d comfortable and had a wonderful bed. It was large and firm and much, if one had the inclination, could be done on it. My own bed, incidentally, is some distance from what one might consider comfortable. Which is not to say that I dislike my bed. Often during my recuperation, I would lie on it and listen to the river that flows near my apartment. I would sigh and the phone would ring and I would never answer it. Food would appear at the kitchen table, very simple dishes, quite easy to chew and digest, which, in the evenings, I would leave my bed to eat. Then I might take a soothing bath with large sponges and fragrant salts, and one day when I went into the bathroom this woman was there, already in the tub, and she had with her the aforementioned green plastic duck. Good lord, I said. Unusually nice, huh? she said. I immediately sat down on the edge of the tub and we talked. I asked her how business was and she said business had not been good lately, not enough coins and no bills were being left in her hat, although her repertoire had expanded and she had made certain innovations that had positively affected both her voice and her playing. Well that’s encouraging anyway, I said. Then she pulled me into the water and, when I was further recovered, I went to spend time in her bed. You need to get up now, she said. What? I said, opening my eyes. Beside my head, faintly pressed into the concrete, was the imprint of a hand. Not a large hand. Perhaps a child’s. Or not quite a child’s. It was somewhat larger, the digits thicker. There was water in the little finger. Had it rained? I remembered something. Another city. Many years before. Being dead. It is almost time, said the woman. I looked at my watch. I was no longer wearing a watch. But then I remembered that the small computer I had acquired was capable of giving the time in several zones. Which zone are we in? I asked her as I stood and extricated the small computer, which, in its protective case, seemed to be undamaged. Put that away and follow me, she said. But I don’t have any sunglasses, I said. She did not appear to hear me and set off walking, so I set off walking after her and I could not, in following her, help remarking the fine articulation of the muscles in her calves and the near proportionate slimness of her ankles, which put me in mind, as we walked along the deserted street, of another pair of calves and ankles and of other things, which, so thinking, reminded me of a film I had seen recently in which a robot follows another robot through the desert. It was a fine movie with great dark cities and burned plains set against the backdrop of galactic empires and frightening weather patterns, and this aging robot, or rather this robot who thinks he / she / it is aging and cannot stop thinking of days gone by. It is never made quite clear what has set this robot, after 7,000 years of service, to, as he / she / it puts it, dwelling. I cannot stop dwelling he / she / it says at one point to a companion robot. This must be your fatal error, the companion robot says, not without a touch of awe. They speak, of course, without lips and with lights flashing and have large, boxy heads, but their voices betray much feeling. In conversation recently I was told that my own voice betrayed much feeling, that my interlocutor could detect in it a distinct trembling. It is trembling because I am afraid, I told my interlocutor. Afraid of me? Yes. It is this companion robot who does not know what his / her / its own fatal error is or will be, who precedes our hero out into the desert at film’s end. The two robots walk slowly out into the sandy wastes, and our hero, watching the small, blinking, turquoise lights on the backs of the other robot’s knees, thinks of other small blinking lights that he / she / it has seen over the course of his / her / its 7,000 years, and perhaps later dreamed of, for these robots dream occasionally — they refer to it as being “on in off mode.” They even have nightmares. This they refer to as being “on off in off mode.” I have nightmares. I think I have addressed this elsewhere. Once, recently, however, I was on off in off mode and saw electric horses fighting slowly in a forest. It was, I think, the remembered slowness of their battle that most troubled me upon waking, and the fact that when they noticed I was there they tore me, slowly, to pieces. This was not very long ago. Also not very long ago, it occurred to me that perhaps what I was most lacking, even more than a sturdy cerebellum, were solid grounds for my argument, that in fact my argument, such as it was, was utterly groundless — where did it come from? relative to what did it exist? I say to myself: I have a hand, I know that this is my hand, but can only mean very little by it. At one point during the movie, a robot of a different variety asks our hero — who is wanted by the authorities for not having debatteritized another robot, that is, for not having terminated it, our hero is a “central matrix assassin”—what it is like to be on in off mode, could it be viewed as analogous to being off in on mode. No, he / she / it responds, adding that the phenomenon only ever merits discussion when, in instances of being on off in off mode, it is troubling. My matrix has never been troubled, the robot of a different variety says. Then you do not understand, our hero says. At this point the conversation is terminated because the authorities have arrived. There is a terrific robot fight involving serrated pincers and curious threats and our hero escapes. It is at this juncture that the robot with the turquoise lights comes into the story and that their adventures in common begin. All in all it was one of the best films of the science fiction genre in the style of some years ago that I have seen, and I had hoped to discuss part of it with her, in addition to the other films I