Dispatches from the night train: woods rush past black beyond the window. I'm sat at the cafe car's bar, breathing French Roast steam. Edward Hopper has my number; Nighthawks rules the midnight air of the mind. I pull from the ceramic cup, savour the bite of perfectly extracted beans. No one believes me when I say that I have never had a bad cup of coffee on a train; on twenty trains taken in twice as many countries, every native sip like cherries, or chocolate–whatever dances cleanly with the local palate. Suppose you might say it has something to do with the exhilaration of travel; when confronted with the new, standards expand, the senses grow less skeptical. We tend towards parochial distrust amongst the creature comforts of home.

My senses are expanded everywhere. What does that say? It belies any sense of home at all, really. Perhaps that's the semitic part of me, rootless, wandering the desert, all continuity internal, taking on enough trappings of the haut monde yet never quite being a part of the fabric of things. Or perhaps, it's the African part, footloose but never fancy-free. A token of bad old ideas of possession dispossessed of ethnological record, in alien skin a prison, stripped of myths. A threat just by being; the ethos of defensively fighting everything disagreeable in eternal conflict with my other eugenic parts: Germanic, Nordic, Anglo Saxon; masters of nature. Their push-pull between king and nation, freedom and consensus. Sovereignty prevails. I shove the dead-weight of genetic determinism off me and gather the fresh air of self-control, looking back. Inbetween worlds as I am in between sizes. The waste-heat of this intestinal molecular race-war that, like Wayland the Smith, forged my self-imposed shackles; a desperation to "make it," too monumental a chip for my ectomorphic shoulders.

Seattle was a bust, no surprise there. A week of meetings, the Ad Agency circus shuffle, no one buying the pitch. How to connect with those who must see themselves in you first before buying in? Be more doppelgänger. Self-erasure is the price of success. Be real on your own time, kid! We're not paying you to be yourself! Individuals are a threat to the edifices of ego. I close my eyes and evoke St. Helens, will Ranier's quiet Northern slopes to flame; nature's great yawp to man's hubris intensifying in my mind's eye, keeping pace with my frustrations. I see a cinereal column of pyroclastic death rising above the city, capped in anvil shockwaves that shove aside lazy cumulus. It belly-dances in the mountain's fury, pregnant with fire. God flipping the chess board, Vesuvian irritation at a pawn hedgehog deployed lazily to protect ineffectual Kings, Queens and Bishops. A day or two of terrestrial expectoration before a murmuring sun rises again, muted behind the ashen veil. The survivors emerge, taking tenuous steps amongst the ruins of First Hill where Pike Place Market's sign made monument by the occasion; they crawl from the shadow of Queen Anne's skirts, distinctions fall away, the categories of social order and Weltanschauung meaningless in the face of this. It takes disaster to remind us of our bonds, our fraternal contracts. Why pay such a high price in blood when we can choose to be familiars?

The train pulls into Portland's Union Station, The Pearl's neue-brutalist apartment blocks awash in sodium vapour. I shoulder my duffle-backpack–waxed canvas and reliable, schlepp down the empty car, through Amtrak steam and into the Wong Kar-Wai night. With one husky hand, conductor tips blue hat at the gaggle of dusk to dawn commuters, pant-suited and high heels, chattering away in hushed voices passing office secrets. I take the long walk down the gangway. It's strange to go from indoors, to outdoors and indoors again, I think, passing through doors rimmed by Romanesque Revival sandstone into 1896 or 1913 timeless echo, a hall of polished marble and neon dahlia signs. No one's home, even Wilf's piano bar is closed up for the night, a lone busboy buffing teak tables with orange oil rags. There's no one to meet me, so I make my way into the Pearl on foot, flâneur in my own city in search of a watering hole.

Sat alone at the business end of a bar, reading a worn out book of Jacques Prévert poems, the harsh spotlight above the bar bent and ambered by glencairn and Lagavulin 16. The few barflys there are keep their distance, casting askance glances. Who the Hell goes to a bar to read? Bars in this contrarian part of the world exist to drown any meaningful contact in a torrent of overpriced sauce, hip-hop audile terrorism and kitch on tap; not sling weighty conversations over carvery dinners. Abandon all expectations, ye who enter here. I double down on my book, a lone man alone does not a creep make, though I can tell who thinks otherwise. You see, uneccesary inward apologies, rehearsing conversations I will never have, I'm not usually out on Friday nights, I hate crowds. Although, I would hardly mind if some loveless bird, with librarian hands and deep set blue eyes, eased up to the bar on a dare, positioning herself in that way single women do; offered up, to be noticed.

