On a rainy morning in the worst yearof my life, as icy eyelets shelled the street,I shared a tremor with a Dobermanleashed to a post. We two were all the worlduntil a bicyclist shot by, riding
like a backward birth, feetfirst,in level, gentle ease, with the season's hard breathbetween his teeth. The rain was almost ice, the skymild and pale. I saw a milk carton bobbing byon a stream of melting sleet.
A bicyclist. A bicyclist. He rode away—to his home, I guess. I went home,where I undressed, left my jacketwhere it fell, went straight to bed, and sleptfor two days straight. But those clicking wheels
kept clicking in my head, and thoughI can't say why, I felt not only not myself,but that I'd never been ... that I
was that man I hardly saw, hurling myselfinto the blast, and that everythingI passed—dog, rain, cold, the other guy—I left in my wake, like afterbirth.
