At first I thought something had broken in my book.

I didn’t notice until the afternoon light from the windows began to recede. I tried to increase the brightness settings of the page, but no matter how I thumbed the margins, they would not change. For the first time, I looked carefully at the gold printing along its spine. The book was dead.

What kind of library carried a dead book? I wondered.

No one responded to my calls for assistance. There were no working service-buttons near the shelves that I could see. I walked downstairs to the circulation desk. No one was present at the self-checkout stalls, and I assumed, like all other recent changes, that this was the result of cuts to the city budget.

The more I looked at the gold-laden book, the more I considered it may not have belonged to the library at all. It had no identification tag on the inside cover, no chip at its base. Perhaps someone had left it, hidden among the other inventory, for some unknown reason. There was no way to scan a book that didn’t belong there, so I put it in my coat without checking to see if cameras were hovering over me and walked out the door.

The entire ride on the 2, I wondered if something would happen. I waited for an officer to pull me aside at the station exit. Or for a street drone to make me step away from the pedestrians on the icy sidewalk. But nothing came of it, my taking away the dead book. I was surprised, and even disappointed, in the nothing that seemed to follow.

---

“The Winter Hills by Carrigan Salt.”

The owner of the video store studied the binding, the page edges, much as I did before. Alaric had an eye for dead things that I did not, and he understood instinctively the rarity of what I had brought him.

In the weeks after my mother’s funeral, I had come to the video store more often, bringing boxes from her Court Street apartment. Recorded-over VHS tapes, floppy disks, and undeveloped photo rolls. The Brotherhood on Montague was always eager to collect physical effects and would accept donations of any kind, I had been told. Even if they could not use or preserve them, they often had a sense of who could.

I was curious if he would buy the dead book from me, given his obvious interest.

“I’ll consider it.” Alaric paused, then he redirected the conversation to my mother’s things. Some of her belongings I had chosen not to donate outright. One in particular, I had requested the Brotherhood try to restore and copy.

“The digital video disc, the DVD, you asked about—we’ll need a 650 nm red laser to create a copy from the scratched original.”

“Just as it was? No optimization?”

It was important to emphasize this. Every other data center had been unable to pull the file without automatic edits to the image settings and content.

“That’s right.” Alaric nodded. “No optimization. Just as it was. The Brotherhood’s burner is on loan. It’ll be a week or two.”

He was about to give back the dead book, but he kept touching the textured cover. “I never read this, the original, in ink on pulp,” he said. “It’s part of Salt’s Long Wanderer series.”

“Oh,” I said, as if I had heard of it before. Salt’s name had been vaguely familiar to me when I plucked the book from the library shelf, but if there were more volumes like this one, I didn’t recall seeing them.

The old man turned several pages. He was reading, but it was apparent that he was thinking of other things. I could feel his mind split between the words and wherever else he was. His breathing slowed, and then he closed the book and put it in my hands. There was some sound in a distant part of the shop, behind the shelves and stacks of preserved things—spinning racks of cassette tapes, mounted pinhole cameras, an old standing arcade cabinet. A rhythmic rustling, there, that continued until I left.

---

Elii met me at the promenade after dark, not far from Montague.

We sat on a bench and watched the East River behind the slow-moving bodies on the walkway. I tried to show her the dead book, and she thumbed the margins before giving up when it wouldn’t brighten. It was clear she had no interest in the thing.

I’d been hoping after several months of dating we’d be able to take off our amp-glasses, but she insisted we keep them on. I’d already snuck little peeks of her around the edges of my frames. I knew she did not look all that different without her themes. Her cheeks were less contoured, her lips less plump. The alterations in the glasses were only slight. Nonetheless, she had only ever let me take them off when we were in total darkness together. For people who kept glasses on, it was never really about looks alone.

She asked if I was almost finished with my mother’s apartment. There were just a few more boxes, some paperwork, and the deposit to get back. My bereavement leave was done, and I had borrowed from next quarter’s vacation time. But I’d be back in my apartment soon.

We began talking about the scratched disc I’d sent to Montague St. Video, how it contained, among other things, old footage my mother had shot and saved. Clips of us up at Lake George in the years after my father had left. I offered to show Elii some of it once it was restored and copied.

“It sounds like your mom held onto a lot,” she said. “That’s a lot to go through and settle up. A lot of things.”

“Right. That’s true. It is a lot. A lot of things. Too many, even.”

“Yes, maybe too many,” Elii agreed. “I was thinking, because there’s so much, we should probably hold off on visits and videoconnects—until you’re done settling everything, at least.”

“Oh? I mean, sure. That does make sense.”

