Have you heard of the old straight track? he asks. I confess that I haven’t and try to change the subject to the Bakhtin I’ve been reading in my spare time. The bum usually gets a kick out of the fact that an aspiring civil engineer has worked his way through half the philosophy section in Barnes & Noble. He calls me Matilda. But he isn’t interested today. He cuts me off. Matilda, he says, you’re looking for truth in the wrong places. Alfred Watkins. Now there’s a man who knows about truth. Discovered the old straight track. A whole system of them, made up of these lines going all over the earth. Ley lines. Churches and pyramids and synagogues built on them. Silos that multiply the grain inside. Make it fertile. Well they run through here, too. If you catch them at the right time you can ride them. Sail right on up to the sky, just like it wasn’t nothing at all.

That’s very interesting, I say.

Soon, he says, you can catch it.

All right.

He holds out my now-empty Tupperware and winks, his dull eyes a piercing green despite their wateriness. I notice his shaking hand is missing two fingers and is curled into a claw. I smile, stuffing the container into my backpack.

I met Elba in our apartment elevator last winter and asked her if she would be willing to model vintage hats for me. I had a collection but no one to wear them and looking at Elba was like gazing into the radiant face of Lisa Fonssagrives at twenty-four. It took all of my willpower not to seize her where collarbone met neck and kiss her right there in the elevator. I offered to pay her for the photos but all she did was laugh and laugh in my face. I’d never shot a thing in my life but the thought of my beautiful collection becoming food for dust mites grieved me and I’d read somewhere that the line worked and it did.