The Song of a Particular Bird

    There was a red dust over everything.  He had noticed on first moving to the region.  He had waited, in the enigma of those early days, for someone to explain it to him, for it was not in his nature to ask needless questions.  But no one mentioned the red dust, and whatever interest he may have had in it he soon lost.
    But there are explanations for everything.  The dust was real, carried in on a slack but ceaseless wind that blew, it was thought, from the mountains to the east or whatever was beyond them.  The red came from the street lamps, which shone night and day around the Facility and in town.  The lamps had been arranged to illuminate all habitable space, which was for practical purposes defined by the wall---part masonry and part metal grid.  Beyond that, it was broadly and quite simply understood, no one ventured.  The thin, rust-red light from the lamps pervaded everything, making it feel like night even when it wasn’t.  The light could not be kept out of houses but leaked like the dust around the edges of windows and curtains and shades, staining all things visible.  And anyone emerging onto the streets and sidewalks and happening to look up at the low clouds creeping overhead might have noticed that even they were tinted, providing what seemed a red ceiling to the world.
    Morgan had arrived in the dark, months ago, in a van along with six other interns.  Six times the van pulled to the curb and stopped.  The door slid open, and the driver called a number, and an intern squeezed past and stepped down onto the sidewalk with a suitcase.  The door closed and the van drove on.  It was the last he saw of any of them.  He sat expectantly by the window, his breath fogging the glass, the only thing separating him from the press of that impenetrable night.  Finally it was his turn.  The van swerved to a stop and the door opened and then he too was standing on the concrete.  The driver gave him a sad smile.  Morgan was moved to look up at the sky, which was not like a sky but like the sound of something breaking.  As he watched the van drive off, he was visited by an irrational fear disguised in the form of understanding: that he had been let loose into a vacuum, a world entirely empty of souls.  The impression did not last.  But, though from that moment forward everything was new to him, it seemed even now, months later, that a part of him had not left that sidewalk.  A part of him was still standing under that night---a night that, but for the red tint of the street lamps, might have been black as tar.
    Morgan spent most of the following days in the room he had been assigned, putting his few clothes away out of the dust on hangers and in drawers, parting the curtain to gaze out the window, and rereading the materials for orientation.  The materials had been sent to him before he’d left home.  He studied them carefully, believing them to be important.  In the cafeteria, where he took breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a steady trickle of people filed past the servers.  Observing them as they ate languidly, he watched for signs of who they might be, but he could tell nothing about them.  When he’d taken as much time as he plausibly could at his meal, he rose, cleaned his place, and returned to his room, where he again lifted the curtain aside and looked out the window onto the street below---a street the color of blood running into water.  Subconsciously perhaps, he was hoping to see something that would reveal to him his connection to this place.  But the street revealed nothing.
    In this indefinite way, his internship began.  And so it continued as the months passed---as far as he could tell---without ever properly ending.  He would have preferred a clearer break from his former life, which had very little hold on him to begin with: his father plodding through his days in silence.  Of his mother he had no memory at all.  He’d found he was good at observing people, and this became his life---a life spent at the periphery of the lives of others.  
    Now, however, thrust into these strange surroundings, he wondered whether there might also be something he was not seeing, some key to a larger picture.  Orientation came and went, replaced by a schedule of training seminars held close by the Facility in a brooding cluster of buildings called the Campus.  As he hurried with the other interns to and from the seminars, his eyes repeatedly strayed to these buildings and to the wall beyond, which were of an architecture unfamiliar to him.  He could see them too from his room.  Especially at night, they glowed under the illumination of the red street lamps, their angular structures and opaque windows and even the dusty air they stood in seeming to radiate a form of heat that could not be felt.  For in fact the nights here, while not exactly cold, were certainly comfortless.  Something about the sight of this Campus compelled Morgan to wonder about his earlier life, whether it would even be possible to find his way back to it.  Or whether, by moving here, he had stepped irreversibly onto some entirely new plane.
    His interactions with the other interns were uneventful.  He enjoyed the camaraderie, the sense of purpose among them that at times seemed almost devotional, though he found himself again often at the edge of things, whether by his choice or theirs he couldn’t be sure.  There was only one person he solidly did not like---a tall intern by the name of Dressler, who sat about with his feet up and addressed people without looking at them.  Dressler spoke louder than necessary and had a talent for uttering even harmless remarks in a tone that sounded devious.  A simple “Good morning” from him provoked in Morgan’s veins what he could describe only as a scraping sensation, as of tiny fingernails.  After each of Dressler’s pronouncements, he searched the faces of the others for a reaction, but they appeared unfazed, as they did about almost everything.  Only one thing seemed to energize them: worry over their prospects.
