Between the ages of fourteen and fifty-four Nadia does not for a single minute not have an admirer or a boyfriend or a better half. Then Drew, her husband, disappears forever.
Each minute of the next six months is a thicket. The thickets contain police officers, undertakers, insurance agents, attorneys, claims adjusters, benefits counsellors, human-resources workers, notaries, friends. Unforeseen names—Emmaline Cortez, Omar Eaton, Dalary Mason, Clyde Bender—become very important then very unimportant. Somewhere in there her two daughters fly in from and back to their respective lives, in Chicago and Asheville. In early January, Nadia emerges from the last thicket. She drives up to Montreal.
Her consciousness has changed—it, the consciousness, has made her more optically alert. She notices, first, that a beautiful spare brownness has befallen the forests; and, second, that she could not care less about the brownness of the forests, not even if she turned into an orangutan. Orangutans are on her mind because she has been watching orangutan videos. Farther north, the sights—the snowy mountaintops, the ice cascades, the towers on the St. Lawrence—insist on stronger emotions. These emotions are not in her possession.
She does have one encounter with the sublime. It happens in the Adirondacks. The dense dark of night has gathered on every side, but in the west, above the heights to her left, there is a peach-colored patch of last light. Something about the peach light feels abnormal—does not conform to the sense of dusk. The light is extraterrestrial, she grasps. It has come from far, far, far, far away. The Earth has no light of its own.
Nadia addresses these thoughts to an interlocutor who is nowhere to be seen. She has only recently become aware of this inner other. Seemingly neither male nor female, the other listens patiently. When it speaks, it does so carefully. It does not take offense. None of these traits were Drew’s. He was an unreliable listener, an interrupter, a blurter. He was sensitive to criticism. Who, then, is this internal entity, who has no counterpart in her past or present?
When Nadia’s feet drop on her sister’s doormat, she perceives that the mat is saying something. Bonjour Hi, the mat is saying.
In the morning, she drinks coffee at the kitchen window. Runners singly crisscross the street in black balaclavas and tight-fitting black tops and black tights and black gloves. It is a neighborhood of assassins in training. The suspicion comes to Nadia that her husband was murdered.
That seems unlikely, no? the internal interlocutor asks.
Everything is unlikely, Nadia replies.
Drew was reportedly killed on a country road near a Finger Lakes town called Hammondsport. A pickup truck swerved across the line and struck his car head on. According to the police, the pickup truck swerved because its driver was having a cardiac arrest. This individual—Dwight Bloomer was his name—survived both the cardiac arrest and the collision. None of it makes sense to Nadia, including the fact that Drew was driving on the country road in question. He was bound, on a work mission, for Rochester. Neither the work mission nor the driving directions involved a detour to Hammondsport.
“Maybe he was taking a scenic route?” Yolanda, her sister, suggests. They have sat down for breakfast.
Nadia says, “Yeah—maybe.”
Maybe Drew had taken a scenic route, even though scenic routes were not his thing. And maybe Dwight Bloomer, if that was his real name, was as blameless as the police report and the medical report separately maintained. Maybe his heart attack, if it occurred, did occur in the moments before, and not the moments after, the crash. Absolutely.
But maybe not. That’s how “maybe” works.
Yolanda’s boyfriend—he is named Laurent, as in the saint of the river—approaches with three egg cups, each containing a soft-boiled egg. He has already set out a baguette, a tiny jug filled with milk, and dishes holding butter and wild-blueberry jam and haskap jam, whatever that is. With a conjurer’s flourish of his napkin, he takes a seat. His first sedentary act is to place a light kiss on Yolanda’s lips. His second is to offer Nadia the salt and pepper.
“Thank you,” Nadia says.
Yolanda, her younger by six years, was always the sister with the worse name, the worse body, the worse career, the worse life, the one who had long been lost in a “fuckup labyrinth” (Yolanda’s description) in New Jersey, where she had a dead-end pharma job and a never-ending on-off thing with a married co-worker. Then, about a year ago, everything suddenly changed for the better, as in a stupid movie.