“It just seems like something you should finish first. Don’t you think?”

“You’re right. No. You’re right. I should focus and finish. That does make sense.”

“Sorry again. For your loss.”

“Of course.” I went back to watching the dark glass and cement shapes of the city across the river instead of her, already half-forgetting whatever it was that we were saying. “I appreciate that,” I said. “Yes, I appreciate that. I do.”

---

Later, in the stillness of my mother’s apartment, I began reading through more of The Winter Hills. I sat in her old chair, her scarf still draped over the arm and barely brushing against the rug. Lost in the pages, much as I’d been in the library.

Carrigan Salt’s protagonist, the unnamed rider, rode his gray horse across flat and rocky lands and through sparse little towns. The character had a peculiar way of going from one place to another without a sense of purpose. In any other book, I would have known the shape of the narrative at this point. But not here.

He did not understand the urgency with which others lived. They all seemed so eager to reach a conclusion, no matter how partial or incomplete, but in his mind there were always more questions forming like eddies in a stream. Every town the rider visited, he liked to ask himself these three things: What is it these people want? What is it these people need? Are they striving toward one, or the other, with what they do each day? And in examining these things he usually came to a clearer understanding of the people in that particular place.

I fell asleep reading about thundering horses and cattle and sizzling heat. Outside, the heavy trucks on the BQE rattled the icy apartment windows, but I imagined them as hooves over hollowed rock. I dreamt of a man on a gray horse standing at a lake, watching a mother and her young boy at the water’s edge throwing rocks. I woke up crying for reasons I did not understand.

---

My days had already lost normal proportion before the dead book. They were little eras contained within odd chambers that did not begin or end with a sunrise or sunset. There was the unlocking of my mother’s online accounts. The post-funeral cremation and retrieval of remains. Notifying various agencies and sending copies of death certificates. Finding an attorney to settle any outstanding issues with her estate. The time spent reading The Winter Hills in meditative stretches felt no different. Just another era to add to the ones before.

Alaric had not yet finished with the disc I had given him on my next visit to Montague. I found him stooped over an album of postage stamps, carefully arranged on each page in airtight little sleeves. Behind him, a black-and-white movie played on a CRT, and a modified VHS player appeared to be recording the contents for the Brotherhood’s archives. I asked Alaric, while he inspected the postage stamps, if the store sold any paper.

“As in, sheets? Uncoated? No pixelated surface? The Brotherhood has a relationship with the mill in Tarrytown, so we do have some supply, yes.”

He did not ask why I needed it, so I assumed this was not too extraordinary of a request. I bought one ream with some store credit I’d accumulated.

My mother kept an old Trapwood typewriter she had gotten as a gift from her grandmother. She had shown me, when I was very young, how to replace the ribbon, but I still had to spend some time watching videos online before I could do it. Once I’d had everything, I put the copy of The Winter Hills next to me and began typing its words on the fresh paper.

The town was nothing like he knew. There was a solemnity to the way the miners at Copper Hawk lived. Their existence was like a duty they bore begrudgingly but also would not relinquish. The rasp of dust in their nostrils and mouths, the lines of their skin. They did not enjoy the brilliant bang of the white sun. It was only the swollen blackness of the shafts before them, and they could not remember what had been there before the mines had been birthed beneath them.

I didn’t know why I’d begun this project of copying the dead book’s text over onto fresh sheets. My day job as a freelance re-writer meant I often studied material like this. But typically I would be cleaning up inarticulate copy, trying to make output from some desk producer into something people could understand. My agency mandated simplified phrases and strict grammar rules we had to know by heart.

The Winter Hills did not have any of those phrases or rules. There were long turns that were not necessarily about efficiency or meaning, but about rhythm. It was a voice I wanted to transpose for myself to feel the words. I was getting lost in the book, but at a pace and flow that felt more like a dissolving comfort than the listlessness of despair.

It was also during those quiet days when I began to suspect something else was happening, especially when I left my mother’s apartment.

Walking along the slushy sidewalk, past naked black branches waving like claws at the curtilage in front of the brownstones, I heard that distant sound, that rustling, I remembered from the shop. Not like soft wings, but something like plastic or the scrape of faux-leather.

There was a presence I could not explain.

I’d take breaks from typing and go down to one of the corner stores. No one would be working there in person, of course. The camera would dangle from tracks in the ceiling, following over my shoulder and monitoring every item I picked from the shelves. I’d scan my items at the self-check registers, and I’d think, for a second, that someone was in one of the aisles. But I also knew if I looked, I would be wrong.

