A Cure for Suicide

~ ~ ~

IT WAS A MAZE of hallways, a plain building with a maze of hallways. Most of the offices were empty. The doors were unmarked. No one waited before them.

Yet, on one door, there was printed a simple title. It was simple, but puzzling. It read:

INTERLOCUTOR

In the hall opposite, there was a bench. A man, a petitioner, had been sitting on the bench for the better part of an hour. His face and clothing were worn and thin and lined as though he hadn’t slept. His hand was shaking, and he was holding it in his other hand. Perhaps both were shaking. He stared mutely at the floor, and the light over his head flickered fitfully.

Finally, the door opened. A man with lustrous white hair, an old man, wearing a black suit, was looking out. He inclined his arm, and the petitioner stood, walked into the room, and shut the door.

~ ~ ~

As I sat in the office of the cure, he began to speak and explain to me what it was. I was there, and I had no choice but to continue, it seemed there was nothing but that, nothing else — and yet, it was being explained to me, almost without my permission, as a matter of course, this thing I did not understand: the cure for suicide. There had been so much progress in the world at large. So many things were solved, so said the interlocutor. My grandfather and his grandfather, even more so the grandfathers of those grandfathers, they could expect much less than I can, and so on and so on: the general life of man is improving at breakneck speed. But, the solutions all have had consequences, and the worst of these, it crops up again and again, he said, is isolation. In the modern world, we, all of us, are isolated. We might as well be furniture, he continued. That is, we cannot feel — we cannot reach out to others; again and again the problem comes up. There are those who cannot continue. Therefore, now that so many problems had been solved, this was the feeling in the republic, it fell to us to confront this final problem, this problem of problems. It fell to us to find a solution, a cure for suicide, so said the interlocutor. His white hair was feathery and avian, but comforting, and seemed to declare that he was fit for the position he held, whatever position it was. Interlocutor. What was that? He had the same chair on both sides of his desk. The desk was basically a table. He could have sat on either side and it would be the same. I was here to speak to him and he to me. So he said. He said, the Process of Villages was created out of nothing. There was no such idea anywhere, and then suddenly it was a success. Suddenly, departments like this one were created in every city. This department was only a month old. He explained things rapidly, unendingly, and then suddenly would lapse into silence, watching me for unaccountable reasons. He said, the interlocutor, he himself, had just arrived in the city a week before, but he had worked in a different office, an office of the so-called Department of Failure, for many years. That’s what they call it, the Department of Failure, so he said. Regular folk. The real name is just its function: Process of Villages. It is the way the cure is administered. This is the beginning. When he said that, he made a curious gesture of his hand, as if to diminish the whole thing — to make it seem possible. A beginning is easy, so he seemed to say, and from there, it is all taken care of. I felt that he looked a bit like my grandfather, a man I had never liked. But, in him, all the elements of my grandfather that were deplorable and wicked were somehow lightened and improved. It was as though this thing, grandfather, had been revisited with greater care in his person, and now here he was, interlocutor, a person with whom one could speak. He said, for a very long time, for a thousand years and a thousand years before that, it was thought that suicide was wrong. It was believed that one shouldn’t kill oneself, that one didn’t have that right. This was because of a false idea — that the body was not one’s own property — that it belonged to someone other than you. Whether that was God or some other man, the reasoning was the same. But now we can see, there is no reason, really, not to end your life if you no longer want to live it. In fact, living it — provided you don’t want to — is irrational, so said the interlocutor. A man was sitting where you sit, right there, not three days ago, so said the interlocutor, and he said to me, I have never been the person I want to be. Even as a child, I was someone else. Every morning, for a lifetime — a lifetime! — I have woken up in this body that I feel should not be my own in a situation not my own. Why should I not end this life. My reply to him, said the interlocutor, was, if the idea is that you want out, why should it not be so, but consider this: Groebden, Emmanuel Groebden — one of the finest minds this world ever produced, he struggled with this problem. It was as if he spoke with you, with you alone, and heard your troubles, and solved them. His solution was this, the Process of Villages, so I told him, said the interlocutor. So, I said, not three days ago. I told him, we will allow you a complete reinvention. You now have this choice, a choice that men have never had — not in a hundred thousand years of life — to start over completely. That is what we are here for, and that is how we will help you. And, continued the interlocutor, looking at me, we offer the same help to you. Even now, that man who sat where you are sitting, who sat there sobbing uncontrollably, he was wretched, just wretched, sobbing in that chair — even now, he is peaceful and partway on a new journey. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. There are, though, said the interlocutor, many formalities to be addressed. That is why I am here. We are to speak, you and I, and I am to learn about you, to classify you, to see to you and find out why it is that you are here. So said this man who was the mirror image, the spitting image of my grandfather, a man I had hated. I, too, was wretched, I thought. I, wretched, was there, sitting in this office, and I was to tell my wretched story. Very well. He was speaking animatedly. This was a part of his repertoire that was well rehearsed. He said, do you know how it will be in the place you have just left? The place I have left? The place you have left — the house you have left, the people you have left, the body of their communications and thought, their livelihoods, their esteems, their hopes — do you know how it will be settled, your coming here? It is this way: Everyone who has known you well will separately receive a small envelope in the post. The envelope will be opened, and when it is opened, there will be within it a yellow slip. Whoever has opened it will find a yellow slip. He or she will draw out the yellow slip and on it there is a name written. Clement Mayer. Your name. They will read this name to themselves. Some will say it out loud. When they open this envelope what will happen is that they will know that you are no longer in their lives, that this person is gone forever and cannot be found or reclaimed anywhere in the world. This is a comfort for you. You may know that all books will close, that all unfinished ends will finish, neatly. There is no looking back because there is no back. The tying off is complete, so said the interlocutor. I asked him if there was a time when a person had to continue forward. I asked if at some point in the process, one could not go back to the old life. Do you want to go back to the old life? I do not want to, I said, I am here for one reason, but I was thinking, for another individual, perhaps, they are here and learn this information, and then they stand up and leave the office, go back to the street and find their way across the city to the place where they live and the people they know. You can leave, right up until the last, said the interlocutor. You could leave now. I have no intention of leaving, I said. There is, though, he said, a matter of proof. It is lamentable, but we have found it necessary to require a proof of sorts. We like to hear your account of yourself. We do this so that we can be sure that you are in the right place — that you are, in fact, reaching for the hand that we extend. He said this quickly, twice, once to me, and then once to himself almost under his breath. Reaching for the hand that we extend. A woman was here, he said, the first person I dealt with in this city, she had a large family and was a great success in government. I believe you would know her face if I were to show it to you. I looked out of my office, I opened the door just as I opened it to admit you, and there she was. I brought her in, sat her down, and at first she could give no account of herself consonant with a need for our help. Every facet of her life was flawless. She was a marvel, she really was, a sort of titan of life’s powers. But, we sat here for a very long time. It became dark outside, and I felt — I will wait. I don’t need to go home. I have nothing especially to return to tonight. I can do this work some hours more and there will be no harm. And as we sat, she began to talk about other things, not just things from her life, but things from other lives, other things that were a part of her so-called mental life. And as we traveled deeper into this thing — she said it was a sort of mental life, I began to feel a certainty. This was a woman that wanted to be parted from everything that she knew. She was not in grief. She had no tears to cry, nothing to lament. But she was finished. The duration of her interest in her life was shorter than the duration of her life. She was in an existential predicament. I said that to her and she did not agree. She thought such a formulation was revolting. We did agree, however, so said the interlocutor, that the treatment was, for her, quite necessary. She filled out the appropriate contracts, and although it was then around eleven p.m., I made the necessary arrangements and she continued on. She did not need to go home again. She simply continued on, once I had made the arrangements. Or, continued the interlocutor, there was a boy, only sixteen years old, who had, as he put it, started out wrong. Everything about his beginning was the incorrect beginning. I met him not in this office but in the previous office. He was quite a fresh-faced darling, very sweet and straightforward, answering every question with his utmost effort. But all his youth was undercut by a dense black grief. He had been deeply misunderstood, right from the get-go. There was nothing for him. At first, I was sure I would dismiss him, send him back. I am sending people back all the time, all the time. But, when he laid out the situation, not as a child would, but as though he were a long veteran of the world, well, I had to capitulate. I gave him what he wanted, and I am sure that he is in good stead. The interlocutor was talking, but he was waiting. He was talking, but waiting for me to speak. His talking was a form of permission for me: this is a place for talking, his talking said. The idea that I would speak about my situation was unbearable to me. I said that, I said to him, the idea that I would speak about my situation is unbearable to me. When I learned about the Process of Villages, and that this department was the door to it, the entryway, so to speak, I felt, not hope, for I have none, but a wish that I could cross that threshold speechless, saying nothing. If it were that way, said the interlocutor. I know that I must speak about it, I said. I know that. Then the interlocutor moved his chair a little to the left, as if to prepare himself for something that was coming, and the thing that he was preparing himself for was that I was starting to speak, and what I said was this. Imagine that you are a young woman. Imagine your name is Rana, Rana Nousen. Imagine that you live in a house of great wealth, that you have a fine education, friends, a delightful family. But, that one day, you go to a doctor because you have been having headaches, some pressure in your head, and at the doctor’s office you discover you will die. It is certain. You will soon be dead. It could be drawn out, or it could be swift: that much was uncertain. But that you will die is completely incontrovertible. The doctor doesn’t even qualify a word. The verdict is complete. And you are standing there, and everything, all your fine things turn to ash. Just the same, they shine twice as brightly — every good thing is possessed by the utmost fineness of its nature, for it is suddenly finite — that which was infinite, in a long life, suddenly finite. You leave the office, you go down a street, down one street, down another. And on that day, on that very worst day, you meet a young man. For whatever reason, you think that he is quite wonderful. He, though he may have qualities that do not raise him up above others of his kind, seems to you to be very remarkable, so I told the interlocutor. You, Rana, stand in the street and speak to him. You are exchanging pleasantries that become rapidly tinged with a meticulous seriousness. In the course of a small conversation, the two of you find that you want to keep seeing each other. And so, you see to it that he has your address, and you go off. You go off home, and at home you are surrounded by your family. You tell your family the news: you are to die. Your best friends are summoned to the house. They are told: you are to die. Everyone is gathered there, and it is an atmosphere of loss and sadness. Then, you address the group and what you say is this: you say, there are three months left to me. I want to have them. If they are mine, and they are, then I don’t want to speak about this illness again. Everyone here must swear to never speak of it until I am gone. I am going to leave the room and wash my face and hands. When I come back in, in five minutes’ time, you will all be having a nice gathering that has nothing to do with me. We’ll have food brought in and we will have an evening such as we might have had before the news of today. And please, you add, do not be constantly at my service. That isn’t the life I have led, nor is it the life I want to lead. Then you leave the room, and when you return, your family and friends, so sophisticated and strong are they, that they hold to your wishes. A perfectly acceptable evening goes forward, and at some point in the night, the guests all go home, so I told the interlocutor. Now, the next day, there is a knock at the door of your house. It is the young man. His name is Clement. He wants to see you, and you find that you want to see him. Although he is rather poor and not at all remarkable, you find it in your heart to go on an outing with him. This outing brings you closer together. Soon, a week has passed and you have seen him every day. Your family and friends are astonished. You seem to have changed — and grown even more brilliant. You appear to glow — so happy you have become. When you sit about on bridges, kissing this young man, or when you lurk late into the night at motion picture stalls, or drinking counters, you feel that finally it is here — a life you have always wanted. Somehow, though you must have known other wonderful men, other boys, before this, Clement is to you a thing for which to be grateful. Although he does not, cannot understand this, he does not need to. To all his protestations that he is beneath you, you laugh and laugh. You are always laughing at him and calling him to account for his faults and then laughing more, for to you they are nothing. As the situation continues, you see that some you know, your mother, your father, are growing concerned. You worry that they will tell him, that they will spoil everything. So, you tell them, so you tell your friends, say nothing to Clement of what you know. This I told the interlocutor, sitting in his office, my head in my hands. The room became quiet, was suddenly quiet, had been quiet for a long, long time.

