Before he went inside Elster gripped my shoulder, reassuringly, it seemed, and I remained on the deck for some time, too deeply settled in my chair, in the night itself, to reach for the bottle of scotch. Behind me, his bedroom light went out, brightening the sky, and how queer it seemed, half the heavens coming nearer, all those incandescent masses increasing in number, the stars and constellations, because somebody turns off a light in a house in the desert, and I was sorry he wasn't here so I could listen to him talk about this, the near and far, what we think we're seeing when we're not.

I wondered if we were becoming a family, no more strange than most families except that we had nothing to do, nowhere to go, but that's not so strange either, father, daughter and whatever-I-was.

There was another thing she said, my wife, sympathetically, referring to the way I regarded life on the one hand and film on the other.

"Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?"

The bathroom door was open, midday, and Jessie was in there, barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and briefs, head over the basin, washing her face. I paused at the door. I wasn't sure whether I wanted her to see me there. I didn't imagine walking in and standing behind her and leaning into her, didn't see this clearly, my hands slipping under the T-shirt, my knees moving her legs apart so I could press more tightly, fit myself up and in, but it was there in some tenuous stroke of the moment, the idea of it, and when I moved away from the door I made no special effort to leave quietly.

The caretaker drove up, a squat man wearing a tractor cap and a stud in one ear. He looked after the house when Elster wasn't here, which was roughly ten months of the year, most years. I watched him go around to the side where the propane tank was located. When he came back this way I nodded as he went past me into the house. He showed no sign that he'd registered my presence. I thought he probably lived in one of the eccentric sprawls of shacks, trailers and cars on blocks, small crouched settlements sometimes visible from the paved roads.

Elster followed him into the kitchen speaking about a problem with the stove and I looked out toward the chalk hills and framed myself from that distance, clinically, man in landscape across the long day, barely seen.

Lunch was movable, flexible, eat when and where you want. I found myself at the table with Elster, who examined the processed cheese that Jessie had bought on our last trip to town. He said it was colored with spent uranium and then he ate it, slopped with mustard, between slices of prison bread, and so did I.

She was her father's dream thing. He didn't seem baffled by her stunted response to his love. It was natural for him not to notice. I'm not sure he understood the fact that she was not him.

When he finished the sandwich he moved forward in his chair, elbows on the table, voice lower now.

"I don't have to see a bighorn sheep before I die."

"Okay," I said.

"But I want Jessie to see one."

"Okay. We'll take a drive."

"We'll take a drive," he said.

"At some point we may have to get out of the car and climb. I think they spend time on rock ledges. I'd like to see one myself. I don't know why exactly."

He leaned in closer now.

"You know why she's here."

"I assume you wanted to see her."

"I always want to see her. Her mother, this was her mother's idea. There's a man Jessie sees."

"Okay."

"And her mother has certain ideas concerning his designs or just his general manner or his appearance or something. And she stated in her authoritarian way that possibly Jessie ought to put some distance between them, for now, temporarily, as a test of her attachment."

"So here she is. And you've talked to her about this."

"Tried to. She doesn't say much. There's no problem, that's what she says. Seems to like the guy. They see each other. They talk."

"How close are they?"

"They talk."

"Do they have sex?"

"They talk," he said.

We were both hunched over the table now, facing each other, speaking in uneasy whispers.

"Has she ever had an affair?"

"I admit I've wondered."

"No serious boyfriends."

"I don't think so, no, absolutely."

"Her mother sent her. This has to mean something."

"Her mother's a gorgeous woman, even today, but bad blood persists between us and when she sends the girl in my direction, yes, it means something. But she's also crazy. She's a completely manic individual who exaggerates everything."

"The guy's not a stalker. Nothing like that."

"Christ, no, not a stalker, I hate that word. Maybe persistent, that's all. Or stutters. Or has one brown eye and one blue eye."

"Wives. What a subject," I said.

"Wives, yes."

"How many?"

"How many. Two," he said.

"Just two. I thought maybe more."

"Just two," he said. "Feels like more."

"Both crazy. I'm only guessing."

"Both crazy. Over the years it ripens."

"What, being crazy?"

"You don't see it at first. Either they conceal it or it just needed to ripen. Once it does, it's unmistakable."

"But Jessie's the treasure, the blessing."

"That's right. And you?"

"No kids."

"Your wife. The separated wife. Is she crazy?"

"She thinks I'm crazy."

"You don't believe that," he said.

"I don't know."

"What are you protecting? She's crazy. Say it."

We were still whispering, we were bonding in whispers, but I wouldn't say it. I sat back and closed my eyes for a moment, seeing my apartment, clear and still and empty, four in the afternoon, local time, and there seemed more of me there in that dusty light than there was here, in the house or under open sky, but I wondered if I really wanted to go back to being the man who lives in the two rooms that are surrounded by the city that was built to measure time, in Elster's formulation, the slinking time of watches, calendars, minutes left to live.

Then I looked at him and asked if there was a pair of binoculars in the house. We'll need binoculars for the expedition, I said. He seemed puzzled by this. The bighorn sheep, I said. If we don't get swept away in a flash flood. If the heat doesn't kill us. We'll want to have binoculars handy to see detail. The male is the one with the horns, big and curved.

She said something funny at dinner about her eyes being closer together in New York, caused by serial congestion in the streets. Out here the eyes move apart, the eyes adapt to conditions, like wings or beaks.

Other times she seemed deadened to anything that might bring a response. Her look had an abridged quality, it wasn't reaching the wall or window. I found it disturbing to watch her, knowing that she didn't feel watched. Where was she? She wasn't lost in thought or memory, wasn't gauging the course of the next hour or minute. She was missing, fixed tightly within.

Her father tried hard not to notice these times. He sat across the room with his poets, moving his lips as he read.

I approached Richard Elster after a talk he gave at The New School and wasted no time, telling him about my idea for a film, simple and strong, I said, man and war, and he wasted no time either, leaving me rooted to a midsentence gesture but only momentarily. I followed him down the hall, speaking less rapidly, and then onto the elevator, still talking, and when we were out on the street he looked at me and commented on my appearance, saying that I looked like him when he was much younger, an underfed overworked student. I took this as encouragement, gave him my card and listened to him read it aloud, Jim Finley, Deadbeat Films. But he wasn't interested in being in a movie, mine or anyone's.