The water came reluctantly, first with a shudder in the pipes, then a thin brown stream, then clear.

Eli, bending over the basin, held his hands beneath it until they were cold, though there was no reason to keep them there. It was Thanksgiving. It was Thanksgiving, and Elias had been invited to dinner. Somewhere beyond the little bathroom a woman was speaking on television, moving her lips soundlessly above the morning news, and in the room next door somebody had dropped a heavy object on the floor. The day had begun, then, as days did, whether one had slept or not.

He splashed his face. The water ran down his neck, under his collar. There was the mirror, filmed with gray, and in it, had he raised his eyes, the same face; but he reached for the towel instead.

He had been expected at half past two.

This was pleasant, being expected. One might have thought it a small thing, merely an hour agreed upon, a place at a table, but there were people who passed whole years without anyone knowing whether they would arrive at two or at five, whether they had eaten, whether they were ill. Niccolò would be watching the driveway. Amy would have made too much food.

He put on his coat.

Outside the air was damp and smelled of fallen leaves. At the convenience store the Thanksgiving cards had been arranged beside the cigarettes and lottery tickets, little paper declarations of affection, each priced according to the amount of gold on its surface. He chose one with autumn leaves. There were others, with turkeys, with pumpkins, with families sitting beneath trees; but this one would do. He bought butter cookies too, because it was impossible to arrive empty-handed, though Niccolò would laugh at him whatever he brought.

The pen at the counter failed after three letters.

Eli.

He pressed harder, leaving the faint indentation of a fourth letter which did not appear. How tiresome. Yet perhaps three letters were enough. People had called him Eli for so long that Elias seemed almost to belong to somebody else, somebody who had once answered to it from another room, somebody who had stood in a garden in Devonshire with mud on his shoes and had never been scolded for coming indoors.

Was it the garden? Or the kitchen? He had never been scolded; of that he was certain. His mother or that maid had stood somewhere, and there had been mud.

He shook it, tried again, and made a faint mark on the paper. The cashier was occupied with something beneath the counter and did not look up.

"Have you got another pen?"

She searched in a drawer and found one, but it was dry too.

"Never mind," he said.

He put the card in the bag with the cookies.

His Crown Victoria stood beside a dumpster at the edge of the parking lot. It was an old car, with rust along the wheel arches and a driver's seat that had worn through at the seam. He had owned it for years and was fond of it, although he sometimes complained that it used too much gasoline.

There were bottle labels arranged along the dashboard. He had peeled them off at various places during his travels, sometimes because he liked the design, sometimes because there had been nothing else to do. Several were now so faded that he could no longer make out the writing, their edges curled by the sun.

He lit a cigarette, turned the radio dial to the steady hiss between stations, and drove away.

The lawn was very green.

It struck him before anything else, that astonishing green, even in November, spreading between the pavement and Niccolò's house, so carefully trimmed that one could almost believe each blade had been considered separately. And there was Niccolò, coming out before Eli had stopped the engine, broad and smiling, his flannel shirt hanging loose about him.

Forty, Eli thought.

Forty was an age one could see. It had settled beneath Niccolò's chin, softened the skin beside his mouth, thinned the hair at his temples. Yet when he grinned, showing those conspicuous teeth, there was the boy he had known, the same quick delight in his own jokes, the same inability to let anyone arrive in peace.

"Told Amy twenty bucks says you'd show up right before the roast came out," Niccolò said, clapping Eli hard on the shoulder and peering into the convenience store bag. "Butter cookies? Moving up in the world, man. Way better than those expired mints you brought from the Amoco last year."

"Shut it, it was the only thing on the shelf that didn't look like it had been expired for twenty years," Eli muttered, rolling his stiff shoulder as he followed him into the oak-floored hallway.

Niccolò laughed, and for an instant, while he laughed, the years seemed to fall away; then he turned toward the house, calling something to Amy, and Eli saw the small bald place beginning at the crown of his head.

The house was overheated, thick with the smell of garlic, rosemary, and roasting beef drifting out of the open kitchen. Amy stood behind the island tossing a huge bowl of gluten-free pasta with two wooden spoons, smiling and waving one of them toward the living room when she caught sight of him. Sarah and Susan were already settled on the leather sofa with drinks in their hands, turning to call out hello as Eli unfastened his coat. Across the thick rug in the middle of the room, the seven-year-old kid Sarah and Susan had raised was lying on her stomach next to Niccolò’s daughter, Elia, building a crooked enclosure out of bright plastic blocks. Both kids looked up at the sound of footsteps and chimed out an "Uncle Eli" toward the hallway.

