When I woke up he was already at it in his backyard below our windows. He’d traced a circle on the ground with a shovel, and was scraping the surface with sideways strokes of the blade like a hockey player working the puck. Loose dirt and clumps of uprooted grass piled around the rim as he worked, and the hole emerged like the moon goes through phases: first a crescent of brown against the green lawn, then spreading until the circle was full. The remains of his tomato patch were pushed to one side, a few red spots showing through knotted green vines and fruit that wouldn’t ripen now that fall had turned cold.

I called my wife over and she took the glasses from my face to see past the window. We joke, sometimes, when sharing our glasses or taking fresh contact lenses from the same box, that we might as well buy whatever corrective devices our kids will need now they’re guaranteed weak vision from all of our genes. Kat said the other day we should ask at the clinic if they can change that, since they’re already doing so much.

"What’s he doing?"

"Maybe he’s planting," I said.

As if he could hear us, our neighbor—who we knew was called Finn, but not whether that was his first or last name turned and looked up. He waved and we waved back. We’d only moved in a few weeks earlier, and waving through our windows when he was outside or through his own when we walked past his house was as much as we knew about Finn, aside from introducing ourselves and saying hello once or twice.

Kat said I should go down and ask what he was doing, and I said I might after having some breakfast but the morning went quickly and soon it was time to run errands. But he was still in his yard when we got home, and I saw that he’d driven a ring of wooden posts around the edge of the hole, one every twelve inches or so. Now he was piling stones against them, working his way along the circle, and the walls were already as high as his chest when he stood in the pit. Curiosity had me.

As a pretext, I walked past his house to the convenience store around the corner where I bought a bag of potato chips. The store’s at the foot of a huge office park built on old granite quarries filled in after decades of digging were over. The quarries sent stone all over the country, for skyscrapers and statues and cemeteries, and then they were closed. I don’t know if they ran out of stone or if there was some other reason, but the pits were filled in so a hotel and some office blocks could be built a long time before we moved here.

On my way back, I slowed to get a good look at what Finn was doing. I couldn’t see over the fence from street level, but there was a gap where a gate should have hung so I stopped there to watch. From that side of the yard, I saw an opening in the tall ring of stones big enough for a man to squeeze through. Finn knelt with a bale of hay at his side, and wove one handful after another into what looked like a frame of thin sticks tied together like one of those papasan chairs everyone had for awhile. I wondered where he’d found hay in the city.

I said hello and Finn stood with a jerk, face flushed and bits of straw perched in the puffy white tufts at his temples. He looked older at such short distance, the wrinkles we couldn’t see from our windows all shining in sweaty relief, and the smooth dome of his head was as bright as the tomatoes left behind in his garden. He wore an inside-out sweatshirt with its sleeves cut off. The gray fleece made me think of the vests Vikings wear in the movies.

"Oh, uh—uh—," he sputtered.

"Colin," I said. I didn’t mind that he’d lost my name because we’d only spoken a couple of times. I apologized for startling him but he brushed it away with his hand. "So what are you doing out here?" I asked. "If you don’t mind my asking."

He rubbed a muddy hand on his head like he was thinking about the answer. "I was watching this show the other night. You know, that one where they build old crap to see how folks did it back then? Catapults and castles and all?"

"Sure. On PBS."

"No, not that one, the one on cable. You know. This guy was on, some professor of something, and he said that technology and—inventions and everything, that we had it all figured out best in the iron age. Gone downhill since." Finn wiped his palms on the sides of his khakis where brown, hand-shaped streaks ran already. One knee was patched with red cloth.

"Weren’t there plagues back then?" I asked.

"Sure. Sure, but—it wasn’t the best time ever or anything, but it was okay. Folks had what they needed. They didn’t cause problems with all kinds of new stuff. A-bombs. Plastic surgery."

"They did things for themselves," I said, and Finn nodded. He stooped over the branches and straw and when I looked at the assemblage more closely, I realized it was a roof.

"So you’re building a hut?"

"An iron age dwelling. Saw it on TV and said to myself, ‘I can build that.’ "

I waited in vain for some explanation of why he needed an iron age dwelling in his backyard. "Where’d you get the plans?"

"Making it up as I go."

I looked over his fence toward my own living room window and saw Kat on the other side of the glass, but she wasn’t looking so I didn’t wave. "I haven’t seen your wife lately."

