Two men stand in a passage with a ball between them. One believes they’re there to play catch. The other thinks the object is to throw the ball as hard as he can at the places in the passage that his opponent can’t cover, and in this way get the ball past him. Imagine the frustration of the man who means to play catch!

When out of the blue the child asked what the difference was between homicide and suicide, she cried, “You're spilling!”— and that he please hold his cup upright. When he asked if suicide were more common than homicide — or if homicide was more common between the two — she said, “You're getting all wet! — please hold your cup upright, or if the next time you're thirsty how about I don't feed you?”

Five years ago — or maybe ten — I clipped an article containing a quote that has haunted and inspired me ever since, and tacked it to my wall. Describing the success of diplomats from nearly ninety nations to convene in Oslo, Norway, and agree on the wording of a treaty banning the use of antipersonnel landmines, a delegate from France called it “one of the rare moments in international life where the reasons of state encounter the sentiment of peoples.”

Whether I read those words five years ago or closer to ten hardly matters. What matters to me right now is that not long after finding the story I went to bed and dreamed about a beach. I remember this beach vividly. The sun was low in the sky. The water was rough and reddish and oily looking. According to the rules of my dream, I knew that I was standing on a beach that on a clear day I could see from my bedroom window, on the second story of the house where I was born. Most importantly, I couldn’t take a step in any direction without landing on what looked like an upright helmet, an infantryman’s helmet, olive drab, buried halfway to the crown in the sand. Without even a clue as to what they really look like, I immediately understood that in the world of my dream these helmets were antipersonnel landmines. I was stuck there. I couldn’t move without being killed or maimed. The United States stayed away from the conference in Oslo on the grounds that landmines were an essential aspect of the overall security of US troops stationed along the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. The Landmine Ban Treaty is nevertheless one of the few treaties actually being enforced in the world today.

I’m thinking about those “…rare moments in international life where the reasons of state encounter the sentiment of peoples” for two very different reasons. The first is that diplomats and activists are, at this time early in the new century, gathering in Zagreb, Croatia, to discuss the ongoing international campaign to ban antipersonnel landmines and to help landmine survivors. My second reason for revisiting this issue is that — miraculously and years after the fact — I am at this very moment staring at a photograph of the beach I visited in my dream. Every detail is at least outwardly the same. The sun is low in the sky. The water is rough. And yes, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of green helmets embedded in the sand. Of course, they’re not really helmets at all, but carapaces, and this beach is nowhere near my home. The caption underneath the photograph reads: MEXICO’S OLIVE RIDLEY SEA TURTLE MAKES A COMEBACK. Citing increased protection from poachers, the environmental protection agency in Mexico known by its acronym PROFEPA reports that sea turtles, though still endangered, are spawning in record numbers along the Pacific Coast.

I wonder if you can easily picture these animals. They’re small for sea turtles, maybe a foot or two long, with heart-shaped carapaces and flippers for feet. Their olive green bodies are streamlined. I picture them gliding effortlessly over some sandy seafloor, their shadows slipping along after them. Returning to the beach where she was born — her natal beach — a gravid female waddles ashore, clearing an area in the sand with her front flippers and digging a nest with her rear flippers. She isn’t alone. Hundreds if not thousands of Olive Ridley sea turtles have come ashore, forming an arribada, the Spanish word for arrival and also a mass nesting of turtles. While in decline throughout the world, they come ashore at Gahirmatha Orissa, the last arribada beach in India. They come ashore at Playa Nacite and Ostionales in Costa Rica. They arrive at La Escobilla, Oaxaca, and at beaches in such countries as Surinam. They dig their nests, deposit their eggs, and return to the sea in the same amount of time that the moon takes to transit through its phases.

I want to see one of these huge nests for myself, just as I want to witness the extinction of antipersonnel landmines. Who are the people — their names, their dreams for themselves and others — gathering in places like Zagreb, and Oslo, in Norway? Do the great nations who are not onboard with such a treaty stand in the way of their effort, or do they merely look the other way like individuals with conflicted emotions? How does word come down that a new field has been Okayed for clean up? Who are the people who go into the fields and the woods and, in the name of those who have been or may be blown to pieces, defuse or detonate the forgotten explosives? I have a hard time imagining how one goes about ridding an area, a beach, a field, woodland, of bombs. They must detonate them, but how? Maybe they shoot them from a distance. They mark them somehow — with a flag or by chalking a circle around them—and then they shoot them. Or maybe they cover them with a metal or a stone bell, a bell with a plunger running through the crown that acts like the leg of a wanderer. Finally I wonder who the flesh-and-bone wanderers are—their names, their desires—who stray into mined areas, climbing a hill, for instance, unknowingly.