The iron-handed sheriff of Copper Hawk did not take kindly to the rider or the differences between them. In his mind, every stranger was a new element to be carefully accounted for, and the sheriff was not one with the patience for it. He did not ask questions about what people wanted or needed, only what they could do. No, he and the rider were not the same at all.

The ending of the dead book was as mystifying as the rest.

The rider spent weeks in the mining town of Copper Hawk, slowly coming to the realization that the sheriff there, working under the auspices of a metals corporation, was bleeding the people of their wages and exploiting their labor. The last chapter involved a shootout, as these kinds of books tended to have. But instead of a decisive victory, the rider ended up winged and bleeding. The book finished with the rider, delirious, on his gray horse, barely escaping with his life out into the desert. Nothing resolved. No one in Copper Hawk saved. Perhaps the rider would return to the town and set things right in another book, but somehow I didn’t get that sense. So the ending felt haunting, strange, and unfamiliar to me.

I found a living reprint of The Winter Hills for comparison. It was encased in shiny plastic, the spine with the usual rechargeable port. I scanned and skipped along the various digital chapters to see what had been altered by the publishers posthumously. It wasn’t uncommon for the estate and rights holders to periodically update these kinds of stories. The benefit of a living book was that they didn’t have to contact readers to update the content. Alterations would sync in the pixelated pages whenever the book went online next.

The biggest difference I noticed in the new electronic copy was the ending.

There was a shootout in Copper Hawk like before, yes. But instead of the loss and the blood and the shame of the rider, the iron-handed sheriff was the one to take a bullet. The miners of the town staged a revolt against the metals company in the third act. They set fire to some of the shafts with an explosion at the end of the action, to punctuate the triumph. I could almost sense the hand of audience-score maximizer programs in the plot. It could even have been a re-writer at my agency that oversaw the edition, for all I knew.

I felt better in some ways, having read the new, happier ending, but I forgot it promptly, like some garbled conversation I’d overheard on the subway, something that made me chuckle and then escaped my mind.

In my dreams, I kept going back to the image of the original ending—that rider bleeding, leaning over on his horse, clutching at its neck, and whispering softly to the beast. And then I remembered my mother wearing sunglasses, on a towel at Lake George, reading a magazine, while I ran back and forth on the white-hot sand.

“Why would they change it that way, The Winter Hills?”

Alaric was inventorying one of the last boxes of my mother’s belongings. He held up a record and inspected its sleeve. There were also a series of digital postcards, rewritable electronic messages in thin plastic film, some from Cabo, others from Denmark, sent by my mother’s younger sister who had never stayed in one place too long.

“People have a tendency to confuse change with improvement. So alteration seems like creation to some.” The old man peered down the glasses dipping at the end of his nose. “We like the feeling of progress, and folks figured out a while ago that you can always tweak things in your surroundings to heighten a perceived movement through time. Even if, in truth, you haven’t advanced anywhere meaningful at all.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Alaric laughed, to me or to himself, I could not tell. “I’ve never been accused of clarity.” He typed something on his dust-covered computer and studied the digital postcards from my aunt. “It seems counter-intuitive, but it’s really the preserved things—fixed markers that never move—that are the more meaningful measure of change. A traveler on the road can look at mountains, forests, other landmarks, and he understands the difference in his positions the farther along he goes. Just like when I listen to a song, look at a work of art, read a book. And then later, return to that same piece. Something will be different, will have moved, in me. That’s the benefit of the work we do in preserving things in particular forms, I like to think. We remember who we were then, so that we know who we are now. Does that make a little more sense?”

His words did feel right. Like something I’d been thinking but didn’t know how to articulate in the weeks of going through my mother’s things. Again, I removed the dead book from my coat pocket and offered it tentatively to Alaric.

“Have you considered, by the way . . . ” I felt almost embarrassed asking. “Whether you’ll buy? The dead book, I mean.”

He did not answer quickly. The question appeared to weigh on him. “I’m making inquiries, but I have to be frank. We may not be able to offer a fair price. Not what you could get elsewhere. We will do our best to get back to you soon.”

“I understand.”

“In the meantime, you should be careful.”

“With the book?”

“With who sees it. Not everyone appreciates these things the way the Brotherhood does. Materials that can’t be modified, adjusted, or updated. Some enjoy true things like that. Some can’t stand them.”

“I see,” I replied, but again, he had lost me.

“Where did you find this copy, again?”

“Just an old place in the city. My mother used to go.”

“Your mother . . . she was from this neighborhood, you said?” The old man studied my face and the postcards, like he was trying to figure something out. But if he put anything together, he didn’t say a word about it or give any other indication. After we’d finished with the box, and as I was about to reach the stairwell, he called out to me.