Finn didn’t seem to be listening. "It all went bad after the iron age. We can’t be blamed for that, can we? I mean, hell, we weren’t even born. We got to pick up the pieces." He bent over, and I looked away from the plumber’s crack visible above his beltless pants toward the round wall of the hut.

"After I do the dwelling, I’ll smelt some iron. See if I can make tools."

"How?"

"They quarried granite for a hundred years in those holes. Must be iron there, too, if I dig."

I wasn’t sure Finn could find what he wanted simply by digging or by wanting it to be where he looked. I didn’t say anything because I don’t know much about quarries and iron and I wasn’t here when they were. "Aren’t all the quarries filled in?"

"I know a spot," he said, and smiled with a finger against one side of his nose. "Gimme a hand with this roof."

Finn lifted one edge of the frame and I took the other. I hoisted and grunted, surprised at the weight a pile of dry grass could take on. We flipped it over and the roof was more pointed on top than it looked upside down, almost a straw witch’s hat. When we’d raised it onto the stones, the peak stood as tall as my head.

"Not bad," he said, rubbing his hands so dust puffed like magician’s smoke. "I think in the old days they built the roof right on the walls, but it seemed easier to do it like this."

Finn worked his way around the roof, lashing it to the posts with strips of leather. I didn’t ask where they’d come from. When he finished, the sky had darkened to a deep blue and the wind had grown cool.

"Well," he declared after circling his dwelling for a final inspection. "I’ve got some poteen to celebrate. What do you say we break it out?"

"What’s poteen?"

"Irish moonshine. I think it’s made of potatoes. It used to be illegal, but not anymore."

"Is that what people drank in the iron age?"

"The gal at the package store thought it was closest."

Finn went to his cellar through a side door, and while he was gone I leaned into the dwelling and breathed the damp, dirty smell of the floor and the dry dust of the roof. I laid a hand on the stones near the ground and they were cool like roads after a rainstorm but without being wet. I stepped in all the way, and the hut felt bigger than it looked from outside. I tried laying down and the soles of my sneakers pressed the wall on one side and my scalp scraped the other even with my knees bent, but curled in the fetal position I could have slept comfortably. The walls were so thick they blocked traffic sounds and deadened my own echo inside.

Finn called my name from the yard and I stood, catching my hair in the thatch so it pulled as I stepped up from the hut. I left a few strands hanging there in the doorway. He held a green bottle with a silver label written in what I assumed to be Gaelic, and in his other hand were two wooden mugs with rawhide thongs tied to their handles.

"Brother-in-law brought these from Sweden. Look prehistoric to me." He filled each cup to the brim and I took one when he gestured I should, but hesitated before having a sip. The poteen’s smell burned my nose and made my eyes water. Finn drained half a mug in one gulp and let out a long sigh.

"Go ahead, it won’t kill you," he said, so I took a small sip. I’ve never been one for hard liquor, and from the look of it I thought poteen would be more like vodka. But it tasted just like it smelled, a bit burnt and a bit burning, and I choked it down, then gasped for air.

"Might make you blind, though." Finn laughed and clapped my back too hard to help with the choking. "You’ll get used to it."

He gave me the bottle to hold then went around the side of the house, returning with a section of log on each shoulder that he dropped in front of the hut. "Iron age chairs. How’s the poteen?"

"It tastes a little like—toffee, or something. Like burnt toffee."

"Folks say that sometimes." He drank from the bottle then refilled my cup, which was already more or less full. I took another sip and it wasn’t as shocking as the first one had been, I think because my taste buds were dead. I looked up at the glossy black window of my apartment.

Finn and I sat, first drinking then getting drunk. He talked about the neighborhood and how it had been, how many families had moved away while he stayed, and the evening closed in around us.

"Damn it if we don’t need a fire," he said, and went around the house for more logs. He arranged the wood in a pyre on the ground and stuffed leftover clumps of dry grass in its hollows. He lit the stack with loose matches drawn from his pockets and scraped against the walls of his dwelling and soon the fire was crackling. I watched an orange ribbon of sparks untie itself into the sky. Every so often I heard a car pass, but behind the high walls of Finn’s fence even their headlights were hidden except when they passed by the gap with no gate. It felt like camping when I was a boy, and I leaned back on my stump to drink from a mug of poteen I didn’t seem able to drain.

