He’d been alone in the car that day, or he likely wouldn’t have noticed something amiss on the grassy embankment beside the interstate, would not have pulled over onto the shoulder in the first place. A bitch nursing a few pups, it turned out to be—a cur, a mutt—what was she doing there? His car on the shoulder, the dog and her wretched pups sprawled panting in the longish, blighted grass, and for some reason (and here was the gap, the stitch, the missing step in Moose’s personal history) for some reason, rather than get back inside his car and continue home, rather than haul dog and pups into the backseat and drop them off somewhere more hospitable, Moose had left his car parked beside the interstate (dangerously) and climbed the parched, grassy slope that hugged the overpass, climbed without knowing why, then sat immobilized looking down at the traffic, hypnotized by the flux and flow that had surrounded him only minutes before, a crush of humanity in whose midst he had subsisted blindly, un-reflexively until that moment. Hours passed, so many that when he looked again, the bitch and her pups had vanished. He lay on his back in the grass and let the sky push against his face. From somewhere came the whistle of a train. And Moose had understood that it was over: the trains, the factories—the world of objects was gone and imagery was ascendant, whirling over tiny filaments of connection he could actually hear amassing hungrily, invisibly beneath the soil. Wires that weren’t even wires. Information that lived on the very air.