JULIAN

I have been studying since eleven.

Not working, which was unusual. Reading, which was also unusual at that hour, though not in the way that required explanation or concern, I had slept earlier, briefly, the specific shallow sleep of a man whose mind was doing its work even in the resting, and had come awake at eleven with the clear and restless quality of someone who had had enough sleep to be done with it and not enough to call it complete. I had gone to study. I had read. I had looked out the window for a while at the city doing its late and quietly sustained work....