and I was fully clothed. Nevertheless, once I had adjusted, it was nice underwater. It is lovely to see a lit pool from under its surface, lovely to lie on your back near the bottom. Then they fished me out. For a while, I lay on the tiles beside the pool. From where I lay, I could quite clearly see that what I had thought was a gun had not been one. In this case I was not as certain. The bright sun was falling across the table onto both of them and it certainly looked like a gun. I tried mouthing the word, gun, but I am not very adroit at mouthing, so that when she looked up and saw me doing so she raised one eyebrow, frowned, and looked elsewhere. Then I was taken away by two large individuals. They did not speak to me, they just silently invited me into the back of a truck parked some distance down the street then handed me an ice bag and silently invited me to get out. When I returned, she was gone, although the woman who had been holding the gun, or what looked like a gun, was still there. Then I had to go to work. Work, in this reference to it, did not involve the phone call I had received earlier. One of the many interesting aspects of the organization, and I believe I may have touched on this elsewhere, is that there are very few, if any, organic assets who serve the organization full time. As the work is part time and not always very well paid, one finds oneself obliged between assignments to seek gainful employment elsewhere. This had not been the case for me when I had arrived those months, or perhaps years, previously, but now it was. In my previous employment, with another organization, a transactions firm, I had managed to put a certain amount of my compensation aside and, for a time after I had been obliged to leave and had come to this city, had been able to live quite comfortably; i.e., many of my days were spent lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, listening to the river, or to the rain, or to the falling leaves. That afternoon at work I sold thirty-six cakes and earned compliments from the senior cakeseller, compliments I was only too glad to accept, as my luck with the cakes had not always been excellent. In fact, early in my period of disaffirmation, and up until my recuperation, it was not uncommon for me to sell a mere six or seven cakes over the course of an afternoon. This is not many cakes. Especially since they are attractive cakes. With thick glazing and the scent of fresh lemon and cream. I was not at all astonished then, given the excellence of the cakes and the fine location of the cake stall, as well as the comprehensive nature of my training, that the senior cakeseller expressed a certain amount of disappointment, in the early going, at my poor luck. In that light, it was fortunate that, as far as cakes were concerned, my luck underwent a change. Regarding other aspects of my life I can report that I have registered no such change. For a brief time during the period prior to the events I am now relating, I was under the impression that it had changed, but it had not. I am not very lucky, I told her later that day, when I saw her again, which is to say that I did see and speak to her again, whether or not it was her. We were sitting in a dark room on a couch and had been discussing science fiction movies, a topic I had proposed. Certain events were to begin shortly, and until they began we were obliged, according to instructions, to wait together in the dark. She had refused to gloss her presence in the room, except to say that it was job related, and she hadn’t asked me why I was there, so I told her about a movie I had seen recently in which the rocket a man is riding in loses an engine, forcing him to crash-land on a planet populated by citizens dressed in iridescent robes, who enjoy going to the arena, where often there are gladiators fighting wild pigs. The pigs in the film were very large, I explained to her, much larger than the average pig and they could fly. Actually it would not be quite fair to say the pigs could fly. What they could do was hover. This was described as a form of instinctual levitation. As a young man, subsequent to my coin-diving period, I knew pigs, our pigs — often I was given the job of filling up their trough. It was quite a deep trough and the pigs were frequently hungry and, as I remember it, I used to hold this against them. Made aware of this, a friend suggested we hit them with two-by-fours. It was unclear to us whether or not they noticed. One day having worked with the pigs, I went to school without changing my shoes. Normally in such instances, the teacher would strike us with a textbook. That day, however, he instructed me to remove one of my shoes and, holding it carefully, used it. Basically, the spaceman was lacking both the tools and the materials to repair his rocket. There were many shots of the stranded rocket — a glistening, elongated cone with elegant blue fins. It was pleasant to hear the people in their iridescent robes who came daily to offer advice to the spaceman say, titanium.