Water, out of sync with what was on the terrace, gushed from a sink in a bathroom. A length of loosened rope snaked around the posts of the headboard and down over a mattress half in the floor. The intruder stumbled backwards, toppling a waste can at his calf. Wet, wadded-up newspaper flopped out to scatter dozens of used condoms, like slithering baitworms, over the low-pile rug. Snatches of a headline suspended in the onion-skinned layers of paper conveyed something jagged. Popcorn rain flicked at his pants cuffs to urge him down the metal stairs outside. Once in his car, Michael sulked; the light of the blue neon moon resembled molested iris petals dribbling down his windshield.

It had been a tortured bit of melodrama on his part: his leaving her that morning when it was clear she did not want him to leave. And, in truth, she could be forgiven for construing his absence as a form of punishment or abandonment or both. A bigger man—a man with less pride—would have stuck it out with her in her hour of need. But it was a weaker man who had not acted, and it was a foolish man who had left her to seek solace in another man’s arms. He was a thirty-six year-old smarting over a younger woman in a way that was as predictable as it was pitiful. His conflict was more nuanced than it had been in his twenties, but it was made no more reasonable.

The driver turned over his ignition, yet tarried on seeing Amber, shielded by an umbrella, descend the steps to her car with her suitcase. The prostitute intuited her way off the splashing lot, and Michael followed in her wake.

The road forward captured his frayed nerves. Rain fell in ordered sheets like rows of sharks’ teeth. Leafless trees were blasted down to their roots in the savagery, and mist-like smoke, thrown up in the thrashing, ringed the road. His gaze stayed fixed on Amber’s unblinking taillights, and as the rain closed like a curtain around the car it concentrated his perception all the more, leading him to turn over what had passed for confession between prostitute and client.

It was difficult to explain, but Michael was desensitized to his feelings most of the time, and it was only when these feelings were rarified or intense he could contemplate acting on them. When it came to women, he could be strongly attracted to them physically or romantically, but as physical attraction was quickly exhausted in a physical act, and romantic love plateaued or ebbed over time, he was sooner or later confronting a void that made his interest appear illusionary and self-indulgent. Yet appearances could be deceiving. In his few unions, breakups were inevitable, but never clean, for in rising to enough emotion needed to act, the intensity of feeling would briefly rekindle all his other emotions, including his initial passion for the person he intended to leave. It was not the case his feelings for the lover had evaporated completely, but they had subsided to a level where they dropped off the radar screen. This was an intellectual understanding of his feelings, as he always needed to understand what he felt; yet the most important of human feelings paradoxically—and as Amber would agree—defied the intellect. Whether or not his subterranean mode of feeling was enough to make him want to keep faith with a love he generally could not see was an untested idea. Still, love was hope, if it was nothing else.

Orange flares emerged ahead, and then the flashing light of a service truck on the shoulder. A billboard for Peek-a-boo Putt-Putt had fallen in the squall to bring down phone lines. Workmen were using a winch and ropes to hoist the obstruction and clear the highway, which allowed Amber to squeeze through the bottleneck before him. When he reached the place where the old and new highway forked, he could only guess whether she had turned toward Stonesthrow or back toward Chicago.

Despite the sudden onset of the storm, the rain had mostly subsided once Michael crossed back into town. He parked his car at the house, but in his state he did not go inside. A thornier drizzle pushed him up the block. Toothy jack-o-lanterns poked out from porches on either side of the glistening street to stitch together tumbled-down yards and buckled sidewalks. Runoff made shadows pitch and yaw under his feet, as if puddles of bluish-brown pigment were being blown away over rough paper. The scene was reminiscent of a Charles Burchfield’s watercolor, where ghostly houses moan with loose shutters, and every window is a haunted eye looked out of in loneliness.

Halfway to top of a hill, he paused on hearing sloshing behind him. The incline put whatever he was trying to see below his line-of-sight, although his sense was of a skulking dog weaving in and out of shrubbery. With higher elevation, Michael finally spied the glint of a wet rope strung taunt between trees. It was being used in a bizarre pulley configuration. He could not say who was pulling on it, or what it was tied to, but the sound on the dragging end was of something disobligingly heavy.

He kept to his walk.

