The wheels were slowed by clumps of moist soil and dead blades of grass

His sandwich eventually arrived, and all he'd managed to write was 'Dear Angela,'. He pulled the sandwich apart and ate it's constituent elements methodically, imagining the order to be very important though he didn't bother to explain to himself why. He ate it and idly pictured himself an anachronistic fop dappling the corners of his clean-shaven face with the bleached white napkin. The napkins here were the cheapest, thin variety and the acid of his saliva combined with mustard easily cut through and created ugly, ravaged-looking holes. He saw bits of the napkin getting caught in his beard, rolled up with mustard stains and glued on by his spit. The thought disgusted him and he went to the bathroom to wash his face. He returned and sat, stirring his second coffee and staring ahead ahead. When he finally finished his lunch, he weighed the pen in his hand and closed his notebook.

***

Two years later he met Elise. He never bothered to write to Angela, never returned to his apartment or to the memories of the grotesque sexual carnival that their grey and pale bodies had performed for the appliances there. He never returned to work, never collected his paycheques, never wanted for money. He could barely recall how he had met Angela now. When it came down to reconstruction, he had settled on a brief workplace courtship as their official history.

His fondest memory of that period was the easy way in which he had dissolved out of their lives. Since then, he had hadn't so much as imagined their reactions, her face, the way her eyes leaked, red for too long after the mood of him had passed, the sick desire she'd had for the corpse of him. Only now did he cast his mind into the faint glimmer of family and food they'd made together, however briefly. And even now when he looked back it was always with indifference and benign amusement.

Mostly, though, he thought of Angela's father gazing aimless into the space between his wife and daughter, a source of echoes like the walls of an abandoned quarry.

Mostly he just didn't think at all.

A series of accidental women had led him to his spare and barren apartment, to the vapid world of art. The strange ease with which he produced wealth encouraged the increasing disconnect between himself and his history that had begun well before he'd met Angela. He'd tangled himself into the city and mapped all its alleyways and atrocities. Imagined the city and himself, and more than imagined, more the impostor every day. His personality slowly took the form of a burial into tiny ceremonial relationships, little set-pieces, locked away and catalogued to be forgotten. For a brief instant each one of these was perfect and beautiful in exactly the way his thoughts about Angela had been. Sometimes this feeling lasted long enough that he could discern an imagined interior for the faceless bodies of the bodies he employed for love and affection and friendship. But these moments were few, and grew increasingly rare. He had become a collector of roles, keeping everything of himself in tiny self-contained boxes. No overlap, no history, just individual beautiful notes with no rhythm and no melody. "The cold music of fact," he thought that sometimes and smiled. He'd become something of a quarry himself and he smiled at that too.

Two years later, though, he met Elise and his careful segmentation started to blur into a new kind of history.

***

His name was Peter. Every day he woke up and beside him was his wife, whom he loved, and, on most days, one of their two daughters had bullied their way into his consciousness with a request (a demand). No.

His name never mattered, and today he found himself alone in a room whose dimensions he couldn't quite make out in the half light. It was clean and cold in there, and there was an air of violence. He tried to sit up but was somehow constrained, though he couldn't feel any straps or restraints of the usual kind. "Welcome," a voice intoned.

No, today his name was Jonathan again and his head was pulsating with horrible pain. Someone, not Elise, stroked his forehead gently and whispered strange words in a language he couldn't understand in his ear. The skin along his shins was raw and bruised, and he imagined walking would be a painful ordeal. "Thank you," he said to the unfamiliar woman. "Thank you". And he let himself weep.

***

The phone rang and he knew it would be Elise.

He dragged himself away from his desk and picked it up on the third ring.

"Hello"

"Hi." [It wasn't her. He panicked.]

It was her. They were supposed to meet for lunch but she wanted to cancel.

"Lots to do at work?"

"Not really," her voice was flat, "I just don't feel like going anymore, I'm going to finish up here early and come home."

"Bad day?" he asked.

"No, not bad, just," her voice didn't trail off but there was no commitment to the thought shaped by her sentence and she abandoned it. This was odd for her, he thought.

He conjured up worry, felt it. "Look, I'll come pick you up, come home and take a nap. Don't think anymore"

"I'm not thinking now. Don't come pick me up, I'll just finish and come home on my own, it's alright. I just didn't want you wasting your time coming to lunch when I'm like whatever it is I'm like."

"Well, okay, just call me if you want I'm sitting here pretty whatever you are myself, I've been drawing a circle for half an hour."

She laughed, and they agreed she'd come home in a few hours.