Eli paused with one sleeve half-off, giving a vague grunt through his nose in reply. He hung the oversized trench coat on the lower peg of the stand, walked over to the far corner of the sofa, and sank into the cushions.

"The heat down there was ungodly this July, killed half the St. Augustine grass in the front yard," Sarah was saying, rattling the ice in her glass while the creases around her eyes bunched up. "Susan insisted on renting a tiller from Home Depot to redo the sod herself and threw her back out for a solid week."

"They wanted four hundred dollars just to scrape the top layer, and the guys they send out barely work half the afternoon," Susan said, helping push the kid's glasses back up her nose before looking over at Eli. "What about you, Eli? Still up near the county line, or did you move again?"

"Same old, mostly just driving around," Eli said, shoving his hands deep into his trouser pockets and resting the back of his head against the leather while staring at a bruised apple in the centerpiece bowl.

Years ago, when they were all living in Brooklyn and went out drinking together, Sarah and Susan had often talked at three in the morning about moving south. They used to say they would buy a house somewhere warm, grow vegetables, and never have to scrape ice off a windshield again. At the time nobody had taken these plans seriously. But eventually they had moved to Texas, bought a ranch-style house with a yard, and turned a barroom joke into a mortgage.

Now they owned a house there. There was a mortgage, a lawn, a girl of seven, a great many bills. Their lives had gathered substance around that old conversation, as a shell gathers itself around something soft and living. They had gone away, and the place they had imagined had become the place where they bought groceries, repaired things, and grew older.

He smiled, and she smiled too, though there was a little pause afterward, in which she seemed to expect more.

What had he been doing? Driving, certainly. Sleeping in motels. Eating at counters. Buying gasoline, cigarettes, newspapers. He had been in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, somewhere in West Virginia; the roads came back to him more readily than the towns. There had been a diner with a cracked red seat, a woman who had asked whether he was old enough to be out so late, a room with a view of a brick wall. All this had occupied weeks, months perhaps. Yet to say it aloud would have sounded like nothing.

He might have told her about the psychologist.

But Niccolò came in with beer, talking of the freezer at his store, and Susan turned to ask how much the repair had cost. "Here," he said, handing one to Eli. "Tell me something. Do you know anything about compressors?"

He began describing the trouble with the freezer at his store. The business had once been rather uncertain, and in those days Niccolò had always been going somewhere, meeting somebody, or waiting for a telephone call. Now it was a respectable storefront operation, and he spent much of his time worrying about equipment and deliveries.

He was talking about the repair bill when he picked up a bottle cap and flicked it toward an ashtray; as usual, it missed and dropped between the sofa cushions. Eli watched him. There had been a time when those hands were never still because there was always something to conceal, something to count, some arrangement to make. Now they were occupied with bottle caps, receipts, freezer repairs. Niccolò had a business, a wife, a daughter; the nervous energy had found its place in the world.

It was extraordinary how little some things changed.

They ate late in the afternoon.

Amy had prepared a large roast, potatoes, vegetables, and several other dishes. The children were made to wash their hands, and everybody sat down. There was more food than they could eat.

At first they talked about the meal, then about schools, taxes, and people they knew. Someone mentioned a man from Brooklyn who had died in the spring. Eli remembered him well, though he had not seen him for years.

"He drank himself to death," Niccolò said.

Eli remembered the man as a young fellow with a broken front tooth who borrowed money and never returned it. Once, after an argument outside a bar, the man had insisted that he was going to California and become rich. Eli could still see him standing under a streetlamp, shouting and laughing, with blood on his shirt from a cut above his eyebrow.

Now he was dead.

"Did he have children?" Eli asked.

"Two, I think," said Sarah. "One of them's in college."

"Already?"

Sarah looked at him. "Well, yes. He must be twenty by now."

Eli nodded.

After dinner they remained at the table for a long time. Niccolò complained about his cholesterol. Susan spoke of a dentist who had charged her an outrageous amount for a crown. Amy wanted to know whether a particular brand of gluten-free flour was available in Texas.