    The interns succumbed, on and off, to fevers of speculation, calculating and recalculating their progress through what were variously rumored to be the two or three or five stages of training.  They debated at length the distinction between Intern and Trainee and whether designation as one or the other affected one’s chances of landing a suitable appointment.  During one of these discussions, Dressler announced that an intern status lasting longer than five weeks was not a good sign.  The room fell silent then as each intern privately reckoned the time that had elapsed since his or her arrival.
    Now and then as the days went by, new interns would materialize, and just as often others would vanish, never to be seen again.  These comings and goings were watched closely.  Anything rising above the routine of their days could be regarded as an omen.  Morgan was not immune.  All the conjecture fed his hope that he might yet understand his place here.  Indeed, it pleased him to learn that others were as much in the dark as he was.
    After several months Morgan was moved to his own apartment, a change that appeared to elevate his spirits, except for an awkward stillness about his kitchen that he could not account for---a stillness suggesting the imminence of something that seemed already to have taken the breath out of the air.
    And he discovered he had a mentor---Mr. Boyce, a quiet man of exact posture, whose presence in the background he had already noticed.  Morgan was given a desk in an office with twelve other people---one of them Dressler.  An austerely lettered sign over the door read “Communications Pool.”  Morgan soon found himself writing project reports.  During frequent meetings with him, the engineers in charge of these projects did their best to explain their work, mostly involving electronic devices.  Their explanations were elliptical, relying on mathematical equations, and he only marginally understood them.  He did what he could, working long days, often to the point of exhaustion.  He looked for his days to brighten. Instead a darkness settled over them, a darkness in which somewhere awaited him---he suspected---the thing that he was not seeing.

    He had just returned to his desk after a session with the engineers, his head awash in test results, when he noticed there had been a change in the office.  Someone was sitting at the spare desk.  The desk stood in the corner by what had been a window, though the window was now blocked by filing cabinets.  Earlier that morning the desk had been empty, but now an intern he had never seen before---a woman with short, dark hair---was occupying the desk, bent over her typing, as though she had as much cause to be working there as anyone else in the office.
    The woman’s presence was a distraction.  Morgan had a clear view, and his eyes would not let go of her---her hair, her posture, her face in profile.  His gaze had just settled on the curvature of her neck when, without warning, the woman stopped her typing and turned to stare at him.  He glanced away, assumed a meditative look, and returned to his work.  He had two reports to finish---he didn’t need to remind himself---and another to begin.  In this way he nearly convinced himself that he had not actually seen the woman, or at least that he did not care whether he had or not.
    The intern’s name was Loa.  And, despite his show of indifference on that first afternoon, he found her impossible to ignore.  Some quality about her was new and disconcerting to him.  He at no point admitted to himself that the sight of her delighted him.
    Who could have blamed him?  His thinking was clouded by eagerness and perplexity and perhaps a little shame.  He devoted himself to his work at the office as he imagined he was expected to, arriving usually by first light, ahead of everyone else.  He kept his head down and did as he was advised and returned in the evening to the silence of his kitchen.  Day after day it went like this.  Back and forth he made his way under under the unsteady glow of the red street lamps.  Their illumination bled into the streets and sidewalks, the fabric of his clothing, and even his skin until it seemed no longer a red light at all but a part of the original condition of things.  At the same time he felt haunted---as if, behind some wall in his mind, the ghost of an idea was eluding him.  There were moments when, immersed in writing or editing, he started, as though from a dream.  He looked around him, and it was then, in the quiet busyness of the office, that he saw the full strangeness of his new life.
    One morning, immersed in the proofreading of one of his reports, he made a terrible discovery.  Error had somehow crept into the document.  Not just one error but several.  All of a sudden there were numbers he could not recognize, language he was sure he had never used.  He had labored over the report for the past three days, hoping to turn it in that very afternoon.  And now this.  How could he have been so careless?  He sat mute, burning under the disgrace of it, his skin soaked with perspiration.  His eyes ransacked the pages in his hand until at last they stopped on the reference code on the upper right-hand corner of the title page.  DR441.  It was, as far as he was concerned, a perfectly meaningless number, except for the one thing it told him: the report was not his.  It was someone else’s.  In fact, he realized, he was looking at one of Dressler’s reports.  Earlier that morning, he had somehow picked up the wrong file.
