Lem no longer noticed he was there. He was paying attention to how it felt to be standing there inside his bones, which were covered by muscles and skin. He remembered learning a long time ago in junior high school science class that the skin was the largest organ in the human body. He had sat across the table from Bobby Blackburn, who he’d had some sort of an unwitting crush on. Very occasionally they’d lock eyes, and these gazes held a deep significance for Lem; but even then he knew that Bobby had no reason to notice anything about him, that Lem was just a kid who sat across from the table at science class.

He found himself standing there, locked in some sort of a gunfighter’s stance. And at the end of the street was the stoplight methodically going through its signal changes even though there were no cars using the street to notice any of them. Green, to yellow, lingering doubts, then a solid decision to be red. Though it was blocked from his view by a brick wall on the corner, he saw the IHOP in his mind’s eye and the consumers of food in their booths, not many at this hour, the bacon and eggs and hash browns in colorful geometry on the plates, and a cheerful pot of black coffee given to each booth as their very own to use and cherish throughout their visit. They weren’t people at all, he realized; they were just happy consumers. Happy to be consuming. Then there were the waiters and waitresses, the short order cooks, the hostess, the busboys: they were the providers. Was he consumer or provider? He was good-looking; he was the type that lots of guys went for, he noticed with some measure of disdain; he didn’t care about that, he wanted not to care, but he knew that it meant he could be either, both consumer or provider. In fact it was necessary to be both. He pictured himself, sitting naked on the edge of a giant white plate, round and shiny, and he pictured himself looking down at another white plate. John was on the plate, and so was Grant. And so was the guy from the Unicorn, and all the other guys he’d ever been with. It was strange; he saw them all as a single person on the edge of a round white plate.

But it was clear, he felt it, that everyone was on a white plate, and that at the same time everyone was looking down at everyone else on their own white plates. So really, everyone was the same. It didn’t scare him; it was just the way things were. This streetcorner where his mind was standing half a block away from his body, this random intersection in a city on the edge of a lake: it really was the whole world. He had the fleeting glimpse that no matter where he would go the rest of his life or what he would see, he would never really leave this spot. The exact point on a map someone had drawn where Broadway and Halsted met, and Halsted ended and was absorbed into Broadway, and a street named Grace cut across both of them and continued west somewhere into the far off prairie. That Peter Gabriel song. These had been Indian trails, and this whole place had been a swamp, but someone had unfolded a map and willed the city into existing. For a moment, he felt everything inside him. God, was it that easy?