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a full view of the property. So this was it: an old farmhouse, a fallow field, and a bursting kitchen garden—the Great Leap Forward on two acres of land. Joseph hadn’t given much thought to what he’d find here, but surely a grander set-up than this. Didn’t Alex’s idealism and unflagging energy demand more? Joseph studied Alex’s face for the beginnings of an answer. Two deep lines stretched from his mouth to hischin, and his brows came down over his eyes like a hard ridge, giving a preview of the old man he’d be one day—biblically stern, the flat blue eyes taking in the measure of his land, separating the clean from the unclean, the fertile from the barren. Something in that expression, its total identification with the landscape, repulsed Joseph. Sure, the city was going to hell, but as he scanned the fields, wondering where the cows were but knowing the answer would only depress him, Joseph saw nothing to replace the city and all it represented—culture, progressiveness, the energy of self-invention.
    Alex saw something more.
Good for him
.
    Joseph finally settled his eyes on the forest across the field.
    “You should see the forest,” Alex said. His mouth had softened into a self-mocking grin. “Even a nature hater like you would love it.”
    “Are people more authentic in the country?” Joseph asked, instantly regretting his flippant tone.
    “People do live closer to the land. They’re not waiting for the World-Historical Individual to fix their problems.”
    The World-Historical Individual—who else but Alex still referenced Hegel?
    Joseph nodded, his attention drawn to a little house near the garden, maybe six feet tall and surrounded by a low chain-link fence. It was a wooden replica of the brick farmhouse it faced across the yard, the colours, angles, and lines so well matched that he felt like he was staring at an allegorical painting.
    “What is that?”
    “It’s actually a chicken coop,” Alex said. “More of a carpentry project I did with Liam.” He kept smiling as they walked over to the miniature farmhouse. It was a child’s dream fort, with framed windows and a green-shingled, peaked roof topped with a tiny metal weather vane of a man running to nowhere on pinwheeling legs. There were even little window boxes painted beneath the windows.
    “It must have been a nightmare to build,” Joseph said.
    Alex shrugged. He hated to let a project go unfinished. Back in the city he’d set up a communal garden in the park near their old apartment, and helped found a food co-op and a collective for independent filmmakers. He’d even spearheaded a parent-run alternative school, an idea Joseph enthusiastically supported until the other parents backed out, conceding that, despite their multiple M.A.s and Ph.D.s, they had nothing practical to teach their children. “It’s too bad we didn’t take the basket-weaving course of right-wing lore,” Joseph had joked, scoring a laugh with everyone but Alex.
    “None of the chickens will sleep in it,” Alex said, stepping tentatively closer to the coop, as if he were slightly afraid of something inside it.
    “Where do the chickens sleep?”
    “In the bushes, the trees, everywhere but their house.”
    “I’d live in it. With my debts, I may have to.” Joseph laughed, but the knots in his neck tightened. He stooped to look inside a tiny window, relieved that no face, human or avian, stared back. Alex’s determination to finish what most men would have abandoned both shamed Joseph and made him feel slightly superior, but it did not lessen thequeasy presentiment that a face, grotesquely out of proportion to the house’s miniature accessories, was about to appear at the window.
    He stepped away from the house, the sweat on his back over-performing its cooling duties, the rising heat from the fields setting the not-so-distant trees in motion so that his throbbing eyes saw them as a bannered army on the march. He squinted again and traced the