It was because I hadn't been looking where I was going. The young woman hardly seemed to stop to take my hand; now she was holding it gently but surely. On the other side of the street she as quickly relinquished it, glancing back at me with grey eyes at once determined and without vision. Thus I was to cross a famous intersection in the centre of the city not far from the student quarter. I still remember the calm, bright sunlight falling upon one side of the concrete buildings, and a vista of streets and busily moving traffic stretching to the red sandstone buildings of a church to the east. Elsewhere, the same mild light must even then have been illuminating the courtyards of the University of Santa Magdalena, settling among the nicotinia beds of streetside cafes, shining back from the shallow waters of the harbour with more or less perturbation.

Already I knew that the hand that had led me across the road belonged to the sandstone church, even as that church and its sandstone in turn belonged to a constellation of cars caked in sand that lie abandoned beneath the ruins of a watercourse somewhere on the outskirts of a desert. That hand and those eyes, the light and the red sandstone were not so much discrete details as mutual causes of and explanations for one another. What they promised to define was a thing I had still to seek; but for now it was sufficient to surrender to the sensation that all these things seemed to connote, ramify, to become a part of each other's meaning, impossible to explain in and for themselves. Like arrows shot from the same bow, they arch different ways, picturing the same landscape from varying heights and directions.

I had seen those grey eyes before, their determination, their lack of vision. But it was far from that downtown intersection, beneath the dirty brick and rusted iron girders that supported the expressway alongside the waterfront. For it was there that the junk-yard owners turned back the battered awnings above their stalls and an old man tapped his way with a stick past the bench where she was sitting. Even then I had turned back, but for what? Her expression promised a need I could not fulfil. A second later I knew my mistake, that instead it promised a fulfilment that I could not accept. Steadfast, the eyes had not distinguished mine, and I found myself losing faith in the different set of eyes that, momentarily detained, now bobbed their way over the scrubby heath toward the hospital blocks and the refuse bins, the broken steps and padlocked yards, the twilight back streets and the moon.

Lying on my back I saw those eyes once more, determined, without vision. Perhaps that was the heart of it - a determination without vision. Instinctively the words came into my head - "a life without purposes." A very different proposition, of course, from a purposeless life. The purpose of her life, in fact, would be as irrelevant as to question whether it had a purpose. Here was a life which failed to distinguish particular things rather than a life which took failure for its principle. Though it might retain a similar energy, the life without purposes must lack the drama of a purposeless life; and while the purposeless life is likely to be forgotten, the life without purposes is more likely to be overlooked. Thus it would not be impossible for this woman, and perhaps a man, and even perhaps a small dog that chances to walk beside them, to appear in a puff of smoke as they round a street-corner to guide a man across the street.

So it was that, on a certain afternoon, I created St. Kim of Puerto Alcan, an unlikely virgin upon whose steadfast head the torrential waters of that city's desires and failures gushed down in baptism. Incarnate angel of the dusk, patron saint of the timely lapse from grace, she rode pillion to thwarted hopes in the chariot of human frailty. I chose her face from a gaudy Easter among the dollar stores, and her perfume from the cheap scent of bundled candles, as, slouched gaily at a table in an upper room, her laughter rose and fell among peppermint umbrellas, dinner plates, guitars. Physically, I decided, she must have stood in a long tradition of impetuous American faces, waxy-cheeked and thin-lipped, with soft, huelessly brown hair that was part and parcel of an age of stripped pine and chaise-longues, futons and gas barbecues. And yet, beyond her channel-flicking and gum chewing, she stood apart from them, her shiftless eyes, for all their intensity, singing with nothing buoyant. In them, rather, was the settled wisdom of a kind of profanity.