I looked at the interlocutor and he was looking at me. I said, she and I, we met, and some months passed. Some months passed, and I said to her, Rana, why don’t we take a car into the country. We are always here in the city with other people around. Why don’t we go somewhere where people aren’t. It might be nice. She was nervous about the idea, so I told the interlocutor. I could see that. She appeared to fear the idea that we would go into the country. Despite the fact that this was a perfectly ordinary, a perfectly acceptable idea, it nonetheless brought a reaction that I could not in any way have anticipated. Away from the city? She was unnerved. Her face became pale. But, she was such a strong person, was always ahead of me, always more consistent, more sharp, and so now that I had hit upon this weakness, I leapt. I said, actually said, I can hardly bear to say it now, but I said to her, I told the interlocutor, I said, come now, you aren’t afraid of going into the country? She said she was not afraid of going into the country. If I wanted to go, we would go. She said this simply, and somewhat breathlessly. I was pleased. Then, why don’t we do it? I continued ruthlessly. It doesn’t matter to be where we can be with other people, where there are services, things, rooms full of belongings, does it? No, she said, it doesn’t. But, I could see that she was afraid, and I could not see why. Still, I pushed her. And so, one morning, when no one was around, we loaded up her car with some canvas bags and a suitcase, and drove out of the city, to spend a week at a house her parents had. They had many houses, and this one was nearby — it was in the country, two days’ drive away. To that house, we drove. She cried a bit as we left, and I couldn’t see why. She was crying and I tried to console her, I said, Rana, what is it? And she would only say, nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing, nothing. When I pressed her, she said that she didn’t know. It had come over her, she didn’t know why. What it was she was feeling, she deemed, was unexplainable. I did not press her. I said something like, well, I am sure you will feel better once we are in the country. That is probably true, she agreed. As we drove, she sat sometimes in the seat beside me, the passenger seat, and when she did she would sit turned so that she could watch me. The top of the car was down, and so her hair would be blowing away in the wind, or alternately she would bind it back with a cloth, and then it would go nowhere, it would just sit neatly beneath the cloth as the wind beset her face. Either, in the first situation, she would allow her hair to be loose, and she then would appear to me out of the corner of my eye as some blinding valkyrie, some effulgent flood of a thing, beauty knowing no boundaries, burning at the edges of itself, or she would bind it down, bind her hair down in a simple cloth, and in binding it down she would transform, all this in the corner of my eye, into a perfect outline of a thing, a nature of natures, a sylph or naiad. This was my passion. I would look at her, actually turn, moved by her appearance to stare at her, and forget the road. At such times her reaction was the opposite of that which anyone could expect. She would say nothing, and stare back at me, face tinged with a smile, until I, coming back into my mind, would realize: I am driving off the road: we are at our deaths! At this very moment I am inches from the edge of the road! Then, I would swerve, and save us, and we would continue. This must have happened nine or ten times, and she never spoke a word about it. She would watch me as I drove and we would talk of other things. At first when we were traveling quickly, it was difficult to hear one another, but when we had gone beyond the city some ways, the roads were all narrow and curved, and then we drove slowly for the most part. When she didn’t sit beside me, there were other places she would sit, and in each she appeared to my eyes quite remarkable. In a sense, I am sure, it is true that she was not beautiful at all, not, as someone would say, a beautiful girl. Rather, she was the utmost extension of an idea of what a particular sort of girl should be. For me, it happened that this was the very type for which I had no defense, none at all. She would climb over the seat and sit amongst the suitcases in the backseat, sprawled out almost flat. Then she would look up into the sky and sigh, and speak to herself. I could hear almost nothing that she said then. At those times, I adjusted the mirror, so that I could look up from the road now and then and see her. Likewise, in the mirror, she could see my eye, so I told the interlocutor. I said, the car was a bit of an antique. I explained this antique car to him, there in the office, using my hands to show its dimensions. It had broad bench seats — really the most comfortable possible car for a drive like that. Her family had the most perfect taste. They didn’t own anything that wasn’t simply great. They owned many things, many, many things and all of them were great. I, on the other hand, owned almost nothing, and the things that I owned were, although carefully chosen, not the finest in the land. In fact, it happened when we met, when I met Rana, that I was embarrassed to bring her to my home. We spoke of this when we were in the car. She was driving and she had large sunglasses on. These were almost the sort an old woman would wear who wanted nothing to do with the sun or anyone beneath it. She said they helped her see the road. She said, do you remember when we first met, and you wouldn’t let me come to your house? For three weeks, I kept begging you, and you would tell me, all right, come to my house, and then you would give me an address, and I would go there, and when I had gone there, it would be a different house — the house of a friend of yours, or the zoo, or a tea shop, or a glovemaker. A glovemaker. She laughed. I never told you to go to a glovemaker’s shop, I said. I don’t even think there is such a thing anymore. Oh, there is, she said. But, I did let you come, I told her. I did, but it was only after…at that point, I told the interlocutor, she interrupted me to finish my sentence. She did that often, so I told the interlocutor, because she had seen an old film as a girl in which the two actors, who were deeply in love, had as the badge of their love that they would finish each other’s sentences. And so, it was in her mind, she was adamant, adamant about it — that she would finish my sentences, and that I should finish hers, and that it would be a good proof. She said, it was only after your house had been robbed. I didn’t get to see it with your things in it. Well, you did, so I told the interlocutor, telling him what I told her, you did go to the house. I said, my house was robbed, all the things were taken out of it. I had planned to invite her and show her my apartment, which was really only one small room in a boardinghouse, but I was going to show it to her, so I told the interlocutor. I lived in a boardinghouse, and there was only a feeble old lock on the door — a double-cut skeleton key would open it, a key such as you could buy — you could actually buy it at a locksmith. You didn’t even need to break in. You could go to a locksmith, buy the key using the change in your pocket, and then be able to open my door with no fuss at all. In fact, I continued, I often suspected that anyone in the entire house, in the boardinghouse at large, could open anyone else’s door. I was of the opinion that all the locks were the same. I did not, however, ever, at any time, try any of the other locks. I wanted to, but was afraid I would be found out, as most of the other boarders rarely left their rooms. They were mostly shut-ins. In any case, I returned one day to find the door locked, but within the room there was nothing at all. It was as if the room had been cleaned out. My assumption was: There has been a mistake. All my belongings have been thrown out in the street. It is because there was a belief that I did not pay my rent — and this must have been the opinion of the landlord, and it was an opinion that he acted on. However, this line of thinking gave me comfort because I had paid my rent. I would be due some remuneration if my things had gone. It would not be so bad, so I told the interlocutor, relating my turn of thought. Yet, at the front desk, I was informed that my rent was paid in full, that this payment was understood, and that I had not been evicted. The manager, a yellowed, rancid sort of man, the type who seldom clips his nails, who believes they need be clipped less often than you and I do, he said, it has been happening almost every day lately. Someone comes down here complaining of being evicted. Really, it is just that a thief has taken your things. You won’t get them back, I wager. I’d guess you’d be lucky to see any of them again. A feeling that I had had before — a sentiment that maybe the other people in the boardinghouse were shut-ins simply in order to keep their rooms safe, now came again. I had once inquired about putting a second lock on the door, but had been derided. What do you have that is worth the price of a lock, the landlord had said. So, I shouldn’t have invited her, I told the interlocutor. I had invited her, but I shouldn’t have. In the first place, to bring her to a shabby boardinghouse — this was a joke of an idea. Who would bring a girl like that there? But, once you took into account that I had put a great deal of care, an immaculate care, I felt, into picking various small and good objects and placing them here and there in this room…The room was quite tiny, and so it was easy to furnish — it hadn’t taken very much skill, just care, and I had done it to the best of my ability. I had put things here and there, and made it rather nice. I was eager to show the place to her. I was terrified that she would realize the yawning divide that separated her grace from the constant forced bowing and scraping of my sad situation, which is to every month, at the end of the month, in the last days of the month, have actually zero money, and be waiting in a fast for the time when there will be even a few coins to buy anything at all. However, she had been so kind and so gentle, that I felt there was something in me to praise, and that furthermore, by showing her the room, I would show her some hidden resources that I had — something about me maybe she hadn’t yet seen. Whether this was a fabrication remained to be seen. In my life I had often had such delusions of grandeur, and when the time came, they were always knocked down. But, perhaps this once, I thought, and then the day came when I returned to my room, unlocked it, and stepped inside and found nothing there. I had actually told her that morning, come to this address at eight in the evening. It is a boardinghouse. My room is no. 37. She was to be away all day, and then would come straight here. The idea was that I would go and buy two items that were good enough for her. One was a loaf of bread from the best bakery in the city. The other was a small piece of cheese from a grocer near the museums. Neither one of these items would be at a disadvantage anywhere. Even if they were to appear in my room, that low place, they would maintain the real integrity of their quality. I felt I could give her a good morsel of food and not be embarrassed. However, now there were no possessions at all. When I spoke to the manager, so I told the interlocutor, he said that he would give me a chair and a small table and a pallet, but only for the time being. He did so, and I was overwhelmed with the feeling that these were the table, chair, and pallet that had just been in my room. He saw my reaction and said, everyone here has pretty much the same furniture. Don’t think too hard about it. Then he turned away. The situation was, therefore, that I was sitting in my room on the one chair, at the one table, looking over at the pallet that was pushed into the corner. A small metal device for heating things was in the corner. It was actually screwed into the wall, and they hadn’t taken it. You remember, she said, as we drove in the car, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I told you, I said to you, she said, it was the most wonderful thing anyone has ever done for me. Do you remember my face when you showed me your room and your things? Do you recall how pleased I was? She was driving quickly, and I had to lean over the gear-shift to speak to her. I said, it was only that I wanted you to like me. Well, I like you, she said. What had I done to please her so? I asked the interlocutor. Well, I had gotten a sheet of paper, a roll, almost a spool of paper, a long spool, and a pen, and some tape. I bought the bread and the cheese and a small glass jar. I bought one orange and a very small strainer. I went back to the house. I laid out three or four lengths of paper, tearing each off, and put the food items on it on the table. I put the table by the window, where the streetlight would shine on it. Then, I went around the room and where each thing had been — where each of my belongings had previously stayed — I wrote the name of it on a small piece of paper, and described it, and taped a placeholder there. So, she said, when I came into the room, I could see what your life had been like. I could run about at my own pace and read your tiny handwriting and learn how the room had been. Then, you squeezed the orange for me to drink, it was sour, and you said you had gotten a sour one on purpose, that it was a special savory orange, and we ate the bread and cheese and lay in the dark. The road ahead dimmed to a tunnel and we shot through the side of a hill, and out again and we were high above a terrain of low hills on a mountainside. What had been a hill on the far side was now a mountain, here where the ground fell away. The road ran in loops to the bottom. In the distance, there, she said, is an inn. Do you see it? I could not. It is there, over that way, she insisted. I think we could stay there tonight.