“West Nyack.”

“Hm?”

“There’s a Brotherhood in West Nyack,” he said. “Not that far out of the city. They know dead books and sometimes teach others about them. If that sort of thing interests you, maybe those are the ones you should go and see. They might have something to offer or to teach you too.”

I thanked the old man for the information. There were other things I probably should have asked, but that I just let go. I suppose I thought there would be time with other visits. I did not think too much then about leaving Montague St. Video behind.

---

Caliper John approached not long after that conversation. Or rather, he decided to make himself known, I suppose. Even then, I should have known he’d been listening for some time.

In the days that followed, typing and re-typing passages from The Winter Hills, I found myself awake in the quietest parts of the night. Sometimes, as my mother and I used to do when I was a kid, I made my way to a small Greek diner a couple of blocks from the apartment that was open at all hours. The owners had changed a couple of times over the years, but the kitchen stayed the same through each transition. No automated preparation. Just staffed by a few older men who rotated shifts. My mother had always gotten the fries and the coffee, oil and acid, she’d call it, and read at the blue booths closest to the radiators. So I took to doing the same on these chilly nights too.

He came to my table while I was reading, alone.

“Excuse me, but that book you have there. Have you ever considered selling? It’s been some time since I’ve seen an original Carrigan Salt.”

His voice was weak, almost a whistle, and did not fit, because he was so unnaturally large, bigger than any man I had seen. Something animalistic in my brain went off. I felt threatened by his shape and the way it towered above me. He wore tiny glasses and a tailored jacket, little signs of seeming gentility. But they could not obscure the physicality and power of his frame.

He introduced himself as Caliper John and said he had seen me reading The Winter Hills and felt compelled to come by. Later, I realized he did not specify when he had seen me reading the dead book.

I asked if he was with one of the Brotherhoods, and he shook his head.

“Not quite.”

His eyes would never rest for too long on the cover of the dead book, like he could not take in too much of its details. I noticed, then, a special watch on his wrist, running applications I could not read from where I sat. The watch was similar to mine and other personal computing devices, but it was clearly more expensive and technically advanced. This one seemed like a tiny bracelet on that beefy wrist, and yet he managed to tap and swipe at the watch’s face and pull up several programs with ease.

“Physical depreciation might impact its value, but you could get quite a high price from specific collectors. For example . . . ” A few taps into a search bar on the watch and he pulled up a store profile, which he projected just above the watch screen. An antiques and rare editions shop called Satoshi Print. It looked like it was somewhere on the Upper West Side, based on the address. “Just an example, you understand,” he said.

“You work for them? Satoshi Print?”

The large man did not meet my eyes. He was listening to the sounds from the kitchen, the sizzle of a frying pan, or maybe the clang of utensils.

“I could make inquiries for you. This is, you understand, not the sort of establishment where individuals can approach. Mine is a tricky business with very little trust. But I am something of a known entity. So if I should broker something, they will make serious offers. It could be quite a lot. Potentially five or even six figures. And you and I could work out a percentage for my commission.”

“I . . . I appreciate that. I’ll have to think about it. Mister . . . ”

“John. Caliper John.”

“Right.”

“Right.” He repeated, not mockingly, but more like an uncontrolled echo. The large man, Caliper John, seemed to sense a need to adapt his approach with me, so he smiled. It felt practiced, and he appeared to think it would be reassuring. “People do not often hesitate when I tell them there is that kind of money involved. You understand what I am telling you, about the money involved.”

“Sure. I don’t know. I’ve grown attached, I guess.”

“Ah. Grown attached. Yes.” He touched his small glasses. “I understand what you are saying about growing attached. But items can be replaced. Similar ones bought. That is, after all, what all of the money is usually for. There is a substitute for everything. A meaningful replacement. Everything. You understand what I am saying too?”

He touched the strange watch, and something beeped on my own. I realized he had sent me his contact information, which now appeared on my watch display. I had not accepted any link or pairing, which was usually required for such transfers.

He was smiling, but there was something violative in that otherwise innocuous gesture. I realized he was showing me, in his own way, how insubstantial the separation was between us, and how easily he could pass through it, if, or when, he wanted.

The large man stood and buttoned his jacket around that swelling frame. “I will circulate this, on your behalf, and let you know if there is any interest. If I come back with a number, I ask that you please consider it seriously.”

I looked away from his stare until he disappeared, and then I very slowly finished my coffee and fries. I wanted time to pass, to put more space between me and that man. I left my tip and thanked the kitchen and headed out into the cold. As I crunched on the sidewalk slush I felt it again, that hovering presence somewhere about, though I could not track it at first.

