The Pigeon at the Window

He sat in the chair in the dark in the cold room with the tin on the sill and four dollars in the tin and a pigeon on the sill and the notebook in his coat and Dane at last, properly, fully, finally dead in his mind, and he thought:

Then I will build the AC motor, which is a door the size of an armature, which is a door small enough to harness. I will build nothing larger. I will make it so that the small door earns me enough money that I will not have to build the large one. I will put the large one out of the world.

He lay on the cot. Dagmar flew in from the sill and settled on the pillow beside his head. He did not move. He could feel her small heat beside his ear. He closed his eyes.

He slept for nine hours, which he had not done since he was seventeen.

In the morning he rose before the landlady had come up with the coffee, and he washed his hands three times in the basin, and he put on his coat, and the notebook was in the inside pocket where he had begun to carry it in Paris four years earlier, and it would be there now for every remaining day of his life. He went out into the February street before it was properly light, and the air smelled of coal smoke and wet stone and the particular cold of a city that had not yet made up its mind to be spring, and he walked south toward Broadway, and he did not, this morning or any morning after, doubt what he was going to do with his life, which was to go on being a man who had once, at five, seen a door in a field, and who had, at thirty, finally understood that the door was not going to give him his brother back, and who would spend the rest of his years at the smaller door — the door the size of an armature — trying to earn his way out of the larger one.