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severe, had dropped his gold ring into the river as he adjusted his tie, crossing the same bridge several weeks before. “What will you do when you find your child?” said the man. “I’ll teach him not to disappear,” said the woman. “What will you do if he leaves again?” said the man. “I’ll teach myself to disappear,” said the woman. “What will you do when you find your ring?” “I’ll return to my life,” said the man. “I’ll reunite with everyone I’ve pushed aside.” “What will you do if it leaves you again?” said the woman. “I’ll drag them all along with me,” said the man. Both unsatisfied with their answers, the man and woman tried to impress one another with miraculous visions. “Look,” said the woman, “I see seventeen angels skimming over the water.” “Look,” said the man, “I see a bicycle cycling with no rider upon it.” “Look,” said the woman, turning bashfully to the man, “I see a child sleeping in the river with a ring around his finger.” “My ring is not in the river,” said the man angrily. “Neither
is my child,” said the woman angrily. So the woman went her way, and the man went his way, and only once did they look back to see how the other was getting along. The water beneath the bridge did not show any sign of having known it was the cause of their sorrow; it kept flowing. The man and woman are still alive even today: mad, wretched, and searching.
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    This is not the usual way in which this story is told. It is usually presented as a riddle: A child sleeps soundly with a ring around his finger. He knows every secret, every one. And if he is not in the river, where, then, is he hiding?

If We Should Ever Meet
    P LEASE READ: I want to tell you before you begin that there are moments in here when I talk more about my family than the strange thing that happened to me, and if you’re in a hurry, you can skip over them without losing very much of the story. I don’t want to waste your time, and it’s too late for me to change anything. Thank you.
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    I came in on a bus from the north. In my previous town, I worked in a building that was so tall that people used to jump from the roof when they became so sad that they wanted to end it all. One day I was sitting at my desk next to a window when I felt this shadow fall across my face. It was only there for a second, and I really didn’t think much of it, but then someone I worked with came into my office and told me that somebody had just jumped off my side of the building, and asked if I saw it. I told him I had, even though I had only felt the shadow, and I became so guilt-ridden about saying this that I took a long time off work, just lying around in bed trying to figure out if that dead person was angry with me for making a memory out of him that wasn’t true. When I finally decided that
the person was probably furious with me, that I would have to live my life with the lie just eating at my heart as a punishment, my work called to tell me I was fired. So, getting off the bus in my new town, I made a vow to myself that I would try to view each new situation as independent from all the previous ones, and make no snap judgments, because although I had visited once before, I was unfamiliar with the people and customs. When my brother got home from the war, before they sent him out again and he got killed, at dinnertime my father and mother and my brother would all gather around the table, and before we started eating, my brother, who was a lot older than me, would lead us in a song he wrote called “If We Should Ever Meet,” which became a little controversial within the family because the lyrics were vague and kind of ominous, and nobody could ever understand why he was singing about a meeting with strangers when there we were, all of us around the