The aligned autos looked, from the distance of the outlying road, like overbred ammo, awaiting an imminent battle between land leviathans. Perpetually imminent. There was talk in the saloons of the inevitability of war with the Soviet Union. The offhand acceptance of destruction of the world entire, but for picaresque cells of foragers and deep dirt husbanders, only the strong who had somehow managed to survive, afforded Ted a clearer meaning of the term Cold War. Reason had been frozen over. America was a land of savage metal art and compulsory conformity. The States, in the end, terrified Ted and bored him.

4.

Sylvia

Abdiel had given her the stone bust of the veiled woman to ward her away. She could give him back a gift in kind. She could write a chilling poem that would turn him from himself. Perhaps even toward her, the long way around. She no longer wanted him as much as she wanted him to want her, if only once. She took up her pen. The cold had gotten into her folio as it had bided there on the tidied marbletop. The page had grown pure and reflective. She stared, fretfully virginal of mind. Her breath was smoking, light as a vapor. Light as a vapor, she could hear the purring of the swastika under the marble surface of the table, the littlest wheel working, the tiniest circular saw buzzing. She put down her pen. She looked at the veiled woman through the yoke of her fingers. Here was an instance of the past informing the present. This was well and good, but she had covered all that in rhyming verse back when poetry was something so secret that she only allowed herself to read or write it in the tent of the bedcovers. In the bane of hindsight, she would have to admit that she had nothing genuine to say to herself, and by extension to the entire world, in those evenings of her ninth and tenth years on the planet, either. What she did have back then was the conviction that something genuine needed to be said. And that someone, some enlightened proxy of the human race, would hear with encoded clarity precisely what she was attempting and failing to say. This individual would realize that he or she might have said the same, but said it better. Above all, poetry taught her that harmony lay in collective isolation.

Sylvia went back into the bathroom. She put her head into the roulette basin of the medicine cabinet. She’d forgotten which capsules were for sleep and which were only for the temperament of sleep. It hardly mattered since the line between the two was rapidly dissolving. Her fingers were distended and itchy.