For five years, I was convinced, she had lived upstairs on that little landing, and washed a priest's vestments, had surrendered herself furiously to all things utilitarian that govern a saintly life. Singing cheerily in the small church whose copper roof ajoined the presbytery, her voice mingled a girlish ebullience with the emptiness of the tomb; behind its unstudied resonance there seemed a hidden misery, as though the song were being distorted by an emotion exterior to it, and which derived no solace from the act of singing; and as she stood to one side in the foyer, making conversation with the worshippers outside the church, a pair of grey and unforgiving eyes raised themselves attentively to affirm a transitory involvement in the happiness, in the loss, in the surprise, of the small lives that presented themselves to her, staid and cold in their constant charity. For the thing I sought for now and was incapable of finding - a discovery that came to mean more and more to me - was any kind of idealism in that face.

I knew she had the kind of face that would attract men, although this wouldn’t be because it was pretty in any conventional sense; indeed, what was sensuous about her was precisely the numbness, the greyness, the emptiness which her eyes seemed to offer as a destiny. At odds with her persistent gaiety, this apparently settled lethargy of spirit proposed - not happiness, no, - but perhaps, in a strange sense, a kind of absolution, a mysterious vision, the sensation of everlasting poise. It was as if this gaiety and this emptiness were perpetually offering themselves as a conundrum which would only be deciphered by a violent intimacy in which moment the two might suffer themselves to meet; it was as if she held within herself both Kim and her potential admirer, keeping them apart because no opportunity had yet compelled her to force them together.

I knew therefore that the man who sought her would have something lacking in himself, or rather that, insofar as any admirer could ever be termed "appropriate", there would be something essentially inappropriate about him. For some months I watched, first with interest but later with a mounting boredom, how this or that congregant would smile at her, meet with her for drinks at The Spruce Goose, hug her with such feeling he quite lifted her small feet from the dance-floor; I watched as, one by one, the small secrets of the parish unfolded about her like flowers seeking the sun, offering themselves to her in exchange for an intimacy that was never forthcoming; I watched her carrying confidences like a clanking bunch of keys; there were tearful partings; and, on summer evenings, there were hours of lowered voices on the warm gangwalks of the slatted fire-escape against the presbytery, before the man at last turned away onto St. George and she stood there, deep in thought, a cup of coffee forgotten in her hand.

I did not give up yet, waylaying her with handwritten notes, with songs and sheet-music deposited outside her room at the top of the staircase (blue-tacked to which there was a smudgy photograph of her fondling a horse). Not only did I allow her aging employer to proposition her; I even let him die six months later. But I searched in vain for her face among the many black veils in the churchyard of a distant provincial town. And I started to realise that I had no right to ask for it, that to demand from her an indiscriminate concern for or involvement in those about her who sought her intimacy would be to trivialise rather than understand her situation. Whatever Kim was to do, I reflected, she would have her reasons; and perhaps it was only because they were unfamiliar to me that those reasons would have meaning.

There were other reasons though why I found great difficulty in imagining my saint, happily or otherwise, bound by emotional ties to some second agent through whom I might begin at last to understand her, foremost of which was the impossibility of a proper introduction. For the introduction I sought needed both her bright, welcoming face, the smallness of her stature clearly apparent as she found herself framed between the oak pillars on either side of the entrance to the presbytery; but it also needed, no less, an occasion for her to fix that patch of pink powder to her face, for a lightly scented, dishevelled room she might call her own. It needed both her untransmissive eyes, looking out from the doorway, and also a view of that vanity mirror, askance upon the closet, which would be reflecting without condemnation the bleak garden and the bin-liners filled with refuse below. It needed both her clothes thrown upon a body, and those same clothes in a jumble over the back of a chair; it needed her being here and also something circled in a diary, an idle scrawl, which might supply the occasion for her absence. In brief, it needed some third agency through which different presences could be united in a way which was intuitive rather than logical, an effect which could subsequently become the cause of itself. I placed little faith in Puerto Alcan, for which transformations seemed impossible; neither did I believe Kim yet had it in her to manipulate a personal fate. So I found myself waiting patiently, forced to accept that resolution must come unbidden, and that, when it did, my only obligation would be not to question it.

