You break a word down into letters and the meaning disappears. A, B, C. X, Y, Z. Could be anything. Could be the true unmentionable name of God. 

TROOPS

I understand, am understanding, do understand.

I peered at the microwave. The light inside was flickering. Was it a grotesque, hazardous malfunction or the normal sign of fluctuating power so as to more efficiently reheat food? I couldn’t remember. “Flickering lights,” I said to myself out loud.

I lay face down on the floatie, wondering what side of the pool I was bumping against. My mind drifted toward sleep. I considered Kim Jong-un. Was it his uncle he had killed? The ashen-faced man in his military garb, being escorted from a party meeting and to his death. The image I conjured of the supreme leader was of him greedily inhaling a cigarette on the platform where his official train had stopped somewhere on the way to somewhere else. He’d had a personal attendant light it of course. His sister maybe? Keep ‘em coming and he might not turn on you. 

I was awoken by the intermittent whine of a motor scooter as its rider revved up the block and slowed for the speed bumps. Not awoken from sleep. Just awoken.

On the terrace the black birds descend on plates of leftover food moments after diners get up, their brittle feet clambering over forks and plates like nothing, their beaks stabbing at breakfast sausage and crusts of French toast. You can shoo them away but they come back immediately. They hide in the bushes and wait for people to leave, the waitress tells me.

It occurred to me while reading by the pool today that I never realized womb rhymes with tomb. Am I the last English speaker on planet earth to discover this?

I fell asleep very briefly and woke up breathing fast, adrenaline flowing, fight or flight. I examined my surroundings. Sun, attendants in polo shirts and khakis. The looming concrete facade of the hotel building set against a partly cloudy sky. All was as I’d left it a minute or two before. I picked back up the book.

The waiting area by the gate, one flatscreen showing a storm surge lashing Florida’s coast, another showing golf, white men hunched in a green expanse, the tedious unchanging leaderboard displayed. Plus. Minus. Even. The bar and grill across the way is closed but already at this early hour you can glimpse a server behind the screen of idle taps, getting things ready for the coming onslaught of anxious, booze-mad fliers. The agent at the gate informs us that boarding will begin at five forty-six, one minute past schedule.

Man he really is concentrating on that putt. 

Last call for San Francisco from the neighboring gate. The others in our seating area are utterly unremarkable. No defining features, mannerisms. No intriguing conversation. A terrible torpor has set in; they barely reach their hands up to their faces. They’ve been reduced to this: travelers. When they get back to where they come from they’ll reinhabit themselves. People with jobs, friends, hobbies. Secrets. Features that define a life. But for the time being they’re in a state of grace: they’re nothing.

In fact the TV screen with golf has been frozen all along.

I just want to drift off to sleep with the lulling reassurance that the lighter among our Tupperware are flipping around willy-nilly from the forceful jets of the dishwasher, some to come to rest upside down, which of course means right side up, and gather little pools of hot water.

You wonder whether the wax figures are thinking of you. Resenting you for your mobility, your ability to dart in and out of their personal space, taking endless selfies and family portraits with them as props, objects of reverence or lust or derision. You walk away into the next room of the exhibition and they stand prone as though frozen in time. Maybe there’s something they know that you don’t know. You sense it from their sly smiles and unblinking gaze.

After the pop stars and the Royal fam you get a bit of history: in the Reign of Terror Madame Tussaud was enlisted to make death masks of aristocrats by clutching their freshly severed heads between her knees. I guess someone had to do it. Exit through Star Wars and the gift shop.

I couldn’t really comprehend it all so I decided to focus on random details: the wording of a billboard, the arrangement of furniture in a living room spied from the top of a bus. It seemed to help.

At the bus stop at night I was suddenly gripped by the impulse to take a picture of the street sparkling from the rain. It was a humdrum scene—parked cars, kebab shops, delivery guys on bikes. Traffic lights on red. When I first tapped the button it didn’t take. Almost like it wasn’t meant to be. The light turned green, I tried again. It worked.

