Coo found the jar everywhere. He plucked it from Madeleine’s hair when he had one of her great tits cupped purple in the other hand; when he dug out the septic tank after a disastrous overflow he discovered it in a moist and stinking pile of earth. It rattled under the hood of the Datsun, trapped between the serpentine belt which rubbed furiously against the glass. Everywhere Coo went he barely found a jar – the jar was both barren (bereft of any substance he could discern, even, he suspected, of air) and barely there: he was never sure how he found it but he did many times daily and without failure. It did not fit in the pockets of his jeans so he thrust it down the front of his pants where the jar seemed to always disappear in a moment of forgetfulness occurring as easily as the conscious effort to breathe – if he thought of it, Coo could not make himself forget the act. Yet if he attempted to go through an entire day thinking, without interruption, breathe, Coo, breathe, he failed.

(Maybe it was not like a Mason jar at all.) It was round except for a blunt landing which allowed the jar to sit upright on a shelf. When Coo found the jar it never sat upright or proper; it lay instead on its side or upside down, or he found it in the sugar bowl, with the lid off, the contents filled with sugar, and the mystery substance (or lack thereof) entirely vanished. There was no order except that he found it everywhere: in his laundry, rattling in the washing machine; in the burnt embers of the fireplace; so plainly on the kitchen table that he scarcely noticed that it was the jar and not some other, less significant, jar; he saw it tinkling in the coffee shop, TIPS boldly scrawled across it. He even found it on people: Madeleine’s hair as they entangled in an aggressive bout of intimacy; a massive bulge in his Father’s pants (which Coo desperately hoped was the jar) at a Sunday family dinner; in a co-worker’s orange hard hat, and thoroughly entangled in his friend Paulson’s fishing line on a Sunday morning at Lake Milsen.