The rider felt an unsettling and restless quality to the iron-handed sheriff. There was a hollow in the man that went deeper than eyes could see. He did not operate outward from a source but took things from around himself to sustain an internal void.

Beside the trash cans of a nearby restaurant, I saw something move close to the ground, making that rustling sound. It went quickly, but from what little I could see, it looked like a lizard with hundreds of legs, and yet it was the size of a small dog. There were strange translucent wings up and down its back, rubbing against itself like plastic sheeting while its body undulated further into the darkness.

Between the shadows, I thought I saw its nearly human face staring out at me from behind one of the wet dumpsters, but I did not stay long enough to be sure.

---

What surprised me most was not the offer from Caliper John, but how it came.

Elii contacted me wanting to meet, not on videoconnect, but in person, despite our previous conversation. In fact, she chose a nice restaurant, next to the bridge and overlooking the East River—Oubliée. I told her that place seemed a little out of our reach, but she said that it was taken care of. I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask her what that meant.

I only knew Oubliée was the type of restaurant that required a jacket and reservation and a certain demeanor. Everyone there was intentionally and strategically thin. The patrons who seemed uncomfortable and sharp-eyed and on their watches were likely of the working layer of the city. The ones who were slower and well-rested carried electronic notebooks like they were serious or artistic people, but leisure was clearly their business and everyone knew it. I kept thinking about the rider in The Winter Hills, his three questions, while we were seated and studying the menus, which seemed to have no prices.

What is it these people want? What is it these people need? Are they striving toward one, or the other, with what they do each day?

The waitstaff was clearly informed to take good care of us.

A young man came by with a tray of pills—relaxers and enhancers and different kinds of stimulants. The right elevating component could brighten flavor and become the perfect complement to a meal, I had always heard. Non-addictive. Neurotropic. Personally designed. If you could afford it, why wouldn’t you? That was the implicit tenor when these things were presented.

Elii picked two bright blue pills the waiter explained had been manufactured in Fukuoka and would go well with the fresher ingredients on the menu tonight. I struggled with the decision but ultimately went with the yellows, which were supposed to be mildest.

Elii kept her amp-glasses on, and talked very animatedly about the food, which was some fusion of several cultures that I did not understand. At a certain point in the meal, though, it became clear that she was supposed to talk to me about the dead book. The dinner reservation, all of this, came about because she’d received messages from Caliper John.

“I’m actually not sure how he found me,” she admitted. “I would’ve, you know, told him to pound sand, but he said he wanted someone you trusted to give you the number.”

“Right.” I drank some wine.

“It’s a big number.”

“Right.”

She told me what it was, the offer for my copy of The Winter Hills, and it was, in fact, a big number. More than I could earn as a re-writer in a decade.

“I don’t feel comfortable, to be honest.”

“Selling?”

“Selling to him.”

Elii closed her eyes, like she was feeling some pleasant effect of the meal. “Do you have another buyer?” She hummed. “One of those video stores, maybe they have some kind of offer?”

“No. That’s not it.” I shut my eyes too, feeling dizzier than I expected to feel. “I just don’t get the sense that good will come of giving anything to that man. I don’t know why.”

“Well, he’s just a broker. The buyer’s someone he knows at Satoshi P—”

“Satoshi Print. Right.”

The problem, of course, was that there was no Satoshi Print.

The large man had shown me its information at the diner. There were numerous corroborating sites, reviews, mentions for Satoshi Print I’d found since. But when I went on an early Sunday up to the neighborhood out of a percolating curiosity, just to get a sense of what kind of business this really might be, I found only a half-empty parking lot.

No, there was no Satoshi Print in the physical world to speak of. And if Elii were being honest, I think a part of her already could have guessed it too. This Caliper John and people like him using digital husks, they were not the type of people who usually meant well.

“I get it.” She cleared her throat and tucked her hair behind her ear. “You don’t like it. That kind of thing. The smoke and mirrors. Shiny and empty. Even if they paid you upfront—did I say he said he’d pay upfront? Anyway. You still wouldn’t take it. Not you. Because you like things solid. Things to hold onto. Like the book. And so, you hold on.”

“I guess that’s right,” I agreed. “Yes. Things like the book. I do prefer to hold on, at least, for a little while. Sure.”

“Of course. For a little while.” She nodded. “But not in the long run. You don’t want to be that kind of person in the long run.”

“That kind of person?”

“You know. With too many things. Didn’t you say that, about your mother, how she held onto too many things? And you don’t, you know, want to be too much like that.”

I stopped eating, and Elii seemed surprised. I wasn’t angry. I just couldn’t remember if I had said that about my mother the other day. It sounded like something I would say, but I just didn’t know anymore.