There was a red form through the frosted glass of the loo. It had a human quality, like someone’s head cloaked in the hood of their anorak. It was probably something nothing.

The hot water came out cold and the cold water came out cold.

I noticed all the wines on the pub menu were high in alcohol, fourteen, fourteen and a half. It’s a sure sign of global warming if there ever was one.

There were two aging portly men at a booth talking about how they’re fucked, they don’t know where the money goes, there’s not enough to last. One said, “I ask myself, can it get any worse? And it gets worse.”

The pub beside Trumper’s, full of yuppies drinking after work. A man walked stiffly on his prosthetic legs across the street. I made a point not to stare but of course I did after he’d passed by. Then I thought, he must feel everyone’s eyes on his back too.

What I saw through the lens of my phone didn’t resemble what I saw through my eyes. It was duller and flatter of course but also it didn’t seem to feature the charming little village off in the distance to the left. I took a picture anyway and put it down. Now there’s just poles and fields and low forests racing by.

Writing is exploring undiscovered territory. The text prediction on the smart device is a tool like a helmet lamp in a cave. It sees everything a moment before you do but it doesn’t care.

It must be said it offered me the word “care” a bit reluctantly there.

A road with a new black surface and bright white stripes darting from below the tracks into the woods.

Gravel piles, always gravel piles.

And the French have businesses with names like Crea Concept, the stenciled name reaching from the darkened picture window into your addled brain. What do they think they’re doing to a people at night tossed on red wine with a word like that. Concept.

TROOPS

Poe squinted, his small eyes peering out beneath thick eyebrows.

The block party band outside played cover tunes hamfisted. Free Falling, The Weight. Bad Moon Rising. We were stuck inside cause J. tested positive.

Dappled sunlight shone on the sloping street, occupied for now by grills and folding tables and kids drawing in chalk. People sat drinking beer, most on the building side but some, like us, by the graveyard. There was a space allotted for music: mic stands, speakers, drums up on the sidewalk.

Right now a duo played: a sax player in a dandyish leopard-skin suit and fancy hat and a guitar player dressed normal. They were pretty good. When they were done I spotted the sax player hovering around the food table as I got a hot dog.

“Mind if I… grab a…?” he said uncertainly.

I said of course, of course. Though nothing was mine to give.

“Nice playing,” I said. And really meant it. You don’t always mean it when you tell someone nice playing. It feels good to say it and mean it.

He made one of those ass-backward acknowledgments, “Thanks much to you” or something. It was a bit weirder though. Like maybe, “What you said I appreciate.” Might have even ended with “my man.”

I stood there for a moment wondering whether he actually understood that I wanted to pay him a compliment. Then he spoke again.

“You just wait for the next band. There’ll be LOTS more people,” he declared, pointing. “And that’s a PROMISE.”

And the next band played and he was in it. And they weren’t quite as good actually. And there were exactly as many people as before.

I awoke gradually, hearing the radio play dimly over the air conditioner. Some tune or other and then a voice intoned: What is jazz?

I stay in bed through the six-thirty news read by Gary, or Bob, can’t remember now, one of them’s the DJ and the other does news. When I hear their names fresh out of my dreams they’re obvious and recognizable but in later, lucid hours it’s all a blur somehow.

It ends with the scores and weather. And when a tune starts up again that’s when I rise.

The artificial intelligence took us through unfamiliar streets, the types where bashed-up cars are parked and weeds grow through the sidewalks. “In one thousand feet, turn right,” she says, and we obey.

At a stop light I observed a used car lot. CROWN FORD PRE-OWNED, it said, and all the letters were immaculate blue and white, the logo we all know below. I marveled at the correctness of it all, the font, the kearning. The folks at headquarters must be hands-on. But then as I rolled away I noticed the entire block of text was off-center on the concrete facade. Not by much. Only by an inch or two. But enough.

On the Belt Parkway we watched as the planes came in. There’s always one that surprises you, that appears right out of the trees and blots out the sun.

At the party she didn’t speak to us except to say excuse me. But at least we stayed until after she left.