Finn sat elbows on knees, holding his mug in both hands. His eyes aimed at the fire but seemed to look through it. "How long have you two been married?" he asked.

"Seven years next month."

"And no kids?"

"Not yet. We’re—trying." Finn nodded like he knew what I meant. "We’ve been seeing these doctors," I said, unsure if I should tell him or if he really wanted to know. "They’ve done all these tests. They think it’ll work."

It felt like a bubble had burst in my stomach leaving a vacuum of hunger behind, and I felt sick all of a sudden. I hadn’t eaten since lunch. So I fished around in the firelight for the potato chips I’d never opened. The salty fistful I stuffed in my mouth dulled the pain before I’d even swallowed.

I held the bag over to Finn and his hand crunched like mice in the walls of a house. "It’s good having kids," he said through half-chewed chips. "Good to have ‘em around."

"We want to. I’ve always wanted to, but—" A log popped between us, spraying sparks into the air. "It’s great they can do it, but it’s not what I imagined. There are so many people involved."

We listened to the logs in the fire and the potato chips in our mouths. I guess adding junk food to my empty stomach sent it into high gear, because it gurgled so loudly that Finn looked my way.

"My wife said we needed a second TV when the kids left. She didn’t want to watch my ballgames and fishing shows and I don’t like her hospital stories. So we bought another set and put it in the spare room."

I tried to wash the salt from my mouth with a swig of poteen, but got only the wood of the mug so I looked around for the bottle.

"She watched upstairs and me downstairs and I didn’t know what she was watching. Sometimes we’d watch the same shows without knowing."

The half-finished poteen stood out of reach next to Finn. I stretched my arm and fingers to grab it, but only managed to bump it so it leaned against his stump.

"When I was a kid and we got our first set, all the neighbors came over to see. We had potlucks. And here’s me and my wife watching two different shows in one house, not even in the same room."

Finn reached for the bottle but it wasn’t where he’d left it and he seemed to give up. "And this guy was saying if we didn’t leave the iron age. If we didn’t have all these inventions, you know? Things wouldn’t be so screwed up."

I strained for the green neck of glass, off-balance over my stump, and fell so my arm launched a flaming branch from the fire. It happened in slow-motion: the fiery brand spinning over my head and arcing toward the thatched roof, the bright burst of it landing and burning straw scattered into the air. I jumped up and spilled chips to the ground and their bag disappeared in the dark.

Finn grabbed the branch off the roof and pounded the flames with bare palms but the fire was already spreading. I pulled the cuffs of my sweater down over my hands and patted at spots that were burning, then my sleeves were on fire and I shrieked in a voice I wish had been deeper and pulled the sweater over my head. I threw it to the ground and stomped its flames out while Finn kept on hitting and hitting the roof of his hut. The air around us was etched with sparks and burning straw, and several inches of yarn had been chewed from each sleeve of my sweater.

Finn beat out the fire and somehow kept the burning to one small, round spot a bit darker in moonlight than the rest of the unweathered thatch. With a sigh he turned and reached for the poteen still leaning on his stool, and drank all that was left before tossing the bottle out into the grass where the chip bag had disappeared. I didn’t know what to say and my cup was empty so I stared at the dwelling I’d almost burned down.

Then Kat called my name from the window above. I heard TV voices behind her but couldn’t tell what they were saying. "Are you coming in?" she asked. "Supper’s ready." I waved my goose-pimpled arm to show her I’d heard and she closed the window then pulled the curtains together.

"Guess I’m going in," I said, and Finn waved the same dismissive hand he had when I arrived. I left him with his fire all knocked to hell and a burnt patch in his roof and nothing to drink in his bottle. Not even any chips left. From the top of the stairs outside our apartment I looked down on his yard but all I could see was the dim orange glow that remained of the fire and the red lump of my sweater still catching its light. From that angle most of the hut was obscured by the fence, and so was Finn, or maybe he’d stepped down into the stone circle. Sparks lingered on a column of left-behind heat and rose as high as our door, dancing at eye-level while I stood on the porch. Through the glass I watched Kat pull a stoneware roasting pan out of the oven, loaded with far too much food for just two of us, enough meat and potatoes to feed a whole family. She’s a good cook, and I love to eat, but after all the salt and strange whiskey I’d filled myself with I wasn’t sure I had much appetite left.