In my mind's eye I saw the black-slatted fire escape and the setting sun, the sanded redbrick lintel and the flimsy kitchen door beyond it, the still, cloudless dusk gathering colour from the skyline. I was waiting for the cessation of a sound - the clink of small, heavy mugs on the table beyond the door, the blunt sound of the lid closing upon a coffee-pot somewhere. I was waiting for the woman inside to depress the fire-bar, for the door to stagger open, rattling and squeaking over the low, waterlogged jamb; for I knew that in a moment she would come out, and I should be able to see her face clearly for the first time. She would come out and walk across that black-slatted gangway to first one and then the other side-rail, in order to look without anticipation over the low, massed trees, the coarse sward on either side of the parking lot, the small concrete cross that surmounted the triangular leaded roof of the church. Her eyes would wear their habitual expression of a determination free from particular purposes; her brown hair would be bobbed both ways (just slightly - as it had been these last nine months or so). And, indifferent to the beauty or nostalgia that the late afternoon might conceivably awaken in her, by degrees her glance would take in the gravelled forecourt, the road, and, further away, Soldier's Tower, the Manulife Centre, the pink skyscrapers along Bay, and finally, behind it all, the yellow mist rising up from the harbour.

Her eyes narrowed, and, with elbows on the side-rail, she sank her cheeks into the palms of both hands with a sigh, an exaggerated gesture of girlishness. "Well, here I am," she said to the world in general, closed her lips and repeated the phrase more thoughtfully, as though calling the skies to witness.

And that picture, that episode, that method of mental composition was redeemed for me, when Kim freed me from the irresolution within which she had become entangled, and, reaching down, accepted the bouquet of flowers that I had had placed against the railings on another's behalf.

Resurrecting the ruined water course, the motor cars caked in sand, the grey and unforthcoming eyes, the sandstone church, I was striving to combine them all with the particularly still summer evening that surrounded Kim on the fire escape. I saw again that causes could never be single, that somewhere a woman was alighting at the quayside, where a man rose to greet her with a formal caress; I knew that a fishing boat that tacked sadly to and fro was not without significance, and that even the tourists, sloughed off by their homelands in the spring, had a role to play as they moved their hands complacently through a medley of cheap necklaces, copper bracelets and windchimes that adorned the ricketty stalls. I was waiting for some presence to coalesce, that flagging time after the last cocktails when the summer evening seems filled with a particular hue of sand and the smell of dust, accompanying one's ability suddenly to walk an infinite number of steps, the capacity to accomplish an absolute sacrifice.

Leaning against the wall of my apartment, a cigarette between my lips, I made such movements as were necessary to turn myself into a stranger, forearm crossing waist, elbow seated in palm, and chin between the knuckles of two fingers. In a moment of poise I began to create the quiet summer of the country town to which the man must owe his origins, placing it at the limits of the day, filling it with the sound of karytids and dryflies, the scent of citrons and musk. I gave the small lizards on the verandah the audience of a silent man, deposing all other duties of involvement to distant places. I willed them to comment; I willed them to take up the picture I proposed; soothed by the faint sound of bells, peeling from a remote railroad crossing, I emptied my mind of all realities before it, in order that they in place could fill it.

And slowly I felt the tedium of the day becoming broken by the stillness of a living idea, the absent name I sought beginning to shine with undirected radiance, like stone of Bonona, however variously it still hovered between all the forms available to it and him. A man turned out into so many stories that it would be impossible to recount them all, and each of which bled to the touch, as though they had been born without a skin to contain or protect them. One man who, at the close of a beautiful day, had found himself carried by sheer momentum a little beyond the blissful limits of that day; who landed upon his feet in the twilight, when the others had gone home, and was suddenly forced to realise what it must mean to look from a distance into the lighted windows of a house no longer his own. A man who, taking two steps from his front door, has entered a desert, and, taking two steps back, returns to a room already and eternally crippled by every act of departure he once made from it. A man who, in everything he might do, says nothing significant, and of whom I know almost nothing. Except that he has been carried on a little beyond the limits of the day, and that, without realising it himself, there is something infinitely touching in the fact that he still lives and thinks, that he fails to understand what has happened, as though he had stepped out unwittingly upon a lighted stage.

