*

The sun was low above the snow, and through the dim light the man saw movement. He plotted it from left to right, walking a circle around it. He watched it shrink into a dot when it withdrew into the background, and when it moved into the foreground, grow, into a woman. Hey! he shouted, Where are you going? The shape that was the woman slowed, changed direction, and started moving through the snow toward him. She wore so many layers of clothing, she seemed to be round, rolling. When she came to a stop she pulled a long pink scarf from around her neck, and asked him, What? He watched the snowflakes settling on her nose, melting. Where are you going? the man repeated. The woman pointed back the way she came and said, In. She turned around and started walking, adding over her shoulder, I'm getting out of the snow. He watched her shrink until she disappeared, rewinding the long pink scarf back around herself like a slow pink tornado.

*

The man had a nightmare it was Christmas Eve and he was supposed to be the fourth Wiseman, but he couldn't find the star that signaled birthplace of Christ. Through a rudimentary telescope, he scanned small sections of the sky, stopping on stars he thought had potential. That one's pretty bright, he thought. Then, No, not quite bright enough.

*

The woman was cold, so she put on a coat, but then she was still cold. So she put on two coats, three coats, four coats—more coats than she had ever put on—but she was still cold. The man was walking through the snow toward her, and he had only one coat on. When he reached her, and he saw how cold she was, even with four coats on, he took his off and offered it to her. But since she had so many on already, she couldn't get it on without his help. She raised her arms, and he stepped around behind her, pulling the fifth down over the fourth. She turned around and grinned, already feeling warmer. She thought she might kiss him, but because the coats restricted her movement, she couldn't. The man began to laugh, which made the woman frown, which made the man laugh harder. He had doubled over, and in the cold without a coat, his body turned blue as it shook. Like a flame, the woman thought. Then she felt colder.

*

God I'm so afraid of China, the woman said, tromping through the kitchen. She hadn't taken off her boots, and so the man was watching all the snow she'd tracked in melt all over the linoleum, forming little pools of gray water. She opened the refrigerator, removed the bread, and put two slices in the toaster. Fucking China, she said, jumping up onto the counter. Haven't you seen them marching in unison? He listened as she rattled off a list of signs of China's rising global power, until the toaster timer dinged, ejecting the toast. She grabbed a piece and began munching. Little toast crumbs fell from her lips, bouncing down the front of her coat, and off her pants, sprinkling to the floor where they were absorbed into the pool of gray water growing underneath her boots. Did you know that 80% of the world is Chinese now? she asked, taking a giant bite of toast. What am I supposed to do about that? Tears were shaking in her eyes. The man reached out and gingerly lifted her chin with his finger. A drop slipped down her cheek. My own mother is Chinese, she cried.

*

The man was worried. He knew that if he went out with his friends, his friends would love him, and that would feel good, but soon he would remember that he would rather be in, quietly doing nothing, and that good feeling would fade away. On the other hand, if he stayed in, submitting fully to his own desires—never answering the phone, emailing people back only intermittently, sometimes after months had passed, sometimes not at all—then his friends would feel betrayed, and that would put the man in agony. But he also knew that agony would also fade away, as he realized he did not need, nor even want, the love of his friends—a realization that would put the man in even greater agony, but it would be a different agony. A different, greater agony that would free him from the original agony.

*

The woman's scarf was dirty. It was supposed to be pink, but parts of it were gray. Then, on her birthday, she got a package from her mother, vacationing in Italy at the time. Opening the package, the woman withdrew a bright, new, teal, cashmere, Italian scarf. When this happened, the man was standing behind her, watching. Upon seeing the bright new scarf, the man pretended to be impressed, although in truth he much preferred the old one. One day months later, when the weather had turned suddenly cold, the woman walked into the man's house. She kicked off her boots, threw off her hat and gloves, and then unfurled, not the new, teal, cashmere, Italian scarf, but the old pink gray one. The man was standing in the kitchen. Where's the new scarf? he asked. She smiled and sauntered through the room toward him, swinging her hips and pulling the old pink scarf between her legs like a stripper. I think I like the old one better, she said, tossing the scarf around his neck, pulling him close, and kissing him. He liked how she tasted. Like snow, he thought, as their bodies pressed together. But by this time the man had grown used to the new, teal, cashmere, Italian scarf, and so when he told her he also preferred the old one, he was pretending that too.

*

Dog Cull in China, the man read the headline aloud. The woman looked up from her oatmeal. Rabies kills three, one a girl of four. He scanned the article further then continued. Mouding County officials kill fifty thousand dogs over a period of five days, sparing only police and military dogs. Dogs being walked are taken from their owners and clubbed on the spot. After nightfall teams enter the towns, creating noise to make the dogs bark. Then the teams hone in on the sounds and beat the dogs to death. Before the teams go in, owners are offered sixty-three cents per animal to kill their own. With the aim of keeping the disease from people, we kill the dogs, say spokesmen. Outside it was snowing.

*

The woman couldn't sleep, so the man hummed her a lullaby. He stared intently at the back of her head while he hummed, imagining her eyes on the other side, staring intently at nothing. When the lullaby was finished the woman asked, Do you know who wrote that? The man did not even try to think of an answer. After a moment of silence had passed between them, the woman rolled over and got in his face. Brahms, she said.