Eli ate another potato, although he was no longer hungry.

He had known these people for many years. He had seen them quarrel, fall in love, separate, reconcile, marry, and grow older. There had been times when he had disliked them intensely. He had borrowed money from some of them and lent money to others. Once he and Niccolò had not spoken for nearly a year over a matter that neither of them now mentioned.

He was glad to be there.

Still, he had the uncomfortable feeling that he had arrived at the wrong time, as though he had entered a room in which a conversation had been going on for years and could no longer understand what everyone was talking about.

Sarah was explaining the cost of school supplies. Niccolò said that when he was a boy they had managed perfectly well without half the things children needed now. "Oh, you are starting to sound like your father," Amy told him. They laughed.

Eli remembered Niccolò's father. He had been a large, irritable man who wore a gold ring and smelled of tobacco. He had died some years earlier. Eli remembered how Niccolò had cried at the funeral, standing beside the grave in a dark suit that was too tight across the shoulders.

Now Niccolò was beginning to look like him.

It seemed strange that nobody remarked upon it.

It seemed to him that the room was moving very gently, like a boat upon a broad, slow river. The people at the table were carried along together. They had known one another when their faces were smooth and their bodies tireless; now they compared ailments, counted expenses, and worried about children. Nothing had happened suddenly. No one had announced the change. Each year had added its little alteration, and now there they sat, recognizable and changed.

He could remember Niccolò at twenty.

He could remember him at thirty.

He could remember him at forty.

Niccolò, looking up, caught his eye and smiled.

For a moment Eli felt an almost unbearable affection for him. It was ridiculous. The man was talking with his mouth full, and there was gravy on his cuff. Yet he had been there, year after year, growing older, making mistakes, forgiving them, becoming a husband and a father, until this ordinary man at the table contained all the others Eli had known.

How much of a person was visible at any one moment? How much lay concealed beneath the face, the gestures, the little habits? One looked at Niccolò and saw a shopkeeper of forty. But Eli saw the boy he had been, the young man he had become, the father he was now. All of them existed together in his mind.

And what did Niccolò see when he looked at Eli?

When the wall clock chimed nine, the two kids were rubbing their eyes on the sofa, and Sarah and Susan stood up to help Amy load the dishwasher. Eli pushed his chair back and walked out to the hall tree for his coat.

"You sure you don't want the guest room tonight? Amy already put clean sheets on the mattress," Niccolò said, wiping his hands on a dish towel as he leaned against the doorframe.

"No, I've got things to take care of back up the road," Eli said, pulling the heavy lapels together.

Niccolò didn't push it, stepping forward to wrap him in a brief, overly tight hug that smelled of cheap cologne and garlic. Eli raised two fingers in a wave before walking down the porch steps and climbing into the cold front seat of the Crown Vic. In the rearview mirror, the yellow porch light shrank to the size of a pinhead before the turn at the end of the street cut it off completely.

Interstate 79 was empty, stretching out ahead of the headlights like a conveyor belt of wet asphalt. The dashed white lines fed under the hood at a steady, hypnotic pace while the radio static hissed softly from the dashboard speakers. The dashboard glowed faintly, illuminating the curled edges of the old bottle labels. Eli drove with one hand on the wheel, opening the window from time to time when sleep pressed against his eyes.

There was something strange about driving at night. One passed through towns without knowing their names, crossed rivers without seeing the water, entered and left counties whose boundaries existed only upon signs. The world was reduced to the narrow illuminated strip ahead, and beyond it lay everything else, enormous and invisible.

He had driven so often. Through rain, through snow, in summer heat; past factories, fields, shopping centers, houses with one light burning in an upstairs window. Sometimes he had driven because he needed to go somewhere. More often, lately, because he had nowhere in particular to remain.

After two and a half hours behind the wheel, a heavy, leaden exhaustion settled into the back of Eli’s neck, his eyelids drooping until the reflective road signs started to blur at the edges. He sniffed, cranked the window down another inch to let the freezing wind slap his forehead, and reached his right hand across the dash toward the base of the windshield where he kept his cigarettes. His fingers pressed down next to the peeled bottle labels and flattened an empty cardboard pack without a single loose crumb of tobacco left inside. Annoyed, he crushed the box in his fist and tossed it onto the passenger floorboard.

