So I took my keys and I waited outside and I was looking up the number for your shrink when she’s abroad with my phone on a neighbor’s wi-fi, and I texted it to you and I watched as you talked and I saw how your pacing eased and calmed as you did. And then I drunk the second beer, the third, the fifth, the last.

I thought of that night and it was a familiar country in my head, and maybe if the cold was less biting just then, it would have been enough, but I was still uneasy, and I got out of the car and I jumped up and down a little, trying to keep quiet and looking at your window. But that didn’t work, and so I got up to your place and broke in, quietly, and sat like a thief in my armchair in your dark living room.

I sat there, staring, betrayed, at your new drapes, twitching my legs and wanting to smoke. I took off my shoes, taking care to leave them by the chair in an orderly fashion, and I went to your bedroom door and I almost sighed out loud with relief when I saw you were sleeping alone. I don’t know what I would have done that night if I saw you there with somebody. I sat there on the bed next to you, watching you breathe, and breathing with you, and then I lay down, and then I curled into a ball and watched you like this all night, matching a breath for a breath. And when the sun came up sufficiently I got up gently and closed your bedroom door and I made you breakfast. Quietly as I could, and nothing too fancy so the smells won’t wake you. One piece of bread, very lightly toasted, one piece of bread toasted almost black, with the edges cut off, on the edges of the plate, and a simple salad — lettuce I ripped by hand because I couldn’t find the knife, and some cheese — tried to arrange them all nicely on the plate, and I put my shoes on and I closed the door behind me. I often think of it, and about many things like that, and of what you might be thinking to yourself as you’re eating those breakfasts.

A dog, horribly skinny, was tied with rope to the carriage beside me. He was barking murder, mad with the smoke thickenning and enclosing us. Billows of smoke. What do you think of that? Dreaming that dream almost every night since? Why would I dream of the Astoria burning?
The dream won’t recede, won’t fade. I carry it with me to the shower, to the bus station, to work. Not just because this unnatural repetition makes it more vivid; it’s that word I keep hearing, billows. Billows of smoke, billows of smoke. Ever since that day I try to avoid words that sound like your name. They cut. Billows. Bill. Billiards. Building. Thick Billows Bellowed as the Building Burnt. Bill me for that Billiards Ball, Bill.

In real life the Astoria never burnt, I checked that out. Am I thinking of that plane that took down the Empire State Building that September 13th? I must be. That’s where I’m taking this picture of men jumping from windows. Jumping into their deaths. Thick Billows Bellowed as the Building Burnt.

Then it gets quiet, for an hour, for a morning if you are indeed in luck. Maybe it’s a Sunday and nobody goes to work; maybe the snow fell thick last night and all the cars are stranded. In those rare moments you can hear the many birds chatting in that one tree next to the house, and they are nothing like the birds you knew as a child in the country. They’re louder and they all chirp at once, never conversing in their bird tongue, as if oblivious to the sound of others. In those moments you realize that in this constant city noise, all the birds have gone deaf.

“Where is he?” I ask. She wears a black dress that doesn’t become her. But she’s pretty; enviably pretty. She doesn’t answer at first, just gives me a frosty look that accents the distance between us: me at the door, she by the table next to the wall. Her hair is red. He always had a taste for bizarre women, I think, and then she answers: “don’t you know?”

“No,” I say, “I don’t”. I suddenly notice how sombre everything is: her black dress, the white flowers, the darkness in the house. She looks away and then at me.

“Hurt?” I say. She nods: no. “He’s gone now.”

The room is now colder, darker; I say, “surely…”

“It was,” she says, the custodion by the flowers, and there’s an air of firm sadness to her that keeps the news unreal, yet undeniable, “only a few days ago”.

“How?” I ask, and I’m near her, next to the table, looking into her eyes, dreaming, perhaps, of consoling her.

“A freak accident,” she says.

“Freak accident”.

“While travelling north,” she says, her eyes glimmering, “on a fishing expedition. The boat met with unstable currents –”

“The currents”.

“I mean there was a storm”.

“He died on a boat in a storm,” I say and sigh.

“No,” she says and nods very firmly. “He didn’t die on a boat in a storm”.

“Yes,” I say, and close my eyes. “After… in the water… it was surely cold, the water”.

“Surely,” she says, and closes her eyes.

“And then?”

“And then…” she whispers.

“Was he fighting long? Did he suffer much?”

“No, no,” she says, and there’s merely an inch between us, the powder on her cheeks so visible now in this thin light, “no, he must have suffered very little”.

“And brave…” I say, and look at her lips.

“So brave…” she says and parts them.

We look at each other. A sunbeam penetrates the darkness. She draws back.

“He coming down?” I ask.

Her face shuts like a door. No trace of secret smile remains. “In a minute,” she says.

They nod and mumble in appreciation: they are all holding now-empty glasses. The bottle they left on the ground, and it is growing steadily far in its carafe, swimming in a bed of ice water. Just the thought of it growing so far away — a meter a minute — is enough to give you motion sickness. Above them the engine roars a muffled roar in the thin, windy air.

“And I am unlucky,” says an obese man, well-dressed in his wheelchair, “in health”.

“I’m unlucky all around on Mondays and on Thursday nights,” says another man. The airship sails, up, up, up; the men all whisked away in its shaky embrace.

“I am unlucky in my sciences,” says the man who invited them all. He wears a white suite and a monocle, the staple of a scientist. “Yet I am positive we shall succeed. I know not all of you have faith. But the best researchers are all united in agreeing in the theraputic effect of high altitudes on the Fortune gland beneath the cortex…”

Somewhere on the ship, a man in his shirtsleeves says, “I am unlucky with my children.” The man he talks to says his investments all started to falter the year previous, after he had fallen from an apricot tree. Then there’s a sudden wind that blows hard and rocks the airship, sending wine glasses overboard, and it exhausts all conversation — the confessions, the stories, the science lectures.

“I,” whispers the pilot, but they all hear anyway, “am unlucky in sailing”.