Give me a sign, I think ... Say; This counts for a lot. This counts for nothing. Give me a sign so that I may know you.

I ask him if he thinks his life is a text.

"If my life's a text than I've been able to understand only a word or maybe a phrase. But I'm thankful that I know a little about how to read." He pauses, "and you? What do you think your life is?"

I think for a while but don't answer. His arrogance is attractive in a way that I want badly to avoid. He wears a cardigan as brown as the waxed paper used to wrap pounds of coffee from the Italian roasters. His shirt is white and rolled up at the arms over the sweater. By the time he finishes reading the afternoon will have moved far beyond autumn and both the book and his cardigan will be dusted with the first lines of snow. His sleep is neither hard nor fast and when it travells it moves without devotion; as if God is hesitating in the middle of a sentence; as if his exhaustion is an unexploded bomb lying in a field he wishes to sow with wheat.

My sleep has a thief's swiftness and he knows that there would never be a place where he will match me.