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another time of day, a young woman on a bicycle pedaling past, foreground, oddly comic motion, quick and jittery, one end of the screen to the other, with a mile-wide storm, a vortex, still far off, crawling up out of the seam of earth and sky, and then cut to an obese man lurching down basement steps, ultra-real, families huddled in garages, faces in the dark, and the girl on the bike again, pedaling the other way now, carefree, without urgency, a scene in an old silent movie, she is Buster Keaton in nitwit innocence, and then a reddish flash of light and the thing was right here, touching down massively, sucking up half a house, pure power, truck and barn squarely in the path.
    White screen, while I stood waiting.
    Total wasteland now, a sheared landscape, the image persisting, the silence as well. I stood in place for some minutes, waiting, houses gone, girl on bike gone, nothing, finished, done. The same drained screen.
    I continued to wait, expecting more. I felt a whiskey belch erupting from some deep sac. There was nowhere to go and I had no idea what time it was. My watch was fixed on North American time, eastern standard.

- 5 -
    I’d seen him once before, here in the food unit, the man in the monk’s cloak. He did not look up when I entered. A meal appeared in a slot near the door and I took the plate, glass and utensils to a table positioned diagonally to his, across a narrow aisle.
    He had a long face and large hands, head narrowing toward the top, hair cropped to the skull, leaving sparse gray stubble. The cloak was the same one he’d been wearing last time, old and wrinkled, purplish, with gold embellishments. It had no sleeves. What emerged from the cloak were pajama sleeves, striped.
    I examined the food, took a bite and decided to assume that he spoke English.
    â€œWhat is this we’re eating?”
    He looked over at my plate, although not at me.
    â€œIt’s called morning plov .”
    I took another bite and tried to associate the taste with the name.
    â€œCan you tell me what that is?”
    â€œCarrots and onions, some mutton, some rice.”
    â€œI see the rice.”
    â€œ Oshi nahor ,” he said.
    We ate quietly for a time.
    â€œWhat do you do here?”
    â€œI talk to the dying.”
    â€œYou reassure them.”
    â€œWhat do I reassure them of?”
    â€œThe continuation. The reawakening.”
    â€œDo you believe that?”
    â€œDon’t you?” I said.
    â€œI don’t think I want to. I just talk about the end. Calmly, quietly.”
    â€œBut the idea itself. The reason behind this entire venture. You don’t accept it.”
    â€œI want to die and be finished forever. Don’t you want to die?” he said.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWhat’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?”
    In his voice I tried to detect origins in some secluded bend of the English language, pitch and tone possibly hedged by time, tradition and other languages.
    â€œWhat brought you here?”
    He had to think about this.
    â€œMaybe something someone said. I just drifted in. I was living in Tashkent during the unrest. Many hundreds dead all through the country. They boil people to death there. The medieval mind. I tend to enter countries in their periods of violent unrest. I was learning to speak Uzbek and helping educate the children of one of the provincial officials. I taught them English word by word and tried to minister to the man’s wife, who had been ill for several years. I performed the functions of a cleric.”
    He took some food, chewed and swallowed. I did the same and waited for him to continue. The food was beginning to taste like what it was, now that he’d identified it for me. Mutton. Morning plov . It seemed he had nothing further to say.
    â€œAnd are you a cleric?”
    â€œI was a member of a post-evangelist group. We were radical breakaways from the world council. We had