“Once in the back, and once right in the back of the head,” the young man said. “Two times.” He was leaning across the table again, his meaty breath damp on Farrell’s cheek. “That’s why I eat glass. Good glass, colored glass a lot, like wine bottles. Desert glass, them old mason jars been out in the sun for years and years. I eat all that stuff.”

The mention of wine bottles reminded Farrell that it was Thursday, his usual day to pick up some small dinner present for Ben and Sia. He scraped his chair, mentally choreographing his flight to clear sidewalk: a buttonhook around the Iranians to cut between the regular Rastafarian debating society and two women playing Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary on musical saws. Vaguely he thought that it might be useful to start wearing a hat or carrying something like a portfolio. You put it on the table when you sit down, and when you pick it up even the Ancient Mariner knows you have to go. He looked along Parnell once more, yearning angrily past the street merchants, the record shops and the tiny bead-curtained restaurants down to where the medical office complexes abruptly began. I’m lonely, he thought, this nut’s made me lonely. What a dumb thing.

The young man said against his face, “And when I’m all full of glass, right up full, and it’s all in my bloodstream and my bones and in my brain, and I go somewhere it’s dark, in a closet or somewhere, how I’ll shine! I’ll be like one of them pictures you make with little bits of colored stones, tiles, I don’t know what they call them—”

“Mosaic,” Farrell said automatically. Then Julie Tanikawa drove her motorcycle slowly past the South Forty, and Farrell got up and went after her without a word, bumping into tables.

Traffic was backed up for several blocks, as always on Parnell in the late afternoon, and the huge black BSA was barely moving at a walking pace.