Forget Magazine. Remember, Remember, Remember.

Gaul doesn't go into town too often. He sees no reason to mingle with these tissue paper people, see-through folk who crumble in your hand like pollen. Even the towers, rooted deep, muscular with cement and marble, don't impress Gaul. Any field has its boulders.

He belongs, he feels, among snouts of rock nuzzling shore. He belongs beside the insinuations of the inlet, peering through conifers to the sea. Hills bunched up at his back, knotting their knuckles, bristling with pinetops. Nights, he can see his tent as if from years away, a firefly against a cliff face. It is necessary, Gaul believes, to sleep on the same dirt that heaves itself up into mountain ranges, that slinks from him and goes submarine.

But today he must endure the frailty of town. Already he's been jostled by two thugs, thick with glottal noise like strangled deer. They were laughing or something, demanding some kind of surrender, and he swept them aside with arm and blade as if he were wading kelp. Where do these apparitions come from? Why do their switchblades puncture nothing?

Already he's been chased and harangued by a whore pocked crimson. Kicked aside rattled coin tins, spraying copper. Predawn pried a door with his knife, taking what he found: two cans salmon and a silver watch. He will never use a watch. He throws it into traffic. He doesn't need the fish, either. Back where he belongs, he plucks coho from torrent, bites through their necks.

Gaul has been impatient this trip. Here makes him restless; he needs a substantial rind of earth to stand on. He has strode ferocious and what he needs eludes him.

It is after dusk on the third day, and he thinks the town may finally dissolve, grey and white and falling intact before implosion. But he knows it won't happen, because the town is still there, every time, whenever he comes to sate his need.

Slowing, he reaches a quiet intersection and widens his pupils. Everything here is so damn faint. Nothing you could kick and hurt your foot on. All slush and shadow. Suggestion without voice. Gaul stands where one streetlamp ray nudges another. At his feet is a manhole cover.

And there it is: substance. This isn't what he came for; this isn't the urge that propelled him into town. He gets plenty of substance back home, where grizzlies ripple with it and eagles snatch it from tall grass. But here's something completely new. A new solidity.

The manhole cover bears a grid-work of raised squares. Letters encircle the grid, denoting town property. It's an iron disk probably, but it seems more. Dense as a newborn, but afloat on this hint of road. It heralds; of that Gaul is certain. It is herald, and something must emerge from it.

So something does, and it is a man. Not much of one: the usual tissue paper. Thin, ribbed with balsa. Skin you could pinch between two fingers and slice open with a breath. Yet this man has pushed aside a manhole cover which, for its unearthly heft, might belong to a buffalo herd, and he has hauled himself up on to the road.

He drips; perhaps it is sewage. A doe could shit more in a day than this town does in a week. There is no smell, and the fluid turns vapor before it lands.

"What the fuck were you doing in there?" says Gaul. He hasn't used his voice in several years, so it emerges cobwebbed. He tries again: coughs, rustles up his best holler: "What the fuck were you doing in there?"

The man has a voice of molten titanium. "I was foraging in the sewer," he says, and angles away.

Gaul peers down the open manhole. Something courses beneath, and he can tell, without seeing it, or hearing its current, or smelling its breath, that it seethes. Its atoms mock mountains; its tide undercuts them, and one day they'll collapse. Here is a stream to absorb all rivers, erode all earth, swallow the Tantalus and the ladder that descends whole.

Gaul unsheathes his hunting knife. Earlier this week he used it to skin an elk. It has done combat with bucks and carved calendars into granite. But he knows he cannot penetrate the underwater river with this blade. He hurls it at a skyscraper; it passes through and vanishes.

Only Gaul himself, unadorned, can enter. He sheds his clothes, even the buckskin sheath, and lowers himself enclosed.

Here, submarine, are others. Even those who left for town and stayed, or found other cities down coast, or up north, further into the bush. And all of them gleam with solidity. They are legions, Gaul realizes, and together they will wend past the snouts of rock, under the knuckled hills, diving fathoms, wrapping themselves around the world's core, from which volcanoes feed.

Elk are here, too, and grizzlies and salmon and pine. Other creatures he hasn't seen or hunted. Everything has substance, and all substance thickens in the water's thrust. Tugged, firmly tugged, Gaul lets his eyes close. His need flows from him, dissipating into the tide like orphaned milt.

Peter Norman is down stream.