The interlocutor coughed. I looked up over at him. You know, he said, we think of memory as a redeeming thing. We build monuments that appear to be monuments to this person or that person or this struggle or that, but really, do you know what they are? They are monuments to memory itself, so said the interlocutor. We want it to be meaningful that things be remembered. Everything proceeds from that. If we do not remember what has happened before, then we are powerless to give meaning to what is, day to day. Because, he cleared his throat, because we are all like the Vikings, hoping to be feasted for eternity in a mead hall, there to have our deeds shouted out again and again for the regaling of some fierce and terrible company. In fact, he continued, memory is not the heart of the endeavor. That is the human secret. Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory. His voice slowed as he said these last words. He drew a long breath. There was a bulb overhead in a loose casing. Suddenly, it was very bright, for the lights in the hall had been turned down. A man stuck his head in the door. The interlocutor assured him it was all right. We were just finishing our business. Though we would be some time, it was all right for the janitor to leave for the night. I will lock up when I go, so said the interlocutor. The door shut. What is the rest of it? he asked, and again I was struck by the horror, as I had been, again and again, during my tale, that I was confiding all this in my grandfather. It was inconceivable to me that I would say such things to a man I had hated, and, already distraught to begin with, I recoiled at the sudden fear. Then, his eyes met mine, and they were full of sympathy. It was like that — when he was looking elsewhere, I felt that he was very much like my grandfather, and when he met my eyes, I knew him as this new person, a sort of confessor. Do you need some water? he asked. He was holding a cup. He had filled a cup with water and it was extended to me. I drank it. We arrived, I said, at the inn for the night. She was still driving. This was a territory she had often passed over. She whirled into the parking lot and stopped the car just about anywhere. She pulled up and hopped out, leaving the car, as if it were a horse, any which way in front of the inn. This was something I liked. No one else would be coming, clearly. There was no reason not to do it just the way she had. The people inside the inn did not know us, but were efficient, kind, effective, gave us the keys to a room, showed us the room, brought us some supper, a dish of cold meats that was more than we needed, and dismissed themselves for the night. Rana said, Clement, she said it from the bathroom, Clement, come here. There was a large bathtub — larger than usual, one could actually stretch at one’s length. This was the sort of inn it was — a way station, for people to get back the energy they needed in order to travel on. It must have been there forever, I said to Rana. It has been for my entire life, or at least as long as I can remember things, I can remember it. She was precise in this way — and hated to say things that were not true. Sometimes, she would correct herself, days after having said something, it would occur to her that she had not been specific enough. Then, she would demonstrate the thing she meant, at length, from several angles, to her satisfaction. I, who had never been specific, for whom specificity was a dream, and on whom specificity was wasted, was now the chief recipient of her wonderful specificity. We sat in the bath, and I remember, so I told the interlocutor, that she wanted me to tell her about my hopes for my life. Tell me, she asked, as she sometimes did, what do you plan for yourself? I hated these questions, but I was always calm and quiet. I always avoided them carefully. I had a plan, I said, once, to be a ferryman. That lasted a while, then I wanted to be a traveler, some kind of marco polo. What do you hope for? I asked her. She said, now that we are grown so close, I have begun to include you in my hopes. What if we were to move to another city, one we hadn’t ever been in, and learn it together — we could learn the whole city together. We could learn a new language, just to live there, and we could speak that language together. We could start some business, a business that we know, because it is common here, but the sort of thing that isn’t to be found at all in that city. Then, we could sit in the shop and now and then sell something, and we would have a fine life. I have enough, she said, to support us doing something like that. We wouldn’t even need to make money with the shop. It would be our pastime. Then, every so often some of our friends would travel and visit us and we could see them, and at their arrival we would be so pleased. Hello, hello, we’d say, and after they had been with us a time in that new place, they would go, and we would be equally pleased to see them leave. That’s how it would be, she must have thought to herself, before saying it out loud to me — we can have a fine life like that. I am prepared, I said, to go anywhere. I only want to know ten minutes in advance. Why is that, she asked. Ten minutes? If you will go, you’ll go. You don’t need ten minutes. Ten minutes? She pretended to be wounded at the thought, so I told the interlocutor. Only that I might bury a few things, I said. When I live in a place, I always like to bury some of my belongings in the ground near where I lived. Then, when I come back, I can have the sense that — if I like, I can dig them up. I don’t believe I ever would, but it is nice to feel, even if everything else changed, one’s few things are waiting there beneath the earth. Like bones, she said. If you were really brave, you might leave a finger or two, or an ankle. I would do it, I said, if I thought there was something there worth remembering that badly.

When we slept that night, so I told the interlocutor, I woke and found that she was gone. The bed was empty, and the room was utterly quiet. I had the sensation, such as one sometimes has, that I had been alone for a long time. I went outside and she was sitting on the steps, staring out at nothing. It was dark — country darkness, near complete darkness, and she was sitting in it, by herself. Rana, I called, Rana. I am here, she said, and she was there by my feet. I had walked clear to the end of the porch, and she was there. I sat, and reached out, Rana, and found her. I can’t see you at all. I can’t see anything, she said. Her voice was hoarse, and when I pressed against her I could feel that her face was wet. Are you all right? It is nothing, she said. I was thinking of my parents. But, if we go to a foreign city, I said, it would be a long time before you saw them again. But, I would, she said, in that situation, I would see them again. What do you mean? I asked. Nothing, she said. Let’s find our way inside. Then, we were driving in the car, I was at the wheel, the sun was overhead. I had on a burlap sack of a shirt that fluttered all around me. She wore a light gray dress that was sewn to her — it didn’t flap at all. We shot along the road beneath a frighteningly blue sky. The forest gets deeper, and deeper, I shouted. Deeper and deeper. We are almost there, she told me, as we stopped for gas. She filled the tank, and the two gas station attendants stood watching her, eyes glued to her, as she insouciantly pranced about the gas station, filling the tank in the absolute most tom-boy fashion. My father bought this place when he was still a child, with his inheritance. This statement she repeated, as we pulled up the drive, as I stopped the car in front of the lodge, and as we got out. I carried the bags up the wide steps and she repeated, my father bought this place when he was still a boy. His father passed away, his mother, too, and he no longer wanted to live in the house where he lived. His aunt had come to take care of him, but he was not to be taken care of. He would take care of himself, so she said, I told the interlocutor. He sold the house that he lived in, and bought this one, and moved himself and his aunt there. It was an important place to him, and so I spent most of the summers of my childhood here. The truth is, I haven’t been back in five or six years. It hasn’t, she said, even occurred to me to come here. But now, I am finally here again. My father would have happily joined us. She seemed caught up by the thought. How he would like to be here again. You could contact them, I said, and have them come down. Somehow the thought frightened her. It would be…she said, hesitating, and then she fell hesitating into a sort of not-speech about the matter. She was turning it over in her mind and instead of telling me what she had arrived at, she did the opposite. She walked away and began to explore the house and see the state that it was in.

I am not crying, she insisted. I had found her in an upstairs bedroom, and she was curled on the bed, shaking. You are not crying, I said, but your face is wet. Her face was wet, I told the interlocutor, and she had been crying, but I didn’t know why. I used my sleeve to wipe her nose and mouth, and kissed her, and I did everything I could to comfort her there. When we made love, I said quietly, it was a brutal, brutal thing. It was never easy. It was an intimacy so terrible that it left us both reeling. The first time we did, in my room at the boardinghouse, we could neither of us move for some hours. We lay there, entirely spent. When I found her in the upstairs room, it was almost the same. It was as though there were little walls that would spring up, again and again, between us, and the moment of our physical love was the actual breaking down, the shattering of them. She frequently would cry, abjectly weep, and it would be terror and grief that would turn to joy or joy to grief. She said to me, once, afterward, that she thought nothing physical should ever be easy. It should all be difficult. It should all be done with the maximum effort, utterly helplessly. I said that I would do, as always, exactly what she thought was right. She said, don’t do anything I say, ever. She turned her face away from me. She was crying again and could not be comforted. We rose after an hour or two and went and saw to the house. It was a hunting lodge. I hadn’t been in a hunting lodge, didn’t know there were hunting lodges, but it was one. There were various trophies on walls, and guns in places. There was a mudroom, and natural wood chairs and rocking chairs on long porches that knelt to the ground. The trees were fabulously old, older than practically any trees I had seen in quite a long time, and the house had apparently been built amongst them. The porch had a tree halfway through it that supported the porch roof. See, she said, here is what I wrote in the tree, and she showed me her name there. Raina. I wrote it this way when I was, when I was, it would have been, from nine to eleven. I wanted some self-determination, so I changed my name. Then, a dreadful thing happened. What? A girl came to the school where I studied, and her name was Raina. I didn’t like her at all. She was extremely vulgar, but she liked me, and she liked that we were alike. I remember the teacher saying her name, saying it unnecessarily in my presence, just so I would know that there was another Raina about. I was horrified, disgusted. So, I changed my name back. But, here it is. You should put your name here, she said. She took a little knife from her bag and I opened it and cut my name into the tree. Clement, I wrote. See, I said, I didn’t spell it differently, but I thought I might. You thought you would, she said, but when it came to it, you like your name. You couldn’t write it differently. There is a sacredness to names. Sacredness, I said the word over. Sanctity, she said. I guess sanctity is the word, but it feels like the meaning is wrong. You are better now, I said. You aren’t sad anymore, I told her. You appear fine, I said out loud to Rana, so I told the interlocutor. I don’t know if I wanted her to be fine, or whether she was fine, but while we were there, I kept watching her to see if she was sad, and when she was sad, I would smile and divert her mind, and when she was happy, I would say, helplessly, I would say, oh, you are happy again. If anything, this reminded her of her sadness. I couldn’t tell what it was, and she wouldn’t say. There was a telephone there, but she wouldn’t use it to call anyone. When I suggested it, she said, no, we have come here, and now I don’t want to go anywhere, to be anywhere but here. This is the place for us. We have this house, and the little town nearby where we can buy our groceries. Tomorrow when we get up, we’ll walk into the town. I feel weak now, but tomorrow, I think I will feel stronger. And when some hours had passed, she felt strong enough that we went up a ladder to the roof of the hunting lodge, where there was a sort of viewing platform. We can sleep up here, she told me. There is a thing that happens, if you are very still. The bats pass by overhead, just inches away. I went and brought up some sheets and a pillow. I found a pile of old coats, and I brought them up. We can sleep on these. This was my coat, she said. She held one up. Look, I can still fit in it.

The truth is, I said to the interlocutor, she was perfectly right. When she mentioned the possibility of bats, I did not entirely believe her. I thought she might be speaking metaphorically, or just exaggerating a childhood memory that would never need to bear any proof. However, when we lay there on our backs, looking straight up into the night sky, bats flew past. They flew past. A fabric of stars such as you have never seen, impossibly far, and yet spread before you so clearly, all from right to left and up and down. You felt it had been placed there, so particularly were all these distant objects put into relation to one another. And then — bats, just inches away, tearing past. She said that it would happen, and it did. The bats flew past — not one or two, but dozens and dozens. It went on for at least an hour, just at sunset. I can’t believe it, she said to me, clutching at my arm and pushing against me. She pulled herself up until she was on top of me, and her nose pushed into my cheek. She said, all these years and it is just the same, the bats pass overhead. I imagine they come out of the same caves, they live in the same colonies. I imagine these bats are descended from the bats that I knew, the bats that passed just inches above my face on summer nights fifteen years ago. Once, she said, my brother and I set out one morning to go and find those caves. We told my father. We put on our coats and packed a rucksack, and set out, and there on the porch, where he was sitting, reading, we told him we were off to find the caves. He bid us goodbye and told us that if we found them, there would be a choice then. It is the choice that people have when they find the thing for which they are looking. Will you come back. Then, my father said, you should decide in our favor, in what I would call our favor, in favor of the continued life of our family, and come back. You should not stay there with the bats. I will definitely stay with the bats, my brother said, if we find them. In that case, said my father, I take back my blessing. I hope you wander lost for some hours, and then stumble back here in time for supper. Of course, Rana continued, that is what happened. We had an idea of waiting until dark and using a flashlight to judge the direction of the bats’ flight, but we grew afraid as the night started to fall. When supper came, we were both to be found at the table. I assume, then, my father said, that you did not find the bats, as I hope that you are now, and will always be, a man of your word. This he told my brother, regarding my brother’s proposed domiciling with the bats. You have to understand, Rana said, that all of this is very funny. To my family, it is very funny. It is also something we never would laugh about, or talk about, or even mention. I only tell it to you now so that you can get to know me better. I want you to know me. She threw herself onto me, biting and scrambling with a feigned indignation.

