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“What am I supposed to do with a rabbit?” she said, handing her friend a coffee.

“You could always boil it up,” her friend said, more than a little high-pitched. “I hear it’s very good all peppered up.”

“You could eat this rabbit?” She turned to the friend, who sipped and winked.

The friend said, “Well last night, did you give them to him? Was he thrilled? You’ve been at this plan for weeks.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” she said. “Pelgram is such a romantic. It went just as I’d planned, yes.”

She was always early. But didn’t expect him to be. She stood under an awning, across from the bridge, waiting. She almost jumped when he appeared with the cage and the rabbit. And shadows, always that long shadow he walked with, like a knife for cutting.

“We met under the lamp. You remember when I told you that the first thing I noticed about him was his shadow.”

“Which I never understood.”

“Regardless.”

And it was his shadow that first appeared, which is what made her jump. The last orange sunset light had crawled before him, complicated by the bridge lamps. At first she wanted to dash across and up the slight cobble rise, meet him, show him.

“He gave me just a little kiss and smiled, the way he does. Oh my, the dinner, the dinner with wine at Adaggio’s. Yes. The dinner and the wine were wonderful.”

Her friend said, “But the tickets. How did he respond? Go on.”

The rabbit padded to a leaf. Began its quiet nibble. It observed while chewing whatever rabbits observe.

“I’ll get to that. Wait. It’s a story.”

She waited. He put the cage down. Stood there for a moment watching the water, his shadow foreshortened, drawn at angles by the bridge lamps, crosses behind him.

“We talked. We ordered another bottle. It was going down like water, you see. Wine and laughter. He told me about how his parents had met in China. Yes in China.”

“China now that’s a coincidence. His parents met in China? Was he born in China?”

He left the cage, the rabbit, which she couldn’t believe. He’d attached a note. With the rabbit and the note, she followed him across intersections. She hid behind an elderly couple. Pelgram walked slow, as if in no particular hurry, shadowless on this dim boulevard. He held to a brick wall, waited. He watched for the Walk sign. Crossed. Once he looked behind and she sided to a nook in a wall, holding the small package to her heart.

“Yes, he was born in China. They moved back to San Francisco when he was four. Imagine that. His parents separated. He went to school. Was very successful at the school of architecture. Went back to China, worked there for years, then became lead at the firm here. He told me about some merger, some big deal upon which everything depended and I mean everything. He said it all went smashingly.”

“And so he gave you a rabbit? I think it’s a sable or something like that.”

He leaned to a cab at a line. She had to time this one well, better than she’d had to other days. “Can you follow that one?” she asked the cabbie, who said, “Yup.”

She sensed watching eyes from the dark row windows, one lit high in a house where she imagined children reading. She watched a house across the street from behind a tree, where the moon played and passed from behind the leaves. She wondered if it was an elm, an oak. The bark was rough and cold. She felt the weight of the rabbit. An orange cigarette coal rose and fell, rose and fell from the dark of the porch, then he appeared, stepped down the sidewalk.

“Yes,” she said. “He said he used to raise them. He said they’d always been a part of his life, and that’s why it was a gift to me.”

“Dear, this sounds like commitment,” her friend said. “But you still haven’t told me about yours, these wonderful coincidental tickets to China. What did he say. Tell me.”

She knew nothing of boats. At the marina, 1:00 AM shown bright green on the surface of her watch. She never knew of a boat, never knew of that house. Pelgram’s boat leaning with the movement of the night’s thicker surfs, the ocean out there past the flags and the masts flat and crystal and loud but not loud. He was a dark shadow on the docks, an even thinner shade at the wheel. This was her thought: If I’d just known of a boat. What adventures we’d have.

She heard the engine come to life. Slowly the boat moved away, this now 1:15 craft. It grew small. The water calmed. Over the hills at either edge, the stars crowded, while the moon hung big and silver like something that should fall and sink into the sea. She unfolded the note and looked for words. But the paper was blank.

She watched the rabbit. She listened to it chew. She said, “He was thrilled, so thrilled. He said China this time of year is something not to miss, something to long for.”

One day a man woke up to leaves heavy with water outside his window. Yesterday, the sun spotted the green ground and he laughed at the wrens in the bushes. But today, the water made the leaves heavy and the higher branches muttered at the sun.

Yesterday, encouragement, mulching, work, love, and walks to the top. Tomorrow, he’d feel a creaky stress in his chest, like an old sea urchin. But today felt like a wet rag, not even a nuisance or a discouragement, rather an indifference, a sandy decline onto a dry river. Following such would mean a dry tongue soon and light to dry the eyes into stone.

“Sometimes these things creep up on you,” a friend said. “Sometimes everything disappears.”

“I heard about a man once,” he went on, “who followed ten people through the woods and when he stepped out onto a place where the land opened up he found that he had come out of the woods alone.”

“That’s an image I can eat morning cereal with,” the man said.

“Sorry,” the friend said, leaving.

The man grabbed the wrist of a pickpocket. The pickpocket said, “It’s not safe to do that.”

