Writers were infamous for this. They claimed life, shaping real events into “material.”

To the woman, just the opposite seemed to be happening. Her life kept tuning into a text, making of her its reader. For example,

At seven one morning, after a hard discussion brought the couple late into the night, three men in neon vests and hard hats arrived at their door.

She answered in a silk shorts-and-cami pajama set and unadjusted eyes, the summer sun already hot and inflexibly bright.

“Good morning, ma’am. We’re here to check the pole behind your building. Can we get through?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Behind your building, in the corner, there’s a big pole. You know?"

“I do…”

“We need to come through your apartment so we can check the wood.”

“But,” she revised her question. “Why?”

However badly passed inquiry and information, he eventually understood that she wanted to know not what he was asking to do, but what he was hoping to ascertain and on whose behalf.

She understood that he and his colleagues had been contracted by the internet provider in her neighborhood to examine the poles that ran their cables for the minimum standards of safety.

She walked them in their boots, helmets, bucket, ropes, and drill through the apartment and out the back,

closing along the way the door to the bedroom so over her beloved’s face passed a diminishing sliver of hall light.

Occasionally, as then, the thought struck her that he was named for an archangel.

He could not have been sleeping, only pretending or trying very hard.

On the patio, she and the three men stood in the extreme daylight, she still in her pajamas and they in their workwear.

One man climbed the pole and bored into the wood, the other two came close around the base,

and she stayed back by the door, watching.

The drill sound mixed with bits of language from last night’s argument, the two sounds drifting through her like dirt in a glass of water.

At the apex of the pediment on an otherwise simple church in Vienna, the angel stood on Lucifer’s torso, a gold-plated sword raised overhead. She’d taken a photograph, hoping to examine an unresolved aspect in the angel’s face, something to the side of overt struggle.

The man who had climbed up climbed down, and the three spoke briefly among themselves.

Then the first man approached and looked directly into her face: “It’s rotten. All the way through.”

She wanted to say, illogically, not even to the man but to events themselves, Goddamn it, I can read!

A thought she had again, two weeks later

when a heavy closet door fell off its hinge at two a.m., and she stood there naked holding it up, while her beloved went to get the drill, the ladder.

By the objects that populated the scene, she knew exactly what kind of text they appeared in.

The genre was to neither of their tastes, yet here they were, possessions all around them.

Was this a contemporary feeling? Wanting to first recognize yourself in something else in order to see it?

Before the serviceman left, one nailed a plaque to the wood, and the one who’d first come to the door handed the woman a sheet of instructions in how to arrange a follow up.

She asked about his work. Specifically, she wanted to know the route, how they knew where to go.

He held out a tablet showing a map of the city and spread his fingers over the screen, zeroing in on the neighborhood where they stood.

Pink dots ran up and down every block, and he drew closer and closer until they were looking down together at the yellow square corresponding exactly to where they stood,

and he touched the dot corresponding to this very pole, property of Spectrum, so it changed from pink to red.