In the morning we woke early, as everyone does who sleeps outside, and she said that she felt strong. This was a thing that sometimes came, whether she felt strong or weak, and we would change our plans accordingly. In the city, I had seen her every day, but not all day, and I imagined, standing there beside her at the hunting lodge, that I had not had the whole picture. She had, in the city, as a way of course, saved her strength so that she was always feeling strong when she saw me. The other things that she said she had been doing in the day, perhaps she had not been doing all of them, or at the very least not with her whole strength, and with breaks. Now, though, in the morning, we stood there in the morning light looking off down the mountain, she had her strength, so she said, and we were to walk in the town. This I told the interlocutor. Where the town was, it was positioned nearby the hunting lodge. Her father, being a boy at the time, had romantically been drawn to places not in the town. His parents had both died in the town. He preferred, then, living with his aunt and guardian, to move to a place beyond the town. Yet, he wanted to be able to observe the town. He had lived there all his life. The town was what he knew. He wanted to be near it, and yet to be apart from it. He took up residence in the hunting lodge, and modified it, with his own plans and the help of architects. He built the porch out into the trees. He raised a platform on the roof. He extended the back to reach out over a stream, so that there is a room actually in the house through which a stream flows. Rana told me all this as we walked into the town, I explained. She loved her father dearly, I could tell. How did it happen, I asked, that his parents died. My grandparents, she said. Yes, your grandparents. Sitting there, speaking of grandparents with a man who looked like my own grandfather, I felt an odd resonance. Perhaps once, I would have said it out loud, actually confronted this person to whom I was speaking, explained it to him, but I was weary and I felt very old. That, I did say out loud. I said to the interlocutor, I feel old. It’s the thing that is most often said to me, he replied. But it isn’t you that is old. You aren’t the thing that needs to change. It’s that you are overcome by your situation, by the way the world has descended on you. There is much in you that is young and new — and not just in you. In any person, even the oldest conceivable person. That’s what it means to be living — to engage with the cacophony of objects. The interlocutor handed me a cloth to wipe my face. Can you repeat, he said, the last portion. You were speaking very quietly and I couldn’t hear you very well.

I don’t want to talk about them, she said, bitterly. Holding the cloth that he had given me, I told the interlocutor this, the bitter thing she had said. Standing there on the wooded slope fast by the hunting lodge, I told her, I can wait. But, a moment passed and she said very cleanly, as if she had cleaned off the sentence with a brush and then handed it to me, my grandfather went first, and she followed him after a week. We went on, she held my hand, but didn’t speak. We walked slowly, and it was mostly down one hill or another. In the town, Rana was recognized at every place we went. First, at the grocery store, by the clerk, a young man of about our age; he said, Rana. He said it in a very unadorned fashion. Rana. Outside the grocery store, she commented on it. Do you hear the local accent? I said, I think I do. You can tell, she remarked, that someone is from here, if it sounds like they are narrowed in on what they are saying — as if they are saying it after having thought about it for a long while. It isn’t so much an accent, I started to say, as…a mannerism, she said. A collective mannerism, that’s right. I used to play with that boy. I think he was in love with me. We went on into the next place where she was to be recognized. That was a store that sold sweaters and other things of wool. She bought a long wool sweater for me, worked all about the shoulders with patterning. Everyone who comes here, she said, must buy a sweater. The girl there, who was extremely pretty, told Rana that she shouldn’t pay. Rana brought the sweater to the counter and tried to pay, and the girl would not accept her money. It became clear that they knew one another. Take it, this girl said. I thought to myself, she must be the most beautiful girl in the village, even as she said to Rana, Rana, I haven’t seen you in so long. Then, they talked for a little while, and I went outside. I could see them giving me furtive glances, these two utterly elegant people. They must have been speaking about me. In my heart, then, a sort of hollow but steely pride that Rana would want to be seen with me. She came out and we continued on. There was a small store that sold wine and had some chairs and a few tables inside and outside. Here we are, said Rana. This is where my father would sit, when we came here in the summer, she said. He’d sit here and play backgammon all through the summer with other old men. There were no old men there at that moment, so I told the interlocutor, relating the situation in the village. The place was largely unoccupied. Let’s sit, she said. So, we sat there, and the proprietor came out and brought us two glasses and a carafe of wine. It is very good, she said, without pouring or tasting it. This town has a reputation for wine through the whole world. If you like wine, you will enjoy it very much. You seem happy, I said. You are doing all right. I feel good, she said. I haven’t been here in such a long time. It is a good place to come to. It is nice that some things can’t be taken away, as long as…She poured the wine into the glasses and we sat there. The proprietor came back over. I am sure of it, he said, I am sure you are Rana Nousen, Andro Nousen’s daughter. I remember you. She accepted this, and she said his name to him, and he was very pleased. He explained that they don’t come to his place to play backgammon anymore, the ones that did, because they were mostly dead. The younger people aren’t interested, but we do all right. We get enough custom in the evenings, he said to us, so I told the interlocutor. We sat at a table on the side of the main street of the little mountain town and heard this man’s estimation of his business, so I said. But, your father, the man asked. He is still living? He is, said Rana. Hers is, he said to me, a very delicate family. All the aristocracy from these parts are. He gave her a familiar nudge with his elbow. It is something you are quite used to, I know. We have all become used to it. Your brother’s death, though, was too early. Much too early, he said. He was here often. He would come with your father, nearly every day, carrying that monocular, what was it — that shooting glass that your father had given him. He was always staring off through it. Much too early, much too early. He coughed a short, harsh cough. Much too early.

You must be used to what, I asked. What brother, I asked. I didn’t know you really had a brother. What was he talking about? The proprietor had gone away, and we sat there in that village, at a table in the street, and Rana was looking at me with her bright, lovely face, and her hair was falling all over, and her posture in the chair was graceful, so graceful, I almost couldn’t bear it. I could see that she was tired again, I could see she didn’t want to speak, but she was bearing up, and part of it was in her raising up of her chin and her shoulders, and it stretched her dress against her body and she was breathing in and out with difficulty. If I had ever loved anybody, I thought to myself, and I kept saying, tell me. What did he mean? She shook her head. I wasn’t hiding anything from you. I just didn’t mention it yet. My brother, he died when he was a boy. I told you about him — with the bats, the bats. He died of the same thing as my grandparents. It goes that way in my family. Most of them die of the same thing. That’s why he asked about my father. He is not very old, though, my father. He is not going to die. What is it, I asked. Now we were walking again. I was carrying a canvas bag with all the groceries, and a flask of the wine over my shoulder, and we were walking back up the hill to the lodge. We would stop occasionally so she could rest, and then we would continue. The exertion and the mountain air made her eyes bright and fierce, and she would look at me and it was as if the sudden sight of me pleased her. That was a thing that was different with her than with everyone else I had ever known. With everyone else, they would come into a room and I would be standing there, and they would see me and recognize that I was there, and then something would happen, an action or a conversation. It would proceed directly from their recognition of knowing me, or their recognition of not knowing me. Something about me would activate in their head, everyone I had ever known, and in the space of a moment, some action would occur and I would be enmeshed in it, or I would be separate, I would push myself away from it, and be distanced. That was the usual thing. But, with Rana, whenever it happened that she didn’t know I was somewhere, or whenever she was away in her mind thinking, and forgot that I was there, then it would happen, so I told the interlocutor, her eye would come upon me, and an absolute leaping delight would rise in it. I would see that her whole being was gladdened. She had seen me — I was near! For me, this was hardly to be believed. I didn’t know what it was at first, until I knew, and then it was a thing that I could only be grateful for — a thing I could never deserve. In the mountain air, she was sitting on a rock and she was looking at me, and her eyes flashed with that same light. It is a sickness, she said, that makes your body unable to defend itself. Slowly you die of something else. And because there is always something else, always something else. Stopping any one particular something-else doesn’t call a halt to it. My grandfather died, and my grandmother, who was related to him — in my family cousins often married — must already have been battling it, and when he died, she gave in. My brother gave in when I was fifteen. Everyone gives in. That’s how we talk about it, she said, my father to me, and my mother, my brother even, my cousins, my aunts. He gave in. She gave in. After a time, it was too much, and he gave in. Then she had no choice but to give in also. How do you know if it has begun? I asked. Have you ever had any sign of it yourself? She blinked and smiled. She actually laughed, so I told the interlocutor. Me, no. No, not me. I’ve always been just fine. Why would you think that? I said that she had been weak of late. She said, it is just the altitude. Haven’t you felt weak as well? This was, she said, in any case, a good climate for the illness. That’s why my grandparents had been here in the first place. The family had settled part of their estates here, hundreds of years back, because it was a good place for convalescence. Of course, she continued, all that land is long gone. Just the hunting lodge remains. You are fine, I asked. Are you? Stop it, she said, hitting me lightly on the arm. I’ll beat you up the hill. Then, she went ahead of me up the slope, I told the interlocutor, and I could only hurry after her, burdened with all our purchases. When we reached the house, she was exhausted. Her face was sunken, and she could only lie in the downstairs daybed, breathing softly. I helped remove her clothing, and looked at her body there on the bed beneath me. I undressed and lay beside her. We are as far away, she said, as anyone can be from anything, here. Do you like that feeling? I asked her. I like it, she said. I have longed for it. I entered a state, so I told the interlocutor, wherein I was with her and I was watching us both from a point beyond. Somehow, I could see that we were in the house, going about the house, making meals, eating meals, playing cards or chess, sitting out late drinking wine and talking of nothing at all, or sitting close together on a bench with our heads inches apart, talking with great direction of particular and very important things, these things I could see as from a great distance, and from up close. I could see as though out of my own eyes, and out of the eyes of another. I feel it was some circumspection that had grown around me. She said suddenly, after we had been there four days, I want to make all of our plans. What plans, I asked. All of them, she said, I want to make all of the plans that we will make for our future, I want to make every one. I want to make the plans for what we will do now, while we are young. I want to make plans for what we will do partway through our careers, when we are in our primes, and the world has received our gifts with great gladness and even approbation. I want to make plans for our old age, for what we will do when we are old and the world opens again — to the separate wishes we have then, when for us everything will have changed, everything but that we will still want — that I will still want you with me. This she said to me, I told the interlocutor. This person who was so far above me, not just in terms of wealth or birth, but in actual human evaluation. I am sure of it, as sure of it as I could be of anything, that if a group of the finest people that had ever lived were to see to her and look her over, speak to her and know her, they would set her high, high above me, so high that I would never have met her or known her. I said, I can scarcely believe that it did happen, that we did meet, but we did, and for some reason she recognized me as something like herself, although in this I think that she was wrong. Where she was courageous and strong, willful, passionate, clever, I was cowardly, weak, forever bowing beneath the weight of things I did not understand and could not. Perhaps I will be a doctor in a small town, she said. We will find a small town where so little is known of medicine that we can smatter together some portion of knowledge and I could be a doctor and you could be my helper. We would do what we could for people, and not just for people. Perhaps it would be a place so basic that the same person deals with animals and people. Not a human hospital, not a veterinary hospital, just a hospital. She said this, laughing at herself in a way, laughing at her plans and her planning, but delighting in it. She had no intention of being a doctor. By this she was teaching me how to enjoy her planning, and her work of ideas. We shall take pleasure in everything, she was saying — in things, and in the hope of things.

