Ten past midnight on a Saturday night in September I sat in the upper rooms of a club in Glasgow. I'd been there about an hour when someone came up behind me and said:

"You'll not believe me, but the bar cut me off. Not the barman, mind—the glass. Passed right through my hand."

 

I had seen him around, knew his name—Paul.

"Has anything like that happened to you? I'm not kidding you, you know."

I shrugged.

"Give us a smoke then, since you don't believe me." He gave a sly smile.

We walked out as they were bringing the birthday cake in. This much my memory tells me but memory is not enough.

We walked through the night, not talking and ended up at an all night diner across from a nightclub. As couples exited he said, "Fucking. Why bother?" He addressed the other tables. "Anyone else sick of it?"

I drove him home. It was too late to drive back to mine. "I better sleep on your floor," I said but he was passed out. I woke late the next morning.

"You still here ?" He came to the window beside me. "What is it?" he asked.

"Don't you see the rainbow? You must be blind."

He gripped my arm hard enough it hurt.

"I don't see any fucking rainbow."

 

 

I called everyone from the party. No one knew the full story, but what I did hear could fill a book, each story more extreme than the last. I tried to find a way they intersected but he was not going to let himself be seen so easily.

"I fear no man," he told me. "Do you believe that?" He gave me a look of contempt.

"I think I do."

All winter he slipped away but never left altogether, waiting for me to catch up. Drunk in bars he would suggest going to strange exhibitions. To see how far he would go I took him to an immersive theatre performance. Two or three weeks later he sent me an expensive edition of The Washer of the Fords.In the endpaper in Paul's hand was a note, carefully phrased—casual enough to deny, precise enough that it could not have been meaningless.

 

I phoned him.

"Weird book. Never took you for a nature lover.”

He put the phone down and refused to speak to me for weeks. By Spring he had given up his job and moved overseas. He came back at the height of Summer. He was away a year but we picked up where we left off. Whatever he wanted with me was as important as it had been that first night he singled me out.

"How was your trip?"

"Good," he said absently. "I want to show you something. It would mean going up North."

I didn't want to lose another year so I agreed. He wheedled me into letting him drive, doing 120 on the Motorway. "Beautiful Blue Sky," he said, breaking heavily to avoid a truck. The curving roads of the peaks were flanked on both sides with wild horses up to their necks in Heather.

"Did you see that?"

"Don't talk," he said and stopped the car.  He adjusted the rearview mirror, looking into his own eyes. "That’s close enough for now."

"Let's go up, you don't want to know what happens if you lose your nerve."

There at the edge of a limestone valley fringed with yew, spotted orchids, grassy banks scattered with ferns I stood tranquilized by the gold light filtering between the oaks, pouring its devouring light back to the world. Beside the low summer sun burned a second sun. The valley lay beneath two opposed shadows.

 

 

"All that stuff I told you about the wood I said to get you going." He drove back to Glasgow in silence, parked my car and walked onto the tube. I called him daily for two weeks, then monthly. In the end I had to give up. It was the place I kept looking for.

This city is provisional, an arrangement of streets, nothing more. Since then I have kept a notebook, I track the weather, names overheard on the train.Take me aside. Tell me a sign.