The Dry Riverbed

He woke up in a city, which was wrong.

He had always woken in water — not drowning in it, but made of it, the river's mood his mood, the river's direction his understanding of forward. He remembered this clearly even though he could not, at present, remember his name.

The city was loud and smelled of fuel and food and something acrid he did not have a word for. The sky was a particular shade of brown-white that he was certain skies had not been when he was last paying attention.

He was sitting on a concrete embankment above a dry riverbed.

He looked at the dry riverbed for a long time. It looked back at him with the expression of a very old wound.

"You're the third one this month," said a voice beside him.

He turned. An old woman sat on a folding chair with a cup of coffee, watching him with the mild interest of someone who had seen everything at least twice. She wore an apron with a coffee shop's name on it and had the look of someone on a break from work.

"Third what?" he said.

"Person to come and sit here and stare at the Ilissos like it owes them something." She gestured at the dry channel. "It ran underground. Nineteen hundred and something. They built roads on top of it." She paused. "You have a very unusual reaction to this information."

He was, he realized, shaking.

"It was mine," he said, before he could think to say something less strange.

The old woman looked at him over her coffee cup. "Yes," she said, with the calm of someone confirming a weather report. "I thought you might be one of those."