Do you ever convince people to go through with it? After some point? I asked the interlocutor. He shook his head. Never, never. Then, he thought better of it, of this thing he had said, and he began to speak: There was a man who came to me, right at the beginning, said the interlocutor. I was not very good at this job, yet. I didn’t know exactly how to go about doing it. No one did, really. We were still working out all those things, for ourselves and for each other. But, then, at that time, there were many people, as there always are, who needed our help. We could not fail to do the job because we didn’t know how to do it. Then, at that time, not knowing how to do the job, we still had to do the job. It was in this way that we learned the work, and came to our present expertise. In any case, this man, this case that I am telling you about, he came to me first thing in the morning. We have a consensus, we who do this work, said the interlocutor, that the people who come first thing in the morning are the ones in the greatest danger. It is easy to feel at night, or in the loathsome stretch of the afternoon, that all things are near to their end. But, in the morning, the bright morning, to wake and go forth, and feel utterly confined to a brittle wash of apathy or misery, that is something else. So, when he arrived in the morning time, right when I was arriving, in fact, I had a premonition. He was a librarian, and a poet. He had published many books of his verse. This is what the secretary said to me, coming into my office ahead of him, in order to fill me in. I’m just filling you in on the details, she said to me. Nowadays, I would never allow such a thing. As you can see, we operate entirely without secretaries. They are unimportant in this enterprise. Also unimportant is — to be warned of anything. All that I need to know, the person himself, he or she will tell me. And that is crucial. The interlocutor became very animated. He shook his fist. It is crucial that a person be allowed to pierce the veil of their appearance and show me the person that he or she really is, beyond the apparent state of his/her being. But, at the time, he continued sadly, I hadn’t yet worked those things out, and so I was forewarned. I called the man in. In fact, I had read a book of his poems before. I actually owned one book of his poems, given to me by a friend. They were wonderful poems. I dislike poetry, as it is mostly bad, the interlocutor confided to me, but when poems are good, they are better than anything, better than cinema, novels, theater, song, so said the interlocutor. He was speaking on and on, and I realized I had lost track of what he was saying. I was tired, and I had practically drifted off, but not into sleep. I was just numb, sitting there numb. He was still talking, and I tried to listen. He said, there are, though, only a few good poems, and this man had written one or two of them. I made the mistake of, during our speech, as he told me what he expected for his life going forward and how he wanted nothing to do with it, I made the mistake of actually employing a turn of phrase that he himself used in one of his poems. I don’t know how it happened, I must have, my mind must have been repeating the poem quietly to itself as he spoke, comparing his speech with what I had read, and so the phrase was there, in the ether, and I snatched it up, trying to say something calm and gentle to him. But, rather than saying something calm and gentle to him, I triggered the worst conceivable reaction. Whereas before I had spoken, the place we were sitting was completely safe, was a calm, cool place for him to be, a sort of perch from which he could look out on other lives — a place from which he could go out without the clothing of his own life, to seek new things, whereas it had been that, as soon as I spoke, it suddenly became a place where he was known, where he might be remarked upon. In that moment he lost his humanity, and became a kind of organ grinder. It was as though I had asked him to dance like a bear. But, perhaps it was all for the best, continued the interlocutor, because, and the reason I am telling you all this is still to come, it forced me to come up with a formulation that could rise above the error I had made, and bring him back to peace. Just as you have a sense of yourself, and propagate that sense of yourself with your tales and personal legends, so he had the same. His was, though, completely poisoned. He was as weak as a child, not in that chair where you sit, but in another very much like it, not in this office, but another precisely like it, the mirror of it. I said to him, it is a fallacy to divide thing from thing, and it brings us all our pain. You have spent so long discriminating, finding the least possible, finest discriminations until you are capable of saying how this leaf differs from that, or the way in which a window, an unapproachable window high overhead, can contain all our feelings of helplessness, that you now seek only to divide, even when you think you seek nothing. We have a help that can be offered to you. You can resume, can easily resume, the business of being a person — not this person, or that person, but a person. And you can stay that way. We can provide you with an unspecific life. And so, for the first time, I broke the rules. We are never to attempt to convince anyone. That is not our job. But, I felt certain, sitting there, that I had taken away the purpose with which he had arrived, and that he would never come again. In fact, I convinced him to take the cure. I administered it to him that very day. A digression, he said, quite a digression, but an answer to your question. I will always try to give you the truth if you ask me for it. He adjusted his suit and looked up and down the pant leg, as if there were something there. I had been listening to him, but not carefully. I was still in the mountains, still pretending in my own way to be sitting with Rana, looking at her, and being looked at by her. So, I continued, telling the interlocutor, saying to the interlocutor that I have never had much thought for myself. I said, continuing, I have always drifted from place to place, thinking myself the least of the matters near to me. I have never felt wronged when someone has gone on ahead of me. But, she, she would feel wronged, I could imagine, hearing her speak of me, on my behalf. What she thought of me was far more than what I thought of myself. And so, she wanted nothing more than to talk of plans. Her idea of our future was a large and bountiful one. All the ideas that she wove spread out like ink in water — we would have a garden, a house with a garden. There would be a garden on the roof of the house, and on the wall that ran around the house. The paths would be made of stone and moss. The house would have thick glass windows like portholes. No, it would have no windows, none at all. We would be living outside, essentially, in the garden. No, we would live under the house in a kind of burrow, and emerge now and then into a garden, a garden we spent most of our time tending. It would be cool there in the summer and warm in the winter. It could be outfitted with fine wood like a nordic spa. It could be marvelous. The windows could be paper. Whenever they tore, we could simply place another window there. She became gripped and her ideas ran on and on, on and on. I felt that it was disturbing her, that this talk of our future was making her weak. I was sure that she was growing weaker. It seemed that the altitude and this flurry of speeches, one speech after another that she was giving to me or I to her, were tiring her. But, she became angry, and actually said coldly to me, if I didn’t want to have such conversations, we need not do so. Of course, I wanted to — and so we did. Then, suddenly she was happy again. We sat on the daybed of the house, and she said, do you know what, I once earned a degree. A degree, I asked. A degree, she said. Sitting there on the daybed, she told me that she had once earned a degree in philosophy. The school where I went, they only taught philosophy. It was a college just for that. We would take courses in math and science and literature, but all of it, only in the service of philosophy. The idea was, she related to me, that everything is useless without philosophy, because, not having the proper philosophy, one will never know how to apply anything, how to apply the things one knows. Then, one can only mimic other people, follow after them. One can never apply anything in one’s own right. She told me that she had taken a course with a professor, that he had offered a course on a man named Jens Lisl. Lisl was a great philosopher, she said, but he was mostly unknown, and no one wanted to take the class, no one but Rana, and so the professor, who already had a high opinion of her, he told her that they could make the course a thesis course, and that she could write a thesis on Lisl, if she was so interested in him. She laughed, telling me this. She had signed up for the course on a whim, because she liked the name, Jens Lisl. But the professor was sure that he had intimations of her seriousness. He called her to his office, actually to his office in the ivy-run school building, past the secretary, and all the other offices, and he sat her down and he said, Miss Nousen. I think that you are more serious than most, and I believe that you can make a contribution to the efforts that have so far gone forward in the study of Lisl. Lisl, Jens Lisl! She laughed. A name I did not even know. I had not read Lisl yet, I said. I am sure of it, he told me. This is a certain proposition. So, the last two years of my study, I did not take regular classes, as the way was with all the other students, but I took this one class, Lisl, with this one professor, and we wrote several papers, actually together, my contributions and his, about Lisl. I mentioned then to Rana, so I told the interlocutor, that I had never heard of Jens Lisl. No one has heard of him, she said. He is a sort of amalgam, as it turns out. He is an amalgam that serves as the core of a philosophy of inevitability. It is also sometimes called Modern Inevitability, or, the New Inevitability. It is a rethinking of determinism. We worked on these ideas for two years together. I was nineteen when we began, nearly twenty, and when we were through, I was twenty-two. I graduated, and never thought about any of it again, really. Sometimes, the professor sends me letters, but I don’t read them. I believe, she said, that he was in love with me. You like to say that, I said. She blushed. She was always very serious. I do think that he was in love with me. I told her it wouldn’t surprise me. Everyone would fall in love with her, given time. But, not if they know how I really am, she said, the way you do. At that point, I said, most would abandon you. I agreed with her, and told her that anyone, actually getting to know her, would get rid of her in an instant. This was extremely funny and we laughed for some time. I didn’t tell you, she said suddenly, that I had earned a degree out of pride. I am not proud or ashamed of it. Like most things in my life, I am not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. It will just be hard for you to understand me, if you don’t know that I spent a long time on work like that. When I am cutting a carrot you can think of it, and understand me better.

It was my idea the following day that if she was strong enough, we should take another walk into town. She wanted to, but felt that we should wait a day. I insisted that it would do her good, that waiting a day might just make her settle into a sort of lassitude from which she would only emerge when we had returned to the city, and then we would have lost the opportunity once more to see the town. We might never come back here again, I said. Oh, we shall come back many times, she disagreed. But, all the same, I forced her out the door, and we made it about a quarter of the way to the town before I realized what an awful idea it had been. She was absolutely overtaxed. She could barely stand. We stood there in a sort of alpine clearing, the path going up on one side and down on the other. Even the vegetation appeared taxed. I can go no further, she said. She didn’t say anything. She would never say that she couldn’t go on. It wasn’t her way. Instead, she sat there and wept soundlessly. That was her way of giving up. I carried her back to the house and installed her again in the daybed. I got her water and some food. Then, I drove down into town to fetch more things, and returned, and made her supper. By the evening, she was feeling better again, although she was weaker than I had ever seen her. She had taken off her clothing. She wore just a loose pair of pants and a shawl. She lay on the bed, her head propped on a pillow. When I entered the room, she smiled. When I came again, with supper, she sat up and, leaving the shawl, came to me there in the middle of the room. She was mad with energy, then, I told the interlocutor. But, as soon as we were finished, she was exhausted again, and I had practically to feed her the supper spoon by spoon.

When supper was through, I told her about my visit to the town. I told her the wineseller had been talking to me about her brother’s death again. She said that he always talks about it. He had a son who was best friends with my brother, and the family took it hard. In fact, the wineseller himself was probably her fifth or sixth cousin, related at some insurmountable distance. I had mentioned this thing, my conversation with the man, as a way of gaining territory. I wanted her to feel that I was conversant with the town and with the past. That even, separate from her, I could navigate the waters of her past and of her family’s past, and that furthermore, to others I was identifiable as someone connected to her. All of this was present when I had said, the wineseller talked more to me of your brother. But, if this statement had the effect that I wanted, I did not see it. Rather, it plunged her into a sadness in which she could think only of her family illness. She wanted to speak of it with me. Now she would tell me about it. The family illness. Before, she hadn’t said anything of it to me, but now perhaps it was good for me to know, and why not from her, rather than from strangers like this wineseller, who, after all, does not know the real account, or the real ideas, but goes along filling in the narrative with his own creations, or so she supposed. You wouldn’t believe, I told the interlocutor, how carefully she laid out these mental objects, the mythology of her family’s illness. She said to me that she had never spoken about it to anyone before, to anyone who had not had complete knowledge about it, and so, she would be clumsy in talking. She was unused to ignorance on this subject, as everyone in her family possessed knowledge about it that predated her own. Still she would try. She told me that her family was known, in the places where they historically had owned land, as a family of effete languishers. They were practically defined by their illness. One after another, for seven hundred years, as far back as the family goes, the illness has struck again and again. The only way out of it, she confided, is to die in some physical accident. Even in this age of medicine, there has been no advancement. And why? Because, she said, it is not worth it for the world at large to put medical resources to work on a problem that affects.000000014 percent of the population. I don’t know if that is the actual number, she said, but if it isn’t that one, it is one like it. During the Renaissance, the family had been wealthy, much wealthier than they are now, and they had employed doctors specifically to find a cure. Of course, the state of medicine was such that it was useless. They tried to cure it with alchemy. This was not a joke. Vast wealth had been spent trying to save her family from an illness using alchemy. If it had worked, her brother would still be living. In fact, before that, before her brother’s death, when she allowed herself to think about the illness more often, it had occurred to her, and she had once actually said so to her father, that the money had been ill spent. Ill spent? Her father had not understood. His daughter, eight years old, was standing before him, telling him that their fifteenth-century predecessors had misspent funds. What could she mean, so I told the interlocutor, that’s what she said to me, explaining her father’s turn of mind concerning his young daughter’s statement. I told him, she said, continuing, that if our ancestors had set aside the sum used to employ those doctors, quite a large sum, and set those monies at compound interest for all of the time until now, medicine would have changed, would have become useful, actually useful, as it is now, rather than useless, as it was then, and we would have the money to employ scientists and doctors to find a cure. Her father and mother had enjoyed this idea very much, and had often brought it out as evidence of their daughter’s brilliant impudence, relating it at dinner parties. So often have they told it, so Rana said to me, sitting there in my arms on the daybed, that I tired of it and never wanted to hear the story. But I tell it to you now, as it makes sense to hear it. The other idea that was had, and this was a very good idea — it was had during the nineteenth century, by some woman of the family who went on to be an abbess, who actually left the family to be an abbess. All the same, she had an idea for the family, as a young woman, while still with the family. That idea was: we could benefit from marrying others, and not marrying with the group of ourselves. Breed it out of us, so she said. Although this suggestion was taken very seriously, it could not be effected. Why was that? I asked her. The reason is this: almost no one in my family can tolerate the presence or conversation of those not in my family. Although we are in some sense a populous family, although in each generation there are between seven and ten children, every house a full house, she said, still it is true that it remains the same blood. Cousins marry cousins marry cousins. Occasionally sister marries brother. And why? Because we are all so sensitive. We simply cannot bear to speak with or be with other people. Therefore, a feeling grew up in the family, within the family, one never spoken of, that the illness is simply what we deserve. She told me this and I told the interlocutor, saying it with the same emphasis she used, what we deserve. That my father, for instance, she continued, deserves to die based upon his parents’ inability to tolerate the company of regular people. That my brother deserved to die based upon my father’s inability to tolerate anyone other than my mother. But, what about, I said, you and I have met and we are together. If we were to have children…I don’t think I need to tell you, she said, what the general feeling is in my family about you. It is regrettable, but we shouldn’t hide from it. She laid her head against my neck. It isn’t your fault, she said, but they don’t really want to see you around. They have, you see, certain things that they want to talk about, and they only want to talk about those things, and they only want to talk about them in a particular way. You could imagine yourself, perhaps, now, as we sit here talking, thinking of a way that you could isolate, through careful study, what are the exact things that my parents, and their brothers and sisters, my great-aunts, my great-uncles, the whole clan of them, settled at a long table or beneath an arbor at a gathering, would want to talk about, what those things are and what they are not. You imagine now that you could isolate, she used the word again, these things, and that having done so you could take part, meritoriously, in such a conversation. But, in fact, it just isn’t true. You would begin to say something and immediately you would go awry. You would miss a subtlety of phrasing, and a feeling would spread through the crowd — disdain. It wouldn’t be your fault at all. Darling, I feel that you are their equal, that you are equal to every last one of them, even to them all gathered together. Wasn’t I the one who said, let us go to a foreign city? Didn’t I say it just yesterday or the day before? I did. Yet, you aren’t good enough for them, not in the way that you want. And when I am there, with them, it is even hard for me, much as I champion you, to listen as you put your foot wrong again and again and again. Even when we speak of something like, the last time you came to visit the house, you see now what a thing it has been for me to have you visit, and still, I had you visit again and again and again, don’t you see what that means, well, when you last came to visit — there was said, my father, he told us a story about his work. You remember, he said that he was conducting an examination of the Hruezfeldt dam, along with two of his brothers, who are all amateurs by the way, none of my family has ever professionally done anything, nonetheless they are brought in to consult often on matters of every sort by government, because of their extreme expertise. You recall that he said the problem of the dam was not a physical problem, but an economical problem. The government itself, in its maintenance of the dam, might as well be standing there at Hruezfeldt with its finger blocking the dam. That was the manner in which the Hruezfeldt dam problem was holding back the province at large from taking effective action in any number of spheres. Do you remember what you said then, in response? She remembered, I told the interlocutor, the entire conversation, a conversation I had utterly forgotten. I had to tell her that I did not remember. At that very moment I wanted to be for her a person who remembered everything and who therefore perhaps, beyond all possibility, possessed a chance of earning her father’s respect. But even in that one minor incident of our conversation about a conversation, even there, away from her family, I was forced to capitulate and explain that I could not remember what had been said, so I told the interlocutor shamefully. He looked on, waiting for me to continue.

