We are no longer proceeding through the market slowly, cautiously, but are in fact fast-walking—double-timing, as Benny would say—out of the enclosed portion of the piazza and down a corridor full of craft stalls—into a space which stretches, or seems to; into a state of mind: like when Jimmy Stewart looks down the stairwell in Vertigo. Nor does anyone still believe it was the wind that disturbed the produce; or that, as in my own case, the dogs somehow followed us onto the concourse (in perfect silence, apparently, like ninjas). No; the feeling now is that, as evidenced by what I saw (or think I saw), we have been met by something new; something unknown; and that we are, beyond a doubt, no longer alone.
Not, of course, that we ever actually were alone—not really. How could we be, when th
