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98 Cheers They could have been us hours ago. Two figures huddled hip to hip in their parkas like one big foam finger for the sky’s yearly coughing of sparks and spangles, these percussive pops that stand in so often for independence, the blank case, the empty shell. It took the human race five thousand years to invent nothing as a concept, I think, my headlights flashing their coupling of ooh and ahh, their addition by subtraction, long division into unity, two faces to one mouth— a numeric ideal found faster than zero, harder to lose. Any infant knows the letter I, the silver look of a mirror in white light. They could have been us studying the many shapes of one hand inside another, fleshy certainty of the body as it tries on disappearance. The crackle of gunpowder 99 through the car window, the yellow sodium glow as fallen angels of incandescent ember halo their hair. Could have been us if only we’d dressed for the weather; these cold desert nights, this copper chloride blue. ...

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