Could I have a glass of water again, I asked. He nodded, and went out into the hall to fetch it. When he had given me water before, I hadn’t noticed him leave, but perhaps he had. He returned and stood there, handing me the glass. I took it and drank. He sat. I was embarrassed, I said. She had never disclosed any of this before, and now, there in the mountains, I felt we were coming to the heart of my unsuitability. So, I told the interlocutor, there in the daybed, she said to me, in complete seriousness, she said, about my father, in that conversation in our house, three weeks ago, in which he mentioned out loud that darling of his mind, the Hruezfeldt dam, a thing which, to my knowledge he had never done — always before he had called it the dam or the backbone, already he had been so kind and solicitous in this conversation as to mention the dam by name — and you told him, fiercely, that perhaps a different source of power could be used to replace the dam, you said it loosely, easily, a different source of power, and then the province wouldn’t need to rely on water, on that form of power, which after all was only one of many ways. After all, during your time in the civil corps, you had worked on other forms of energy, so you said. Water was not the final ends and means. You said it matter-of-factly and without rancor, but the offense you gave was enormous and sudden. I remember in particular the callous way you threw in this colloquialism, ends and means. The whole table was horrified. My father reeled back in his chair. Make the Hruezfeldt dam, the enormous Hruezfeldt dam, into a sort of architectural folly? Declare the work of our hands, of our fathers’ hands, and of their fathers’ hands, all some sort of mistake? The Hruezfeldt dam? Was I speaking about that dam or about some other? It had been frightening, said Rana, to hear my father spoken to in this way, and indeed, she had never seen him respond in that manner to anyone, never having needed to. You recall that I spoke for you, saying that, of course, we were speaking extremely theoretically about it. We, in the dining room of a house nowhere near Hruezfeldt, some of us never having even been there, never having even seen the dam itself, were extremely theoretically discussing it. I told him, she said, that this young man, you, understood the matter was not the Hruezfeldt dam, but the province itself and the political map. Perhaps, I suggested, she told me, perhaps, I said to my father, that an alternate suggestion was to redraw the political map of the province. So she said to me, remembering her interaction with her father, and so I told the interlocutor. Do you recall, she said, how, as soon as my voice, with its known cadence, rose in the family dining room, my father appeared assuaged? Do you recall how as the gentle good sense of my measure, so quickly suggested, washed over him, he fell at peace at once. He merely nodded, and took another bite of his food, the matter forgotten. The only glimmer of it was when we rose from the table and he dismissed himself, he went to bed early. Do you remember it? She pressed my hand, there on the daybed. It wasn’t your fault, she said, but you simply can’t understand him, or any of them. It would be like trying to run a race beneath a road while the rest of them were running upon it. You would always finish last. There we were, sitting in the lodge that her father had bought as a child, and I had learned this truly momentous thing: I would never become a part of her family. Also, I learned a corollary and equally momentous thing: she did not care. We would go away together and never see any of them again. She would make occasional trips back to see them, but I would not be in attendance. There would be no reason for it, she said. She delighted in planning these details of our life. For her, my absolute rootlessness, the fact that I had no family, had little connection to anyone, lived in a boardinghouse, wrote inconsequential ideas in little notebooks, and generally was beneath all notice — for her, that was wondrous. My very nonentity made it easy for me to be assimilated instantly and totally into her plans. She was one, I confided in the interlocutor, who could not speak of something if there was the least chance it was not realistic. She did not want to waste her time in unrealizable projects. For her, she could take no joy in them. All the same, with her family’s vast wealth, many projects that seemed to me from the get-go foolish or impossible, were to her completely sensible, inevitable even. That I could be without a doubt incorporated into her plans made it easy for her to chart with pleasure the things that she would want to do, and made it conceivable that these plans, fleshed out in her mind, could be said out loud to me, and related. I have never before, she told me, planned with anyone. Even my brother, whom I loved dearly, and even all my other brothers and sisters, who were already grown when I was a child, even they have never heard me plan. They believe that I have no plans, that I go from day to day planless. Of course, to them, this is sensible. They live extremely coherently within the traditions of our family. You will, I’m sure, meet them all briefly, at one or another family event where you are absolutely required. You will see that they are of a piece. I am to some degree viewed as a wild person. I have had friends, for instance, who are not in the family. This is a liberty my mother never had. Indeed, I went to school outside of the home, another strangeness. You could say that I was a sort of experiment that my father made. It has turned out well, I told her. Yes, very well, she agreed. Shall we go outside, I asked her, for it had begun to rain, and the raindrops were sounding on the porch roof. I helped her to a chair on the porch and we sat there, staring out into the rain. Sometimes, she told me, I feel that we are in the clouds here. Of course, it’s nonsense. We are not that high up, but I sometimes enjoy thinking that we are. I looked out at the clouds, and I felt that she was right. She was right that we were in the clouds, and that we were not in the clouds. This occasioned a small happiness that ran along my spine and out to the cuffs of my shirt. Rana looked at me very seriously, then. That chair was the chair that Seamus Mendols always sat in. He was my father’s rival. He would visit and they would argue, angrily, for hours. Nothing was good enough for him. He was angry at my father for not living up to what Seamus Mendols had expected for him. He was angry at my father for having children who had failed to do things as great as the things that my father ought to have done, the things my father had not done, but that Seamus Mendols had expected of him. Seamus Mendols could drink any amount of liquor and get nowhere near drunk. He could reason like a logician, and he picked apart everything that anyone said, as if it were a necessary function of the conversation, that it be reduced to its barest, most functional essentials. The lessons in logic that we all received, even my father, a so-called finished person, a true gentleman, the lessons we received from Seamus Mendols during the summer months of my childhood, were truly something. Seamus Mendols hated the days of the week. He disliked the base-ten numbering system. He argued against clothing that required zippers or snaps. He was writing a book, had been writing a book forever, the publishing of which, at some point in the future, would be a great corrective. No one but my father had seen this book. He would not speak of it, but sometimes Seamus would say to my father, in passing, as they spoke of something else, as in 3:12:92, referring to a passage. Then, my father would nod, and understand, so thoroughly had he read this work of Seamus Mendols. My brother was inadequate. To Seamus Mendols, my brother was a sort of joke. My sisters and brothers who were long grown, but whom Seamus Mendols had watched grow, sitting on that same porch, long before my birth, they were, if anything, richer jokes than my brother was. However rich the joke of my brother was to Seamus Mendols, the sisters and brothers who had preceded him were richer. That so many little beings could issue forth from my father, and none of them, not a one could make any motion to complete the work that was my father’s to do was to Seamus Mendols a frightening, sad, and inevitable confirmation of the world’s slothful indifference. Of the world’s impassive, perfect indifference. Its slothful indifference. He could not decide. He would sit in the chair repeating first the one and then the other back and forth. My own arrival, Seamus Mendols greeted with animation. He thought of me as a sort of antidote to the general horror of my family. She is your better, he would tell my father again and again. Of course, it was not true. My father knows everything I know, and then beyond that, he knows other things the existence of which I have not guessed at, and he moves through all of it with ease. I, meanwhile, make my small attempts. Seamus Mendols saw these attempts and rewarded me for them, for each one, with a cheerfulness that was quite rousing. It was his idea that I go to a college, that I be educated in public school. He spoke to my father, and I was their little experiment. When Seamus Mendols died, at the house he kept just up that road over there, my father said, I will never come back. He has not returned to this town since that day. That is how dear Seamus Mendols was to him. My mother, my father could bear. He can speak to her and live with her day in day out. But, I believe the person whose company he most enjoyed was Seamus Mendols. The chair you are sitting in right now is the chair he spent years of his life in. There is no such thing as feeling the effects of that. Seamus Mendols does not linger in that chair. But perhaps you can enjoy the view, and feel the import of it. When I was here as a child, no one but Seamus could ever sit in that chair. My father did not make a rule of this, nor did he enforce it. It was unspoken.