*

Everyone who is smart disagrees with you, the woman said. The man was hurt by this because he knew she was right. When he thought about it, the number of smart people in disagreement with him was staggering. As she continued to rattle off flaws in his reasoning, the man's mind wandered. If disagreeing with me were a movie, the line for tickets would stretch out of the theater into the parking lot, cross the street, twist through all the buildings downtown, enter the mall, snake up and down the escalators, clog the carousel, pass through live fountains, eventually exiting the mall through one of those big department store entrances, pushing deeper into the suburbs, blocking intersections, halting traffic, trampling lawns, barging in homes, ruining carpets, overturning coffee tables, stepping on roller skates, out the back door, bursting through porch screens, spoiling gardens, disrupting barbecues, knocking pool furniture into the pool, jumping off the diving board, clearing the fence, hitting the ground running, invading the country, flattening crops, entering the forest that borders the fields, weaving through trees, startling wildlife, macheteing undergrowth, tripping on roots, chased by bees, eventually emerging out into open desert, scrambling up the sun-beaten side of one dune only to tumble back down the cooler, shadowy side, over and over, until the sand gives way to water, where underneath a melancholy sky awhirl with gulls all cawing insanely, perhaps the smartest people in the world would be, flanked by gnashing gray waves, standing ankle-deep in the cold, bitter sea. Then the man smiled, imagining all the people in that line happy to be there, excited to see the movie, clapping each other on the back, and laughing.

*

In the other room, the woman was on the phone with her mother, but there wasn't any sound coming out of the room.

*

The woman dreamt the man was teaching English at a Chinese university. But she was trapped beneath the university, in a network of sewers, corridors, and abandoned classrooms. Did this used to be the old university? It didn't matter. Water dripped from unseen sources in the darkness, splashing her from odd angles, and everywhere she turned the malodorous tinge of moldy chalk and wet erasers assaulted her nostrils. Her eyes burned. On the walls electric signs flickered, some with bright, upward-curling arrows, seeming to indicate routes to the surface, but the woman wasn't sure. The characters marking the arrows were all Chinese, a language she had not learned. She followed them anyway, climbing ladders, crawling through cramped tunnels, feeling her way through the damp, unlit sections, never knowing where anything led. She only knew that somewhere up above her, the man was in front of a classroom full of disciplined Chinese youth. He'd just asked them a difficult question, and every single hand in the room was raised.

*

In regard to her daily routine, the woman hemmed and hawed before she made even the tiniest decision—what clothes to wear, which movies to see, which friends to avoid, what time to set the alarm for—but she was the model of decisiveness when it came to larger issues—which cause to favor, which candidate to vote for, whether or not the end was near, the truth about the war—and it was on these larger issues that she urged the man to Grow a pair, and take action. But the man remained ambivalent about any major political or ethical question. For every problem, he saw only sides, angles, and possible positions—each of which seemed to have equal merit to him—at least that's what he claimed. But when it came to the minor, insignificant decisions making up his daily life, the man was machinelike. He didn't waste a single second dallying over when to wake up, what clothes to wear, what to eat, which movie to see, where to park. And when the woman dragged her feet before each and every one of these tiny decisions, the man pretended not to mind, but secretly, every moment wasted by her hesitation felt to him like an invaluable piece of time, lost to both of them forever.

*

The man dreamt the woman was walking the beach, alternately looking down at her toes, which shined like jewels obscured by the surf, and looking up at the stars, which seemed to him, through her, to be twinkling much brighter than before. Or, was it to her, through him? And before what? He wasn't sure. Maybe this was a nightmare, but there in the surf, those toes were definitely hers.

*

The woman loved to drive, but didn't have a car, so the man was letting her drive his. She giggled indulgently as she latched the safety belt, adjusted the mirrors, and put the car in gear. He viewed her skeptically from the passenger seat. Other than her tendency when turning to confuse the signals, activating the left and right blinkers quickly in succession, unsure of which to use, she was a good driver. The man let her know this. You're a good driver, he said, out of the blue, staring out the passenger window. It was the first day of Spring, and even though it was only forty degrees out, and the sky was only partly cloudy, and the sun was lighting everything up, it was snowing. The snow was very light, but the flakes were large. They were long and uneven. They were oblong.

*

The woman remembered the night of the blizzard. She and the man had gone to the store for ice cream, and with so few other cars on the road the man was bragging about how great of a driver he was, and how good it was that all the other drivers had stayed at home that night, merely playing video games of driving, watching movies and reading books about driving, leaving the real driving to drivers like him. Instead of laughing, the woman was watching the snow, plummeting out of the dark, heavy and thick. She remembered how the man would gun the engine a little when turning, and the car would make a wide arc, tail first, into the oncoming lane, and she would tense up. Relax, the man would say, reacquiring control of the slide. But just before they got to the store, they reached a medium-sized hill, and climbing it the man had lost control of the car a few times, and he had not laughed. Because of the ice on the incline, the car kept losing speed and traction, but every time he gave it more gas, they slid perpendicularly into the opposite lane, making it unsafe to accelerate. The car eventually stopped, halfway up the hill, in the middle of the road.

*

The woman dreamt she was a Chinese soldieress, standing at attention, cradling a helmet in her elbow. The helmet is heavy, made of ancient silver, and is upside down, like a mixing bowl of tarnish and shadow. Her hair falls down around her shoulders like black straw. Her leather armor crawls with sequences of hand-painted slashes, like an insect-covered scroll, or someone giving a polygraph to history. The leather is brown. A pile of oranges shines at her feet. Above her head the sky is long and red, like a pulled-down bottom eyelid. Behind her shoulders zigzag the ranges of China, green and black and severe, haloed in blue cloud. In front of her the brown ground rolls downward, out from her feet, which are bare, into a purple valley that villages pepper, and where farmhouses appear as if on fire, suddenly.

*

When the woman woke up, instead of where the man was supposed to be, there was smoke.

*

When the man woke up, he was riding a star over China, but down below, where China was supposed to be, was snow.

__

It was very snowy that winter.