He was not faithless; he had fallen out of faith. He rejected no part of the day; it was, rather, that the day could no longer accept him. He stooped down to pick up the fragments of letters that blew across in the wind, the photograph of a girl still intact; torn to scraps, the phrases took on a continuity they had possibly lacked before, creating a set of indeterminate beginnings from which the girl seemed to stream - "enough, but nevertheless"; "treasure it, is the best part", "lost my faith. The priest". The scraps of paper were intended for him, surrendering both to what he could read and all that he must fail to read in them; carried across into the twilight, they seemed his only link with a day which would not dawn again, the only future which could be created from the stasis of the night. And so he tied his past up in a bundle, hawking it for a bus ticket across the border. Already I was focusing on a particular smutted bridge along the waterfront over which the express trains squeak and reverberate, a dingy place smelling of oil and gasoline, and surrounded by rusted tin drums, trampled mesh fences and a litter of ends of wood, grafitti, discoloured beer bottles and last year's leaves. Above, the great southern ring road swung sharply about, leading a legion of cars along clear and level lanes alongside the first buildings of the city. Among the traffic, a minibus driven by a fat priest was entering the sliproad, in the back of which a man had turned his face toward the city, watching its approach without emotion, one hand lying almost absently on the leg of his companion. He and that minibus are headed for a point of presence which is also a point of difference, an intersection in the heart of the city where futures and meanings divide. In dividing they will connect themselves with other things, becoming the substance and cause of previous events, so that it might in fact be time itself which has swung about sharply, moving swiftly forward through a thousand new details in order to bring origins to life.

So it became possible at last for me to see this man, serious and with slightly stooped shoulders; reconjured in Puerto Alcan, he was wearing a heavy coat, walking with long strides through rain, a cigarette in the corner of lips which turned inward with vague self-mockery. For the time being, it was enough simply that he was walking, and that he took in the littered forecourts, the razed lots, the decaying machinery among the wharves, carrying their memory possibly a few paces or possibly for a lifetime. Walking through those seedy suburbs, the firm curves of the soles of his shoes - as much as his quixotic eyes - expressed something for which I could not find a name.

For the moment, I say, I was content simply in surrounding him with the streets, houses and shops that made up the waterfront of Puerto Alcan. It was enough that, like some insentient creature, he exhaust his life in unconsidered shuttlings up and down Bloor Street East, pacing past three sandwich bars and a second-hand clothes shop, not afraid to meet the eyes of the incessant stream of conservatory students issuing at all hours with flutes and violins from the ivy-run buildings of the Academy.

But for him to live congruously, it was necessary he disappear into a livelihood. And for this I settled on almost the last building in the furthestmost reaches of the city - a tiny casino miles up Avenue, with four small beige tables and a pair of sulky croupiers. An upper room one entered by way of a steep and narrow flight of stairs, and whose few windows gave upon dirty lots and backyards twisted into shapes with rusty wire. Here, between a fat woman with dyed hair and a gaunt suited manager with cruel eyes, I was to discover such life as he might offer up to public comment. Here, between a shorts bar that was little more than a cupboard and the thin plaster walls that concealed none of the sounds of the street; here, upon a cheap red carpet whose polyester crunched beneath one's shoes, and among the few - always the same - men and women who gambled there, he would let fall at times the tokens that passed for conversation. They were indistinguishable from the commonplaces Kim exchanged with her friends; and all too often I was obliged to turn to the odd bits and pieces of thought he had scrawled on the backs of envelopes, or else listen to the recitations he would deliver to himself as he lay down struggling to sleep, to find anything remotely substantial.