One evening, over dinner, the visiting Yolanda triumphantly produced her first-ever Canadian passport. Nadia didn’t understand—until she remembered that her sister had been born (randomly, ridiculously) in a Canadian place called Saskatoon. Within three months Yolanda had sold her place in Teaneck and bought, all cash, a third-floor walkup in a “charming” Montreal neighborhood. Drew, who loved corporate-style humor, said, I didn’t have that on my bingo card. Within another two months, Yolanda was claiming to have landed herself a “fun job in the farm-to-table sector” and a man friend who was “kind of farm-to-table himself.” Yolanda sent a picture in which she, unathletic and unathletic-looking, wobbled on a two-foot-high tightrope strung between two trees. Her right hand was stretched out for balance. Her left hand was held up by a muscleman in an unbuttoned white shirt. Drew said, I’ll have what she’s having.
Laurent didn’t accompany Yolanda to Drew’s funeral. Now here they both are, in the flesh—the happy couple.
Their relationship doesn’t add up. A piece of information is missing.
Nadia’s egg has no taste, no matter how much salt and pepper she puts on it.
Before Yolanda leaves for work she says, “One thing: don’t touch the jigsaw puzzle.”
The jigsaw puzzle occupies the card table in the corner of the living room. Somebody has made a start on it.
Laurent, Yolanda elaborates, is possessive about his puzzles—displeased if anyone else so much as turns over a single piece. “It’s kind of an O.C.D. thing of his,” she says.
“Of course,” Nadia says.
Yolanda delivers remarks about the therapeutic value of jigsaw puzzles and their importance to Laurent, this man friend who is not only a master puzzler but a deep and deeply well-read person who has taught Yolanda so much, taught her about her own body, no less, and so on and so forth and excruciatingly on and on, all while she is standing by the front door in her coat and hat and tantalizing Nadia with her unrealized departure. Maybe it’s Canada, maybe it’s the mimbo, but Yolanda is boring, boring, boring, boring, boring.
When Nadia’s sister at last exits, Laurent—whose occupation remains obscure; it would be wrong to press for details; the guy is obviously unusual; something shameful is being hidden—also absents himself. Nadia is alone.
She is supposed to stay for two more nights. That doesn’t seem doable. One more night doesn’t seem doable.
She steps out. She is wearing Yolanda’s coat and Yolanda’s snow boots and Yolanda’s insulated mittens. Somewhere nearby, she’s heard, is a famous open-air market. Nadia will find her way there by intuition. If she doesn’t find her way, whatever.
The sidewalks have been cleared of snow by little sidewalk snowplows. She walks the length of one block, then of another, then of another. At every crossroads, it seems, a child holds hands with, or rests in a stroller pushed by, or sits on a sled towed by, or is ensconced within the coat of, a parent who turns out to be a dad. Where are the mothers? What’s going on?
It begins to snow. The flakes are as grand and as intricate as shuttlecocks. Nadia gives up on her walk. She goes back to the red brick triplex on the top floor of which her sister and her man friend live in the relationship that will not add up.
That night, the sisters go on foot to a restaurant. They will be joined by Yolanda’s best friend in Montreal, a Frenchwoman whose name is Élise, or Alise, or maybe Alice, or maybe even Éloïse. Does it matter which? No.
As they walk along a tree-lined street, Nadia experiences a powerful feeling, neither agreeable nor disagreeable, of recurrence—as if long ago, once upon a time, the two sisters tramped outdoors just like this, side by side in the cold in big coats, into and out of the soft glow of the street lanterns, each escorted by a small spook of breath.
“There are marmots here,” Yolanda says. “Under the sidewalks. Under our feet. Lots of them. They come out in the spring.”
“Marmots?”
“Groundhogs, you’d call them,” Yolanda explains as if she’s no longer a U.S. national.
On they walk. The feeling of recurrence has gone.
Yolanda discloses that the Frenchwoman they’re meeting has also lost her husband.
Nadia hates being thought of as a widow, hates any suggestion that she must identify with other widows, hates the very idea of widowhood. But she says nothing. She is caught up in an awareness of the marmots—of a concurrent marmot universe, of a concurrent marmot metaphysics. The awareness is visceral—the touch of a small clawed internal hand.
When they arrive at the restaurant, the other widow isn’t there. They wait at the bar.
Nadia notices something odd: the clientele consists almost completely of pairs and trios and quartets of women. Where are the men? Don’t they eat out? Nadia is about to mention the mystery to Yolanda when the other widow materializes. She doesn’t seem French. She is a laughing and solid-looking woman who looks, even after she’s removed her coat, like she’s about to chop wood. Nadia likes her right away.
The three women are shown to a table among tables filled with women.
