Steven is watching Mary as she stands beside the empty train car. Someone once lived there - stocked it full of blankets, leftover food and trinkets from the dumpsters in and around the eastern block of downtown. Downtown is where the restaurants are.

While Steven watches, Mary streaks her first two fingers down the steel car, watching the damp marks form. She isn’t watching Steven; the stale smell of the downtown rail yard is enough for Mary at this moment.

She breathes out and watches her breath as it floats about. Thirty-seven seconds ago Steven isn’t looking as worried, and Mary has just been asked, after the hello, how she wants to put it all together, "now that we are finally here."

Fourteen months ago Mary’s husband Jack is dying in a hospital bed after a car accident on Highway 287 four miles out of Bosler. He isn’t speaking effectively because of his wounds and he is burned badly. Mary isn’t sure what she can do, but she is at the time sure that her husband is in a lot of pain. He is probably going to be paralyzed, if he makes it at all. Eventually he scribbles something onto a napkin with difficulty and hands it to his wife, who takes it like a puzzle, smiling for a moment remembering the newspaper puzzles the two of them used to do after they married and before her husband’s accident.

"The camera?" she asks, feeling strange, looking at the message and then looking at her husband looking back at her.

She alternates her stare for awhile, lets her eyebrows fall down and mouths something to her husband. Then she covers the camera with the napkin and helps him die.

Four months ago Mary is catching a code in the newspaper. She isn’t able to do the puzzles anymore with Jack, feeling that it’s too difficult to do them. It’s too difficult not to do them, too. Her brain is clogging itself without the exercise. The code is in the personals section and is a mess of letters. It is saying, she solves, Who wants to know?

For three weeks she is watching the same code appear in the paper. Intrigued, she is soon sending a message back in the same simple code. Me.

Three and half months ago the codes and the messages are moving back and forth with simple questions like where are you and what is your name.

Two weeks ago the messages are turning into I missed you last weekend and where can we finally meet. Mary is finally feeling like herself again since her husband died, doing puzzles at night and looking forward to the morning. Steven is changing the way he works. He has been for the past three years the editor of the ads page at the local tribune, taking in letters and phone calls as requests for personal ads at a table in the corner of a larger office. He even takes pictures for some of the strangers. He no longer changes the ads to what he feels is more appropriate and real. He no longer changes "Mid-thirties worker; caring and honest; looking for someone loving; loves to cook" to "gone too far and needs something sexy; you won’t have to cook afterward." He no longer needs to deepen his own reality by shallowing all the others-someone answered his code.

The last reply Mary reads is something that resembles a chess move, placed on the grid of the town. It’s written two days ago. During that day Mary is looking through the phonebook maps of the city, finding a block and a point inside the rail yard, near the eastern block of downtown. With the message ad next to her on the table she finds it.

A day ago she is studying the empty train car that is unused and off the tracks, wondering why this is the spot to meet.

A few minutes ago she is asking Steven and he is saying "it is quiet here." Looking childish, he is telling her how it fits into their scheme. "Just for us, and nobody else to know about," he is saying to her.

"Like a storybook or a movie," she says to him.

"Yeah."

In a few seconds Steven will say "How do you want to put this all together, Mary, now that we are finally here?" and will suggest both a Byronic heroism with romance and history and a mysterious passion with poetry and high-strung voices. Action-adventure or indie. A few seconds after Steven will look worried and wonder if it has all gone wrong, if his newfound faith in the world of finding pieces through puzzles is all misplaced. He’ll watch her as she moves away towards a boxcar and feel it nervously for minutes on end, until she turns to him and, watching her own breath twist and twirl, add her own question.

"Can it be both?"