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doing. Come on, it’s fun. Look.”
    The girl turns the book facing him, lightly touching the corner of her mouth with the tip of her tongue. (Every winter, since I been in this country . . .) Draeger leans close to the dimly lit album. Rubbish; she doesn’t know any more than . . . The juke bubbles as he turns a couple of pages of faces:
     
    Ah cast a lone-some shadow
An’ Ah play a lone-some game.
     
    The rain hums against the roof overhead. Draeger pushes the book away, then pulls it back. Rubbish; she doesn’t —He tries to situate himself more comfortably in the wooden chair, hoping to overcome the unruly feeling of disorientation that has been building ever since he twisted that focus knob. “Nonsense.” But that’s the trouble, that is the trouble . . . “This is senseless.” He pushes the book away again. It is nonsense .
    “Not at all, Mr. Draeger. Look.” (Every danged winter . . .) “Let me leaf through a bit of the Stamper family past . . .” Giddy bitch, the past has nothing to do —“For instance, here, 1909, let me read you”— with the ways of men today . “ ‘During the summer the red tide came in and turned the clams bad; killed a dozen injuns and three of us Christians.’ Fancy that, Mr. Draeger.” The days are the same, though, damn it (days that you feel like pages of soft wet sandpaper in your fingers, the silent pliant teeth of time eating away); the summers are the same . “Or . . . let’s see . . . here: the winter of 1914 when the river froze solid.” The winters are the same too . (Every winter there is mildew, see it licking its sleepy gray tongue along the baseboards?) Or not essentially any different (every winter mildew, and skin rash, and fever blisters on your lip). “And you must go through one of these winters to have some notion. Are you listening, Mr. Draeger?”
    Draeger starts. “Certainly.” The girl smiles. “Certainly, go on. It’s just . . . that jukebox.” Burbling: “Ah cast a lonesome shadow/An’ Ah play a lonesome game . . . ” Not really loud but—“But, yes; I am listening.”
    “And using your imagination?”
    “Yes, yes! Now what” difference should these bygone years make? (every winter a new tube of Blistex) “were you saying?” “Though you’re gone, Ah still dance on . . .” The girl assumes the air of one in a trance, closing her eyes. “As I see it, Mr. Draeger, the ‘whys’ go a long way back . . .” Nonsense! Rubbish! (Yet every winter, feel the hole already forming? Lower lip?) “As I recall, Hank’s granddad—Henry’s father—now let me think . . .” But. Perhaps . (Relentlessly.) “Shadows lonesome.” “Of course there are—” Nevertheless . (Still.) “On the other—” Stop . . . stop.
     
    STOP! DON’T SWEAT IT. SIMPLY MOVE A FEW INCHES LEFT OR RIGHT TO GET A NEW VIEWPOINT. Look . . . Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface. So don’t sweat it. For focus simply move a few inches back or forward. And once more . . . look:
     
    As the barroom explodes gently outward into the rain, in spreading spherical waves:
    Dusty Kansas train depot in 1898. The sun lip-reading the bright gilt scrawl on the Pullman door. There stands Jonas Armand Stamper, with a furl of steam wafting past his thin waist, like a half-mast flag from an iron-black flagpole. He stands near the gilted door, a little apart, with a black flat-brimmed hat clamped in one iron hand, a black leatherbound book clamped in the other, and silently watches the farewells of his wife and three boys and the rest of his gathered kin. A sturdy-enough-looking brood, he decides, in their