The widow from France speaks very good English, with an accent that’s more British than American. She and Yolanda met at a spin class, Nadia learns. There is some discussion of the spin class. Nadia says, “Orangutans like to spin. From a rope, I mean. You know—dangling and going round and round. They like the feeling of dizziness.” Orangutans, Nadia hears someone say—someone who, it turns out, is herself, as if in addition to an inner other she now has an outer other—orangutans use medicine. “They’ll chew on a leaf to make a paste out of it. Then they’ll apply the paste to a wound.”
“That’s amazing,” Yolanda says.
“I’ve adopted an orangutan,” Nadia continues, falsely. The adopted orangutan, she narrates, is a little guy whose parents were murdered by poachers. He is six months old—a baby. He lives in an orangutan orphanage on the edge of the jungle.
“Does he have a name?” Yolanda asks.
“His name is Arnold,” Nadia says. “I chose it. If you adopt a baby, they let you choose the name.”
The women talk. For some reason the other widow asks how Nadia and Drew met. Nadia answers, “In a cigar bar in Syracuse.” It is the truth, and also it is a joke. Nadia adds, “My date had stood me up.”
“You never told me that,” Yolanda exclaims. “Who was the date?”
Nadia says, “His name was Davy O’Connor.”
This is an untruth. There was no date with Davy O’Connor or anyone else. Davy O’Connor, however, is not an invented character. He was a boy Nadia knew at Michigan. These days, Nadia has discovered from her online searches, Davy O’Connor is a lawyer in Yonkers.
Meanwhile, the French widow is saying that it took three years after her own husband’s death before she properly felt single. She had not expected it to last so long—the monogamy of mourning. Another surprise awaited her: the shocking reality of dating men in their fifties and sixties and seventies. They were, almost without exception, bad lovers.
Nadia wants to break in—wants to say, This is going to sound weird, but what is your name, exactly? Could you write it down for me? Doesn’t it bother you that you have this name that sounds like ten other names? Didn’t your parents know better than to give you a name like that?—but the interior other commands her, Just stop, and her exterior self, jumping in, says, “Bad lovers how?”
It wasn’t a question, the woodcutter widow answers, of the physical. The bad backs, the bad knees, the pills, the drugs, the intimate malfunctions—such things were to be expected. The shock came on the level of the mental, of the psychological. These men were like ruins of men. The most meaningful parts of their lives—their marriages, their families, their work—had overwhelmed them. In the place of maturity, she encountered childishness. In the place of self-confidence and tenderness, she encountered disappointment and fear and anger—especially anger.
Her most recent date, the French widow goes on, presented as a normal guy. He had good things to say about his ex-wife, he was proud of his kids, he had no complaints about his career in the medical-supply business. Anyway—twice she and this man went out to dinner. After the second dinner, he invited her back to his house.
The three Nadias—internal, external, and essential—are listening.
The date lived out in Laval, in the suburbs. After a drive of more than half an hour, they came to some houses. It was night. Dark fields and dark woods lay beyond the houses. The date’s house sat atop a knoll. The car paused at the foot of the knoll while the garage door slowly rose, exposing a dark grotto. The car climbed the knoll. Its headlights lit up the garage interior.
A dead deer hung in the beam of the headlights. A wire cable, suspended from a ceiling hook, was attached to its neck, twisting the head toward the wall. A long pink tongue protruded from the mouth. The two front legs stuck out at a grotesque angle. In the place of the stomach was an enormous red cavity held open by sticks in the shape of a cross.
The widow jumped out of the man’s car and started running. There was nowhere to go but the neighbor’s front garden. On the lawn was one of those pretend cars for children to pretend drive. Standing next to the car, she called a taxi.
The date remained on his property, laughing. He yelled that he hadn’t shot the deer—that it had jumped in front of his truck.
Yolanda says, “What does it matter if he hits the deer or if he shoots the deer? He should have warned you what to expect. Weirdo.”
Nadia says, “He must have had a pickup truck.”
The other widow says, “Yes, he did.”
“My husband was killed by a pickup truck,” Nadia says.
A man appears. It is the waiter. He is a boy, really. He slowly and anxiously fills Nadia’s wineglass, then Yolanda’s wineglass. He is sweating. The women silently wait for him to be gone.
Nadia resumes: “Why was he driving a pickup truck? He was driving to the Lions Club. That’s what he told the police—this story about going to the Lions Club. But nothing had been picked up by him; nothing was going to be dropped off. There was no load. So why was he driving a pickup?”
Nobody responds, not even the internal interlocutor.
Nadia goes on, “His truck weighed six thousand pounds. It’s a death machine. Why was he driving it? Why was he driving a death machine?”
