I'm looking at my photography project in the dark, by the light from the TV, and even in this dim light, even as I listen to triumphal administration officials, the uneasy awe from the announcers, the endless babble about the Red and the Blue, the casualties, the stock index, employment figures, Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving, I can see that I won't be able to fit these pictures together.

I'll have to cut more out, exclude more of the image.

Winston O Link perfected the railroads. He made the steam engine new, but I can't do it. My vision is fractured. All I have is a series of static images, disconnected parts, without synergy.

I sit on the ground, next to a wooden bench with a donor's name on a plaque, and I spill a handful of the glass beads on the weathered planks. I spread the baubles out. All of them are clear glass, all have a bubble in the center. I try to arrange them by size, but somebody sits on the bench next to my display. She just plops down, not even looking. I glance up at her; she's about my age, maybe twenty. She's wearing cat eyeglasses and has the kind of black hair that's obvious dyed.

She's kind of pretty. She's got a far away look in her eyes like she just got out of her parents' Winnebago, or like she's on Thorazine. I look at the shapeless but short dress she's wearing. It's gray and black with square patterns of stripes, and I can't decide whether or not it's a hospital gown.

I go back to arranging the beads on the bench but stop again when she reaches down and takes one. She holds the bead in her palm and stares, her eyes flashing back and forth on it, scanning. Then she pops the bead into her mouth. She doesn't say a word, but takes another bead, and another, and swallows them dry.

The UFOs in the sky over Portland look like hubcaps. Silver or chrome plated saucers, all of them roughly the same size and all of them spinning, hang miraculously in mid-air, but most people either don't see them or pretend that they don't see.

At first the saucers were news. The same shot of a silver disc hovering over the White House dominated every television broadcast. But, when nothing more happened, after administration officials appeared on the Sunday morning talk-shows and denied that there had necessarily been an alien invasion, after the President called for more study, the cameras were turned back towards earth. By the end of the second week the saucers were no longer a serious topic of conversation, and now, at the end of the third week, most people barely remember that they are up there at all.

"Are we going to talk about it?" Alex asks.

"I don't know. I'm out of booze again," Shelly says.