Half a mile up the highway, a tall fluorescent sign buzzed above an exit ramp, marking a twenty-four-hour service station. Eli yawned, tapped the brake pedal, and coasted down the ramp onto the cracked concrete apron, pulling up beside pump two to top off the tank while he was at it. A kid in a greasy navy windbreaker and a beanie stepped out of the attendant's booth, and Eli rolled his window down to hand over a twenty-dollar bill and tell him to fill the tank regular before shoving the heavy car door open. His legs wobbled slightly from hours of sitting as his boots hit the pavement, and he pulled his coat tight against the wind, walking across the lot toward the convenience store attached to the garage.

The bell above the glass door clanked as he stepped into the glare of the overhead tubes. The clerk behind the counter was leaning on his elbows reading a battered paperback with a folded cover. Eli walked up, pointed at the packs racked behind the register, paid for a fresh box. Peeling the cellophane strip off the pack with his thumbnail, he popped a cigarette between his lips as he stepped onto the curb, squinting across the lot toward his car. The attendant in the navy windbreaker was still standing beside the rear fender of the Crown Vic with his hand on the nozzle, watching the mechanical numbers roll slowly upward on the pump face. Of course he is not stupid enough to smoke near the gas, he returned as asked the clerk for the restroom key and head right to the back.

The metal door at the side of the station scraped loudly over the concrete as he shoved it open. The room was freezing and smelled of damp grout and cheap lemon disinfectant that failed to cover the sourness underneath, lit by a single fluorescent tube that flickered every few seconds with a low buzz. Eli turned the deadbolt, dropped the PVC key tag onto the edge of the sink, and steadied the unlit cigarette between his lips with his left hand while sliding his right hand into his coat pocket for his lighter.

His knuckles tapped immediately against the heavy revolver deep in his pocket. Impatient and heavy-headed with sleep, he pulled the heavy piece out of his pocket simply to get it out of the way, setting it down on the porcelain rim of the sink. He checked his left pocket, found nothing, and stood still for two seconds until the memory of Niccolò clapping him on the side in the hallway clicked into place. That bastard didn't even smoke and still couldn't stop stealing his lighters. A dry, humorless laugh came out of Eli’s nose.

The cigarette had become damp between his lips. He threw it away and turned on the tap.

Cold water ran into the basin.

He bent over the sink, washed his face, and stood with his palms against the porcelain.

Then he raised his head.

The boy in the mirror had red hair, hazel-green eyes, and a pale, narrow face. There were two small scars near his mouth. Metal braces covered his teeth.

He looked fourteen.

Eli rested his hands on the sink and studied his reflection.

He had never understood what had happened. Nearly forty years had passed since then, and he had not grown older.

There had been a time when he was astonished by this. Later he had become frightened. Eventually he had learned to live with it, as people learn to live with an illness or some permanent misfortune. He had worked, traveled, made friends, and lost them. He had lived in many places. He had learned to drive, to use a telephone, and to understand the strange language of modern advertisements. He had seen buildings demolished and others erected in their place. His appearance had remained the same.

Some time earlier he had gone to see a psychologist.

He had told her about Devonshire, about his childhood, about the accident in 1906, and about the extraordinary circumstances of his arrival in the modern world.

The psychologist had listened politely. She was an intelligent woman, and Eli had liked her.

She had suggested that the story might be the construction of a mind attempting to protect itself from some unbearable experience. Such things were known to happen. Memory, she explained, was not always reliable.

Eli had found this explanation reasonable.

Indeed, he had found it so reasonable that he had been unable to sleep properly for several nights afterward.

There is a peculiar cruelty in a reasonable explanation offered to a man whose life has been unreasonable.

He could forgive the psychologist for doubting him. He had often doubted himself. The difficulty lay in the fact that doubt did nothing to diminish the memories.

He could remember the damp woods near his childhood home. He could remember the sound of his mother's voice. He could remember the blow to his head and the bewilderment of waking among buildings and automobiles that belonged to another age.

Yet he had begun to forget smaller things.

The exact shape of a particular window. The name of a lane. Whether his mother had worn a blue dress or a green one on a certain afternoon.

He had once believed these memories indestructible.

Now he was less sure.