The other widow finally says, “Yes, that’s a good question.”
“When you start thinking about it,” says Nadia—the new Nadia, the one who has powers of vision, the essential Nadia—“you realize these killer cars are everywhere. Which means there are killers everywhere. Thousands and thousands of killers, ready to kill. They’re almost all of them men, but some of them are women. I kind of wonder if I could become a killer, too. I mean, why not? It’s allowed, right? There are so many people I would like to kill. I wouldn’t enjoy killing them, but I’d like to see them dead. I really would. It would make me so happy. You know what I’d do, if I had powers of invisibility? I would kill people. Bad people. There are so many of them out there—people who deserve to be killed. Especially in America. In Canada it’s probably different.”
Yolanda looks at the other widow as if it’s her job to say something.
Before the other widow can speak, she is interrupted by Nadia, who says to her, “Isn’t hanging up a deer carcass, like, a venison thing? A meat thing?” Nadia looks at Yolanda. “You know—a farm-to-table thing?”
In the morning, Nadia stays in bed until she is certain that the sister and the mimbo man friend have gone. When she achieves this certainty, she makes herself a cup of coffee. It is ice-cold outside, and there’s nothing to do in this apartment—other than the jigsaw puzzle, of course.
The jigsaw puzzle is a classic tiger-face thousand-piecer.
A task lamp is attached to the nearby bookshelf. Its purpose is to illuminate the table. One turns on the lamp. One removes one’s reading glasses from one’s pocket and puts them on.
The puzzle’s four edges have been completed. The pieces that go into the body of the puzzle have been placed outside the edges and turned right side up. A few have been sorted into the beginnings of groups.
Stop right there, the internal entity says.
One examines the scene of the puzzle. One senses, again, one’s altered consciousness—one’s heightened optical powers. One moves closer to the table.
It is not a question of doing the puzzle as such. It is a question, rather, of entering a kind of raptor state, of hovering and hovering over the puzzling table to study the tiger image on the lid of the puzzle box, of studying the shades and the variants of the colors of the tiger, the oranges and the golds and the blacks and the yellows and the whites, of focussing and focussing until one notices, for example, that certain parts of the tiger fur consist of gradually more tangerine golds, that the tiger’s irises are uniquely amber, that the darkness of the black fur in one part of the puzzle is different from its darkness in another part, and it is a question, too, one learns, of becoming attentive to differences and similarities of pixelation—color blurriness and sharpness, in other words—produced by the disuniformity of the photographic focus, a question, in short, of seeing more and more and acting accordingly, that is, of picking up puzzle pieces and comparing them inter se, these paperboard amoebas, for correspondences of shape and agreements of color, and fitting together one apt and concolorous pair at a time, the nectarine with the nectarine, the banana yellow with the banana yellow, the unusual outie with the unusual innie, and so on, raptly, beginning with the distinctive, more easily recognizable elements of the jigsaw (the very white whiskers; the pinks and the peaches of parts of the tiger’s neck fur) and then moving on to subtler, more unlikely compatibilities and contiguities, including the rare ecstasy of making a hybrid or parti-colored pair, in which two wholly unlike and apparently disjunctive pieces join to form a twosome, an entirely gold piece and an entirely non-gold piece, say, and so on and so forth, one tiger fragment at a time, so that there occurs a gradual, ever-growing convergence of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, even as the integration of the puzzle is not the true purpose of the puzzling. It is not a question of revealing the face of the tiger. It is a question of rapture.
Hours pass. One takes stock of the jigsaw puzzle. It is more than half complete. Laurent, one calculates, will be back within the hour.
Undo it all, the inner other commands. You’ve had your fun. Now put all the pieces back as you found them. Do it now. There’s still time.
One does not heed this other one. One gathers one’s things and flees to New York a day early.
When Nadia enters the United States, she simultaneously enters night. Soon she is driving on an empty road through forests and mountains devoid of a single particle of illumination except for the white roadside posts tipped with small glowing reflective spectres.
Out of nowhere comes an alien blaze and brilliance. Nadia pulls over. Why does she feel so happy?
The cop car stops thirty yards distant, twinkling like a spaceship. After a delay, its traveller emerges. His slowly approaching silhouette—he wears a wide-brimmed trooper’s hat—is visible in the side-view mirror. Nadia lowers the window. Freezing air penetrates the cabin, as does a black glove. She hands the glove her driver’s license.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” the cop asks.
