We believed no one could die on our island, the gods forbade it, and disaster would follow. And so when the sickness came upon one of us, the oarsman would row away with the dying islander over the horizon. My father the oarsman and his father before and his father and on and on. No one knew where he went, and no one knew what became of the bodies, but the bark was always empty when my father rowed it back to shore. Some said he floated somewhere over the horizon, waiting for the dying to die, and then heaved the body into the sea. But most imagined there was a place, a watery grave, a shining coral garden among the darker waters, where the bodies could be released and remain.

For each ascent, it is the sovereign who is naturally the first to climb new tower floors, the stairs carpeted in silk rugs dyed violet with the blood of roosters, while the sovereign’s attendants bear upward with solemn ceremony the collection of treasures in trunks made of glass—the amethysts, the vessels of bergamot oil, the astrolabes, the taxidermied birds of yore with their great wings spread for flight—as the sovereign’s women with their full hips and long braided hair dance up the stairs chanting a song about the sun.

Long into the night, he wandered the city streets. Road bikes hurtled past, small engines straining like some kind of strangled explosion. Women whispered on high black balconies. Stumbling drunk tourists, lost in search of bars. Little gabled Monopoly houses cowered at the feet of monolithic condominiums. Sleeping bodies twitched atop yawning grates. Rusting pay phones clung to brick like locusts under the pale squares of watery lights. A madman with werewolfian hair gibbered and hit himself with a wrench. He passed fleabag alleys, chainlink wonderlands, vistas of blankets and chrome. A man smelling of excrement with a blitzkrieg expression threw his arm round his shoulder and said, “Right now, funk brother, right now.” It felt astatic to be out here. It felt obscene….To be late at night in the city on the street is to hear a thousand secrets and understand none.

She woke in the middle of the night. She’d been dreaming about something obscure that posed a threat, it seemed, for her children. Without looking at the clock she guessed the time. In the dark she drew open the drawer and listened for the watch. She listened a long while, waiting for the silence to settle and the ticking to appear in her hearing like a figure rounding a bend and approaching in the wood. But there was no ticking. The watch had stopped. It was half past three.