The anxious man soon arrived at his destination. Without compunction he stepped to the side of the house less exposed to the street. Divots from Emma’s mismatched heels were still turned up in the soft earth around the rear door where they made their dramatic exit. Steps shot up from the weedy threshold into utter blackness, but the stranglehold was no deterrent in him dashing up to the door at the top. Face to face with a studio he had only passed through in haste, Michael probed for a light switch. His impulse was to trash the place, but on seeing Seth Bowles’ canvases arise in the glow he was caught off-guard in his reaction. The paintings were all strangely covered in coats of crystalline black paint. They were reminiscent of the work of the minimalist abstract artist, Ad Reinhardt, only without the subtle differentiations in shading. The trespasser was flummoxed, for he could not connect the boilerplate abstracts in front of him to the artist who painted the nude portrait downstairs. A pink and green Japanese screen was set off in a corner; an unlatched lockbox, filled with unmarked videocassettes, lay under a camcorder and tripod behind it. The home invader did another turn around the room and fumed, coming lastly on one painting covered with a red velvet cloth. He lifted the fabric with anticipation, and to his amazement unearthed a meticulously rendered portrait of a beautiful woman. The title engraved on the frame read:

Intangible Gift

The fellow painter’s admiration for the work was short-lived, for in realizing it was Seth’s wife as a young woman, he picked up a utility knife from a worktable and slashed the canvas to pieces. Still seething—and indifferent to his desecration—, he was quickly falling back through the narrow escape and down the stairs. He punched the door at the bottom and stomped out into a quadrille of dead leaves.

The distraught man cut the shortest path back home and passed between houses to enter the Quadrangle. He had not intended to do so, but found himself passing Brae’s bedroom window. Police had removed the cut wire screen, but the eerie opaqueness of the dusted pane held him a second longer. More leaves danced behind him—though more like footsteps and a cold stare peering over his shoulder.

On walking into his house, Michael could hear the grind of the camcorder from the bottom of the stairs.

It was inadvertently left on.

A loud splat greeted him at the bedroom doorway. The lamp was quickly flipped on to reveal a dark water spot spreading outward from the ceiling light fixture; a second, bigger spot was on the bedspread. As he waited for the second shoe to drop, giving floorboards in the attic groaned from the same vicinity as the leak; the oscillating pitch was consistent with shifting weight.

He stared up with wan expression. “How can this be? How can I be asleep?”

Both pieces of the sleeping tablet were still lying on the basin in the bathroom where he had left them.

“The antihistamine,” he mumbled. “The antacid…”

The confounded man rushed out into the hallway and, against sounder judgment, flew up the second flight of stairs. Rainwater from the open skylight formed puddles between peaks of paint on his glass palette, but there was nothing in the floor. No less anxious about it, he returned to the bedroom and the unlit candle on the nightstand. Neither knife blade nor marble had dropped on account of him precipitously extinguishing the candle. The wick was promptly lit to restart the clock and the table lamp turned back off. In the transition from bulb to flame the candle wax shadows were sluggish slipping down into their unfamiliar grooves. The snapping flame directed his attention to a notepad on the same table where a line of text was scribbled:

Without you, I am nothing.

Michael, sensing movement above him, raised his eyes. What was assumed to be a water spot on the ceiling was now a shadow, one somehow being cast from below by the candle. Yet the diffused form—resembling the foreshortened silhouette of a man—was undulating out of time with the flame. Cringing, the painter backed away from the bed and picked up a second shadow between the bedposts at the footboard. When he dared to look, the ghastly reflection of Jacques Cretier was staring back at him from the dresser mirror. The grey dwarf was creaking at the end of a rope tied to the ceiling light; urine dribbled down briefs slouching at his knees to splatter on the spread.

“J-Jesus!” Michael stuttered, swinging out to strike the lampshade. He backed into the tripod and man and contraption fell banging to the floor. “Goddamn it!” he cried.

Jacques was no longer in the mirror; the shadow was no longer on the ceiling; the note, however, was still beside the lamp, though the handwriting was surely not his. Wisped ringlets of hot vanilla off the candle were late bringing the ceramic plate to his attention.

Both marble and razorblade were now lying in it.