The way things break down is often melodic, involved with time as it is, and the crews coming down from the mountain will tell you so. The metal scrying the glass, the edifice of brick bending south, possibly. It wasn't wise to spend so long up there, among the dry materials and the forgotten names of birds—birds of boredom and perdition. And when you are thirsty it is easy to lose yourself in the chambers of a single dollar, where the light switches, thousands of them, tremble. It was a long time before you saw another person, or perhaps you never did. In any case, there was nothing extraordinary about our ability to find work in the desert. There were furnace vents, too, and we spent many years whispering into them, knowing that there were others inside, transcribing the notes of our dream. We were so talkative, or at least that's what our mothers told us when we saw them in the reflections of waterfalls.