I’m thinking about those “…rare moments in international life where the reasons of state encounter the sentiment of peoples” for two very different reasons. The first is that diplomats and activists are, at this time early in the new century, gathering in Zagreb, Croatia, to discuss the ongoing international campaign to ban antipersonnel landmines and to help landmine survivors. My second reason for revisiting this issue is that — miraculously and years after the fact — I am at this very moment staring at a photograph of the beach I visited in my dream. Every detail is at least outwardly the same. The sun is low in the sky. The water is rough. And yes, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of green helmets embedded in the sand. Of course, they’re not really helmets at all, but carapaces, and this beach is nowhere near my home. The caption underneath the photograph reads: MEXICO’S OLIVE RIDLEY SEA TURTLE MAKES A COMEBACK. Citing increased protection from poachers, the environmental protection agency in Mexico known by its acronym PROFEPA reports that sea turtles, though still endangered, are spawning in record numbers along the Pacific Coast.

I wonder if you can easily picture these animals. They’re small for sea turtles, maybe a foot or two long, with heart-shaped carapaces and flippers for feet. Their olive green bodies are streamlined. I picture them gliding effortlessly over some sandy seafloor, their shadows slipping along after them. Returning to the beach where she was born — her natal beach — a gravid female waddles ashore, clearing an area in the sand with her front flippers and digging a nest with her rear flippers. She isn’t alone. Hundreds if not thousands of Olive Ridley sea turtles have come ashore, forming an arribada, the Spanish word for arrival and also a mass nesting of turtles. While in decline throughout the world, they come ashore at Gahirmatha Orissa, the last arribada beach in India. They come ashore at Playa Nacite and Ostionales in Costa Rica. They arrive at La Escobilla, Oaxaca, and at beaches in such countries as Surinam. They dig their nests, deposit their eggs, and return to the sea in the same amount of time that the moon takes to transit through its phases.

I want to see one of these huge nests for myself, just as I want to witness the extinction of antipersonnel landmines. Who are the people — their names, their dreams for themselves and others—gathering in places like Zagreb, and Oslo, in Norway? Do the great nations who are not onboard with such a treaty stand in the way of their effort, or do they merely look the other way like individuals with conflicted emotions? How does word come down that a new field has been Okayed for clean up? Who are the people who go into the fields and the woods and, in the name of those who have been or may be blown to pieces, defuse or detonate the forgotten explosives? I have a hard time imagining how one goes about ridding an area, a beach, a field, woodland, of bombs. They must detonate them, but how? Maybe they shoot them from a distance. They mark them somehow — with a flag or by chalking a circle around them — and then they shoot them. Or maybe they cover them with a metal or a stone bell, a bell with a plunger running through the crown that acts like the leg of a wanderer. Finally I wonder who the flesh-and-bone wanderers are—their names, their desires—who stray into mined areas, climbing a hill, for instance, unknowingly.

Once we were back on dry ground to cheer her up I told her I had saved up enough money to buy her a present. “Well let's go buy it then,” she said, and combed the salt out of her hair. “No need,” I said. I had taken the liberty of picking something out myself and was even having it delivered to her house. Delivery was actually included in the price.

When she asked me what it was, I said, “If I told you it'd hardly be a surprise, now would it?” When she asked me if she could have three guesses, I told her that she could have as many guesses as she wanted, but that she would never guess, not in a thousand years.

“It must be a high definition TV,” she said next. “Is it not a high definition TV?”

“Let's not play the guessing game,” I answered, and went up from the shore without her, wondering how in the world she ever guessed and, in the moment that she did, whether or not I had kept a straight face.

On opening day a girl much too young to be smoking tossed her half-smoked cigarette into a trashcan and entered the building. Once inside, she took the elevator to the top floor, where everybody was waiting. When the elevator doors finally opened, she went straight for the stairwell and, running back down to where she came from, found both the trashcan ablaze and the crowd she had always imagined.

When her daughter stumbled on the steps, she felt just awful. What mother can bear to see her child fall? She herself had fallen lately and though, at her age, it could have been much worse, it still made her feel like a fool. She had even told her daughter as much. "Sometimes when I fall I feel like a fool," she had said. Watching her daughter now pick herself up off the steps to continue climbing, she remembered her daughter's response: "You're a fool for thinking you're a fool. We all fall from time to time. I'm just afraid that you'll fall when I'm not here to help you. If you do fall, please don't feel foolish, Mom. Your feeling foolish makes it much more terrifying."

I don't know why I didn't come to the city oftener. It's funny how you want to do a thing but never do it. Once when I was young one of those boys' clubs took a bunch of us to The Museum of Natural History to learn about organisms. They took us to the city in buses. When we finally got to where we were going we walked round and around looking for the museum entrance, only to find ourselves caught up in the middle of a huge demonstration. I remember climbing to the top of a lamppost to get out of the way of everybody. There were more people in the street than I can ever remember seeing in one place together. They came out of nowhere. They blew their horns and waved their brightly worded banners. They chanted in unison. By the time I got to the top I was screaming and chanting with them. I shook my fist. The skyscrapers and helicopters up above were dizzying.