Nearby, friends–maybe colleagues–part after a celebration in their vocal, showy American way, each time hugging each other like they're about to leave for war. I pull from the glencairn, warm in my solitude, peat and smoke drawing my senses to Islay. It's thirty minutes to last call. I eyeball corporate nihilism-powered Millennials down to their last gambits; another night of dodging debt subsidized desperation with low-grade alcoholism. As they clear, another man quiet in tweed emerges like a rock revealed by the tide. 48-ish, sallow, grey-templed, thousand-yard staring into the ghost of his drink, lost in himself; either in possibilities, or retrospection.

I grab the bartender with my eyes, she sweeps sable rockabilly bangs out of them just in time to catch my signal, Pour this fine gentleman one, on me. She winks cooperation, lets her gaze linger a moment on my rolled up light twill denim shirtsleeves and the tattoos they reveal. She makes sure I can see the arcuate pockets hugging her indigo denim derriere as she leans over for a generous pour. I choose not to see, watching instead for the tweed man's broken gaze. Whispers dance in the air between them, she points back at me with a thumb and a hip. He returns a terse nod, raising his glass to me as she makes herself scarce by the ice machine. I match and we share a silent toast across the gulf of the bar. He indicates a perch. I accept.

"Robert," he offers a careworn hand, which soon meets mine. You can tell nearly everything about a man in a handshake; eye-contact, direct, confident. Does he square his body to yours, keeping it open and unguarded. The particulars of the handshake itself, firm not a death-grip squeeze, but solid, confident, present. Far too many younger men, natives of the warm-fuzzy generation, offer wet-fishes in lieu of handshakes, clammy and limp. Dead inside, or terrified by everything.

"Corey," my grip assertive and present, my other hand travels to the forearm then I take my seat abreast. Robert sips the bouquet, "like it?" I ask as much with my eyes as my words.

"Very much. Islay?"

"It is. Lagavulin 16. The next best thing to being there." We sip in silence a moment. I always test the silence that can maintain between people, seeing how much time can pass without the nervous desire to talk it away. All the intimacy in the world is in silence. I can take in the posture, the kinesic tells that broadcast another's true state.

"I love Scotland," he muses, busting the silence after a subdued three minutes.

"Likewise. I love the light at that latitude, especially in the Highlands, the way it sort of cascades out of the fog; like it slipped out of its leash and God's chasing after it."

"Interesting," he sips, "the way you talk about light. Never really thought of it quite like that... like a dog."

"'Seems to have a mind all its own! It cannot be quite domesticated. It's more wolf than abstraction."

Robert makes a grunting noise of comprehension, arcing his neck back to take in something on the ceiling, drawing off some inner discipline.

"I'm an architect," he starts, "there's no room for metaphors in what I do. Everything is regulated and systematised and, fuck... even the placement of light fixtures gets political. There's no room for character." He turns in his stool, opening, becomes animated, "When I start a project I have to detach from it almost immediately. I know the final product will be nothing like it was when it was in here," he taps his temple, almost violently with one finger "in my head. You ever feel that way?"

"Mmm," I grunt, lobbing a chuckle into my glencairn, "I practically live in that feeling–"

"What kind of work do you do?"

"Cinematographer."

"No shit?" This is the usual reaction.

"No shit." A moment passes, wherein most debate the merits of asking me if I've ever worked on anything famous. I have, but I'm still nobody. He spares me that question, keeps the conversation avant-garde.

"So instead of working with material and codes or forms, you’re working with light."

"Against light! Light is the enemy. It's always trying to assert its own will. It can be shaped, diverted, intensified, weakened, but it can't be owned."

"Like people!"

"Like people."

"And some people, would like to clean up, so we can get home." Our bartender returns, swooping up our glencairns like the hawk to the mouse. "Last-call was an hour ago, boys. 'Fraid I have to throw you out into the cold."

"Nice to have a little peace and quiet on a Friday night," I remark back, placing enough cash to cover the bill on the bar, snatching up my backpack.

"Saturday morning, sweetie," she winks back.

"Peace is always beautiful," Robert declares. I forgot to expect the unexpected.

"I see you know your Whitman," I remark, one eye-brow raised. I've known the architect a sum total of an hour, but I can see more of his soul laid bare in the air before me. The mythos of our association a mutual fascination with applied forms and the urgency of Whitman. Two men with depths out of element, unleashed into the night.

We traverse the blocks of The Pearl, ants to the jet set high above, crossing West Burnside at the corner between west and southwest amidst Portland's kitchy half-block analogue to The Castro.

