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voice gave me an instant’s insight into what might have been their attachment. “I took him here in the end.”
    It was all the way dark now and looking back you could see how many fewer lights there were south of the divide than north. They were scattered. They sketched the streets in broken lines that curved across the slopes as if trying to encircle the bridge. They extended a kilometer up the other hill to the curious darkness of the generating station. I wondered if any of the lights shone on the house where my mother had been a child.
    We heard the irate screaming of a town donkey, or a visitor’s. I could see the guttering of fires and I imagined them in the shells of south-side houses, in the rubble, in the yards of the plant where the night shift was on.
    “It should be all gone,” I said. I pointed toward the failing belt. “Or all staying.”
    My mother said nothing. Her flashlight lit me up.
    “It should be gone or staying,” I said as I breathed out. My voice quavered a little and she looked at me. That wasn’t unfair, I thought; she gave me such careful eyes only when she sensed this kind of particularity in me, as when a cloud of starlings had gone over our house with silent motions so violent that I’d run to her and tried to tell her urgently that the birds above us should have the heads of dogs.
    “You take apart all the buildings,” I said. “Take out all the bricks and push them down and set fire to them.”
    “Bricks don’t burn.”
    “Hot enough like in the sun they do. Right in the sun. You make them ashes.” Bats, I saw bats again, but these ones I imagined in the bricks’ ashes were as big as houses and not flying but walking in their horrid way on the tips of their wings and their claws, and the ash was baked solid so none of it gusted up at their touch. That was where they might live, the bats. Batland between the town and the hill, the country!
    “Or…or pull all the
rest
down instead,” I said. “The
middle
of the town.”
    “Undome the domes?” she said.
    There was only one dome in the bridgetown. Maybe there were more in the coastal city and that was what she spoke of.
    Do it there too, then. Take the domes down and unwind the railways until the city was all gone. It wouldn’t have to be a bad mess, you wouldn’t have to explode the buildings in the center; you could take away one brick, then the next, then the next. The grass would come back then. And the ring of ruin beyond would change again, change back, that very bit already gone into decay would unwind its decline. That’s how we could help. In a few months
that
would be the city, a circle of revived tower blocks around a huge field of weeds.
    “That’s enough,” said my mother sharply.
    I blinked and came back to myself on the dark slope, realized I’d been speaking, was quiet all the way home.
    —
     
    When Samma’s group didn’t come for me, I would accompany my mother through the town at no pace, hesitating under shops’ sun-bleached awnings, acquiring pieces without any logic I could discern. Sometimes, to my anguish, she’d enter fenced-off middens, heaps of junk and rubbish at the corners of streets, and pick through them. She wasn’t the only person to do so, but it wore on me as if she were.
    There were higher and steeper roads where some houses were changed on the inside, rooms and floors removed, even, so the shell of what had been a cottage was now a church of some low faith, or a showcase for huge industrial goods. It was on the door of one such that my mother knocked one day, to be let in by a harried young woman in a filthy apron chewing flavored bark. She let us into a dim acrid corridor raucous with throaty sounds. The windows were blackwashed and there was a low wire mesh in each doorway. Every room had been cleared of furniture and thronged with fowl, gathered by age and sex, tiny chicks chirruping pitifully in what had been a bedroom, larger birds jostling in the kitchen. I coughed