“Listen, I understand,” Elii began again delicately. “Right now you’ve got something of value. Something that feels important. But nothing’s all that important, when you get down to it, in the end. Books fall apart. Memories of books fall apart. Nothing is solid or lasts, right? Nothing. Not that and not us.”

“No. Not us. That is true.”

“So at least with the money—and it’s a lot of money—you get to have some fun and enjoy. That’s all I see when it comes to this. So long as he pays you first, I say you might as well go for it while there’s an offer out there. Why hold onto something you know is going to end up as more nothing eventually anyway?”

Across from us, a couple laughed. The woman bent over and vomited quietly into a little silver pitcher with a lid and daintily wiped her mouth. One of the waiters came by discreetly and picked it up off the floor and took it away. Other customers seemed to have an easier time averting their eyes than I did, familiar with erasing unpleasant things like these.

The enhancers I had taken began to hit their full stride. My head felt like a gigantic bowl, expanding and curving and stretching. The music and dim lighting of the restaurant seemed untranslatable in my brain. But I kept thinking about what Elii said: why hold onto something you know is going to end up as nothing anyway?

Yes, I thought, there was some truth there: why?

At some point, Elii took me from the table and led me somewhere out into the cold with our coats. She said that there was more for the evening, that Caliper John had not just taken care of the dinner, but had set out more for us to see.

We rode together in an automated cab uptown, light flickering and streaming through the pristine plastic windows; then we were in a white marble lobby; then in a gold-colored elevator that was almost as large as my apartment, rising up to the top of a hotel.

Elii had a watch on her wrist that I did not recognize. It was sleek and well-fitting. She used it to swipe us through every scanner and walk-gate we passed in the area. I briefly saw IDs on one of the hotel screens for a “Mr. and Mrs. Uqbar.” More digital husks like Satoshi Print, or were they real people, somewhere? I wondered but did not think about it for too long.

There were no employees at the front desk to verify anything. No one kept us from going up to the penthouse suite, so long as Elii’s watch kept opening the doors. Each door after the other we just . . . went on through.

There was too much space between everyone now, and it was too easy to advance like this. That was how Caliper John did the work that he did, I knew. He and others like him, they were people who worked their way through all of this space.

From the suite’s living room, I could look out and see much of the lower part of the city, everything unpleasant at a distance, small. This, too, like much of this evening, felt unreal. And I suppose that was part of the point of this, his point, and maybe Elii’s point too.

What did any of it matter, if it came and went with so little effort?

“Wait,” I said, before Elii’s slender arm could reach to turn off the lights. “I just—I just feel a little woozy, and I want to take these off.” I touched my amp-glasses and hers. The yellow pills were still spreading through my body like a kind of sickly heat, and I felt like I could almost see through the walls.

Elii did not say anything for a moment.

“Why don’t we just—”

“No.”

Her face went still.

“No?” I laughed. “But I thought—I didn’t really think you would care. Nothing lasts anyway, right? I just want to—”

“No.”

In the silence that followed I knew that something had shifted in Elii. She had spoken so glibly before, about the transience of everything. But maybe that was something she’d heard before or been told to say. This, on the other hand, was very much her. This thing she couldn’t do, with the glasses, was real, and I could feel it. There was something in this that mattered. Something she could not share.

I was a little surprised, but I think I understood.

I couldn’t explain, but I understood.

I told her so, too, before I left the hotel room.

Yes, that was something, for the first time the entire evening, I could understand. A reminder of something similar, in me, that I could not get rid of easily either. There were still real beliefs, in her and in me, that couldn’t be reasoned out of existence, no matter what others told us. There were parts of us, still real, and remembering that was good. I needed to remember that. So that was good.

---

Outside of the lobby and back in the cold, I found that a rising unease had returned. It could have been the yellow pills taking a turn. But no, I could sense it elsewhere, and I was sure. The large man who called himself Caliper John was unhappy with the way things were going, the way I was withdrawing from what he had prepared. I felt again that presence that had been with me over the days and weeks. There, in the delivery drone that buzzed at 6th Avenue. In the red camera ball floating in the department store window. In every mechanized eye between here and the East River and beyond.

I touched the dead book in my coat pocket, its textured surface, and I felt even more certain than before. I had to make my way downtown and across the river, back to Montague Street. Whether the Brotherhood could pay or could not pay for the copy of The Winter Hills, I wanted to go to Montague Street with the dead book. They would know better what to do, I thought, because of the care they took with things like this. Better than me, and certainly better than Caliper John.