At last, settled firmly in a routine, his air of careless endurance began to make sense. I started to notice a pattern in the times at which he would open or close the casino, the quantities of involvement he divided between it and the remainder of the city. Each morning he would set himself a target, refusing to leave until he had made the sum of money he had counted upon. Then he was walking placidly once more, the period of his stride seemingly regulated by the bills he held screwed up in his pocket. It was always the same bar I found him in each night, buying the one drink, standing up at the bar without shedding his coat, leaving the small but secure tip he always left. I followed him down the Boulevard de la Cruz and past the Astor, through a dingy uptown which was without meaning and which seemed to have been constructed from everything that had no place elsewhere; he led me among concrete gangways that had no business to have been built, past rain shelters and palings stripped of ivy, among terminal bridges and gangways leading nowhere, all - like the street lamps themselves - curved into a question mark. I followed him through the rain, the cheap overcoat hunched up on his shoulders, the cigarette in a corner of his mouth, starting to guess something about his incurious expression of acceptance and neglect. He had withdrawn the roll of bills and was leaving the banknotes anywhere they might dirty and be blown away by the wind, lost and forgotten. And, stepping back further, I followed him through the changing seasons of that city, his rent lapsing each time he retrieved the small photograph from his wallet and sought in its eyes the strength to move on from one pallid room to the next. Up and down the city, he was living from month to month exactly the same way as he lived form day to day, searching for something which continued to elude him, making money because he was capable of doing so, wasting it without satisfaction because it was his right to do so, wandering, waiting for his death when nothing would be revealed, nothing perpetuated, nothing completed.

Lifting the roses swiftly, with a deftness which was almost exasperation, Kim looked down at the bundle, ruffling the stems and sharpening her eyes. With one hand she turned over the little card that anchored them, flipped it over and back again, unsurprised, as if seeking no more than the confirmation it bore a name and a message. Then - "Well, well," she said with surprising softness, the repetition caught up in the sound of her shoes as she turned back toward the kitchen. The words were equally free of enquiry and complacency, drawn from her if only because the occasion had demanded some kind of response; drawn from her perhaps because she too, involuntarily, had surrendered to the childish thrill of muttering enigmas on an empty evening street. She was speaking words that, anticipating no audience, do not need to be explained, and whose satisfaction is precisely the mysterious privacy within which they might cloak us, tantamount to the theft of a body, a new set of clothes.

In large part, of course, he addressed her in ignorance, not knowing anything about her or the place in which he might find her. But from the photograph alone he had learned everything, from the mildness of the light which only fell in that city to a probable dating of the red sandstone church behind her. The slender feet, seemingly formed for dancing, were at odds with the body above them, supporting itself against a railing. Nor did the contradictions end there, since the eyes too seemed unfamiliar to themselves, exhibiting a kind of sidelong prettiness. Framed by cars and people, she held herself humbly, quite free of self-knowledge, tranquilly awaiting a destiny, tranquilly repeating the past, caught up in the small cycles of provincial life like a hoop spinning on the end of a stick, and guided through the bright, dusty quarry by a young girl with a pink ribbon in her hair.

"It's that small casino on Avenue, where nothing substantial was ever gained or lost," he wrote. "I'd like for you to visit me sometime." Perhaps he was trying to legitimise his livelihood, or simply to put her at her ease, leaving a meeting to her initiative. True, he could have requested a meeting elsewhere, in less personal surroundings. But to offer more should have been to mislead her. Perhaps too it was that his mind had already run ahead, and he had grown too fond of the poetic expostulation - "I had gambled my heart, and lost" - which would need to be spoken there, and with which it seemed possible both their lives might change forever.

So it was that the weeks passed, filled by his usual clientele. The cards fell on the table with the muted affirmation they might reveal the mechanism of chance. But for those who took them up, the maddening answer only seemed to complicate itself as they drew closer. It was not that the patterns lost coherence, but that they became increasingly delicate, dependent not just upon the width of the shadow cast by a wrist or forefinger, but on the number of cars paused at a stop-light or the shapes of each puddle on the street.

"They're searching for some crucial detail, the critical point about which chance revolves. There are times I can't deceive them any longer, and nod at the trench-coats and the raincoats they've shed at the door. For had they come in unwittingly, without abandoning one set of answers as they entered, maybe it would be easier for them to realise the secrets of chance itself, and to understand that the two of them are the same. The instant they set the latch behind them each evening to come here, the answer they're seeking is illuminated in the fanlights of the door, where their families and futures have already been formed. Why do we have to search elsewhere for the things we've always known, when what we're searching for, without realising, is simply to accept who we are?

