Hushed, Quadrophonic

136 HUSHED, QUADROPHONIC ANDY NICHOLSON He doesn’t know you anymore. The hillside nursing home took his name. Scattered over the valley’s rooftops, it glitters off asphalt shingles in the heat. You’re here, in the hallway, too singular to grasp this dispersal. It won’t stop lapping over the lip of your cupped hands. You trip over your feet into the summer day. The afternoon is steam and brownouts. Who owns this? It won’t help to reclaim a dribble from the heap, and you’re helpless as a floodplain. By the riverbank, cyclists speed behind the stand of elms on the far shore. Two friends or a couple or a middle-aged mother and her grown son ride single-file—you’re too far from their story to tell their story, too far from the thousandand -one nights they live through for you to sustain the city between towering dunes. It is shifting. Each grain shifts along its path, and the horizon’s mirage is another world calling you— the real world— and reality drops through the valley, plunges as rock down to riverbed. You’re here beside a law you can’t decipher, their mumbled debate, the truth they debate. You hear it from the adjacent room. ...