Say someone comes up to your car, idle at a red light. He’s white or black, dresses sharp or just in jeans and a faded polo; perhaps he’s not even a he—she’s a woman wearing only a garter belt and fur coat. You imagine the well-charted territories of her flesh even as you look away, blushing slightly.

Anyway, whoever it is knocks on your window with a pistol, and before you know it he or she is sitting in your place, your wallet with its wealth of numbers on the dashboard. The stop light flinches, and you’re left staring at your license plate’s familiar reassurances shrinking into the stark city at dusk—shadows of buildings, mere tattoos of window light at which you wave your hands at nobody.

It’s as if that person has taken even speech itself.

You watch the car turn left at the next corner until the blinker vanishes behind a parked truck: a memory: something you used to own, though if someone asked you right now to prove it, you couldn’t do so, couldn’t even try.