"I have to grab a few things," He thumbs a solitary door, in a brick building repainted hipster mauve–an invitation up to his inner sanctum of the mind. We climb reclaimed wood stairs, above a boutique in the shadow of our only real skyscraper, pink and pornographic in the night air. Emerging into his office, open plan in a way that invokes some OSS nerve centre during The Battle of Britain; I expect to see maps of the Dover coast, maybe Gerry U-Boats creeping into Southend-on-Sea, stacks of papers and material samples as nebulous to me as enigma codes. I am inside a cathedral mind; Buildings as symphonies. Sworn to secrecy the covenant of those who build our reality with occult architecture, the secret politics of building codes and public works. I catch an encore French perfume in the air, something with a feminine touch. It belongs to a cashmere scarf, left behind on one chair as armour against airconditioning. It draws my eye to a muted mustard couch, lying under one of the iron lattice windows one sees in old factories; a crumpled Pendleton blanket collapsed at one end. From off to my left, the telltale clink of glass, Robert is pouring out two more generous drinks.

"Whiskey?"

"Always," I nod my appreciation, moving over to a black mass dominating one solitary table in the board-room. Robert approaches, his own sleeves rolled up, offering me a glass the way one might hold a chess piece–top-down, deliberate.

"It's not your... what'd ya call it again?"

"Lagavulin."

"Lagavulin, right. Fraid this is just simple Yankee bourbon."

"Your hospitality is appreciated. Thank you," I sip, rolling the briery spirits across my tongue and down the hatch, then shift my attention to the black mass, nodding, "what's all this?"

"The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame…" Robert, quoting Hobbes this time.

"The Leviathan," I watched at he removed the black fabric covering the mass, a to-scale model of a massive modern glass shard of a building, overlooking the River's east-side, "Seems apropos."

"My firm has been working on this for years. We finally got the approval and clearances today," He leans into the dim over head light above the model, shadows gathering on his face. Two men in a workshop, halfway into a glass, opening a well of secrets, "it's going in right on the east end of the Burnside bridge. Crazy place to put a high-rise."

"Congratulations," I whispered, raising my glass, "that's a big win."

"No-no," he chuckled, "it's a disaster. Lotta midnight oil to be burned getting this sonavabitch done," He pulls in a breath, pushes it through a grimace, " 's why she served me with divorce papers today." Now it all made sense, that's why he was staring so intently into his drink he could've bore a hole through the bartop. How do you tell a man you don't know that you're truly sorry for the bad news?

"Tell me more." The three most important important words in the English language, apart from 'I love you,' are 'tell me more,' people aren't used to hearing it, being cared about, invited into the physics of the genuine, " why would she go and do a thing like that?"

"She says I'm not home enough. She feels abandoned," his hands are quaking, sending ripples through the glencairn which he surrenders, setting it on the table next to the mockup, "I've been holding onto this for eight hours." A knowing silence passes between us, a moment of gravity against one must anchor internally. I can't offer him a line from the Disneyfied tome of lesser platitudes; an 'I'm so sorry, man!' or a 'y'know, maybe it's for the best!' Nothing but commiseration will cut it, so I drill down into the depth of my own pain, my own congealed fears swaddling my heart.

"It's funny," I muse, taking up a position next to him, my voice settling into the slow introspective growl I've only heard issue forth from my lips in dire instances, "the women we've known. When we were broke, living on Top Ramen and driving shit cars, they wouldn't give us the time of day. Start making a little money, show a quantum of promise, earn their attention... They get invested. You marry, or you simply cohabitate. Maybe they're making their own money, maybe you're both living off of yours. Then one day they sour and you hear that perpetual refrain–'never enough,' there are never enough date nights, never enough vacations, they never see enough of you. They lose sight of the blood, sweat and toil it takes to have means; the time, sinew, and worry it costs to stay there, in a place of comfort, and you think 'if ELLE or COSMOPOLITAN or JEZEBEL would just run one article a month on economics, or financial operations, they'd accept that wages aren't set arbitrarily, that one must bring value, make sacrifices, in order to live the good life. You don't know how to tell them that if they keep pulling you off your mission, fouling up the gears of your provision you'll only end up resenting them and they'll lose you anyway. You bargain, 'let's downsize, finagle a cheaper mortgage so I won't have to work as much, I can be home more.' That only makes things worse. They resent your display of weakness and leave... maybe they think they'd be better off on their own, or Kevin from accounting seems a better prospect. There's always some schmuck who makes more, looks better. It's not like we're much different; how many men ditch their families for a younger, firmer office girl who looks like their wife did twenty years ago and doesn't nag?" Robert chuckles, setting free a lone tear, "I see these divorced ladies everywhere, eating alone in chic restaurants, spelunking a bottle of wine. You'd bet they'd eat their pearls if they could. You wonder if they regret it. Then reality sets in and you realise you just don't care. We all make our choices. We all have to live with ourselves."