I swiped my watch at the handle of an automated cab at the curb, but it did not open. APOLOGIES. A PROCESSING ERROR, MR. UQBAR, the taxi’s window flashed. Over at a store, I tried an ATM, but scrambled data or a bad connection kept me from completing the transaction. UNABLE TO READ YOUR INFORMATION, MR. UQBAR. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. This was the opposite of what happened earlier in the evening. Someone wanted to show me how quickly these impediments could appear. Just a few changes, and I could not get where I needed to go.

The iron-handed sheriff made sure there was no welcome. No respite. Everything Copper Hawk did was done at the sheriff’s instruction, and the rider could feel the town shifting away from him in every direction, no matter where he went.

When I was a boy, my mother and I used to play a game.

This was before the city had fully transitioned into an extended network. She had taught me how to look for the dead spots underneath stationary cams. How, if you could not avoid a stretch with monitors, to cheat your face at an angle so that programs had issues scanning you to completion. She knew that certain brownstones with a specific pre-war style were historic, and therefore adding machinery to their exteriors was not permitted. The alleys between them were best for cutting routes. Certain subways would probably never be fully up to date, because the infrastructure had been done a particular way decades ago and could not be changed without significant cost.

I thought of her, and all of this, when a four-legged police-walker trotted by, stopped, then turned in my direction. Something flickered across its head panel—the pixelated outline of a facial expression. I moved back and away, between two buildings across from the hotel, and down an unmonitored street that led to a service entrance to one of the older underground stations. My mother had shown me this one, years ago, when we had been caught uptown in the rain.

The tunnel below was empty, and I studied the mosaic tiles of one of the walls.

In the dark, a familiar rustle trailed behind me—a sound I realized had followed me long before Caliper John introduced himself at the diner. He’d been watching me since the video store, maybe the library, I realized, though I couldn’t say exactly when it began. My mind was only now piecing it together, those hundreds of legs rubbing against translucent wings, the sound of a synthetic, plastic multi-limbed surveillance device, getting swallowed by a rhythmic scraping of metal and rumbling of klak-klak-klaking of an incoming train.

I couldn’t see it, that thing, whether it was below the platform or somewhere behind the stairs. But I knew Caliper John was in the remote device, within that little body, controlling and looking out. An empty shell where there was enough space for him to operate.

Flickering light spilled from the moving train windows as it pulled up to the platform, and I could see the lizard-body beginning to lean out from the dark. That face and neck hunching forward, extending itself out from that long shape with its little legs. The face had too many lines. Little seams where plating and pieces were fitted together to look like a person but could not quite pull it off.

The lifeless lens-eyes, like dark little bubbles, fixed on my coat, as though he could see through to the dead book in my pocket. And I could feel Caliper John fixating, so palpable and alien. Alaric had said there were people who despised materials like the dead book because they could not be conveniently compromised or manipulated or remade. I could see it. Caliper John did not want to acquire and preserve The Winter Hills. He only wanted to contain or destroy it, if given the chance, and I knew now I could not give him that chance.

I got onto the subway car before that shape could slither out further into the light.

In the rattling, turning, and bumping as the car pulled away from the shadowy station, that long thing withdrawing back to somewhere I could not see, I looked down at my watch, thinking again about how Caliper John had accessed everything within it. I placed it under one of the seats and left the train at the next stop, then got on the local train behind that one instead. It would take longer, but it would not be anywhere near where he’d be watching, I thought.

By the time I got back across the river and up onto the surface, I couldn’t feel it anymore—the presence behind me. I clutched the dead book in my coat, and I kept thinking about dropping it through the mail slot of the video store, thinking it was just narrow enough, maybe, to fit its way through that slot.

The rider wanted no fight. But he also knew the sheriff of Copper Hawk knew nothing but. And for people accustomed to using violence, there was never going to be any other way. For them, it was a natural repercussion of moving in the world.

The two men shared a drink together from a bottle, as a courtesy. But the rider took very little. He was afraid of what sharing too much might mean. And he was no longer thinking about the people of Copper Hawk and their troubles, or about the people he’d met out in the flat country. He wasn’t even thinking, really, about the blood and gunfire to come. The rider thought only a cold thought.

This might be it.

He had found nothing in the sands or the plains, nothing in the towns or settlements and farms that he’d seen that he could take to heart, and this might be it.

There were fire trucks gathered on Montague Street, splayed at crooked angles and with ladders raised. Men yelled at a deep blackness that barely hid a roaring sound, a rapid whirl of orange light that moved in and out of holes in the crumbling surface of a familiar building, pressing against the cold air like an animal beating against the bars of a cage, something wailed from behind the billows. I stood there on the street with others, knowing it was too late, and it was all gone.

