33. COUNTERPANE

B rown, in a cloak and tight-fitting cowl fashioned from one of the New Yorker’s foam-core blankets, gestured across the rolling beige plain with a sturdy wood-look staff, its length decorated in a traditional pattern of cigarette burns. “There,” he said.

Milgrim squinted in the direction indicated, the direction in which they seemed to have been traveling for some time, but saw only the gibbet-like timber constructions interrupting the otherwise featureless expanse. “I can’t see anything,” Milgrim said, preparing to be struck for disagreement, but Brown only turned, still pointing forward with his staff, and put his other hand on Milgrim’s shoulder. “That’s because it’s below the horizon,” said Brown, reassuringly.

“What is?” asked Milgrim. The sky had a Turner-on-crack intensity, something volcanic aglow behind clouds that looked set to birth tornadoes. “The keep of great Baldwin,” Brown declared, leaning closer to Milgrim’s eyes, “count of Flanders, emperor of Constantinople, suzerain of every Crusader princeling in the Eastern Empire.”

“Baldwin is dead,” Milgrim protested, startling himself.

“Untrue,” said Brown, but still gently, and still gesturing with the staff. “Yonder rises his keep. Can you not see?”

“Baldwin is dead,” Milgrim protested, “but among the poor this myth of the Sleeping Emperor goes all about, and a pseudo-Baldwin, one so claiming, supposedly walks among them now.”

“Here,” said Brown, lowering his staff and gripping Milgrim’s shoulder more firmly, “he is here, the one and true.”

Milgrim saw that not only were Brown’s hood and cloak made from the beige foam-core material, but so was the plain. Or rather covered with it, as it felt beneath his bare soles like a thin carpet spread over a dune.

“Here,” Brown was saying, shaking him awake, “here it is.” The BlackBerry thrust into his face.

“Pencil,” Milgrim heard himself say, rolling upright on the edge of the bed. Cracks of daylight at the border of New Yorker drapes. “Paper. What time is it?”

“Ten-fifteen.”

Milgrim had the BlackBerry now, squinting at its screen, scrolling unnecessarily. Whatever it was, it was brief. “Pencil. Paper.”

Brown handed him a sheet of New Yorker stationery and a tooth-marked four-inch stub of yellow pencil, kept ready because Milgrim had insisted that he needed to be able to erase. “Leave me alone while I do this.”

Brown made a strange little strangled sound, some deep combination of anxiety and frustration.

“I can do a better job if you go into your own room,” Milgrim said, looking up at Brown. “I have to concentrate. This isn’t like translating high school French. This is the very definition of idiomatic.” He saw that Brown didn’t know what that meant, and noticed his own satisfaction at the fact.

Brown turned and walked out of the room.

Milgrim scrolled the message again and started translating, printing in block capitals on the New Yorker stationery.

ONE TODAY IN

He stopped and considered.

UNION SQUARE AGRICULTURE

He used the eraser, which was nearly gone, the metal ferrule scratching the paper.

UNION SQUARE FARMERS MARKET

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