mentioned above, as we sat on the couch together, not too many minutes after I looked at those ankles and calves and thought of her ankles and calves, or at any rate of ankles and calves that I had loved fiercely as a subset of an individual I had been in love with, fiercely, once upon a time. Incidentally, it is fall again — here, now. The streets are quiet and the people begin to move more quickly. The glass in my windows is cold. Leaves drop from the trees. I hunt for warm pastries in the bakeries. I steal cakes at work. There are always crumbs caught in the sugary oil around my mouth. None of this is true, of course. I mean in the sense that it is actually the case, that it occurs, or that it can be confirmed. But that is saying and making too much of too little. She refused to answer any of my questions about what she was doing there, then we sat down on the couch together, is the way it went. The couch was structured so as to elevate one each of our buttocks, in my case the left, in hers the right. There were many other couches in the room and chairs set close to each other and many discreet alcoves and from them, as we settled ourselves, we began to hear a faint murmuring. I’ve missed you, I said. And I you, she said. Would you like me to sing for you? Yes I would. I sang. She was silent. Why did you come back? I never left. I thought you were dead or that you had betrayed me. I was, she said, I did. I then suggested that we make love. The conversation sort of fell off for a time after this, so I started regaling her with film-related anecdotes and descriptions, which I think she found quite entertaining. My interpolations, however, were cut short when it became apparent that we were no longer alone in the room. This is not to say that we had ever been alone in the room — clearly, given the murmuring, we had not. It is just that all those who had been implicitly present, on their own couches, so to speak, had not yet rendered themselves explicitly present, and I think you will agree that that is a very different sort of thing. At any rate, there they all suddenly were, and there we were, being crowded by some of them on the couch, meaning, according to our instructions, that it was time to begin the substantive part of the operation, a prospect that left me a little cold — we had been holding hands, sort of, and her hand, even if altered, had felt wonderful to me. Just before we braced ourselves to leap up off the couch and begin propagating ourselves through the treacherous dark, I whispered, we’ll meet afterward, and she said, of course we will. Usually I enjoy these assignments. One is obliged to operate in dark rooms in which many pieces of furniture are present, so that one must move gingerly, which I enjoy, for as long as it is appropriate. One is always in company and, while the tasks of all those present are distinct, they are far from unconnected. Also, in such a unanimous dark, where one moves across thick carpet and there are always many couches and heavy wall hangings and pieces of soft furniture present, pleasant encounters can occur. Once, for example, I lifted a velvet tablecloth and, letting it drop behind me, found myself in a dark set off from the greater dark in which there was another, some other, come here, she said. And, as we lay a moment later tightly locked, the perfumed air beneath the table was pierced by a scream. It occurs to me that I have forgotten something. This occurred earlier, prior to my acquisition of the small computer and subsequent to my acquisition of the lovely red duct tape and the rather ordinary feather duster. What occurred is I stopped off at a lecture which was to have taken place in a small amphitheater in one of the side wings of a very great and very old university. The lecture was to have been on the subject of the horse in medieval courtly romances. There was to have been a detailed analysis of the number of lines in such romances given over to descriptions of horses and of the categories of horses described. Also there was to have been a slide show, of representations of horses, one of which was to have been an image, from the fifteenth century, of horses fighting in a forest, and I was eager to see this. But the lecture had been canceled. To fill up the time I had allotted for it I went out into the university’s courtyard and sat on the steps between a pair of statues and drank coffee from a small plastic cup and looked at the students and wished that I was one. I had been one. In another country. Before I became involved with organizations and evening missions and amateur opera companies. I was actually a pretty good student and frequently earned relatively unqualified compliments from my instructors. I spoke to other students and they spoke to me. It was one of those students who introduced me to representatives of the first organization I had dealings with, the transactions firm. He later told me that he had done this out of friendship for me, but that he had made a mistake — I was actually poorly qualified. He was highly qualified. And very popular. Especially with female individuals. I don’t know what has become of him. It’s possible that he has retired. Maybe he was disaffirmed or killed. When my allotted time had expired I: left the university, went to a nearby park, took out my knife, inspected the blade, found it satisfactory, cut open the tip of my finger, watched the finger, sucked the finger, felt happy, smiled at some guys who thought I hadn’t noticed them trailing me, then, the bleeding slowly stopping, as it usually does, took out the feather duster and whittled the butt end of its handle into a sharp point. Which proved to be effective. In fact afterward I received a compliment, in writing, on the innovative quality of the instrument I had provided for that evening’s exercise. At the bottom of the sheet of paper, which read,