The second encounter was longer and stranger. Museum of Modern Art. No matter how many times I go to the museum, walking east to west, it's always farther down the street than it was last time. I was wandering through an exhibition on Dada and there was Elster, alone, stooped over a display case. I knew he'd written about the meanings of baby talk and so he'd clearly be interested in a major show of objects created in the name of demolished logic. I followed him for half an hour. I looked at the things he looked at. At times he leaned on his cane, other times simply carried it, haphazardly, horizontally, through tides of people. I told myself be calm, be civilized, speak slowly. When he moved toward the exit I approached him, reminded him of the earlier meeting, talked some baby talk and then urged him gently across the sixth floor to the gallery where the slow-winged Psycho was installed. We stood in the dark and watched. I sensed nearly at once that Elster was resisting. Something was being subverted here, his traditional language of response. Stillborn images, collapsing time, an idea so open to theory and argument that it left him no clear context to dominate, just crisp rejection. Out on the street he spoke at last, mostly about his aching knee. No film, no chance, not ever.

A week later he telephoned and said he was in a place called Anza-Borrego, in California. I'd never heard of it. Then a hand-drawn map arrived in the mail, roads and jeep trails, and I caught a bargain flight the next afternoon. Two days, I thought. Three at most.

Every lost moment is the life. It's unknowable except to us, each of us inexpressibly, this man, that woman. Childhood is lost life reclaimed every second, he said. Two infants alone in a room, in dimmest light, twins, laughing. Thirty years later, one in Chicago, one in Hong Kong, they are the issue of that moment.

A moment, a thought, here and gone, each of us, on a street somewhere, and this is everything. I wondered what he meant by everything. It's what we call self, the true life, he said, the essential being. It's self in the soft wallow of what it knows, and what it knows is that it will not live forever.

I used to sit through the credits, all of them, when I went to the movies. It was a practice that worked against intuition and common sense. I was in my early twenties, unaffiliated in every respect, and I never left my seat until the full run of names and titles was completed. The titles were a language out of some ancient war. Clapper, armorer, boom operator, crowd costumes. I felt compelled to sit and read. There was a sense that I was capitulating to some moral failing. The starkest case of this occurred after the final shot of a major Hollywood production when the credits began to roll, a process that lasted five, ten, fifteen minutes and included hundreds of names, a thousand names. It was the decline and fall, a spectacle of excess nearly equal to the movie itself, but I didn't want it to end.

It was part of the experience, everything mattered, absorb it, endure it, stunt driving, set dressing, payroll accounting. I read the names, all of them, most of them, real people, who were they, why so many, names that haunted me in the dark. By the time the credits ended I was alone in the theater, maybe an old woman sitting somewhere, widowed, children never call. I stopped doing this when I began to work in the business, although I didn't think of it as a business. It was film, only that, and I was determined to do one, make one. Un film. Ein film.

Here, with them, I didn't miss movies. The landscape began to seem normal, distance was normal, heat was weather and weather was heat. I began to understand what Elster meant when he said that time is blind here. Beyond the local shrubs and cactus, only waves of space, occasional far thunder, the wait for rain, the gaze across the hills to a mountain range that was there yesterday, lost today in lifeless skies.

"Heat."

"That's right," Jessie said.

"Say the word."

"Heat."

"Feel it beating in."

"Heat," she said.

She was sitting in the sun, first time I'd seen her do this, wearing what she always wore, jeans rolled to the calves now, shirtsleeves to the elbows, and I stood in the shade watching.

"You'll die doing that."

"What?"

"Sitting in the sun."

"What else is there to do?"

"Stay inside and plan your day."

"Where are we anyway?" she said. "Do I even know?"

I wasn't using my cell phone and almost never touched my laptop. They began to seem feeble, whatever their speed and reach, devices overwhelmed by landscape. Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness. Her father found two handweights in a closet, seven or eight pounds each, made in Austria. How long have they been here? How did they get here? Who used them? He started using them now, lifting and breathing, lifting and gasping, one arm, then the other, up and down, sounding like a man in the midst of controlled strangulation, autoerotically asphyxiating.

What did I do? I filled the styrofoam cooler with bags of ice and bottles of water and took aimless drives, listening to tapes of blues singers. I wrote a letter to my wife and then tried to decide whether to send it or tear it up or wait a couple of days and then rewrite it and send it or tear it up. I tossed banana peels off the deck for animals to eat and I stopped counting the days since I'd arrived, somewhere around twenty-two.

In the kitchen he said, "I know about your marriage. You had the kind of marriage where you tell each other everything. You told her everything. I look at you and see this in your face. It's the worst thing you can do in a marriage. Tell her everything you feel, tell her everything you do. That's why she thinks you're crazy."

At dinner, over another omelette, he waved his fork and said, "You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself."

Jessie rotated the glasses and dishes in the cabinet so we wouldn't use the same ones all the time and neglect the others. She did this in periodic spells of energy, a person possessed, working out a systematic arrangement in the sink, in the drain basket and on the shelves. Her father encouraged this. He dried the plates and then watched her shelve them, each in its determined slot. She was functioning, she was helping out around the house and she was doing it to an extreme degree, which was good, which was great, he said, because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond sheer necessity.

He said to her, "Before you leave, I want you to see a bighorn sheep."

She went slack-jawed and held her hands out, palms up, like where did this come from, like what did I do to deserve this, eyes wide, a dumbfounded cartoon child.

The night she talked about art galleries in Chelsea.

She used to visit the galleries with a friend named Alicia. She said Alicia was deep as a dime. She said they'd walk down the long street choosing galleries at random and looking at the art and then walking down the street again and around the corner and up the next street, walking and looking, and one day she thought of something inexplicable. Let's do the same thing, up and down the same streets, but without going in the galleries. Alicia said yes, like instantly. They did this and it was quietly exciting, she said, it was like the idea of both their lifetimes. Walking down those long and mostly empty streets on weekday afternoons and unspokenly bypassing the art and then crossing the street and walking up the other side of the same street and turning the corner and going to the next street and walking down the next street and crossing to the other side and walking up the same street. Down and then up and then over to the next street, again and again, just walking and talking. It honestly deepened the experience, she said, made it better and more appreciative, street after street.