The other day my brother made one of his nonsensical leaps to why I haven't been back—because, he said, the best I'd ever be was a sympathizer. Where does that come from? He was older than me and called himself a partisan. He said that to think up a plan and never act on it was like a thought you never had. Come again? He said that I could see far enough but would never, quote, fix on a position and take action. How do you get there from my day in the city? I was, quote, moving through in lieu of gathering. To each his own, I say, especially if he wants to talk in code. But it made me kind of mad for some reason, what he said, in a way that I wanted to break his nose, maybe because that—he'd figure it this way—was a thought I'd never have.

At the age of forty, he met a woman and at long last began to feel himself falling in love. In the past, his fear that a prospective lover would spurn him for his flaws and the secrets he was keeping always started off small and grew into his own conclusion that they were all wrong for each other.

Learning now that the woman who had so completely captivated him was a bird lover, he remembered a moment from his childhood when, walking through the shady mission, a blackbird swooped down from some perch somewhere and, flapping in his ears, pecked and squawked, chasing him all the way to safety. When he described a bird with yellow eyes, a purple head, and greenish wings and body to his mother—herself a bird lover—she told him that the Brewer’s blackbird was sometimes extremely territorial.

As a day didn’t pass when he didn’t think about his mother, he today wondered if maybe she would have accepted this new girl, if only for their mutual love of the bird kingdom. Though he missed her badly, he was also glad that she wasn’t around to tell his lover of the terror her boy felt when even the most majestic of fliers passed over. She had never had the best timing, and always managed to say the kinds of things that ruined his chances of ever finding somebody.

Raise your right hand like you are making a pledge and face the audience. Both your hand and your face are open. Stare blankly. Turn the hand until your palm is facing away from the audience. Your hand is an open face, someone separate from you but attached, the term Janus-faced coming back to you from mythology.

Pass your hand in front of your face, smiling so that a new expression emerges. You are happy.

Pass the hand back over the face, changing your expression to fright. Hold it.

Pass the hand again, this time showing despair. Next, compassion. Next, boredom. Work with anxiety, degrees of joy, lethargy and, yes, jealousy.

When you wear the face try to feel the emotion. I for instance feel vulnerable right now—achingly so—though I have wiped away the face of jealousy, though I have been trying on different faces all afternoon. I feel small and ugly. I feel passed over. I feel like a stone at the bottom of a river. I pass my hand over my face again and again, ending as I started.

The other day my brother made one of his nonsensical leaps to why I haven't been back—because, he said, the best I'd ever be was a sympathizer. Where does that come from? He was older than me and called himself a partisan. He said that to think up a plan and never act on it was like a thought you never had. Come again? He said that I could see far enough but would never, quote, fix on a position and take action. How do you get there from my day in the city? I was, quote, moving through in lieu of gathering. To each his own, I say, especially if he wants to talk in code. But it made me kind of mad for some reason, what he said, in a way that I wanted to break his nose, maybe because that—he'd figure it this way—was a thought I'd never have.

Having committed herself to writing the story of the murder of her neighbors, the writer needed to account for a man who, though himself not the murderer, was theoretically complicit in their undoing, and on his way over. In interviewing him for this fiction, I want her to abdicate the very knowledge that makes her our author. She’s going to have to stop pacing. She’s going to have to stop her sobbing. She’s going to have to play it cool, beginning right now by not jumping out of her skin every time headlights sweep the window.

It would happen several times that evening before he realized that the mysterious sound occasionally nudging him awake was the ice in the glass on his nightstand shifting as it melted. In the meantime—in the moonlight with the water slowly collecting—he closed his eyes and, getting this beautiful kind of curve, took up inventing again.

Today isn’t the day. Trust me. I’ve made many plans. Please don’t stop me. Think of the people around us. Yes, you can have my head today. But if you wait until tomorrow, you can have it then and also keep your own head about you. Take your hands out of your pockets. Walk away. Walk away.

Do you really think they're brave?
I myself find them kind of clever.

I believe they're using their size
their talk
the fact that I'm a stranger
in these parts

to intimidate me
and put themselves
in the best possible light.

No one here is going to know me.

When it came to him, he passed.
He forfeited his turn.

When it came to him, he passed,
only to grow more and more furious
because no one else was forfeiting his turn
and he had missed his chance.

See him there.
I found him for a friend.

We dress the same
we talk the same

and we both like to dance
to the same kind of music.

If I could shrink him
I’d put him on my shoulder.

If I could shrink him
I’d shrink us both

so we could both go every place
together unnoticed.

I can't go where you go
even with you my guide

but lift the garden window quiet
we'll spend the afternoon inside

if this new place doesn't suit you
we'll sit another time

Mistaken for a marksman
she claimed the rank of first fine shot.
So tote an empty weapon
and a cloth of rocks
far beyond the broad ephemeral border.

The blue green bullet behind the forehead
personalizes known landscapes.