Want not [antikvár]

ALL BUT ONE of the black trash bags, heaped curbside on East 4th Street, were tufted with fresh snow, and looked, to Talmadge, like alpine peaks in the moonlight, or at least what he, a lifetime fladander, thought alpine peaks might look like if bathed in moonglow and (upon ftirther reflection) composed of slabs of low-density polyethylene. Admittedly, his mental faculties were still under the vigorous sway of the half gram of Sonoma County Sour Diesel he'd smoked a half hour earlier, but still: Mountains. Definitely. When he brushed the snow off the topmost bag and untied the knot at its summit, he felt like a god disassembling the Earth. Micah would surely object to this analogy—the problem with dudes, he could hear her saying, is that y'all can't even open a freaking trash bag without wanting to be some kind of god subjugating the planet—before needling him for making any analogy at all. "You're, like, the only person in the world who overuses the word 'like' the way it's actually meant to be used," she'd once told him. Which was true: He was an inveterate analo-gizer who couldn't help viewing the world as a matrix of interconnected references in which everything was related to everything else through the associative, magnetizing impulses of his brain. Back in college he'd read that this trait was an indicator of genius or perhaps merely advanced intelligence, and while this had pleased him, he was also aware, darkly, that he'd inherited the trait directly from his Uncle Lenord, which wasn't a DNA strand he longed to advertise. Uncle Lenord, who repaired riding mowers and weedwhackers and various other small-engine whatnots out of his