I met him in a place where the pigeons gather because of how, by 4PM or so, the reflection of the sun burns against the brick wall of the Federal Bank across the street, and pigeons, I assume enjoy the diminishing of the day. From below our table we heard the ripple of flags in the breeze. I was counting polygons in my head, sipping beer, considering their prevalence in the built environment, and wondering about the relationship between the crystal and the fruit, the screen and cloister cell.
“I wonder what Nana was thinking, staring at me from inside the rectangle?” Henry asked, suddenly.
I was a little surprised to hear that Henry had somehow guessed my own thinking. “Nana?” I asked.
“There you are. I admit it. I admit wondering about it for significant periods,” Henry said.
“You mean what Nana must have been thinking?”
“No,” Henry said, “what she was thinking inside the rectangle.”
“I see,” I said.
I watched the lines of pigeons on the cornice of the bank building. Their numbers also weighed down the cables that suture the electric template of our lives. I concluded that curves could be the result of the sun, of time, of birds. Then my mind turned back to the nature of polygons and their prevalence and of Nana and, most significantly, Henry, who assumed just then the posture of a man with too many secrets to tell, which is the posture of one hundred pigeons forming a curve above the road.
