a zebra cocktail

The bus turned the other day and sent everything spinning through the windows. A ricocheted reflection transplanted a man safely crossing one street into the maw of moving traffic on another. His breeze-blown trench coat was as near and real as the advancing Chevy, as the sliver of light that slipped off the seat next to me and onto the floor as the driver hauled the wheel around. No sooner had I lamented the impossibility of saying any of it than I returned to Nabokov and read:

One way to do it might be by making the scenery penetrate the automobile.

Damn it! And of course it would turn out that the man's a genius with reflections, sees everything, has even, apparently, looked up from his work in the North Reading Room on a January evening—where perhaps he was sitting next to me all along—and

… fixed his mild gaze on the window above, where, gradually, through his dissolving meditation, there appeared the violet-blue air of dusk, silver-tooled by the reflection of the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, and, among spidery black twigs, a mirrored row of bright book spines.

I cannot stand these writers, the ones I like. They have said everything already.