    He was at first relieved, but immediately that feeling left him, and a more profound and sinister unease came to take its place.  Moving his eyes only, he glanced over at Dressler, whose feet were propped up on his desk, his attention fixed smugly on a sheaf of pages he held in the air before him.  Morgan stood and deposited Dressler’s file in its niche on the shelf, then located and picked up his own and returned to his desk.  He said nothing.  Over the days that followed, he watched and waited for some explanation.  But none emerged.

    And then there was Loa.  Maneuvering along the aisles of the Communications Pool as though she had something secret and particular in mind.  Even when his eyes resisted her, there was no ignoring the click of her heels against the floor tiles.  Maybe it was the fluorescent lighting in the office that forced her eyes into an involuntary squint.  Or maybe she was already having certain misgivings.  Occasionally a strand of her hair would break free and lodge in her mouth when she spoke.  Unapologetically, her hand would come up and flick it away.  All of this he observed with something like amazement.  On some raw and immediate level, she was the purest sight he had ever seen.
    In the weeks following her arrival, Morgan imagined he could sense between them a gradual and inevitable coming together, as if under gravitational influences.  This feeling suited him, for it allowed him to picture himself with her, while at the same time absolving him of the need to act.  He watched, since he was expert at this, and was encouraged by what he saw. She was aware of him.  Of this he was certain.  There were occasions when her eyes searched his so openly that he had to look away.  But, even when her eyes pretended to be busy elsewhere, he knew by her expression that she continued watching him, in the way he supposed women somehow were able.  Whatever observations he made were unfortunately complicated by Dressler, who kept inserting himself uninvited into the equation.  Once, after one of Dressler’s remarks calling attention to himself, Morgan saw Loa stick her tongue out at him.  Dressler missed the gesture, though Mr. Boyce, alert nearby, did not.  What he thought about it, there was no way of telling.  As for Morgan, he would not forget the sight of that pink tongue.
    One afternoon in the Copy Room he was leaning against the sorting table in the chemical air, the machine smartly churning out thick stacks of photocopies when, in what seemed like an act of God, the door opened and Loa entered, a finished report in her hand.  Their eyes connected only briefly before the two of them settled into the business of waiting.  His copy run had seven pages to go, a matter of five or six minutes.  Before long, the rhythmic sound of the machine ejecting its copies into the tray seemed to swell and intensify to the point where it became something else, an almost physical shape looming absurdly between them, a thing which could neither be talked about nor ignored.
    He stood, powerless, trying to conjure in the emptiness of his thinking a reason to justify his staring at the floor rather than at Loa, who was here at last alone before him in all her quiet splendor.  His head bobbed to the rhythm of the copier.  He shifted his weight against the sorting table.
    “You know?” she said.  “Sometimes it makes me a little crazy.”
    She was there in the room, standing next to him.  But her voice seemed to have come from some other place, inaccessible to him.  He tried to bring her into focus, tried to reconcile the words he’d just heard with his idea of her---an idea, he understood, already useless.  
    She looked at the report in her hand.  “All this repetition,” she said.  She tossed the pages on the table and squinted at him.  “We’re all writing the same goddamned report.”
    He knew he was supposed to respond.  But, as he opened his mouth, the words crowded in on him, and he could say nothing.  Her provocative talk, if anything, had only amplified her beauty.  He had dared to consider that she was a possibility for him.  He now saw that she was also a danger, as real as any he had ever faced.
    He managed a smile that she might have mistaken for a grimace, for she continued watching him, as though he were a curiosity.
    The copy machine ejected the last of his pages and lapsed into silence, but neither of them moved.
    Her attention strayed toward the window.  She said, “The air in this room could kill a snake.”  She reached for the cord and raised the blinds, a thing he’d never seen anyone do.
    And there suddenly sprawling before him were the streets and sidewalks and lawns and fences and walls of the Campus.  It surprised him to see it all from this angle---eerily inflamed under the light of the street lamps.
    Loa’s fingers proceeded to flick the lock open.
    He saw it happening, too late to do anything about it.  As she lifted the window, an erratic surge of wind between the buildings threw in a thick spray of dust from under the sash.  Instantly there it was---dust over everything.  Embarrassed for her, he grabbed a wad of paper towels and wiped the sill and table, and then with fresh towels wiped them down again.