We commiserate in silence, perfect strangers mind, swap war stories, the complex ecstatic-terrors of the women we've loved and lost. After hours is where the truth is; the truth of the human condition. The American Karoshi happening in slow motion, Top-earners bigger marks for the thermonuclear strike of a no-fault divorce. The man doesn't know me from Adam, but he knows I can dig it. Without precondition or pre-conception. Been down that dark road before and know every crack in the pavement. You can sense it on me - my own private Ypres behind my eyes. He can sense, in the way soldiers can sniff out a brother, that I've walked similar desolate passes: strange perfection.

"You ever been married?"

"I came close. Twice."

"Think you ever will?"

"Sure, but only when I know it's not out of vanity," I bottom out my own glencairn, my thoughts flashing back to the two women in question, Nathalie and Gwen. A frog takes up residence in my throat at the thought of Gwen, the only one of the two still alive and the paragon of pregnant, if rumour is to be taken on board. "It's three am, 'should get you home."

"Nah, this place is...uh," for the first time I could see it: he was losing his footing to the whiskey, now the couch and the Pendleton squared up, "You haven't been sleeping here have you?"

"Yeah... My kids, you'know? I don't wann'em seein' me like," he waves dead fish arms, "–this."

"I understand... Still, I think it's a little worse if they don't see you at all. It's one thing if you and your wife are through, but if you just vanish from their lives without so much as a whimper, they're going to think you left because of them." I was that kid once, and I wish that someone had said the same.

Robert grunted, running one of those workman's hand through hair suddenly far greyer than I recalled it being at the bar.

"Don't spend this time, while your kids are still so young, wasting away here. Show up for them. If you and your wife need to be in separate rooms for the next few months, so be it. Make sure they remember this time with you being as present as you can be; it's not about you, or your wife. It's about them." I offer him my hand, it hangs in the air a spell, while the greater aspect of him hangs in the balance.

"I'm hailing you a cab," Back on the street, in the night air in that Pre-uber modality where getting home isn't so simple. Robert pulls the cool air through his teeth, as a black and white Radio Cab pulls to a stop alongside.

"Thanks. Thanks for setting me straight."

"It's what I do, apparently," perhaps I should take my own advice, "Good luck." We share a parting handshake, firmer this time, affirming a moment shared in Hell. I take a step back from the curbside, turn, stop then throw a glance back over a shoulder, "Hey, Robert!" He breaks his eyes away from the cabbie, rolls down one back-window, "get yourself a younger one!" He smirks and the cab pulls away into the night. I don't even know why I said it, except that I wanted to clear the air with something absurd. I gather my coat around my middle and move East, home.

Speeding east on the Burnside Bridge a hard day behind me. As I gaze up and left I catch Robert's building, a shock of a black monolith towering above the East Waterfront; referred to by the local hipsters as The Death Star for its burnt steel facade, and slivers of windows. I read Robert was shafted by the city on his design, compromised to local "our way, or the highway" politics; clad in black, fewer windows. I remember the beauty of the mock-up, two men sipping whiskey in the wee hours of a Saturday, sharing war stories.

I'm getting sicker, this pain in my backside growing worse all the time. Justine has stopped nagging me about it, throwing her weight behind hushed contempt. I've been missing the company of a gang; I need men with me in the trenches. A few days before I emailed Robert–it's been what? Four years to the month since that night we sat up in his office triaging souls. My phone buzzes, email summary on screen. I slow to a stop at the red light at East Burnside and MLK, tapping open the message:

Corey,

Good to hear from you. I hope this finds you well. I'm doing fine. Business is good, despite the leviathan.

Onwards and upwards.

Take care, Robert

P.S. You were right about the kids.

"Onwards and upwards," a bit on the nose for an architect. There's an underlying plea in his email which I translate into my own dialect: Corey, Thanks for listening that night, for saving my relationship with my kids, but let's agree to not rehash what a wreck I was. I think that instance of naked shame is something best left to the unfrequented apce between gentlemen– if not oblivion. Take care of yourself. No extension of friendship. My heart falls into my stomach. Sometimes all you can be is an excellent single-use friend. I respect his desire to move on, to not wallow in things he can't change. The traffic light is still red beyond the setting sun. Maybe Robert fixed his marriage, maybe he didn't. I'm okay never knowing.