The man ejaculated prisms. The woman said, “That was colorful. The colorwheel’s spinning in my vagina.”

He pulled the nozzle out of his tank on the way home. He opened a hand and spilled gas through his fingers and through his fingers until he felt the liquid bleed into his socks. Closed his eyes. He remembered the grainy touch of oil changes, engine blocks, watching the wind carry sand over the earth from the underside of cars, how each grain clicked.

“Hey, what the fuck?” the attendant said.

He left the windows down for weeks. “If heaven were real,” he told the priest, “someone having died would’ve leaked that news by now. It’s over. Nonsense. Would you just admit it already.”

“That’s not right,” the priest said. “Let me explain. Consider that, while the leaves may be heavy with water now, they’re heavy for everyone. Are you the only man with windows onto his garden. Are you the only man . . . ”

Later that night he returned and smashed a brick through the stained glass and waited for the police. He told them a young man had run into the woods, that way, and to hurry, and they did.

He ran the other way. He ran to the bus station. He ran to the airport. He walked through a dark patch of woods in the middle city and watched small shapes unwind and curl in the moonlight through the leaves. So dark in the corners, where he slept. When he woke up, he found that some trickster had tied his shoe laces together and cut off his thumbs.

The physiatrist chuckled. He said, “You smell like every patient I’ve ever endured. Please sit. You remind me of a story I once heard, about a man who entered the woods with a crowd of friends. They laughed and laughed and talked about the future, inviting it. Strange though that when he finally found the other side, warranting there is one, he noticed that he was all alone, and he couldn’t recount to anyone how any of it had happened.”

Computer Leon buried sensitive data on his machine, critical histories, whole modes of living. So he decided he should back it up. He purchased a fancy, silver terabyte. It came with all the wires.

He tapped his fingers on the desk as the lights flashed and the disks spun. They sounded like small aircraft turbines. He felt the data move from HD to external smoothly, confidently, like human plasma. As with all users, he could not see the transfer. Could not verify, until needed, but he could sense its tremor and corporeal oscillation.

Months later he turned on the backup. The purple indicator pulsed but nothing happened. He listened for life in the silver case. Light told him one thing, sound another. He waited. Tech support sighed. Backup the backup, Computer Leon told himself. But what’s the depth? How many? Backup the backup then backup the backup. With another backup. Then what?

For a few days, he petted the computer, cooed it with kid’s songs and butter tones. He kept the smooth pad of his pointing finger away from the off button. He did research. Found those lists of multiple stars and user recommendations online. Soon the box came with heavy and solid redundant arrays. But should I have sent for more?

“How should I know?” his wife said.

“It’s sensitive data,” Computer Leon informed her. “Like a baby’s bottom. Like a wedding veil.”

“What do you know about baby bottoms?” his wife said. “How long have we been married?” He ducked from the room quietly.

He hooking things up again, waited, watched the lights, listened to the hums and spins. The data moved from drive to drive, down through the nests. Computer Leon wondered about fault tolerances, distributed symmetry, modernity and data mash. He thought about the smallness of the byte, data imprints, and walls and walls of backup cabinets. He turned his computer off after verifying the process, clicked here, there, and elsewhere. That night he had a dream about fire. Floods. In the city, he saw hard disks lined down the curb in that yellow urban infinity under smoke and noise and the bump of faces and the throng of honks.

He decided to walk. He looked back and found the disks following, hard at his back. Ahead, he saw them forward under the office windows, reflected on scattered vectors, warped subtly like impossible caterpillars in the imperfections of glass above and higher.

He felt pressure at his back, like an impending blow. He started to run. Backups, backups rising to the sky or drilling under the ocean. One of them goes and all the remaining follow, redundancy damned. Lost to where? He pushed through, sprinted from them. Backups, backups and more backups accreting. Data backups, backups of backups of backups of stuff, infinite stuffings of all that should not be lost, unending cases of backups, spinning disks that could escape their compartments and slice through the lanyards that make the knees work or the brain recall and remember and gripe. He climbed and fell. Climbed higher and fell and fell deeper as the disks swarmed and spun at the foot of the mountain or at the ledge of the pit, while he crouched with his head beating like duck wings. And when the light faded and the sound diminished he opened his eyes to a land of slippery yaws, painted imprints on the sides of buildings, small people beneath and lapped around and flipping copies of a blue flower in a cup with a camera. “Soon,” he whispered to himself, rising, “for partitioning, yes, into the wayback, deep and flat and scattered on the surface, food for black holes.”

Then he went home to check for updates.

This morning I can find nothing to write.

I look in the coffee jar for a story and find only grounds and memory. On the porch, the wrens are at a nest and so, more than story, I concoct a wooden box and a hanging place under an eave near the open door.

The clouds puff above 50 degree air. I cut my typing fingers on a knife that had already seen more than enough blood from cow meat and chicken. I think about it. I say, “Where are the bones of time?”

Upstairs, the beds have shed their sheets. The walls tell me to get working on a bench, on the leaves, on a drawing maybe of a mouse or a bird or flowers. They tell me about a younger couple with children, how lumpy the pillows had been.

