Come a time after school he stops dreaming about the tower. Ecliptic dreams, wind dragging on metal, hands pulling on each other in the dark. Terrifying to wake from, near-in-tears clutching his sides in his childhood bed where above the headboard his mother's hand once hung three little phosphorescent birds. What was that all about? Just a memory of a long-ago storm.

They were always pruning and chopping trees in the old neighbourhood on the edge of the forest. One either remembered the smell of wood dust or crushed, wet leaves, the men in their red rubber boots squeezing them underfoot. As children they called it forest wine. Neighbours, couldn't have been more than six then, traipsing through the bent bars and tubes of the playground, kids who held tightly to their brothers' and sisters' hands and never quite looked him in the eye. He looked to the men and their hands by the neighbourhood's edge instead, wondering if they were the same ones he had seen hauling metal in the dream.

He kept a log of those visions. Dreams squeezing metal squeezing hands. He had a habit of finishing his homework early in the minutes after class, to a point where he'd finished whole classes, skipped years. He wrote incessantly, automatically. Teachers whispered to mother in the grey-green hall named after the kid with the bright eyes and the baseball card. Now there's him in the corner again with the dream-journal running through packs of blue plastic pens from the store. Must have been when he was fifteen he started noticing shapes, peaks, a massing of something in the text. Realised they pointed to equations in books, self-intersecting curves. They wanted him in the state mathematics programme, but he preferred nothing. Thoughts of radio waves passed through him, like a ghost.

To the doctors, mother instructed he say nothing. Can't let them know what they're doing is working. The laboratory pays us well enough to keep quiet. But you like it quiet, don't you? Past the point for bribes, he let her press a small mint square into his hand as a treat.

What was all that about, then, on the morning the fog cleared? He had been listless for a while, too young to leave town. He busied himself sorting groceries for the community centre after mother had gone in for work. They would share five minutes noiselessly, her smoking in the car in the lot of the lab, parked under the shadow of the reddening maple. Elsewhere, kids were still in school. That day he looked down at his journal and was surprised to see nothing. It came to mind that the gloved men had finished and packed up the site with all their tools, the dull yellow wires and monitors with green lines that flickered like snakes. The wind was still, and he saw nothing but clear skies. No tower, then. He did not realise his hands had stopped shaking until well after the midday meal. Loving nobody, he had no name for the untension in his chest.

In that year, they fell the trees entirely. Uncanny shapes moved through the brightness of the street, the shadows of clouds cast across the now-unshielded hills. They were filling in the area with more semi-detacheds, white flat squares in thin rows like insects' wings on the developer's plan. Folks were leaving town by the dozens. Come a time he realised he no longer knew how to speak to the unwashed men and women at the bus station, or to the elderly clerk at the packing bay who had always helped him load the bags into the trunk with a gentle smile. Simply put, he had tried applying himself to the world but the world did not come to mind. Living so long in his notes that now the realm of forms seemed loud, insistent, distracting.

When there was the perchlorate leak at the lab, he knew he should have cried but had no inkling as to how. The peak of the tower was now described as a snow-white globe marked at six antipodal points with crosses, thin strings running underneath where the base met the black pylon, tensegrity pulling it taut. He wrote nothing else, remembering little in the intervening years.

***

"And you talked to no one about this, these visions?"

"Not in detail, though I knew they saw me taking notes."

"Which would not be unusual in a midwestern college town, where an anomie often lurks that expresses itself via a certain fascination with the record. A common occurrence, too common to be coincidence. Though you don't seem like the type for speculation."

"I don't speculate. I move through the world in my old car. I like to think it's a physical kind of memory."

"Do you think it works?"

"I don't know."

"Tell me about the three phosphorescent birds hanging from the front mirror."

"A keepsake from the old house. There was more I had wanted to bring but was not able, and those three had always brought me some measure of comfort."

"Why do you not look me in the eyes?"

"Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm trying to be impolite. It's that whether I do look at people's faces, or whether I don't, it doesn't make a difference."

"We can help you. You know that, right?"

He did not have an answer to that one.

***

A conversation he had in the cloister of the campus. She had dark hair, like his mother. Like him, she had wanted to get out of the rain. Couldn't have known he had plied the same spot daily for the last six weeks, nursing the black styrofoam coffee cup cold. The live-wire hum of the signboard punctuated the television chatter; NASA had just launched another translunar probe. Not like that, he heard her say, loud enough that others jumped. It's not put together in that way at all.

Like him, she had been travelling. Her car had been rendered inoperable on the edge of the campus town; strange kindness had got her as far as the motel. She was older than him, with lithe hands, typists' hands. Said she worked on computers. Over the weeks both were received cautiously by the college and in good grace, and greeted each other across the green with uneasy, conspiratorial nods. She intuited the dreams, questioned once or twice about his childhood, but did not press further. Invariably, talk drifted to other people.

He learned there were others like them, massing around the state, pooling around its mid-to-good institutions of higher learning. No less than six, perhaps, transients, each with blank eyes. Each day came reports on the radio of new movements in the compounds of the heartlands, manifestos and leftovers, scriptures written in Sharpie on the back of tin signs. She shared with him cans of creamed tuna and dried sausage which she kept in a cooler in the back of her car. She cut slices from a small black knife which she hung from her lanyard embossed with a number of initials that he could not read, but of which he did not think to ask.

Found her once poring over clippings, a tattered manila folder containing them. Sightings of weather balloons going up around the edges of military bases had alarmed residents, who had also witnessed strange instruments and plumes of coloured smoke. She treated these reports not with alarm but with an air of gradual understanding. A searchlight crossed a fence line somewhere, throwing up long shadows of sweetgrass. You'll stay quiet, but of course, don't you see, the building never stopped. She punctuated that last phrase with a cutting motion of her right hand. Around them, the students flowed like water, paying them no heed.

The building never stopped, you understand. We were like them once. They've got us in every clinic and government compound laying out the guy wires, so we can see as far as space. Sight as far as mind. As she leaned closer he was able to make out the faded words running along the edge of her lanyard: National Prevention. But what was being prevented? These words opened up something deathly in him, and when he looked down, the scribble in his notebook had grown into an angry, black star. She said: We had built the monitor. We need you to come home.

So the signals in space had found their way to earth where young boys in their childhood beds dreamt fitfully of black-gloved hands. This was not the key to his dreams that he was searching for, nor was the dream the key to something that would happen in his future. Rather, this was the present, which was happening all of the time, that swoops down on us with open claws. For the first time, he had looked into another's eyes and she seemed like she was on the verge of communicating something too. So he packed his things and headed west, past the thymoleptic perimeter of the heart, and was never seen or heard again.