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stratifications.
    Americans once believed a single man might change the world. That was what our frontier myths, our stories about rugged individualists, our rough-edged heroes, cowboys, private eyes, were all about. America believed it could change the world. Believed this was its destiny.
    Now we were ass over head in a war no one could win and after twenty years of waiting for the Big Red Boogie Man to gobble us up at any moment, we’d begun destroying ourselves instead.
    No one believed anymore that a single man could change things. Maybe, just maybe, in mass they could. Civil-rights marchers. NAACP, SNCC, SDS. Panthers, Muslims, the Black Hand.
    No.
    No, I was wrong.
    At least one American still truly believed that a single man might change the world.
    Last night he had waited in darkness on a roof—for how long? And when Esmé Dupuy and I walked out into the street, he had expressed that belief, given it substance, in sudden action.

Chapter Seven
    I SLEPT TEN HOURS STRAIGHT AND awoke to darkness, disoriented, in a kind of free fall. Esmé Dupuy’s face kept receding from me, floating down, away, in absolute silence, blackness closing like water over it. Meanwhile I made my way through a landscape where everything was blurred and indistinct—bushes, trees, the swell of ground, boulders, a pond—and took on form only as I approached. I had all the while a sure sense that someone stood behind me, pacing me precisely, turning as I turned, using my eyes, my consciousness, as one might use a camera.
    I lay there listening to traffic pass along Washington, unable to throw off that sense of doubleness even after the rest of the dream had unraveled and spun away.
    I reached down to turn on the lamp on the floor by my bed and found a note propped against it.
Lew—
I was here about 9. You were sleeping so hard I just couldn’t stand to wake you up. But I made a pot of coffee and drank a cup of it. The rest of it’s for you. Drink it and think about me and I’ll talk to you in the morning.
V.
    I did both, thought of her and drank the coffee, without milk since what was in the icebox was well on its way to cottage cheesedom.
    I thought of the first time I saw her, in a diner one morning around four. I’d just been fired—again—and had woke up with jangled nerves and a pounding thirst from a day-long drunk. She came in wearing a tight blue dress and heels and sat by me and told me she liked my suit. After that, I was there every night. And once a couple of weeks had gone by I asked her to have dinner with me. You mean, like a date? she said.
    I finished the coffee and decided to go out to Binx’s for a drink.
    A forties movie was on the TV over the bar, everything black and dull silver. Both pool tables were being ridden hard. Papa sat at his usual place halfway along the bar. He nodded to me as I sat beside him.
    “Lewis. Lost one, I hear.” And at my glance went on: “Miss Dupuy. Man getting shot out from beside you, that’s not something you forget. Doesn’t matter it’s in France or your backyard, soldier or civilian.”
    I nodded. Binx brought me a bourbon and when I pointed at Papa’s glass, hit him again too. It wasn’t the kind of place they often bothered serving up new glasses. Binx just grabbed the bottle by the neck and poured what looked to be about the right amount into Papa’s glass.
    “Generous thanks to both you excellent gentlemen,” Papa said.
    “That’s kind of what I have to wonder, too.”
    Papa took a sip of vodka. I thought about bees at the mouths of flowers. “What is?”
    “Whether he’s a civilian or a soldier.”
    “The shooter, you mean.”
    “Yeah.”
    “What kind of rig he using?”
    “Paper says a .308-caliber, some special load they don’t identify.”
    “Or can’t. Well, that’s a pro gun, for sure. Wouldn’t be one of the regulars. Not what they’re into at all, no profit in it. But strays do wander into the herd. You want, I could ask around.”
    “I’d