I'm a gambler too, then, even if I'm just the one who deals the cards. And in time, maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months, I'll have worked myself into that same narrow place, and need to escape. But perhaps I'll succeed where they must fail, because I choose to wait for chance to come to me, because it can't be forced, because anything we seize can never be truly ours, since we only have it because we took it. History records a different upper room, filled with disciples of a different cause who also demanded the impossible - to be made to believe the very thing that stood before them."

The man had begun to reappear more often, sometimes when I was driving, sometimes in my dreams. I had started to speculate about that narrow place and his need to escape, to try to understand what it was that had failed when he abandoned the lethargy of his quiet summer country town, and which Puerto Alcan seemed unable to fulfil. Aware that I could only watch so much blackjack, he had closed the door to the casino and instead waited for me in other parts of the city. Always the same, I now found him standing or else walking, as though without any real desire to reach his destination, looking up suddenly with a strange expression of credulity and hopelessness. I met his gaze, realising that he envied me precisely my capacity to encompass him, and to carry the scrubland, the thin dirty flats along the harbourfront, a notch of sky and an arrow of sun, along with his empty face, awaiting things to fill it, all together without further discrimination. In a strange way this fraction of a presence was united, in my mind, with books on my desk that I had never opened, at first because I had chosen not to, and later, powerlessly, because I understood that the initiative of opening them had been lost to me. Having grown conscious of their apparent part in my destiny, whatever I chose to do, I suddenly realised, had been already determined and would not avail me.

For weeks, something had been tightening in the air - something blind but inexorable, like the lurid insignia of a butterfly's wings or the stripes of a venomous snake, something vivid and wild but that, for all its show, remained basically inscrutable. The first troubled witness, perhaps, had already been made by a succession of tourists who lolled at the peripheries of my vision - men with complacent movements, whose faces grew from the eyelids rather than the eyes, slow, unworried by obscurity, sure in the knowledge that they could satisfy a woman. Glimpsed from my window in the evenings after work, their upturned faces radiated an insolent and haunting indifference which threatened to shatter my life completely precisely because it was incapable of discriminating it. I knew that St. Kim and the nameless man meant nothing to them, and it became a constant effort of will to sustain their existence in my mind. Believing in them without believing, I walked in the meadows outside my apartment in order to recreate my need for them out of broken branches, grafittied walls, dirty gutters and flowers crushed underfoot. It seemed that the nameless man understood something of this, when, momentarily reclaiming him from a crooked avenue topped by whalebones, he made fresh light of his need to escape, linking our degree of self-acceptance, and thus our ultimate reality, to the way others see or fail to perceive us.

"Not to know," - he pronounced it with half-hearted humour, insistent but detached. Again, "to keep the secret of ourselves, to exist only in the places we remain unknown." Thus it seemed, carried beyond the limits of the day - a metaphor for the loss of self-identity - he felt himself compelled to move through mystery, flaring into life only in those moments when he felt himself to be newly discovered. But the world would not accept first appearances, changing him as it strove to encompass him, like the gamblers in the upper room as they fruitlessly pursued the spectre of chance that in their inmost being they already possessed. Thus, from one place to another, relentlessly, he must always have moved on before the last secret could be settled, rejecting the acceptance he never sought, incapable of admitting that his birth was actually possible, that the world would remain unaltered by his addition to it. His gaze, his clothes, his gait - all these were destined to remain so many things beheld from without, as he himself was compelled to live in the anonymity of non-acquantainceship, a prism through which the untroubled histories of the outer world were refracted and embellished. But it was not that he wanted to hide; on the contrary, he wanted to reveal everything, to settle the facts of his existence with the finality of closing a dead man's eyes; the problem was that in doing so he wanted to go beyond those facts, to be absolved of his failings and to attain an objective experience which would make all appearances irrelevant. He lived for the possibility of clairvoyance, a combination of absolute perception and reflection through which nothing further could be taken from him, so that he became merely the multifaceted jewel of an indeterminate presence, the pale and perhaps vaguely nostalgic luminosity of an inerrable truth.

