The road is longer than I remember roads being. It may be that I have not walked one in some time — not like this, not with a suitcase and no particular arrangement waiting at the other end. The leather handle is warm in my grip. I bought this case in a shop whose name I have forgotten, in a city I lived in for eleven years, and I cannot tell you now what colour the door of my apartment was, though I unlocked it perhaps four thousand times.

Behind me, the skyline holds its shape against the haze. I don't look back. There is no drama in this — I want to be clear about that. I simply find that I am walking, and the city is behind me, and the road ahead is very straight and very open, and these facts arrange themselves into something that feels, if not like a decision, then at least like the shape one leaves behind.

She finds me two streets from the edge of the city — a small dog, brisk and certain, appearing from nowhere in particular at the exact point where the pavement runs out and the red earth begins. She falls into step beside me without slowing, as if she has been waiting at that exact corner for precisely this man carrying precisely this case at precisely this hour of the morning. I look down at her. She looks ahead. I say Betty and she doesn't contradict me, and that is that.

"If you'll be my bodyguard", I tell her, "I can be your long lost pal."

She accelerates slightly, ears forward, already scouting. I take this as agreement.

The balloon arrives somewhere in the first hour. Red, absurdly red, its string wrapped once around my fingers as if it has claimed me rather than the other way around, tugging with small insistent jerks as if it has somewhere to be and is being patient about the delay. The wind plays it like a note it particularly enjoys, bouncing it left, then right, then upward in a little arc of pure gladness. It knows something I don't, possibly. I let it lead.

For some time it is just Betty and me and the road and the dry gold grass moving in a wind I can hear but not quite feel. Then, around what I estimate to be the second hour, I become aware of him.

He is walking beside me on the right. Tall. Composed. A dark suit that fits him without apparent effort, hands swinging casually at his sides, sunglasses catching the morning light.

I have seen him before, I think. In the corner of a room at a party I didn't want to attend. In the glass of a window at a moment when I wasn't looking for my own reflection. In the half-second before sleep when the day releases its grip and something else briefly moves through.

I used to think he was who I was supposed to become. The better-assembled version, the one who'd made the right choices and worn them lightly. I spent considerable time and energy in his approximate direction.

But out here, with the city behind me and the savanna opening on every side, I think I had it wrong. He isn't who I should have been. He is what I touch, briefly, when I stop performing the life that had arranged itself around me before I had thought to want something different.

Above us the clouds are doing something improbable. A question mark, vast and white and entirely deliberate, hanging in the cerulean air. I look at it for a while. The man beside me tilts his face upward too, behind his sunglasses, and something crosses what I can see of his expression that might, on a less luminous face, be called relief.

There are angels in the architecture of this. I feel it the way you feel a change in air pressure — in the chest, behind the sternum, before you have the language for it. The road and the grass and the balloon dancing its small red dance in the wind and Betty's black hat tilting as she trots and the city diminishing behind me into something I once called my life — all of it is spinning, faintly, in a pattern I can almost but not quite see.

Amen, I think. Hallelujah.

I have been, for a long time, a man with a name that other people used without ever quite reaching the person behind it. I attended things. I had views and expressed them and was thanked for coming. All of this was real. I don't say otherwise.

But here is the road, and here is Betty, and here beside me walks whatever it has always been walking inside me, and the question mark above is not an accusation.

It is simply the shape the sky makes when it is paying attention.

You can call me Al. Now. Someone should.

♪ listen