3 A A recruiting center? This was the first idea, an obvious choice. It wouldn’t be enough, of course we all knew this, it would be only a gesture. But we imagined the smoke and stink, the heat, we pictured keyboards popping apart—it would say something. We told each other. Those nights in that room, all our words, mingling in the fluorescence where moths swooped and died: I found them, wings shuddering, on the table, on the floor in the morning. I nestled them in the compost to whisper among the onion skins and lettuce hearts. The beginning. A beginning. A. Yes, it was my house where we gathered, my living room with the road close on one side, on the other the hill descending into brambles, deer paths crisscrossing. I got up, fetched the meal or the weed, finally sat on the stool by the table. Our sense of ourselves as protagonists: Ford stretched out on the couch, announcing his every idea; Vivienne in the chair in the corner, her quick replies; Sara arguing from the 4 floor where she sat like the martyr she insisted on being—no, that was unkind; she stroked the dog’s head and he loved her. And Zechariah on the wooden chair pulled close to Vivienne, when he was not on the phone pacing the kitchen, his crisp speech floating out to us. The bowl making its rounds, what is flame is air is blood. We faced one another. • Those nights ended, Ford and I slept in the room with no door, only a curtain, I never felt I was rid of their voices. In the morning I walked the dog down the hill, where the stream bank was mud and protruding roots, a violence of spring melt water. The dog hunted out an abandoned deer carcass, a femur with flesh clinging. A beginning. Ford would say: A plane taking off, that’s how it always begins. Or a ship embarks, a city of soldiers. Vivienne would summon up an opening line, stand to recite it. Look, Z would say, and unfold a newspaper. ...