Martin kept drinking and drinking, though the night never seemed to care what was in the glass. Coffee, mostly, black and bitter and steaming beneath the diner’s yellow light, with water afterward because a man ought to keep himself moving if he intended to see what morning had planned for him.

He ate just enough, too, a plate of eggs and toast disappearing while the jukebox muttered somewhere behind him, and then he sat back and looked through the window at the empty street. The emptiness was pleasing to him.

Not because he was lonely. Martin had never considered himself lonely.

Martin could hear everything. The refrigerator humming behind the counter. A truck changing gears three blocks away. The soft scrape of somebody’s shoes on the pavement. The wind worrying at an old newspaper caught beneath a parked car.

All of it was music.

That was Martin’s trouble and glory. He could imagine himself anywhere. One minute he was crossing a desert under a white-hot sun, carrying nothing but a battered suitcase and a name nobody knew. The next he was riding a train through mountains, watching pine trees fly backward into the darkness while some distant town waited beyond the next tunnel.

Then he imagined a little house beside a river, then a room above a bookstore, on a motorcycle, although he no longer owned one. Then a sailboat, then nothing at all. That last dream was perhaps the greatest.

Nothing at all except a road stretching away beneath the stars and Martin walking it without knowing where it ended. He liked the not knowing.

Knowing too much had ruined plenty of good days for plenty of good people. Martin believed in mysteries, little locked doors in the mind, little roads disappearing over hills where nobody had thought to put a sign.

The waitress came over and refilled his coffee.

“Going somewhere?” she asked.

Martin looked at her.

“Always.”

She smiled, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t.

Outside, the town had begun to change. The darkness was thinning around the rooftops. Somewhere beyond the buildings, the eastern sky had taken on the faintest gray, like a thought somebody was afraid to speak aloud.

Martin finished his coffee. He paid the bill and stepped outside.

The morning air was cold, and he stood there for a moment, hands in his back pockets, breathing it in. Cars moved along the highway. Headlights swept across the pavement. A dog barked somewhere behind a fence, and then another answered from farther away.

Everything was beginning. That was what Martin liked about morning. Nobody had yet decided what the day meant.

He started walking. There was no great reason for it. No appointment. No destination. No telegram waiting at the end of the road with news that would change his life.

Just walking. His shoes struck the pavement in a steady rhythm, and with every block the diner became smaller, the coffee and the eggs and the yellow lights folding into memory.

Martin smiled. His mind was full of impossible things, and somehow none of it was overwhelming.

There would be rivers and mountains and strange towns, mistakes and miracles, long conversations with strangers and long silences with himself. Some days the world opened its hands, and days it seemed to close every door.

But for now there was the road.