He stepped into the sodium glow of the streetlamp outside the hospital doors, struck a match, and grimaced around the cigarette between his lips. Somewhere, a horn was sounding. It pulsed against the night, bleating its heedless warning, frightening no one away. He didn't see the use in car alarms; if someone wanted what you had badly enough, they would simply take it. The papers were full of stories of would-be heroes cut down for defending something hardly worth defending. What did it get you? A city full of car alarms set off at nearly midnight, a chorus of idiot horns that served no purpose, other than to keep you up at night if you dared to sleep with the window open, hoping for a breeze.

There was no chorus tonight. Only the solitary horn, shattering the night. When it finally died, there was no sound at all. No rush of cars passing on the highway, no chirping crickets from the open field next to the hospital. It was as if someone had clamped a lid down over the night, the way he'd trapped fireflies under Mason jars when he was a boy. He'd never wondered, as a child, whether the sudden consuming silence of an airtight jar had frightened the fireflies he caught--whether they knew, at that moment, that something terrible was about to happen. He exhaled.

He crossed the parking lot to his car. Rolled down the windows and shrugged his jacket off, then loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt. It was possible to feel the whole weight of your life press down on you at once, he thought. Like the pressure of a heart attack, all of it on your chest, until your ribs cracked and your lungs gave out, and every regret and mistake finally let you go. On an upper floor of the hospital, a window went dark. He started the car, exited the lot, and wove his way through the city.

At an intersection, waiting for the light to change, he heard it again: the sound of a horn. The blaring noise, the stink of the city, the press of strangers on the sidewalks. He could no longer remember why he'd moved here, just to spend his days alone in a cheap apartment, cheaply built and cheaply furnished, none of the walls or surfaces reflecting anything about him; he wished now he had hung a framed photo or two, had, at the very least, covered over the beige paint with a color he might have liked to look at. Blue, maybe. The light was still red. It was late; the intersection was empty, and still he waited under the glare of the light. What was the point? He flicked his butt out the window and lit another cigarette. Surely someone, the car's owner, had heard the horn by now and would shut it off. The sound had become feeble in its repetition, like the moans of a dying man. Would the light never change?

Quiet again. Not quiet -- silent. No sound at all but the grumble of the car's engine. He turned his face away from the endless red light and felt a light wind touch his face. The scent it carried stirred something inside him. He knew that scent. Saltwater, sand warmed by the sun. There was no ocean nearby, yet he could smell it on the breeze.