11. Union Square, part 1.

He arrived at a square that wasn't a square, a park that wasn't a park. He could taste the hollowness and misery around him, the suffering of the whole world. This was the one thing that held him to the ground, kept him from drifting up and away into dissolution, the flame and the void pulling apart: this little shard, the rough silver cord, that caught the silken banner of his essence and held it.

Here the misery took as much a physical form as it had those long days ago, with the same methods of holding at bay. Containers of anguish moving along, even smiling and laughing, rivers of sorrow held in thin glass thimbles.