    She watched him, as if interested, or perhaps amused.  A string of her hair caught in the corner of her mouth.  Her hand came up to remove it.  “My mother would have approved of you,” she said.
    At her mention of her mother he was touched.
    “What do you mean?” he said.
    She didn’t answer him.

    A beginning had been made.  He was alert in the weeks following, and at every opportunity he spoke to her.  His remarks were generally professional in nature.  Why shouldn’t he offer her pointers?  She took his suggestions usually without a word, in what looked like a state of bewildered appreciation.  On one occasion she said simply, “Thanks,” her small voice buoying the moment.
    Then one day, word came down.  Third-floor conference room.  Mr. Boyce wished to speak to him.  He set aside the report he was working on, wended his way through three and a half corridors, and ascended two flights of stairs, all in a state of suspended consciousness.  At the door he paused.
    Before he could knock, he heard his mentor’s voice call out, “Come in.  Come in, Morgan.”
    The room was yellow, rectangular, windowless.  The broad surface of the conference table, extending nearly from wall to wall, left only narrow spaces for the chairs around it.  Mr. Boyce was sitting, not at its head, but off to one side.  “Morgan,” he said.  He nodded toward the side of the table opposite.  Morgan squeezed himself in and settled into a chair.
    For weeks he had been anticipating this meeting.  Now, face-to-face with the man designated as his mentor, he sat upright, fully attentive.  He would not squander the moment.  Yet some residue of doubt nagged at him.  He did not feel fully in control of himself.  His thinking kept slipping away from him, distracting him with unnecessary remembrances of his home sector, his father, his former life of comfortable isolation.  He recalled standing on the curb where the van had dropped him off into that thick night.  There was an ache in him that would not let go, like what is left over after a memory has been erased.
    Boyce sat gazing at the surface of the table in front of him as though reading a set of notes.  But there were no notes.  The table was bare.
    Morgan waited.
    The silence in the room seemed to shift.  Boyce glanced up, his mouth set in a way that suggested the possibility of a smile.  But the expression faded.  Maybe Morgan had imagined it.  Carefully, Boyce wiped the table surface with his palm as if to clear it of some invisible debris, then turned to him.  “Well, Morgan, what do you think?”  It might have been an actual question or simply a manner of greeting.
    Boyce was not looking him directly in the eye, but fixed his gaze somewhere about chest level, in what felt to Morgan like an appraisal of his clothing.
    He responded with a thoughtful face.
    Boyce nodded, as if confirming in his own mind what he had suspected all along.  “You’ve got a handle on things then?”
    He hesitated.  Earlier he would have answered yes, he was proud of the work he was doing.  Now he wasn’t so sure.  It seemed there might be soft spots in his performance, weaknesses he hadn’t thought of.
    “It’s done differently here, Morgan.  Of necessity.  If you don’t see it now, then you will.”
    Boyce’s talk had caught him off-balance.  He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, a warning maybe about Dressler’s report, a lecture on the shame of plagiarism.  But there was none of that.
    “There are no easy paths here,” Boyce continued, a surprising warmth in his voice, “only critical choices.  Perspicacity, Morgan.  Nuance, layer upon layer.  When you want your people to see in the dark, it goes without saying, you don’t train them in daylight.  That may work elsewhere, but certainly not here.”
    Boyce went on, speaking softly, his eyes fixed on the surface of the table in front of him.  Morgan looked down and noticed, on his own section of the table, the light reflecting in a way that revealed a thin coating of dust on the surface  In that dust he could see written a scrawl of marks put there by elbows, shirt sleeves, and clipboards from previous interviews.  Morgan stared.  From the angle at which these inscriptions presented themselves, they seemed significant.
    Boyce turned to him, his expression suggesting that his point had been made.  “That’s it then?  Nothing further?  I don’t wish to waste your time.  You’ve made a strong beginning, Morgan.  A strong beginning is good.  A strong finish is better.”
    The meeting ended.  In the several minutes that it took Morgan to return to his desk from the conference room, he kept turning over in his mind the words of his mentor.  They seemed to him a form of riddle, one that he felt certain he was already close to solving.  He would need a little more time---time distilled out of the hours and days and weeks to follow.  He resolved, in any case, to be more aware, more ready for whatever it was that he could now not even imagine.  That much was clear to him.