It rained all that day and into the next. When the rain passed away, I made another suggestion: that we take a short drive. There is an old mill we could go to, I saw it on the road, so I told her. I have never been there, she said, though I lived here for such a long time. We passed it often, and a feeling of mystery has long lain about it. The idea that we should go there, I love it, she told me. Let’s take some things with us and have a picnic. As she dressed, I began to tell her about an experience I had once had. Years ago, I said, when I first joined the civil corps, I traveled to many far places. In one of them, we were working to build a bridge that would connect two small towns. The idea was that these two small towns, each one on the opposite side of a river, would, when the bridge was built, become one single city. Although there had long been antagonism between the two towns — a history going back decades, perhaps even hundreds of years, of rancor, still it was believed the bridge would solve everything. We lived in tents along one side of the river. This was a relatively new part of the republic. There were still measures there in place that did not exist elsewhere, that no longer exist anywhere. One was prison. There was another worker, an older man, who shared my tent, along with three or four other older men. One day, he found that someone had been going through his things. He found that some old photographs of his had been taken, photographs of his wife and child. I did not understand why it was important then. It was beyond me, but he was enraged. There outside the tent, he confronted the other men, including one who he thought, he was sure of it, was the thief. We were using heavy steel cable to make the bridge, and there were pieces of it, cut pieces, lying around the camp. One was in his hand, and he struck the thief with it. To me it seemed an inconsequential blow. The cable was heavy, very heavy, and the blow was slow. I watched his arm travel through the air slowly. The thief did nothing to stop it. He seemed frozen. The cable went to the space where his head was, and moved the head out of the way, it moved the head to a place adjacent from the place where it had previously been. The one who had taken the photographs fell to the ground and was completely dead. He probably stopped breathing before his body reached the ground. So, I told Rana, as she dressed for our outing. She loved stories of this kind, and I could see by the way she drew her clothes on over herself that this was a good time. Where, for another audience, I might have stopped then, seeing that I had horrified them, for her I continued, so I told the interlocutor. I told her that, of course, the man was taken away. He was imprisoned in a place not ten miles away. There was a tribunal that decided on his fate, and he was put away. I worked on that bridge for another year, and every week or so, I would travel to the prison to visit him. It was a mid-size place, with a high electrified fence surrounding it. I would come, and there would be a group of other people waiting to visit. We’d all stand in line and, at some point, would go inside. While we stood in line, we would talk with each other. I remember the first time I went, I was standing with a woman my own age, whose husband was incarcerated. She asked me whom I was visiting, and I told her that it was a friend of mine, a man I had often played cards with. I got carried away, and began to speak romantically about his fate. I was there on the line, a young man myself in a place far from where I had grown up, full of my own life, and in describing the condition and affairs of my friend to this young woman, I went overboard. I said that he was unfairly sentenced, that he had had his reasons for doing what he had done, and that they were good reasons. I spoke very rationally and explained all about why he didn’t deserve to be in the prison, in a way that admitted no doubt in my mind that we were all of us, she and I, and the others in line, a part of an injustice. I imagined that her husband was wrongfully inside, or I came to imagine it in the course of my speech. Although at the beginning of my foolish little speech, I knew that my friend was guilty, and that this woman, that her husband was probably guilty, too, by the end, I had been carried away. I had tried with my speech to establish camaraderie with her on the basis of this injustice. She would have none of it. She turned away, actually refused to look at me, and said, my husband is in prison for raping a woman who lived in the apartment below us. He has no right to have visitors, but still I come, I don’t know why. I stood there in the line, actually trembling. Now, I told the interlocutor, when I said this to Rana, she was not at all horrified, as everyone else had been. Each person to whom I had told this story had been moved to distaste, had looked at me in a sad new light. That I should have such a story and feel compelled to say it out loud, it was horrible. If it were true, then it was awful. If it were an invention, it was almost worse. Which was worse, the invention or the truth — actually, it was hard to say. That was the usual reception of my story. But, Rana, just brightened up. She had finished dressing. She was settling a light jacket over her shoulders. She said to me, I would love to go and see that bridge. Can we?

And we set out driving for the mill, and in the distance ahead of us, we could see the storm receding. We are pursuing it, I said. Then she reminded me of the storm map that she had bought me, and we fell to speaking of my room in the boardinghouse again. Have you, I asked the interlocutor, has anyone ever done something for you so completely beyond all possibility of repayment that you just stand there agog, helpless in their presence? That is how it was for me. When I brought her to my room, there in the shabby boardinghouse, a place where half the windows were boarded up — rooms in which people still lived were boarded up, a boardinghouse because people stayed there, but also, because it was falling apart, it was held together by shabby boards — I brought her there, showed her my room and its absence of things, and she in all her good grace was pleased, delighted, fell even more in love with me, and went off. That it should have happened that way was amazing, but what happened next was this. I went to work at the antiques store where I had a position, and when I came back at night, expecting the same — some pieces of cheap paper, a pallet, a chair, what I found was this: I had given her a gift, I had presented my life to her as numerous notes on paper, taped in the absence of things, as shadows of a sort, in order that she could see whom it was that she had met, when she had met me. For a long time, I had hidden my things, my gathered physical life from her, but finally I had gone to present it to her, and I had failed, I had waited too long, my things were gone; yet, I had created this simulacrum, and given that to her in its place. Knowing her capacity, I knew that she could take my descriptions and hold them all gently up together at once, and that she could feel what the room had been like, and judge me. I wanted that judgment and so I had given that gift to her. Then, she had come back in the days following, she had come back, and, she must have had some help. I don’t know how she did it, how she could have performed such an action, but, using my meticulous descriptions, she searched through the city for each and every one of the belongings named and described on my sheets of paper. Using the descriptions, she matched each to an object as like to it as possible. She brought these objects together, and set them down, each and every one, in the place I had said they should be, and recompleted the room that had been stolen. Somehow, she had stolen into the room, bypassing the lock, and she had replaced every one of my things. A framed photograph of a lunch counter, endlessly continuing its perspective off into the bottom right, a hundred stools or more, punctuated again and again and again by a neatly dressed sodajerk with a white hat. A small painting of a rat, in the Chinese style. An old fountain pen, half size, with a notebook into the binding of which the pen fit, and in the binding of which there was a small pot of ink actually bottled and held fast. A large Spanish folding knife, tied in a cloth and hanging from a nail. A pair of glasses of extremely heavy prescription, useful as a magnifying glass. An empty birdcage, with a bone flute propped in it. A small crank phonograph, nonfunctioning, and two cracked records. A suit of clothes, finely embroidered, for a child, hung on the wall. A map of the Maginot Line. A canvas bag on a peg full of broken ivory piano keys. A Venetian rooster mask. An old-fashioned bullhorn, hung by the window, half painted red, half painted green, with the number 71 in white emblazoned on the green side. I had worked in an antiques store for a long time, and had built up a small collection, a fine but small collection. Somehow she had scoured our city, and perhaps sent out to others, who could say, and had found something like to every thing I had once owned. To these she added one item: on the table, she left all the slips of paper in a tall glass jar, and on the jar she put a note: love, let us replace every imagined thing with a real thing. She did not even need to be there to see my happiness. She was at her parents’ home. I went immediately there, and she disclaimed it. She smiled to herself and said, someone else must have done it. Do you have another lover?

The mill was largely broken down. We stopped by the road and crossed a field of thistle and weed to reach it. As I did, I paused at the threshold, but she plunged in. From room to collapsed room, she went, eager, possessed with the power of the adventure. I went after, looking for her in bedraggled and shattered chambers. Though in many places, an old mill like this would have become the site of drinking, of vandalism, it was here so far from anywhere that it was only what it had been — a mill that someone had walked away from, or died in, that time had settled upon with all its weight. The glass in the windows was old, and thicker at the bottom. The mill wheel had fallen off, and part of it could be seen slumped down into the water. We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise, I thought. Immediately, I heard her laughter through a space in the walls, and I felt — lightness. What a fool I was to think such sentiments. Here I was in a derelict mill and I had humanized the structure in the most paltry way. My mind was so limited, I thought. Where I, standing in the mill, felt only grief at my own impending death, a death that was half a century off, so distant it could not even be conceived, she, on the other hand, felt buoyed. Standing in the mill, she felt the delight that a world could be, and that in it, a mill could be, and that in order they should fall this way — world, mill, and then her standing in a mill, with myself a room distant. I went to where I thought she had been, and it seemed I was mistaken. She was not there but on the roof, actually overhead. She had been watching me. I climbed up with her, and we sat on the mill, and wherever we went within it, it broke more, and we left it worse than when we had come. I said that to her, and she said, it has had some friends, now, though, or at the very least acquaintances. Without us, it would simply have sat this evening watching the road. Then she laughed again, it is almost a koan, what is the use of an old broken grist mill. We were quiet for a while. I could see she had suddenly been overwhelmed. She was dizzy, and sat all the way to the ground, so I told the interlocutor. I should say she fell, but it was slower than that. Are you all right? We should go back, now, she told me. Suddenly, I can hardly stand. It is night already. A moment ago, it was plain day, and now, night. It isn’t as dark as that, I said. Come on. We went back across the field, and though she had skipped to the mill in and out of the high grasses, she now labored as though under a yoke. I lifted her into the car and got in beside her. She regained some strength there, spread out in the car where we had had so many fine times. I once thought, she told me, that I would be a diver. My aunt went on a world travel at age sixteen, my mother’s sister, and in Mexico, she leapt from a cliff and died. She was in a group with others — nine other sixteen-year-olds, all from my mother’s town. They all jumped; the guide jumped. It was deemed safe. Every one of them survived but her. She was found in the water with her neck broken. I was young when my father told me this story, so Rana said. I had been looking at old pictures, and I found one of her, there, actually on the cliff, in a bathing suit. The photograph was taken moments before. It was found in the camera of one of the other children. It seemed to me from the picture that she would be a wondrous diver. The other children were gangly or squat, ill proportioned. She was a sort of swan, just perfect — the sweep of her at sixteen was marvelous. I felt, seeing this picture, that she possessed the utterness of this word, diver. Yet, my father said to me, so Rana told me, that in jumping off that cliff, she had ended her life. I wanted to be a diver, too. I told him that. I stood there, a child, looking at a picture of my father’s sister-in-law, his own cousin, who had died, the sadness of which he had borne for decades, and in the moment of his relating to me the tragedy of her death, I said, I want to be a diver, too. That is how I was as a child. I want you to know that, Rana told me, so I said to the interlocutor. She sat there, stunningly beautiful, in this beat-up old car. We were parked there in the mountains, where a mill had been built by a river, where the river had mostly gone dry and the mill had broken down completely. This place where people had lived had become completely overgrown. She and I, this wonderful girl, Rana, and I, had adventured there, and taxed her, taxed her to her utmost, and now she, terribly, vengefully beautiful, sat with her knees to her chest in the car, telling me of her childhood idols, and her childhood impudence. I think, I told her, that you would have made a spectacular diver.

I woke up on the sixth day. The night before, we had talked of whether we would go back soon, whether we would make the travel. I had asked her about it, and she had had little to say — only, as you like. I am not ready yet, she might have said. When I am a little stronger, or something like it. I had misgivings, I think. I believe, I told the interlocutor, that as I fell asleep, I had misgivings about staying there any longer. I had suddenly come to believe that she was not affected by the altitude at all, that she, as a mountain-person, would never have been affected by it. Just as I was dropping off to sleep, I told him, my thoughts led me to believe that she was not affected by the altitude, but was instead very sick, that she had been all along — the whole time I’d known her, and that I somehow hadn’t seen it. But, it is easy to think that now — to believe I had thought that, when, in fact, it is quite possible that I didn’t think it at all, but rather, as we so often are, I was on the edge of thinking it, and never came wholly into the thought. However it was, however it might have been, I woke that morning in a bed overlooking the stream as it fell through a sort of gorge, the bed that she had chosen for us to sleep in, and I turned over and tugged at her. I spoke to her. This terrible and inconceivable thing had suddenly come to be completely and unutterably true: I found upon waking, that she had died in the night, at some point in the night, and I had kept on sleeping, knowing nothing.

