_Him and Me in the corridor are trying for some version of cheer._ ME: I miss the old days. HIM: What old days? ME: You know, the old days. Before all this hazy uncertain moving around. When all we had to do was go to the cafe and eat and smoke, go home and drink, occasionally go out and flirt with strangers just to make our own lives more, I don’t know— HIM: Alive? ME: Yeah. _Here comes the pause. The pause sits in the corridor with them. Wet. Dripping. Interminable._ _What sets the old days apart from the new days? Essay question. Was it the foreign military invasion? Is the main difference one of political innocence? Does it all hinge on the price of cash, and the fact that then, all you had to worry about was getting hassled by a bored sherriff telling you to slow the hell down because we’ve had fourteen traffic fatalities this year, and all of them were speed related? Yes sir I understand. And he gives you a ticket—and you feel like an ass to remember it later, but you actually say thank you. At least the old cops were human. Now, with the soldiers in the streets, you have to worry about whether your identity is in order. You could be saying or thinking the wrong thing at any time. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. You should see the subversion that comes out of a simple plate full of bacon and eggs. Carve it all up, shovel it all down, but the whole time, your conversation is subject to surveillance._ _Surveillance. We’re all under surveillance now. It’s not supposed to matter, if you’re not doing anything wrong. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But we all know, everyone has something to—_ _Or was the line of demarcation smaller, more individual? Is the individual smaller? Or larger? Depends on the attitude of your radar screen, one supposes. Maybe the difference between then and now is Bnabe’s death. Maybe when the hummingbird hummed over his coffin as the first teaspoonful of dirt hit (coffin? Wouldn’t he have preferred a fiery consumption? A return into the smoke he always said he was a pillar of?_ _But who were Him and Me to protest, mere particles in the fringes of the funeral? Because a funeral’s a cruelly public affair, and the property rights to a dead man’s soul are apportioned according to laws written long before the quirks of lifetime-spanning kinships are revealed to oblivious kinsmen), maybe then the old days became the new. Maybe then there_ might _have been someone listening to Him and Me’s burbling inanities in the dark. But now they_ know _someone is listening. And somehow that doesn’t make it easier. Why not? Shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t their dead best friend’s ghost prove a comfort? Why doesn’t it? Only the smoke knows why not, and the smoke ain’t telling._ _They stop to smoke again. Just want to know the score._ BNABE’S GHOST: I guess you have reason to be plenty embarassed now. ME: I am, I am. HIM: _[harder by habit]_ Why? _ME doesn’t really want to have this conversation. He’s throwing up tumbleweeds, blowing smoke, trying at all_ _cost to avoid this conversation. Why? Ask him. Ask Me for me, will you? Ask Me why I don’t want to know the answers only Bnabe’s ghost can provide._ _Read it in the smoke. Read it in the snoke:_ _Third door on the right._