    Meanwhile, there was Loa to occupy his thinking.  He could daily feel the ice melting between them.  There were Loa’s curious eyes and Loa’s slightly off-kilter smiles and the white triangle of throat disappearing beneath the top button of Loa’s blouses.  Once, as they were passing one another between the rows of desks, she brought her hand up and allowed her fingertips to graze the back of his hand.  He barely felt it.  But when he looked, welling from a scratch on his hand was a tiny bead of blood.
    When he wasn’t watching her, he was inventing rendezvous with her: an accidental encounter at the dispensary, lunch together by the canal, an image of her stepping decisively into his kitchen, once and for all putting an end to its stillness.  Detouring on his way home, he followed her with his eyes and in this way gradually learned where she lived.  He waited.  He could feel the moment approaching.
    One evening, leaving the building, he caught sight of her just ahead of him.  He was on the verge of surprising himself by greeting her and suggesting they walk together, when he saw her turn and walk in the wrong direction, south instead of west.  In his astonishment, he almost called out to her.  He stood watching until she crossed the street and disappeared around the corner of a building.
    On the following evening she took her usual way home, as she did the next night and the night after that.  It was on the fourth night that she again broke her routine, heading resolutely south into the gathering twilight.  He followed at a safe distance.  He was amazed at how far she walked, into a part of town he wasn’t familiar with, turning sometimes one way, sometimes another, always keeping the wall on her left.  How much further, he had to wonder, would she continue this adventurous detour?  At that particular hour---not quite night, not quite day---the red light of the street lamps seemed to weigh most heavily.  He could not ignore a rising sense of foreboding.
    At last, in an utterly deserted section of town, where the wall recessed several feet, she abruptly stopped.  She turned and stared directly at him.  He was afraid then that she’d see him.  But he was concealed in the shadow of a brick building, and she did not.  She turned back to the fence, seemed to crouch, and . . . disappeared.
    His heart was beating fiercely.  He could not move.
    He must have stood there a long time.  Finally, at the risk of embarrassment---or worse---he summoned the courage to approach.  When he reached the spot where he’d seen Loa vanish, there was no sign of her.  He noticed, however, a section of the wall where the metal grid seemed to have come loose.  He poked at it, and it yielded, creating an opening large enough.
    Large enough.
    And still it took him a moment to comprehend.  Loa had slipped through the wall.  She had, for all practical purposes, left the world.  She had ventured into . . . what?---there wasn’t even a word for it.  He stood, dumbstruck, as if blind to the chance that something might happen next.  He could not have named the emotions boiling within him.  Fear certainly.  And anger.  And something like jealousy.  But at the same time a kind of yearning.
    Eventually he seemed to realize that by lingering in that spot he was putting himself at risk.  He began walking, back in the direction from which he’d come.  When he reached the shadow of the building, where he’d earlier stood, he turned one last time, hoping perhaps to see Loa emerge.  Hoping to have the world made right again.  However, there was nothing to see under the red street lamps but the empty sidewalk and, looming over it, the wall.  He somehow took himself home, his mind a searing, featureless plain, devoid of anything resembling thought.
    He slept little that night.  Sometime after midnight he rose from his bed and stood by the window, staring into the street.  He stood that way for a long time, suspended in what amounted to a heroic effort of conjuring.  Gradually the character of the light began to change, and he realized dawn was spreading from the east.
    The following day in the office he could barely see what was in front of him---aside, that is, from the blazing apparition of Loa, her attention buried matter-of-factly in the text of her reports, as if she and the Loa of the previous evening were two entirely different people.  If anything, that day she treated him with unaccustomed tenderness.  Which only made him warier.  For a part of him now was terrified of her.  He was not ready to believe he was confusing memory with dream, or that the episode would turn out to be an innocent mistake.  In the office he was aloof with her, and when she left the building he watched her like a hawk.
    A full week went by before he saw Loa again head south.  He followed her, the fear rekindling within him.  This time she took a slightly different route and walked at a more urgent pace.  He had trouble keeping up with her.  When at last he saw her stop at the damaged section of wall, he was out of breath.  He watched her lean and step through, then rushed to the spot.  Barely hesitating, he pushed his way through the metal grid.  And there he was, outside of everything.
    What does he remember of that other side?  
