The mosquito whines in my ear, every night. The new frogs rattle from the flooded field. I saw Vincent kill the hen with a knife, accidentally through my bedroom window. I heard the universal, barnyard cluck drawn into a final moan. I memorized these sounds according to their appearance, so that, when the next chicken died, I saw its neck severed without looking. When the panicked chirp became a long siren.

I think of bombs falling and people running into a building that will collapse on them.

My soar foot kickstarts the bike. My left hand slowly comes off the clutch, but my right forgets what it's doing and slackens. I jolt into stillness. Maddening. "Pole, pole" they say. All hands in the air, on imaginary handlebars, demonstrative. I cuss them in English and the bike jerks forward. We laugh, but I speed away from them.

Saidi sits behind me this time. "Troisieme!" And I navigate the dirt like a frozen lake. So cold that the waves stopped, mid-climb, mid-fall.

The gray morning. A day amidst days that can't rain, but only give the signs of rain. Clouds like lint balls cleaned out of washer. Vincent and I take motos to the market. My leg stings from touching the exhaust. Skies like this allude to a secret everything keeps. A secret of water, crystal, transparency undetectable when the sun is out. I think of Oregon. (Back seat, cold seatbelt, perfect droplets on the window-- to the library, TCBY, bagel place, to the waterfall. Grandma and her spearmint gum. Emily and I are tiny and we play pre-school computer games in the Grisham library.) Dismount and enter the market labyrinth.

"But, after all, nothing is true that forces one to exclude. Isolated beauty ends up simpering; solitary justice ends up opressing. Whoever aims to serve one exclusive of the other serves no one, not even himself, and eventually serves injustice twice." (Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa)

Past and present intertwine. Siddartha's river-- the mountain stream, the shoreline mouth, the ocean trench, all at once. I belong to the world.