Nadia answers him with a smile.
The cop looks left and right, as if somebody might be watching.
When he returns with the speeding ticket, Nadia says, “Ninety-one miles an hour? My goodness.”
He stoops down and touches the brim of his hat. “Farewell, ma’am,” he says.
His transporter rockets away and upward. Either it climbs a steep mountainside, or it soars into the atmosphere—the dark permits no distinction. The scarlet and blue and yellow lights dart, dart, dart and disappear.
She already knows her next move.
Two weeks later, Nadia is in the Yonkers office of David O’Connor, Esq.
A woman—attractive, in her forties—approaches her. “I’m Beatriz,” she says. “I work with Mr. O’Connor. We spoke on the phone.”
“Yes,” Nadia says. Beatriz was reluctant to schedule a meeting with Davy O’Connor. We don’t do speeding cases in person, she told Nadia. Nadia replied, It’s not just speeding. There’s something else—a sensitive matter.
Beatriz now says, “So: I’m afraid that Mr. O’Connor is in court. It’s unclear when or if he’ll return.”
“I’ve come all this way,” Nadia says.
“Yes. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll go grab a coffee,” Nadia says. “Do you have a number I can text you at?”
It’s drizzling when Nadia steps out. She spies, among the dreary office buildings lining the street, a lime-green door. She goes through it and enters a tiny Irish-themed corner of the galaxy. She has not been in a joint like this in years, certainly not at four o’clock in the afternoon.
She orders an Irish coffee, a drink she’s never had before. She texts Beatriz:
Instantly there’s an incoming text—not from Beatriz but from Yolanda:
Nadia types back:
The bartender turns on green, white, and gold Christmas lights. What are you doing? Nadia is asked, by herself.
What Nadia knows is this: in Ann Arbor, Davy O’Connor was the boy on campus with beautiful long hair, the clever, dreamy, strolling boy, the boy who was amiable to all but also so quietly arrogant that he could, at no cost to himself, be amiable to all, the boy who dreamily strolled from class to class and A to A, who went amiably from one sought-after girl to another, one of them Nadia: for four days they were entangled, as students are, unclearly. After graduation, everyone faced facts and put their noses to the grindstone and learned hard truths. Not Davy O’Connor. He embarked on a series of adventures and special projects that reportedly took him from the Yukon to Borneo and finally deposited him in an upstate New York cabin without electricity but with a beautiful wife. Nadia’s thought, on hearing about the cabin, was, He’ll get his comeuppance soon enough, after which she paid no further mind to Davy O’Connor. So why is she in Yonkers?
Beatriz responds by entering the bar. She’s nearsighted; it takes her a moment to identify Nadia. “Hey! I wanted to tell you in person: David won’t be back today.” Her umbrella violently contracts. “The speeding ticket? He says he can turn it into a ticket for an unattended motor vehicle. That’ll save you six points on your license. He’ll do it remotely. No need for a meeting.”
Davy O’Connor has definitively given Nadia the brushoff. She ought to feel humiliated. Instead, she feels relief and an unaccountable power. “O.K.,” she says, laughing.
Beatriz doesn’t move. She stands there, greenly lit up by a huge electronic shamrock, seemingly on the verge of saying something important. It comes to Nadia that Beatriz fears her as a rival for Davy O’Connor. To put it another way: Beatriz is an admirer.
“How about a drink?” Nadia says.
“A blast from the past?”
“That’s what he called you,” Beatriz says.
Nadia, pleased, tells Beatriz, We dated in college for about five minutes, literally, but I never got a spark out of him, zip, and honestly there’s still no spark, to which Beatriz says, So why’d you come here, if there’s no spark? and Nadia replies, Honestly, I don’t know; I’m very disoriented right now; and, look, it is true that I need to talk to an attorney, a street-smart attorney, not about speeding but about a private matter, and Beatriz says, What’s it about, this private matter?
And so, as Beatriz listens with sympathetic little nods and frowns, Nadia again tells the story of Drew’s inexplicable detour into Finger Lakes country, tells of his killing at the hands of one Dwight Bloomer, with his lethal pickup truck and convenient heart attack, and tells of the authorities’ bizarrely rapid agreement that Drew’s death was wholly accidental and its consequences wholly resolvable by the writing of checks to cover, first, funeral costs; second, the replacement value of Drew’s wrecked car; and, third, the value of Drew’s life-insurance policy. One minute these teams of professionals were all over the case; the next minute, bam, they were gone. What was the rush? Since when did lawyers settle things so easily? Something was off. That was her strong feeling at the time. Something was not right. Nadia still feels that way, she tells Beatriz.
