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you, Peter. You’re not an ordinary person at all.”
    â€œIt might be good to be ordinary. A major achievement, far beyond my reach.”
    She looked at me, hard. “Are you sure you feel all right?”

6
    Ted’s light was on, the top of his gray head just visible in his basement. I hesitated outside my own house, then trotted across the street. I knocked on his basement door, and winced. I withdrew my hand and held it close to me.
    â€œPeter! How are you? Come in, I’m just setting up something new.”
    â€œWhat happened to the village?”
    â€œI destroyed it. Like a god, I took it down. I’m making mountains now.” He held up a box of wallpaper paste. “I’m getting bridges in.”
    â€œWhere are the trains?”
    â€œThey’re put away, but they’ll come back. This whole table will be an Alpine village, circa 1900. I went to the Alps once, you know.”
    The smell of wallpaper paste was bland but overpowering. The stir-stick made a solid, sticky noise in a bucket of it. “I mix newspaper with this stuff, and lay it over mountains made of chicken wire.”
    â€œI can’t believe you took down your village. It was so pretty.”
    â€œNothing. Wait’ll you see this. I’m buying new trains, too. Hundreds of dollars. Made in Austria. Precision and detail you wouldn’t believe.”
    â€œWill there be a town?”
    â€œA village. Twenty or thirty people. And this.” He picked up a small mirror from the clutter of his worktable. “Do you know what this is?”
    â€œWhat is it?” I said, to please him.
    â€œA pond for ice skaters. I think of everything.”
    I was sorry to not be able to see his trains run their circuits around the table. There had always been something comforting about watching the trains arrive again and again, with a miniature rumble past the man with the dog, and the boy selling the newspaper, and the gardener with his shovel, none of them moving. Only the train moved, an illogical event in all that stillness, but a sight that always comforted. But I was excited that something new was coming: mountains. An iced pond. And bridges across valleys that did not yet exist.
    Ted fumbled at his workbench and found a small black radio with his paste-sticky hand, working the dial with difficulty. A Warriors game sputtered. He adjusted the dial and it came in clearly. The score was tied in the first quarter.
    â€œI’ll even have an elk. See him?”
    I nudged a small figure on the table beside me. It looked very much unlike a real elk, but I knew that realism was not the point. I wasn’t sure what the point was, but I understood it. “When will you be done?”
    â€œMonths from now. What’s the sense of hurrying? The longer I take, the more satisfying it is. When you’re finished, you really don’t have anything to do but start all over again.”
    â€œIt takes so much patience.”
    â€œNo, it doesn’t. It takes steady, quiet impatience. The kind that builds real villages. Real mountains, too, I suppose.”
    There was a figure leaning against the hood of a car as I crossed the street. I hesitated, power emptying from my body. I kept moving, even though his car was parked directly in my path and there was no way I could reach my doorstep without walking right past him. The figure straightened as I approached and, although I could not see his face in the darkness, I could tell he was looking very closely at me, studying me, taking me in as if he wanted to know everything there was to know about me. I wanted to run; the only thing I could think about was running, and yet I knew if I ran, it would be all over, that the only thing to do was to act calm and behave like nothing in the whole world was wrong.
    â€œPeter?”
    I took a step.
    â€œIt is you,” he said.
    I moved to where the streetlight fell across his face.
    â€œYou’ve grown so