Seeming to overhear my thoughts, he added: "It's true, I'm like her - a place where the world can come up against itself. And if she and I were to meet, how much might that say for identity? Maybe my own feet wear dancing shoes; maybe it's the railings outside my door where they left the bunch of flowers I sent to myself?"

It was a few days before I was again able to see the church clearly. Nothing had changed in my vision of it, but it was as if the city itself were beginning to subsume it, and I felt myself growing fearful that in its place I would only find a hundred other stories that patiently awaited an ending. Hitherto I had held them at bay with the justification that they were necessarily interconnected, and therefore that it was impossible to recount them together. But slowly I was losing my faith in the integrity of that separation, increasingly having to distance myself in order to prevent them from going their own ways and exhausting themselves in blind alleys that for a dozen reasons must intercede between them and their subjects. At the same time the city was changing more directly, as the late summer now began to assert itself in earnest, and I found ever increasing numbers of tourists wandering in the back streets and the lanes behind the shops. It was not their strangeness - which might have been compelling - but their lack of vision that drained my mind of hope, since they brought with them a conception of the city which left nothing to chance, forcing each detail to conform to its guide-book particulars. Selflessly they were recreating the city as it had always been, or most probably as it had never been, experienced in a moment of dizzy involvement that relegated the cafes, the decaying wharves, the ivy and the concrete to a scheme of dates and prices, interspersed by hackneyed anecdotes and the odd literary quotation. Simultaneously the city rose up to embrace its caricature, too humble to admit the overpowering uncertainties that concerned its origins. Like St. Kim, it accepted the proferred bouquet not because of any affection for its admirer, but because that admirer promised thereby to make sense of it to itself.

But for now I had the dusty room with plaster columns and a balcony that faces east from the small church on St. George. There was the sound of metal and water - something going through a collander, the percolator, cutlery, then the faint patter of shoeless feet, and she moved in an instant from the kitchen to her door, then back again across the red carpet of a dim room lined with books.

"It's true!" she pronounced emphatically, before overtaking her own determination with a snort of laughter. And "Would I lie to you?" Then, "Ah, but I know ..."

The broken discourse hovered about some indeterminate companion, who in turn laughed, affirmed, disclaimed. What I was experiencing was the immediacy of her present and the fact that it included nothing beyond necessity. The anecdote had to do with a small dog whose existence was so transient it might never have been born. Pulled briskly by the lead, it reenacted its headlong flight from the small tin soldier who stamped with a whirring key, a moment later settling on the sofa among the same sequinned pouffes and cushions which, finding her arms empty, she now takes up herself as she waits for the trailers to finish.

She has rattled the venetian blinds to a close, flushed the toilet and, for no discernible reason, paused to look at her reflection in a glass on the table. At last she kneels down alone in the darkness, having set the latch to her little room, removes the waistcoat and unbuttons her blouse, as though it were important to her for the words that follow to stream forth from her nakedness, both physical and spiritual. In praying now, she allows the world to acknowledge the natural pallidness and vulnerability of a body that she has taken no pains - through lotions, or sun, or lingerie - to improve upon. Baring fragile breasts of an imprecise pastel hue, she first clasps her hands, and then secures them beneath her knees, in order that the head can bow and the lips begin to move soundlessly, no more seeking out an audience than striving to confirm their speaker.

The general exposition is completed; thanksgiving has receeded into the darkness. And her soul has become naked, not as a flame or an aspect of truth, but because of an instinctive solidarity with all those who set themselves aside to pray and contemplate. The night has settled about an enigma which does not have the power, even in its humility, to disclose herself; it has settled about an inscrutable reality, the soft breathing of a daily life now closed by placatory rituals of assent and opened up to receive the dreams that must follow - a face not marked by regret, and limbs which move in their sleep without irritation, without foreboding, in accordance to the whims of transitory demons, lacking all anticipation of individual tomorrows, or more than a rosy, gilt and strangely unconsidered vision of the ultimate hereafter.