Montague St. Video and everything that had been saved there, burning.

Decoupled and scattered into the smoke and air.

Everything I’d given of my mother to the Brotherhood.

Just smoke and air now.

Nearly all that was left of her, now just smoke and air.

---

I never saw Alaric after that. Never learned, with certainty, what had happened to the store. The news articles were vague, specifying neither casualties nor cause, though I had my beliefs. Still, somehow, despite the fire, the old man found a way to deliver what he had promised.

There was one last piece of mail from Montague St. Video in the lobby when I got back to my mother’s apartment. I didn’t know why he hadn’t called me to pick it up, or when he had sent it. But it was there. The restored copy of the DVD, just like we’d discussed.

I used my mother’s old laptop, one of the only things left in her otherwise empty place, and I watched the file. Not optimized like all the other copies I’d tried to make after she died. Not cleaned up so that I wasn’t crying in it. Not edited so that she didn’t have those dark circles under her eyes.

My mother looked tired. She had insisted on the getaway to the lake, recording it all, the way she liked to collect things. But she didn’t know, in those early days, how to handle me without my father around. I could see the veins in her hands when she applied sunscreen in the video. A cigarette dipped in her lips. She was stretched out on a beach chair, trying to look calm, even though we’d been screaming at each other moments before the camera started going.

Right before she hit record, I had been asking her where dad had gone, why she’d been so mean about him, why he didn’t want to come back to us, and she had slapped me.

It was sudden. And without the video, I almost wasn’t sure it had happened. But it was there, minutes later, when the camera shifted in her hands and I came into view. I could see it in the aftermath on that little boy’s face in the video, in the red almost-welt on my jaw and part of my neck. I recalled the bright sting, the hot tears spilling, no matter how hard I tried to keep them in. All those little things you wouldn’t have seen if they’d improved upon the file. I watched her, how she was, exactly as she was back then, on the terrible lonely edge of something. And now, with less resentment, and a tiredness of my own, I felt it all.

The dark circles under her eyes, her hands, my burning face. Nothing lasts, Elii had told me. Nothing lasts, that was true. But I also didn’t have to give everything up so effortlessly, the way everyone else did, either. Erasing the bad felt only a step away from erasing the good, and I just didn’t have it in me to do that. Especially with the people I loved most of all.

My mother did what she could, and I did what I could, in the years we had together. So I wanted to remember as much as possible, even hurtful things—the oil and acid, the scarves, the games, Lake George. Because I knew I would never remember nearly enough. No number of discs or books or notes or typewriters or boxes sorted through and preserved would capture it all.

I would try, but I would never be able to remember enough.

Before I locked up, I wrote Elii a digital postcard like the ones my aunt used to send, telling her I was leaving the city for a short while. I hoped to see her when I got back. I didn’t think we were done talking about what mattered and what was real. I don’t think either of us really knew enough yet to know what mattered or was real. But maybe the next time we found one another, we would. Or maybe not. I supposed we would see.

The trip uptown, working my way around the cameras, I kept thinking I saw a large shape, much too big, following me from behind. Something like Caliper John would be there at a park bench, or at a bus stop, but then would be gone. Only able to do so much in the cold brightness of day.

I got to the bus station, cheating my face away from the self-checkout when I bought the ticket. I watched the gray highways rise and the glass disappear behind me. There were fewer cameras in the small neighborhoods and roads out in West Nyack; at a certain point, when I got to walking the main streets, there were none.

From the outside, the Brotherhood video store looked almost identical to its Montague Street counterpart. The color of the frame, the style of window, everything, like it had been plucked out of time. Alaric had said they taught others here. The idea of that, of maybe joining in remembering what was dead drew me to this place, and I kept thinking of a passage toward the end of The Winter Hills. The one I’d typed more than any other, from that ending that stayed in my dreams and mixed with memories of Lake George and the heat, the image of the rider slumped on the gray horse, bleeding and delirious as he wandered away from Copper Hawk.

He knew that the world was unspeakably broken and turbulent and ill-formed in its foundations, a violent and material realm, ever coming apart. But he had to believe that the pain and impermanence was a kind of lie. Because there was something buried within him, somewhere, and with it a feeling that even if he were to disappear some fragment would echo beyond this time and place. Yes, he told himself. They could take everything substantive from him, but not that. They would get many things from him, but they would never get that.

I stepped into the store and put down my bags. I could hear the slight clunk of my mother’s Trapwood inside hitting the floor. I clutched that gold-laden dead book in my hands and walked to the counter, where an old man looked up at me.

He did not seem at all surprised.

“Come on in,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”