He closed his eyes.

In the darkness he saw the woods near his childhood home. The trees were bare, and there was a narrow path among them. He thought he knew where it led, but when he tried to follow it in his mind, the path disappeared.

He opened his eyes.

The mirror was still there. The boy looked back at him.

Niccolò was forty now. He had a wife, a daughter, and a business. Sarah and Susan owned a house in Texas and were raising a child. They spoke of school taxes and bad backs. Their lives had changed in ways that seemed natural and inevitable.

He lowered his head.

There was a drop of water hanging from the faucet. It grew larger, trembled, and fell into the basin.

Eli picked up the revolver from the sink. He had carried it for years. It had once seemed necessary to him, though he could no longer have said precisely when he had last needed it.

He looked at the mirror again.

His gaze shifted down from the mirror to the revolver resting on the wet porcelain edge of the sink. He reached out with his damp right hand and wrapped his fingers around the grip, moving at first as if to drop it back into his coat pocket before unlocking the door, but halfway up, his hand slowed. He turned the heavy frame slightly in his palm, looking at the dull metal in a daze of exhaustion, and then raised his arm toward the glass. Squinting one hazel-green eye, he lined the front sight up with the center of the forehead in the reflection, staring down the barrel at the kid in the braces for a long, quiet minute. As his forearm began to ache from the weight and his thoughts blurred around the edges, his wrist sagged inward, bringing the barrel back until the cold steel rested beneath his own jaw.

He could hear the fluorescent lamp buzzing overhead. Somewhere beyond the wall a car door slammed, followed by a man's indistinct voice. It occurred to him that he had left his fresh cigarettes in the pocket of his coat, unopened, unsmoked. What? Then what did he put between his lips? Ugh. His mind was fooling him. Silly him. That unwraped package might just be a box of peppermint He wondered, vaguely, whether twenty dollars would be enough to cover a full tank in a car as old as the Crown Victoria, or if gas prices had climbed again since the morning.

He could hear, beyond the locked door, the distant sound of an automobile passing along the highway. There were people traveling tonight, returning from dinners, visiting relatives, going home to houses where they had lived for twenty years or to rooms they had rented that morning. They would remember the day for a while, and in another year it would become one Thanksgiving among many, distinguished by a particular dish, an argument, a child who had been ill. Niccolò would remember Eli coming late with butter cookies. Or perhaps he would confuse it with the year of the peppermint candies. Such mistakes were common, and nobody thought them serious. One corrected oneself, or laughed, or allowed the mistake to stand.

He ought to have stayed. The thought came to him plainly, without accusation. There had been a bed waiting for him, clean sheets, breakfast in the morning. He could have watched the children finish their building, listened to Niccolò complain about the freezer, helped Amy carry the dishes. Nothing of importance would have happened, and perhaps that was precisely what made the thought so difficult to bear. It was possible to imagine a whole life composed of such evenings, each one hardly distinguishable from the last, yet together forming something solid enough to sustain a person through the years. Sarah and Susan had made such a life, and Niccolò had made one, and even the dead man from Brooklyn had left children behind him, people who could remember him differently from the way Eli did. What had Eli made? The question seemed foolish as soon as it occurred to him. He had lived, after all. There had been pleasures, friendships, journeys, whole years in which he had scarcely thought about the past. But he could not gather them together now. They lay scattered behind him, as indistinct as the towns through which he had driven, or the labels he had peeled.

The chill of the metal against his lips tugged his thoughts back toward the damp woods in Devon, though the outlines of the trees in his head felt smeared and indistinct, like a photograph left out too long in the sun. If the years kept wearing the edges down, what would be left of it? Would he forget his mother's name? Would he deny his mother's name? He lowered his gaze from the mirror. How did the gun shifted to there? Parted his lips, and a guided oily barrel past them. The front sight scraped against the metal brackets of his upper braces with a tiny, sharp click before sliding inward to rest flat and heavy against the roof of his mouth, his left hand coming up to fold loosely over his right as he stood there in the cold.

Then, with a terrible absent-mindedness, he brought the gun further into his throat. A familiar sense of hollowness ironically filled his chest. His hands were shaking as he griped too tight with too much determination out of nowhere, for nowhere.

Outside, beside the Crown Victoria, the gasoline pump clicked off.