The man waited as long as he was able, maybe even longer than that; time had no more meaning for those who had gone beyond the limits of the day than it had for Lazarus, and he would have been content to wait a lifetime before I turned back to address him. But other things were moving in the world, some against my will, some impelled by it, and many which it was impossible to say for sure. Over the years I had gradually lost focus; and just as many of the things that came into being as a result of my intention dropped dead the instant they were written, as if I could never really have envisaged them, so many of the things I wrote only revealed their intention later as things the future had predicated. This seemed to make it impossible to contain within a story the things which could only come into being as a result of that story, and I soon realised that my project was not art or even really philosophy, but the psychology of faith.

I too waited many years for that meeting, believing it was simply verbality that eluded me. Nevertheless it came as something of a revelation when I suddenly realised that the meeting would never occur, that the man at last would quietly lock the door to the casino and vanish forever into the night, that it was part of Kim's destiny that after a few weeks she would have forgotten that bunch of flowers and the invitation that accompanied them. They could not meet; for all their spiritual emptiness they were already complete in themselves, and they existed to show me the futility of trying to contain a meaning by force. This was not the conclusion I wanted, and those years of labour had been unproductive precisely because I had repeatedly denied it, wondering why it was that every meeting I sketched could never fulfil me, losing faith by turns in what was fictional and what historical. Ultimately it was a question of humility, and I had either to accept that I would write nothing, or else I would allow the words to write themselves through me, transgressing against character, against plot, against all the acceptable mechanisms of writing and the divisions of genre. I would show my own face because I had to, finding that those I wrote about did not judge me and that I could even learn from them. I write now because there are images I can't exhaust, and I cannot live without trying to fathom them.

As for the man - he offered me this by way of leavetaking: "Don't you think it might not be any imagined suitor that she feels compelled to reject, but you?"

"It was because she rejected me that I am here," I said, as surprised by the direct address as by the veracity of my answer: "But, then again, really it was I who rejected her. I wanted her not as she was but as she could be, on my own terms. I tore up the letters she sent so that there could be no way of finding her again, in the hope that my imagination would fill the space left by the future I had thereby annuled. That's why, in my dreams, I still see a woman standing on the verandah of a small house in the desert, holding a bundle of letters and tearing them to pieces. She watches the slight wind gather up the scraps and whisk them away, and she smiles a little sadly as she does so. You see, what's in those letters was important, and maybe they might have revealed something, had she left them intact, which would one day change her life. But she chooses instead to liberate them and allow the scraps to flutter away as possibilities she offers to the wider world. Somewhere, she's thinking, here or there a man or woman will pick up one of those fragments and intuit a part of the reason she could not keep them to herself. Somewhere, someone will understand that their power is precisely the message that blows about, unbidden, among the dusty paths, the foothills, the ruined watercourse with its collection of abandoned cars caked in sand. They'll understand why she chooses to live alone, miles from anywhere, and why she puts on her best perfume every day."

Time passes, and I grow bored with Puerto Alcan, losing all faith in encompassing the idea which continues to live and change beyond it. I watch St. Kim grow older, patiently awaiting the inutile destiny for which she will never be prepared, her feet softly crossing continents on errands of misplaced love, a few dog-eared Bibles in hand. Somewhere, now and again, she will be followed by this or that nameless man who will seek through her to turn love into life, action into history. But he will only find the city in her, a labyrinth in which he will lose his way. I watch her take breath on the summits of hills, greener and bluer realities than Puerto Alcan roaring in the mist beneath her; somewhere I can see her clothes tangled in the cloudy smoke of mud-walled villages, her shadow vibrant in the sunlight as it moves swiftly across sand-blanched stone. And beyond it all, like the hundred clocks upon the four quarters of the city, I hear a general hearkening for the day her hands will part their fetters, and her feet stretch out to ring upon unbroken ground.