In billowing monkey suit and scuffed brothel creepers, like some Forty's Hollywood movie gangster, he skips down the spiraling stairwell of a seven-story walk-up. Tapping the varnished railing, brittle as a snail's shell, a Fibonacci sequence spooling under slick fingers. Her cheap perfume, a sickly flower, droops in the creases of his half-buttoned shirt. Bills stuffed unthinking from her nightstand bulge out pants pockets. Beyond a window, midway down, rising stalks of stars sway in the dark grange of night. Those very stars whose milk he must have drunk long before his mother's. Below them, a police car's light beats like a line from a forgotten poem. He stops and wonders: Is this what I'm really doing here? Looking for the face I had before the world was made? Outside now in the alley, he catches ghost trails of dreams passing through tarmac, asphalt, and stone. Recycling themselves. Dewdrops glimmer on fire hydrants. Moonlight quivers on their taut skin. Some alien knowledge pricks through his consciousness. It tells him in one of those dewdrops there's a hidden seam he could fall through to the other side of some unimagined reckoning. But there's no time to find it. He needs to get far away from here. And the sun will kill it long before he can come back. But now he knows, knows so certainly he'd stake his life on it, that though she may be dead, her laughter still lives. Like light from an extinct star, it radiates through that other place he's just glimpsed, rippling like warm bunting and scented with sea roses, lilac and frangipane. And if he could, he would take it in his arms, as though cradling a newborn. Drape it over his shoulders like that old sheepskin jacket she bundled him in and in whose pockets she filled with hot boiled eggs before releasing him to the long night walk to school. Before dawn dripped from a broken sky in a runny pink yolk. The darkest time. Now that same darkness waits for him in the winding streets beyond. But this time he has no eggs in his coat pockets, only the still-smoking shells he was careful enough to pick up.