"As good as new? What does it taste like?"

"Well. Dead. But like food. Throw it in water and you've got something like a mashed-up potato that the angels made, boy, a potato that's a thousand years old." He looked reverently within the pot and shook the stuff; it made a dry, sandy sound. "Now even a rock," he said, "even a mountain changes in a thousand years. But the angels could make this potato that's dead to begin with, so it couldn't change. They could make a potato that's immortal."

He sat, suddenly lost in thought or wonder. "No glass today. Come back in two, three days, we'll see." He set the child to guide me out. "But remember," he said as I left, "it'll cost you."

I came back; I came back often. That was a long winter, and Teeplee was good to have for company. I talked about a dark house; I talked about forgetting over time. And it's strange: alone in my head, I would sometimes seem on the edge of losing myself altogether, but with old Teeplee I was comfortable - maybe because there's no one so different from everything I had grown up with than an Avvenger.

What I mean about losing myself: when I was alone, still there seemed to be someone there to talk to. I would wake in my cold head (the fire long since out) and lie wrapped in my black and silver, and start a conversation with this other, and he would answer, and we would lie there long and bicker like two gossips trying to tell the same story two different ways.

What we talked about was Boots. At the heart of the story was her letter, but I had forgotten it, had forgotten that her letter was Forget. I would get up at last, and get milk from the cow and sit and smoke, and maybe then clamber back into my cold bed, and all the while chat endlessly with this other about something we couldn't remember to forget.

I really had wanted to be her, I explained; I meant that. I still do. I'm not to blame; no one is accountable, I said, not Boots, not her, not even me; I chose, don't you see, and what is there to say? But he said: then why are you here now and not there? You must not have tried hard enough. I know you're wrong, I replied; I can't remember why, but that's not it, it's just the opposite of that; anyway, I did try, I did… Not hard enough, he said. And we would try to turn our backs on each other; that doesn't work.

What frightened me was that I had failed in the attempt to become her, and that in the attempt I had stopped being me. My earliest selves frightened me when they returned to me in the moments before sleep (have I told you I learned to summon them? Yes) and I felt that rather than learning anything, anything at all, I had instead suffered a grievous, an unhealable wound; that, try as I might, I could no longer really mean what I said, nor say what I really meant. And a hiss of fear would go all through me. I would stare out my eyes and wonder if it wasn't warm enough to go see what Teeplee was about today.

So we would spend the day together, wrapped to our chins in indestructible angel-stuff - he in his barred robe, I in my black cloak and my hat - and clamber over the old messes, and talk about ancient things until our hands and feet got numb; and in the crackling freeze, trudge back to his hole in the ruin to unload our treasures and talk about who should take what. Since I went mostly for the walk and the company, he always got the best things, though I would put up a show of bargaining so as not to hurt his feelings. He would deal hard for dead, useless contraptions, and only abandon them after long thought and much insistence that they could be put to some use.

Sometimes we would be gone two or three days, if Teeplee had discovered a good big stretch of Housing as he called it; sometimes he would bring along one of his boys, but never a wife. ("This is men's work," he would say, with his chin out.)

He knew a lot of angel lore, Teeplee, though I never knew how much of it to believe. I asked him why all the Housing I had ever seen was the same: each little tumbledown place the same, each with its room for a kitchen and a stone place for washing. Didn't any of the angels think of a different way of putting things together? He said that if what I had seen had surprised me, I should have traveled as far as he had, and seen it everywhere, Housing stretching as far as the eye could see was how he put it, and yes, everywhere fitted out exactly as the angels always did, so they could travel thousands of miles, from Coast to Coast, and have another box just like the one they had come from. He said some even trundled one around with them wherever they went, like a snail shell, just in case they ended up somewhere where everything was not just as they required. Think of them, he said, rushing over vast distances you won't travel even if you have many lives, and everywhere finding Housing exactly the same, and wanting it that way too.

Now, how could he know that? Maybe there was some other explanation altogether. Maybe it was a Law.

One rimy day, in a huge place of great fallen blocks sunken by their own weight into the earth - it looked as though the earth had taken a big, a too big, mouthful of the angels' works - I found a good thing: a big box of glittering screws, as good as new. "As good as new," Teeplee said trembling with cold and envy. All the way back, he kept asking if I hadn't lost them, if maybe it wouldn't be safer if he carried them, and so on; and when we were once again in the stuffy warmth of his hideout, and I put them on the table between us. Teeplee ungloved one hand and dipped it into the rustling bits; he felt their clean-cut spiral edges, stuck a thumbnail in their slots. "A screw," he said; "now a screw isn't like a nail, isn't like tying something on with string, boy. A screw, a screw has" - he balled his fist - "a screw has authority." Then, as though the answer were of no real importance to him: "What do you want for them?"

"Well," I said, "I could use a pair of gloves."

He quickly gloved his bare hand. "Sure," he said. "Of course you'd want warm, good ones, not like these things." He raised his black plastic fingers and wiggled them. Why was there a star painted on each cuff?

"They look good to me," I said. "Indestructible."

"You say 'gloves,'" he said. "I've seen gloves compared to which these are bare hands." He looked at me sidewise. "Not a pair." He raised his hand to forestall some criticism I might have, and went to search in his other room.

He returned with something wrapped in a grimy rag. "There are gloves," he said, "and there are gloves." He unwrapped the rag, and laid on the table before me a silver glove that glowed like ice.

Will you believe, angel, that until I saw it there - like a hand more than a glove, like the bright shadow of a hand - I had forgotten that it was with such a glove that Zhinsinura had manipulated Boots, had forgotten entirely that it was a glove like the glove stolen from St. Andy which had replaced me with Boots? It's so: not until I saw Teeplee's glove on his cracked table, did I remember that other - no, more: when I saw it, that moment was delivered to me again, whole, in all its wonder and terror: I saw the small room, the clear sphere and its pedestal; I saw Zhinsinura slipping on her glove, and heard her say Close your eyes. Too many wonders almost immediately succeeded that one: I had forgotten entirely.

"I've seen a glove like that," I said, when the moment had - not faded, no - but passed.

"Seeing is one thing," Teeplee said. "Having is another."

"And I know a story of one like it, a story about this one, maybe." There was a place - a single small place, a point even - where everything in my life intersected every other. I felt my mind cross like my eyes can cross.