floating in the night over waves breaking toward a beach and there is a tree line and the faces of the islanders are looking back and they cannot get to me and I cannot move and their faces have contorted into grins of demons in waiting and I know they’ve never seen their own reflection and they’re waiting for something and I think they know what but I cannot see it and their faces return to normal as the light slowly rises over the horizon and they fade back into the trees and in the pale blue pink distance I can see the mast of a ship begin to slowly turn this way as

November 12, 2001 - Oxford Ohio

light begins to come through the blinds as night becomes morning. He is beside her, one hand beneath her stomach, his face still in sleep. The apartment is nearly silent, only filled by the tick of a clock in the front room and outside the still wet window the door in the courtyard opens as someone leaves toward campus.

She slides out from beneath the sheet with little sound, the floor cool against her feet and pauses at the edge of the bed to look at him. Moving to the kitchen she makes coffee and returns to the bedroom where he is awake, propped against the headboard, watching the door as if he'd known she would appear at that exact moment. "I was quiet." She hands him a cup. She sits on the edge of the bed. The coffee is too hot to drink so she holds it, the warmth against her palms. Outside, the light has changed from purple to blue making shadows on the bed. He looks at her over the rim of the cup. She sets her cup on the nightstand and slides beneath the sheets. "Five more minutes," she says and closes her eyes.

The library is quiet. Catherine sat at the oak table tapping a pen, a magazine open to an article about the war in the Baltic. The words meant nothing. (tap tap tap) Her mind was elsewhere. The white cord of her earphones hung down her shirt. (tap tap tap tap...) The music played but she did not hear it (...tap tap tap tap).

A student returned a stack of books. (tap tap tap tap tap) Catherine scanned them in. She stamped the date cards from habit though no one looked at them anymore. (tap tap) The computer did all that now. (tap tap tap tap)

She looked at her watch. Ten-thirty. She had been there three hours. The light through the high windows had changed. The pale blue light of October.

"You're out of here?" The other girl had arrived for the afternoon.

Catherine nodded. "Yes."

"Busy today?"

"No. It was quiet."

She touched her pocket and stood and gathered her things. She moved between the tall shelves glancing absently at the bindings as she passed. Noticing one out of place she pulled it down and returned the book carefully to its right place, making sure the spine aligned with the others.

Outside the air was cool and sharp. Leaves drifted down from the oaks that lined the campus walk. They were the color of fire and they cracked beneath her shoes.

The sky was bright and pale. She walked with her shoulders straight, heading toward her house off campus.

A fighter jet cut across the blue, low enough to see the missiles fixed beneath its wings. It was sleek and gray and fast. The sound hit her a moment later, a hard crack that echoed between the buildings. Then it was gone, heading south, carrying its purpose somewhere else.

She watched the sky until the sound faded, then she walked on.

The campus ended at College and High. Catherine crossed and entered the neighborhood of old houses. Church Street. Then left on Vine. The house numbers changed. 418. 426. 432. She had memorized them all. A Coke can lay crushed in the gutter outside 432. Catherine stopped and picked it up and carried it to the trash bin at the corner. The blue house on the corner of Poplar was 501. It needed paint. Next to it, 503 with its crooked mailbox. Then 507. There was no 505. She had looked for it many times. Not even a space where it would have been.

She turned onto Beech St. Her house was the third one down, a three-story, white with white shutters. She walked through the front door and climbed the stairs to her attic room.

His apartment is quiet and it’s dark on the other side of the glass door onto the balcony, the two cigarettes on the balcony across move in the shadow created by the light in the parking lot. He’s sitting at the computer as the door opens and closes and she sits down in one of the chairs next to the desk.

“I took your system in a bit of a different direction.” He says.

“Show me.”

“A hard drive full of mp3’s, two copies. The software makes a hexed mapping of it. So long as the contents in both hard drives are identical, the decoding will work. Type your actual message here, the encoded message appears here. The first sentence is the key, the remainder is the message.”

“Can it be broken?”

“Maybe. I doubt it. You’d have to know you were looking at an encoded message to begin with. You’d have to have an exact copy of the hexed mapping. And the algorithm. There are probably a million combinations of encoded messages. I mean, a paragraph of a newspaper article you write could be an encoded message. Shannon, the entropy of a signal, so long as it can blend in with its surroundings it should go unnoticed. A voicemail, a poem. Plain sight. Who the hell would know.”

The music is loud at First Run and the beer was not cold. She leaned against the wall of the stage, holding her plastic cup. He stood beside her. They both watched the dancers.

"Good party," he said.

"If you like this sort of thing."

"You don't?"

"It's fine."

The dancers moved in the dim light. Someone had hung Christmas lights though it was November.