    Dark closed around him immediately like liquid.  Yet at some point it seemed he could see.  Perhaps his eyes adjusted, or perhaps his thinking did.  He recalls nothing of walking---the night was a fabric woven one way, then another.  He wanted but was unable to impose a stillness over things.  An energy that might have been a wind danced the landscape, so that the trees and stones and grasses seemed all of a kind: wild and terrible.  For there were trees and stones and grasses---why had it never occurred to him?---shadowy in their intrinsic colors.  It was as if, beyond that wall, there were no walls, but only the flooding moment.  Somehow he came upon them: the pale articles of clothing, as though discarded on a bush---a grey skirt, a white blouse, undergarments---undulating in the night air.  A little twist of wind provoked a hiss among the grasses.  He heard a rumble, then felt vibration and turned to see a piece of the landscape shrug and separate itself.  But really he knew of nothing, nothing to compare it to, the allure of all this unraveling.  He wanted a safe place for his eyes.  In his next conscious moment he was stumbling, crashing through whatever was in his way, reaching for the reddish glow through the broken wall, squeezing through, and collapsing in a heap on the sidewalk.  He was up then and running, through the streets, crazily, losing himself.
    It ended for him that night: his long time of not knowing.  But he was caught now between two worlds, not alive in either.  The events of that night were for him more than memories, having removed themselves from the wilderness beyond the wall and attached themselves to him.  He dreaded closing his eyes and finding himself still out there, rooted among the tall grasses, unable to see and unable to look away.  His instincts drove him inevitably toward his one chance.  He had a certain knowledge.  He needed to get rid of it.


    Boyce saw him in the same room where they had met earlier.  The mentor’s fatherly smile may have given him comfort, but neither the expression nor the solace lasted long.  This time he was not invited to sit down.  He had something to say, and that was all.  The understanding could not have been any plainer if it had been written in the air between them.
    The trouble was, he was struggling, as if under a weight.  He needed to reach back far enough to get a hold of a proper beginning, without which, intuition told him, things would go badly, though his thinking remained fuzzy on this.
    He stood for awhile in silence.  “I was just wondering,” he said at last.  He paused.  “No one goes beyond the wall?”
    There was, he could have imagined, the slightest shift in Boyce’s expression, which remained otherwise blank.
    “Because there’s a place,” he said.  “There’s a spot, where the wall is broken.”
    Boyce nodded.  He continued watching him.
    “I noticed it the other day.”
    “This breach in the wall,” Boyce said.  “Did you go through?  Did you go to the other side?”
    “No,” he heard himself say.
    “But someone did,” Boyce said, in a way that made it sound not like a question.
    And now he felt it, that he had somehow taken a wrong turn.  He had expected there would be more choices, more ways of making it clear, what he actually wished to say.  For it was not a simple matter, but one requiring understanding and magnanimity and tact.  There were, it seemed to him, tangles of considerations.
    “Who, then, Morgan?”
    He stood there in silence, as if to allow for some last-minute intervention.
    “No need to make a mountain out of it.  Just the name.”
    Boyce---a man of apparently limitless patience---sat waiting.
    Morgan made several attempts, but each time it was as if the name was too big to pass between his lips.
    “Loa,” he said finally, his voice creaking slightly.  “But . . . .”
    Boyce held him in a stare that showed neither anger nor surprise, though there was a flicker of a reaction, as if to a trace of an unwelcome odor.  However, the mentor exhaled thoughtfully and nodded conclusively, and in this way put a sensible face on things.
    And that was the end of it.  Morgan went home, reporting himself ill for the first time in his life.  He slept.
    The next day Loa did not come to work.  Nor did she appear any day after that.  He never saw her again.  Three weeks later a new intern was introduced as Loa’s replacement.  Over time he was moved to wonder what exactly he had done to Loa.  Boyce would say only that she had been transferred to somewhere in the North.

    One evening, later that same year, he found himself walking in an unaccustomed direction, a path bringing him through a part of town he had almost forgotten, to that same section of the wall, which had long since been repaired.  He stood there, attentive, at a loss to explain his impulse to return to the spot that had caused him so much confusion.  He leaned in and grasped the metal grid of the wall with both hands and stared through, beyond the reddish glow of the street lamps, trying to see what he could see of whatever was on the other side.  He stared a long time until he thought he could begin to discern shapes, or perhaps remember them.  He was pretty sure there had been the song of a particular bird.  Dark, translucent clouds, if he recalled accurately, had moved, roiling overhead.  Even in the thick of that darkness, the leaves of the trees, he thought, had been lustrous and green.  He couldn’t help himself.  He felt the emotion boil up inside him.  He let go of the wall.