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slave?”
    “Who ran away? Is that why they got him?”
    “Let go of me.” She shook away. “Don’t talk like that.”
    So I kept walking. Each block has a different smell. On the block that smelled like shoe polish I saw two apes in a large cage shooting at each other with pistols. Three people nearby burst open with stray bullets.
    I had never seen things like these before.

Inside the coal mine I immediately lost my breath. We got there through a tunnel descending underground and the walls and ceilings were a black that nothing could lighten, and each rock that broke plumed out more dust than I knew rocks could hold to black the air too. It was something you got used to, Felt said. And sometimes when a piece of coal came off a bluebird flew out from behind it, but by the time it left the mines its wings were also black.
    It took me half an hour every day to wash the black from my face. Often I’d think it was all gone but when I’d wake up my pillow had black on it.
    And my fingers, too, would leave prints in black on everything. I began to dream in black. The dreams are hard to think of much because they were formless; different spots of dampness, pressure applied.
    The men all began different colors, moon-pale or dark like new mulch, but came up black.
    When we came out of the mines, coal dust was blooming into the sky like an airbag, obscuring the day’s relaxation into evening. When the sun is sugar spun into cotton candy and the jellyfish float beside the lampshade. Dirt and I were coughing more than the others, sitting on overturned milk crates to catch our breath in the oxygenless field.
    “It’s harder to do this than I expected,” he said, leaning over to spit black saliva on the ground.
    “It’s not the work that’s so hard,” I said.
    “No, it’s not the work.”
    Felt came over to us, undaunted by the dirty air, and flipped over another milk crate to sit down. “Can you do this?”
    “We can do it,” I said.
    “It’s easy. Most of us can do with our eyes closed, there’s little to it. You’ll find you could almost do it in your sleep.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “Well you two should get up before the submarine closes. You miss out on that you’ll be stiff as a bridge tomorrow; all of us know this.”
    “The submarine?”
    “It’s where we relax.” The miners were walking toward a distant lump, through the dust they looked like buzzards on a beached fish. We followed them. A hundred footsteps out the dust cleared and the air began to smell like cilantro again; then we could see it.
    The submarine lay on a bed of dead grass and you could hear it, like the sound of a muted television I’ve come to know so well since, by the time you got close enough to see it. One after another the miners went in, watching those before us come out with orgiastic sighs and dazed walks limping away. The sky turned the color of blueberries and then it was time for Dirt, Felt and I to go in.
    Inside, an old man took our pulse and put menthol on our foreheads with blush pads. Then he sat us down, walking across the room to a record player with its arm up. “I’ve never seen these two men before, Felt.” Piano with muffled bass and drums like hammered nails recorded on tin can microphones.
    “They just started today. I found ‘em off to the side, trying to catch their breath— they didn’t even know about the submarine.”
    “Oh, don’t skip the submarine.” I started getting that kind of restless that only happens when you know you need to keep still. It made me think of nights with the other slaves, when I would lie in bed and try to force sleep in anticipation of the soon-blooming dawn. “I catch your breath for you. I do it all for you just so you’ll feel better tomorrow.”
    “Thank you,” Dirt said. “I’ve never heard music before. I have never heard music before.”
    “You haven’t?”
    “But I know what it is.”
    “A man as old as yourself never heard music before? How is that