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than I bargained for—much more—yet doesn’t seem actually to be anything. Just stupid, stupid, stupid. I am. Again.
    Though should I just sit—motor thrumming, hoping the continental edge will re-buoy me? Should I turn on the Fanfare again (Obama used it for his Lincoln Memorial speech, where it worked)? Should I climb out into the foggy chill and have a poke round my old edifice, possibly spy something I left a decade back? A plastic laundry hamper? A bicycle pump with Bascombe painted on in red nail polish? What the fuck am I supposed to do? Anyone else would drive off. I’m worried, of course, about picking up a roof tack in my radials.
    O UTSIDE MY CAR WINDOW , A RNIE U RQUHART, OR A man I take to be him, stands, talking, silenced by my closed glass. (Where’s the Lexus hidden?) He’s pointing beyond the berm and the ruin of my old house—his old house—a stack of sticks rained down from the sky. Conceivably I’ve fallen into a carbon monoxide fugue. Has he been here long? Have we had our meeting already? Have I made everything right by him, the way I once did?
    Arnie seems to me to be talking about the Twin Towers,which is possibly why he’s pointing north. I used to believe I could see them from my deck, though it was only clouds and light playing tricks. “It must’ve taken some real nuts to do that,” Arnie’s saying, as I lower my window. We’re suddenly very close to each other. “That huge skyscraper just coming right at you, three hundred miles a fuckin’ hour. Fascinating, really.” I can’t open my door because Arnie’s in the way. A current of damp, foggy ocean air sifts around me where I’ve been warm in here. When I was in college in Ann Arbor, I loved the cold. But no more. “We bring our disasters down to our own level, don’t we, Frank,” Arnie’s saying. “But those poor people really couldn’t. So we’re lucky down here in a way. You know?” Arnie turns toward the wrecked corpse of his house. “Remember that place? Boy, oh boy.” Out of the ocean’s hiss, a foghorn moans. Surprising it would be working when nothing else is.
    â€œNature always has another thing to do to us, I guess, Arnie.” It’s my best go-to Roethke line and fits most human situations. Arnie and I traded stories about poor old Ted when I sold him the house.
    â€œTake the lively air, Frank.” Arnie says and begins walking toward the uprooted house, as if he’s abandoned all thought of me. “Climb the hell out and tell me what I’m supposed to do with this wreck.” He’s talking into the breeze. “I’d say I have a problem here, wouldn’t you?”
    Arnie Urquhart is changed and changed dramatically from the last time I saw him—at the closing, a decade ago. Every year he’s sent me a Christmas card, each one with a shiny color photo showcasing several smiling, healthy-as-all-get-out humans, grouped either on a dense, oak-shaded lawn, grass as green as Augusta, a big, white, rambling red-shuttered house in the background; or the same bunch in cabana attire, tumbled together on the sand, all grins, with a sparkling ocean behind and a golden retriever front and center. I assumed the beach picture to be taken more or less where we are at present, depicting the righteous outcome of things when life goes the way it ought to. At one point a smiling brown face became part of the Christmas showcase (female, pretty, young, in some kind of ethnic or tribal costume). Then two years later that face was replaced by an even more broadly smiling blond girl who I thought (for some reason) was Russian. I might’ve noticed the change in Arnie’s looks right then, if I’d been looking closely. But I was never bored enough.
    But sometime in the decade Arnie’s undergone considerable “work.” The Arnie Urquhart I sold my house to—age