Erhardt watched the smoke curl from the end of his cigarette like the tendrils of some strange plant. In the near distance, past the swirling smoke, was Edward's face in soft focus, looking villainous as ever with his craggy nose, bad complexion, and high forehead crested with its tousled tuft of wiry black. He sat at the window bench, his pineapple-shaped head blocking Erhardt's view of the sea. He wore the same expression he always did, the one that was so deadly serious, yet so seriously full of it. Sir Edward Dalliance, Earl of Grift, Duke of Dupe. All pomp and no consequence.

How many times had Erhardt been sapped by Dalliance? Surely too many to count. What makes a man sustain a friendship such as that? Is it only so that he himself can be sustained? For if a man has no wife, and no friends, then what, after all, has he got? Naught but the winds.

Erhardt produced a matchbox from his inside jacket pocket. Printed on the front were the logo and name of a hotel he could barely remember, from a time he'd have preferred to forget. But he'd never forget Bernie. Beautiful Bernie, with that magnificent fiery hair and spirit to match. Spirited away. Struck out; like all the others.

He shook out a match and struck it against the side of the box, sending up a small, sulfuric flare in the waning light of the room. Dalliance didn't notice, but instead continued to stare blankly out the window and across the sea at the setting sun. As Erhardt watched the flame burn down to his fingertips it occurred to him, not for the first time, the fragility of the flesh. Was it more or less fragile than the spirit?

A hunger pang and an odd thought simultaneously hit him: Life, like squid, is a delicacy. Somewhere nearby, joyous fellows were feasting. But not here. He blew out the match and considered the mutualistic, antagonistic relationship of wind to fire. He would never forget the warm moisture of her delicate breath against his neck, the smell of it, sour milk and citrus and flowers all together. He considered the sustaining, feeding power of oxygen, and how in a rush, it can blow everything away.

Bernie was an avid gardener. She always kept the strangest plants. Tropical species, mostly. One, he remembered, was a kind of bromeliad, bromeliad tillandsia, commonly known as the air plant. It was this little ball with no pot, no stem, and no roots, just a severed botanical head sitting on her beside table with its bouquet of thick silvery leaves curving out of its lopped-off end like flames, like Bernie's thick, fiery locks in the wind. He found the plant fascinating. How did it just live like that, he wondered? Only later did it occur to Erhardt that should a strong wind have come and blown through her flat, blowing away all her fancy plants and knick-knacks, all her jewel-encrusted jewel boxes and battered, brocaded hat boxes, making lashing tongues of her fiery hair, that little ball of a plant would've been nothing more than tumbleweed.

But there had never been any wind. Just that blowhard Dalliance.

It was around that time, the time of that half-forgotten hotel, the time of Bernie's quiet exit from his life's stage, that people began to observe a light gone out in Erhardt's eyes. People thought it was the accident, the sudden orphaning of a man far too old to be far too upset over it. Or the series of poor speculations that led to the abrupt loss of such a sizable inheritance. But it wasn't. Erhardt had always been a spendthrift. If not for the constraints of a monthly allowance, the money would all have been gone long ago, regardless. It wasn't the money, or the girl, or the grief. Or the hand that Dalliance had played in it all. It was just Dalliance. It was always just Dalliance.

Erhardt was staring directly at him now, they both realized, not at the wisps of smoke from the dormant, smoldering end of his cigarette, or the recently extinguished match. Dalliance, of course, had nothing to say. Instead he just turned again to the sea, letting the breeze from the open window blow his tuft of hair in whatever direction it pleased. Erhardt knew that despite his careless grooming, his attention to social protocol was such that even in this room where just the two of them sat, he'd soon enough make a careful effort to appear casual as he rose from his seat, and dally for a length of polite duration before announcing that he was going for a walk, "to take in the ocean air."

Such a carefully careless phrase, like each that Dalliance used. Erhardt pitied him and envied him. The way he alternately plowed and stumbled through lives, loves, and business ventures. His loneliness and his freedom. His opacity and his transparency. His uncanny ability to drift.

But a man can't live on air alone. And an air plant, if blown hard enough, gets blown away, to tumble along like the tumbling tumbleweed, lonely and barren as a ghost town's dusty, empty streets.

Erhardt tamped out his cigarette and stared at the golden corner of sunset sea through the window by the recently vacated bench. The circling gulls chimed their plaintive, urgent chords like the rusted hinges on the flapping front gate of an abandoned estate. He was so adrift now, a plant without root, a flame in the wind, a squid or octopus or other such strange sea creature washed ashore and left out to dry in the salty air, its multitudinous grasping tendrils all grasping for naught.