“You wanted closure,” Beatriz suggests. “What you got wasn’t closure.”
“What I want,” Nadia says, “is a private detective.”
“A private detective? What for?”
“To get to the bottom of it—all of it.”
Beatriz reflects. Then she looks Nadia in the eye and says, I’m not a licensed investigator, but it’s a field I’ve always wanted to get into, I can do the work, and Nadia replies, The important thing is that you’re smart and determined, to which Beatriz says, I am, and I’m also experienced, I’m a grandmother, you know, and Nadia says, You look amazing, Davy’s lucky to have you, and Beatriz says, I think I make him happy, and Nadia says, I am sure you do. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me, that Davy is happy.
Then Nadia says, “You know what I’d like to be? An assassin.”
“You mean like a hit man?”
“Not a hit man—not a killer for hire. I mean killing bad guys for the sake of it. Pro bono. Like a vocation. God, I’d love that. If I had the power to be invisible, that’s how I’d use it: to take out bad, powerful people who are making the world horrible. Really evil people, people who had it coming. Just imagine how good that would feel. Oh, man.”
Beatriz says, “Yeah, that would be satisfying.”
They laugh loudly, drink from their beers. Then Nadia says, “You know what would be great? To be able to point at someone and say, ‘See that guy? That’s a guy who’s never had a comeuppance.’ I’m talking about a good guy. A good guy whose feet have never touched the ground. A guy who has lived up in the trees, the way an orangutan lives, up in the canopy, jumping around from tree to tree. Orangutans are tree dwellers. It’s part of what makes them special. They almost never come down to the ground.”
Beatriz says, “So—am I hired?”
Nadia says, “What are your fees?”
Beatriz hesitates for less than a second. “Seventy-five dollars an hour. Plus expenses.”
Nadia listens for an inner voice of counsel. There is no inner voice of counsel. In Beatriz’s company, there are no other Nadias.
“You’re hired,” the one Nadia says.
Beatriz’s hands rise to her mouth. Then she reaches into her bag and takes out a pen and a yellow legal pad. She writes something down. She says, “I’m going to need all the documents. And I’m going to need his e-mails, texts.”
“Yes,” Nadia says.
“I’m going to need to go on a site visit. You know, to—”
“Yes,” Nadia says. She has retrieved an object from her pocket.
“What’s this?” Beatriz says.
“It’s for your new career,” Nadia says. “For luck.”
Beatriz grips the puzzle piece. “I need a logo. This can be my logo.”
Nadia doesn’t send Beatriz her deceased husband’s e-mails. Nor does she send her the police report or the coroner’s report or the insurance paperwork. She does not contact Beatriz at all. Nor does Beatriz contact Nadia.
Then it is springtime. Groundhogs come out of the ground at Hammondsport. The reflections on Keuka Lake grow greener and greener. When the lake warms, smallmouth bass swim toward shallower water to spawn. Early-morning sportsmen easily fish them there on the fly. The beeches and the black-locust trees display white flowers. Then it is summer. Children jump from a jetty and hurriedly swim back to the jetty and jump again. Anglers fishing for trout drift in small craft on the lake’s deeper waters. The lake came into existence ten thousand years ago when a long upland of ice withdrew. At the lakeside ice-cream stand, lines ceaselessly form and re-form. Visitors eat thousands of fall-colored slices of pizza. Thunder comes with great camera flashes made by the former god, now photographer, Thor. Crafters—quilters, jewellers, potters, leatherworkers, floral artists, and candlemakers—come to Hammondsport; crafts fans McKenna Poole, Morgan Albalos, Fred Aesoph, Madalynn Cast, Rashaad Jamal, and Dominic Groeder come to see the craftwork. Then the blue of the sky over Keuka Lake clarifies and intensifies, then the reflections of the foliage on the lake go yellow and red and copper and purple. People come by car to take pictures of the leaves. Then the cars go. Then the leaves fall and then snow falls and then, after two very cold weeks, ice forms thickly on the lake. Snow gathers on the ice. The water under the ice goes quiet and dark. Then a bright hole appears in the ice, and into the water enters a little fall of light. Fish go toward the light. One is all at once lifted lightward and cannot breathe at all. Then the same one, again all at once, is back in the water and can hurry away from the light and breathe again in the dark. ♦
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