MEN emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. In winter, Pine Street at this hour is dark, darkness presses down early from the mountain that hangs above the stagnant² city of Brewer³; but now in summer the granite⁴ curbs⁵ starred with mica⁶ and the row houses differentiated⁷ by speckled bastard⁹ sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw¹¹ brackets and gray milk?bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the baking curbside cars wince¹² beneath a brilliance¹³ like a frozen explosion. The city, attempting to revive its dying downtown, has torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate¹⁴ openness, weedy and nibbled¹⁵, spills through the once?packed streets, exposing church facades¹⁶ never seen from a distance and generating new perspectives of rear entryways and half?alleys¹⁷ and

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