Night came and we made camp. The arrangement that repetition had refined into ritual. Your fire, your pot, your notebook, your meditation, your sleep. My distance, my stillness, my open eyes, my humming.

  Your meditation tonight was audible again. Inhale through the left nostril, hold, exhale through the right. The breathing exercises you performed cross-legged by the fire produced sounds that a charitable person might describe as disciplined. A less charitable person might describe them as a man impersonating a bellows while sitting on a rock.

  I did not comment. The commenting had only produced the notebook-scribbling, which had produced observations I did not want.

  The meditation ended, replaced by sleep.

  Except tonight the humming in my chest was louder. Not louder in the audible sense — below hearing, in the range the body perceived as vibration rather than sound. But more intense. My qi's autonomous cycling had accelerated.

  You slept with even breathing. Deep-sleep breathing. Your hand on the notebook. Even in sleep, the contact with the record was maintained.

  I stood, needed to be upright.

  I moved three paces from camp. Into the dark. Into the space beyond the fire's embers.

  I was the humming. It had started as a phenomenon observed by a body. Now it was the body's baseline state.

  Five paces from camp. The dark was complete — the moon behind a thick cover of clouds. Somewhere a night-bird called and received no answer.

  My qi pulsed.

  Not the involuntary jolt that emotion had produced before — those were reactions, collisions between feeling and qi that discharged on impact. This was the qi operating on its own schedule. Autonomous. Like a heartbeat.

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  The pulse radiated outward. Three paces — the standard radius. But it extended beyond. Five paces. Seven. The way a sleeping animal stretched its limbs — not purposefully, but because the body's cycle included stretching whether the mind participated or not.

  The grass at seven paces trembled. Below the lethal threshold but above the perceptible one.

  And it was running on a schedule I had not written.

  The pulse contracted. Seven paces back to three. The expansion was over. The testing completed.

  I moved back to camp. Three paces from where you slept. Your breathing uninterrupted.

  I sat. On the brown grass. At the center of my radius.

  I had a sensation of being occupied. Something using my body as medium, as an instrument, as a thing through which it expressed itself into the world.

  The question was larger than the ones I had carried so far — larger than why-not-him, larger than what-protects-me. You had asked them twice now, but this time it was me who asked it.

  What am I?

  Dawn came, the light changed and you woke.

  I was sitting where I had been. Your hand left the notebook. Your eyes opened.

  "The grass," you said. Not looking at camp — looking past it. At the patch five paces out where the grass had yellowed in a circle wider than my radius should have left. Where my standing and the pulse had left a mark the standard radius did not explain. The kind of data-point that made your hand reach for the notebook before your eyes fully focused.

  "Were you pacing circles?" you asked.

  "It pulsed," I said.

  "Pulsed?" You repeated the word flat, stripped of affect, testing whether the syllables bore the weight of what they described.

  "The radius expanded from three to seven meters during the night."

  "That is not a pulse. That is a categorical change."

  "It contracted back."

  You looked at the dead grass. At the yellowed grass beyond it. At the boundary where yellowing faded into green.

  "It might have contracted back," you said, "but the seven-meter circle is still visible. The grass was — is — still affected." You wrote. The pen paused.

  "What do you remember?"

  The question was not about the grass.

  "I remember standing up," I said. "I remember the dark."

  You waited for me to elaborate. The thing you did when the data was incomplete and you believed more was coming. More was not coming. That was all I had — standing, dark, the humming that was louder than it should have been.

  You wrote what I gave you. You did not write what I withheld.