In the paper, news of thievery and wreckage. While writing this the ugly ping of a lose K. Robbers on the high seas and an image of a splash at night. The seal swims through the dark with a carpet pin. He rises to the underside of a life raft and pokes it full of a holes. And I see a flower flat under the moon, desperations dashed, a wren wondering at the meaning of boxes, his claws scratching at the door in and the door out, her mouth packed with dog hair, the black in her eyes already hatching July.

The garage doesn’t like me. My shoulders ache from the worries of life and dreams I had race through the pines with weird fluffy tails.

For some reason I slash the computer screen. I look this and that way for a middle, for happenings, wondering who that is with their face at the window, their fingers like spiders.

The saleswoman wore yellow.

When she lowered her knees over the pelican, she caught two breaths, then no more. Cars passed. A flat face against glass like the preparation of a pie.

She sat in her office waiting for screens to change. She waited for future messages.

“Is that a feather in the corner of your mouth?” Paul asked.

“No,” the saleswoman said. “It’s the sound of the last two breaths of morning. Morning does end, you know.”

“I think it’s a feather,” Paul said. “It’s disgusting.”

“I see your name in red,” the saleswoman said, winking. “Last breaths come in twos.”

A man invented a method of turning the content of web sites into data-filled jelly. The gelly absorbed new content as it was added via wireless feeds. He also invented a capsule that would transport the data into space where it would emit that content into vacuum in a form of an ever-growing and ever-altering symphony.

One day he entered his office and found the capsule missing and his papers scattered about the room, some of them torn, some of them sliced up, some of them violently turned into wads.

In the hall, he tore at his hair.

“The capsule,” he yelled. “The capsule’s gone.”

He shoved Professor Johnson against the wall of his lab and said, “Where’s my fucking capsule, the capsule.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Professor Johnson insisted.

He explained the situation to the campus police. The Dean studied the door. “This was a very clever thief,” the Dean said.

“Clever? I’m out of my mind. The web is out there. Out there. The guts of our brains. I have to find it.”

The campus police were stumped. The FBI began an investigation.

Days later, citizens began to notice the Internet grow lighter in weight. Whole spaces of information began to disappear. Where once were pages, empty space appeared, flat blank rectangles of light. Empty archives. Governments slowly faded from the web. The chains that linked followers and friends broke. Armies of coders were deployed into the field. Engineers found all their tapes erased, drives wiped, code erased. Inventories piled to the ceilings. People typed faster. Empty spaces to the left or right moved fast to follow.

Molly wept at the emptiness of light on the monitor, as if the very circuits had grown sad.

TV commentators grew mute, forgetting their questions.

In the park, a boy let go of an orange balloon. It rose swiftly, clipped the branches of an elm. Its string jumped in the wind.

People in the park stopped to watch. Whole crowds pointed their eyes at the balloon, rising and rising. They watched that balloon with great attention. If it drifted from their field of vision, they might die, fall into the water and die. Even as their eyes grew sore and as the balloon grew tiny in the sky, they watched.

Six people stood in an open field. They each watched at their feet a dead rat.

The first person said that the rat had four feet to walk with, though they perhaps weren’t of much use now.

The second person wondered at the whiskers and told a story about his childhood with guitars, kites, and cactus.

The third claimed that the rat was gray and therefore wise. Once, said the first person. And what is wisdom to the dead?

The fourth reached down and plucked the rat’s eyes out with a small silver spoon and claimed that the rat must be a relation to fish.

The fifth person said he saw no rat at all, that the four companions lived in delusion, that at their feet was a great hole through which he saw a million and more human beings moving toward a great opening into yet another space where five people stood wondering at a hole in the earth in a field where the wind blew softly and the birds had all but stopped singing.

The sixth person listened and wrote a story.

In a dream, a man lost his son. The son wouldn’t stop committing crimes. He wouldn’t stay in his room, no matter how much the man yelled for this. The son kept steeling the policeman’s handcuff key, pickpocketing wallets. He threatened the world with strange little fists and darted through rooms with a knife.

Outside, an asteroid, trailing great curls of smoke, arced down from a quiet sky, turned away the earth, and raced back into the atmosphere, the desperate cities below glowing orange.

The man woke up weeping, but he didn’t know why. He’d never lost his son in the waking world. In the waking world, his son was intelligent, thoughtful, well-mannered, somewhat clumsy in roomfulls of furniture, and his smile taught the man the mysteries of love.

“Why did I wake up crying?” the man asked his wife, but she didn’t know. In Argentina, he asked a man selling hotdogs on the street and the man gave him a hotdog with onions and peppers. In China they said we know less about dreams than we do about children but that asteroids are stones lurking among an ambience of mindless potency.

When he got home, the man found his son grown, mowing the lawn, grinning in the sun. The man’s knees throbbed and his face hurt from the winds of the sea. He raised a hand and waved to his son, surprised at how green the trees hung, how the smell of grass migrated across the drive. His son raised a hand back, and he aimed the mower at a patch of ground grown wild. Inside, the man kissed his wife. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, peeled off his worn clothes and lay down and went to sleep.