That it could have happened — this dreadful thing, that I could have kept on sleeping while she was dying, and not noticed, not woken up, I felt a momentary hope in it. It couldn’t be true, and if it wasn’t true, then maybe she was still alive. But she was not alive. I thought of the condition of our night’s sleep and her passing. Maybe she had even tried to wake me. She must have. She who was so perceptive, it could be, it could have been that she had noticed her own death approaching and that she had tried to wake me to speak some final thing into my ear, and that I, instead of waking, instead of acceding to her very last wish, had kept on sleeping, dumbly, vacantly, sleeping on, so I told the interlocutor. He handed me another cloth, and when he did so, our hands touched and he pressed my arm with his other hand. She did not believe, I thought at the time, I told him, that she was going to die. But now, I believe, I said to the interlocutor, that she knew all along, and that she didn’t tell me in order to give us the maximum possible time of happiness. If it could be that our last days were spent weeping and carrying on — they would simply have been a blur. They would have bled into one another. She was stronger than that, and her strength manifested in this way: she would not tell me, did not tell me, and we instead spent the time planning a life that we could never live. Where she was in the bed, curled against me, one leg actually wrapped around a leg of mine — it hurt my heart to feel and see it. It was clear that while dying she had clung to me, had pushed as close as physically possible. And all this while I slept, insensible. I lay there for hours, not moving, actually afraid to move at all, and I felt that I wished I could not move. But, eventually I rose. I straightened her out, and laid her hands across her body. I shut her eyes, and pulled a blanket partway up over her legs. Then, I felt strange about it, and pulled the blanket down. I looked at her, there in her nightgown, and I cried and didn’t know what to do. So, I dressed her in some of her clothes, what clothes I could fit over her, and then I went to the telephone and called her parents. Although I did not want to, I did it, I told the interlocutor. I called her parents, and her mother answered the phone. She recognized me, and the first thing she said, in a terrible voice, was, where are you. I said, I need to tell you something, and she said, you don’t tell me anything. Where are you, that’s all. I told her where I was, and she hung up. That same day, they must have driven for fourteen hours straight, her parents arrived with others, and they took her away. They took me back to the city, and actually dropped me off at the outskirts. They did not want to take me into the city. There was a feeling, I came to understand, that I was to blame. No one said, she would have lived longer, but I knew that they felt, every last one, that I did not deserve to have her last week to myself. They had never understood why she had taken up with me. They understood it completely, why she had been able to be so free with me — that my not knowing about her death was the whole of it. But why it should have been me, it was actually unfathomable. I was special merely because of my ignorance. That was what she had seen in me, so they thought. Her father said to me, get out of the car, please, and pulled up at the curb. I got out, and the car sped away. It had stopped for the briefest moment, and then it sped away again. I was deep in my thoughts, in the backseat of the car, and then I was watching as the car drove off. In the car, as we drove in the car, I noticed that her parents spoke with the mountain accent. It was apparent to me as I heard them speaking, as it had not been apparent to me at our previous meetings. We had been driving, all the way back, straight, fourteen hours again, with her body in the car, laid out in a coffin. The car had been turned into a sort of impromptu hearse, so I told the interlocutor, and I listened to them speak, and they said things pertaining to her treatment. They grieved in a very plain way with one another, there in the car, in my hearing. My presence was a difficulty for them, and they overcame it by simply believing that I was less than nothing. Always, one would begin to say things, to make regrets about her treatment, or the decisions that they had made in recent months, and then the other one, whichever one had not spoken, would cut in and say, enough of that. It is useless. And then twenty minutes or an hour would pass, and the very one, the same one who had said that it was useless to speak so, would begin to say again, but I think we could have sent her to this hospice, or perhaps that doctor could have done more…and the first one would interrupt, saying, it is useless. There is no use to speaking like that. And all the while I felt that, although I was in the car, although she was in the back of the car that I was traveling in and we were riding along mountain roads back toward the city, I still felt, surely and completely, that I was lying in the bed in the house with her wrapped about me. I felt that more than anything I wanted that immediate feeling to overwhelm me: the sense that she was totally and endlessly wrapped about me. And simultaneous to that, I could see, as if from above, the room in which I had set her, and the place where she lay, with her hands folded, and her face looking up at the ceiling, straight up, through the ceiling. I was standing on the side of the street, some street I had never been on, at the outskirts of the city, and I sat down. I didn’t even go to the curb, I just sat in the street. I was wearied, completely wearied.

When it became dark, I walked to my house, and I found that a note had been left there. The mother had written a note, and the note explained there was to be a funeral. The funeral for Rana was set, and the note explained that it was a very small funeral. There would be people there, but what was meant by very small funeral was that I was not to come. I was not welcome at the funeral, I told the interlocutor. I gave myself up entirely to tears there, before the interlocutor, and I wept outright. He was totally silent, watching, and then he spoke. I don’t know how much time passed, or had passed, as we sat there, all the while that we sat there. When did all of this take place? he asked. And the funeral, when did the funeral happen? It has been going on, I said, these hours while we sat here. It is probably finished now. The interlocutor inclined his head and said quietly, then she has had two funerals, I think, and one of them has been here, in your speaking. You have spoken long, and given her a funeral of sorts, and I have also been in attendance. I have been a witness there, a witness of a kind. I wiped at my face with the cloth he had given me, and sat inertly in the chair. He sat, waiting. I said, finally, I don’t want to live anymore. Then, he took from his desk a piece of paper, encased in lines — a formal piece of paper. He handed me a pen. I didn’t read the paper. I found its outline on the desk, and he pointed to where I should sign and I signed it. I wrote, Clement Mayer, on the sheet, and he took the sheet. He put the sheet into a metal box on the wall. Then he took out of his desk a little brown case. He opened it and removed a single yellow slip. The paper was very finely grained. He handed it to me. He said, this is how it will be. These will be sent where they need to go. They do not now have your name. These are not the ones that will be sent. The ones that will be sent will be exactly like these, save that they will bear your name. The paper will be of the same weight and color and grain. I held the yellow slip and felt it between my fingers. He took another box out of the desk and opened it. This drawer he had to unlock with a key. He did so, using a key that was on a cord around his wrist, like a watch. He took the box out and set it beside the desk on a short table. He knelt by the little table, on one knee, and all his motions became sharply practiced. There was a little bottle, and a syringe. There was a rubber cord. He manipulated them, set them carefully by. He asked me to pull my sleeve up. I drew my sleeve up. He paused. I will tell you something, he said. I always say this last. I believe it is a comfort, and so I say it last, said the interlocutor. He knelt, holding a needle in his hand, and he said, a quote from the founder, Groebden, Everyone wants life — everyone wants as much life as they can get, and as bright a life. He is reported to have said that, the great man himself. It is often misinterpreted. He was not saying this was the case, that everyone actually wants life, you yourself know that’s not true, but rather that it should be. If animals excel us, defeat us in one thing, it is this: they all want their lives. Life is given to each one of them separately, and they all want it. We do not. And why? Your life has been made up of chambers, a series of chambers, so the interlocutor said, his hand on my arm — and in each chamber it is difficult to remember exactly what it was like to be in the previous room. You can remember that certain things happened when you were a child. But, what it was like to be there, to be a child, it really is lost to you. Our world is a difficult succession of losses, vaguely remembered, vaguely enshrined. The Process of Villages has improved upon it. I say this to you, the Process of Villages is also a world. It is an improvement on the world. It is a house, a series of houses, a system of many series of houses. That which is essential about human habitation and human nature has been boiled down to its core, and repeated until the proportions are exact. In these places, you will slowly get better. I promise you that. There will be people there who will love you, and people who will deceive you. There will be people who struggle on your behalf, people you will never know. All of this has been set in motion long ago. But, it is only now, at the very last, that you go to join it. You can imagine it that way — there are people whose entire purpose is to help you, just you, and only now do you go to join them.

Come, now, incline your chair at this angle, please. I drew my chair over. Your arm, now. He tied the rubber cord around my bicep. He drew the liquid into the needle, and set the needle against my arm. I waited to feel it, waited, but I didn’t feel it go in. We’re done, said the interlocutor. He unbound the rubber cord, and helped me to my feet. Two men, orderlies, came in the room. I was dizzy. He nodded to them, and they helped me along, one on each side. We went out into the hall, ponderously through the doorway. My feet were under me and it felt strange. I felt that I was standing on the sides of my feet. I could feel my weight in my ankles, but nowhere else. I had been sitting so long, and now I was standing, standing outside of the office. The corridor was long. It seemed to go on endlessly, and where it went, the end was invisible. It was completely dark at the end. Back the other way, where I had come from, was there light? Where the building entrance was, there must be light. I couldn’t remember anymore which direction was which. The way we were going, I could make out nothing. The orderlies must know the way, I thought. They walked surely, surefootedly, one on each side, supporting me, their powerful hands gripping me, holding me up as we walked, on down the hallway, on and on, on and on, into the darkness.

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

the

train

was

traveling

THE TRAIN WAS TRAVELING on a line of track stretched like black thread through the waste. It rattled and rode the line uneasily, its wheels crying out now and then as if goaded. The train was mostly empty.

Examiner 2387 looked in the windows of the compartments as she passed through the train cars one after another. One empty compartment after another. Almost no one here at all. But, her instructions had said…

She carried a neat leather bag, bright yellow, and her hair was wrapped in a scarf. Her hands were covered in thin gloves, the color of sand. Her shoes matched, and her stockings were a pale blue. She was like a blot of color set into monochrome film.

One compartment, another compartment, another. Another car, another compartment, another. A porter stood watching her. He looked her up and down, and smiled slightly. She did not smile, but looked him carefully in the face.

He pointed down the narrow passageway — further on. When she got to the door indicated she glanced back. He nodded. She peered through the glass. She rapped on the door and someone within called out.

~ ~ ~

THE WORDS TOOK SHAPE as the compartment door swung in:

What was it the older woman was saying? She said,

— Why, Hilda, Hilda. How nice to see you.

Or,

— Why, Hilda, I hope you are well.

The train rattled so, it is hard to say which it was.

The younger woman answered,

— Yes, Emma, yes. I,

Examiner 2387 sat down opposite the older examiner, whose number she did not recall.

— I, they told me you asked for me. I want to thank you for that.

— I will call you Hilda, said the examiner. You may call me Emma Moran, as you did. The names for this next town are different, but we will get to that.

They sat looking at one another, the younger patiently waiting for the older to continue, the older looking curiously at the younger as if to see who it was that sat there, right there, in the seat across from her.

— Hilda, she said. Do me a favor. Please give me the dialogue from outside the house, the night you left.

~ ~ ~

HILDA CLOSED HER EYES for a moment. She straightened her shoulders, turned her head slightly to one side.

— Martin! I look very different, don’t I? I can see it in your eyes. You thought that the person you were going to meet was just like Hilda, the Hilda you knew. And then here there is this other person standing on the street looking at you. She snuck out of her house at night to come and see you and you don’t know why. Now you don’t even know who this person is, but you can’t stop looking at her.

Hilda shook her head,

— No, no, that was the first time we met alone. Sorry, getting jumbled.

She thought for a second.

Emma watched her, smiling slightly.

— Okay, okay. Here goes.

— They took me away, they took me away, darling. Oh. I waited for you and waited for you, and you never came, and then I went back to the house, and Martin was there, and he was angry — he was so angry…

She shifted her voice.

— And then he said,

She spoke with a slightly deeper register, in a voice rather like the claimant’s.

— Took you away? Who?

— Then, I said,

— I woke up in the back of some kind of closed truck. They were moving the bed that I was in. I was lying there, and we were stopped for some reason. I jumped out the back and hid, and the truck drove on without me.

— Then he asked me how I found my way back, and I said,

— There isn’t anything out there. Just a road. It’s just a road. I went the opposite direction the truck was going. As you approach the town, the waste turns slowly green. There are trees and grass, and then the town begins. I can show you. I don’t know if there’s time.

The older examiner laughed loudly and clapped.

— Just right, just right. Your performance in Case 42395D was indeed marvelous. It was perfect. I was very moved by it, and I can tell you that it was completely convincing. Do you know where I am coming from? I am returning from the board at which I presented the case. The fluency of your Hilda role was, well, as I said, marvelous. There were some there who interpreted this sudden excellence one way. They believe it is the flowering of a talent. You came to us, as you may remember, as a claimant, and one day, became an examiner-elect. Now, on the success of this role, you may continue on. I congratulate you. I did not tell the panel, however, what it is that I really think. Why? Because it is a thing that is for you, for your ears alone.

The train rattled and shook as they crossed pilings that supported the way over a series of small streams. They were entering a sort of marshland. Nothing but quiet in the compartment, and beyond the window, the train’s heaving bustle, and the noise of insects and wind. A bird cried out from the twisted bracken, and its call pierced Hilda. She moved in her seat.

— Emma, what do you mean?

The older examiner spoke as if out of a long sleep.

— We were there together, I was with you, we two examiners, dealing with a man in dire difficulty. It seems to me possible that you acted, that you were an actress, in this case, that the man called then Martin Rueger, was nothing to you. It is possible, of course it is. In fact, just that, that alone was your job. But it is not what I believe.

She ran her finger along the wooden molding of the window.

— Some people forget, do you know — they forget what it is like to be young, to feel things ruthlessly, terribly. If you forget that much of life, well, I don’t know.

She turned toward the younger woman and took her hand. She seemed to be weighing something. A minute passed, then another. The noise of someone in the passage coming closer, then going away, past, away.

— What is it you think?

— I believe, Hilda, you fell into the role so thoroughly because indeed you did love him. I believe that you really wanted to help him escape, despite your position, despite your role as an examiner in his case, despite all. There is something in you, Hilda, that wants to rise up and ruin the world. You are the sort, I think, who, when pouring water into a glass, will let the pitcher overflow the glass, will pour it all out onto the table, if no one has the sense to say, enough, enough, Hilda. If no one says anything, a person like you will just pour the pitcher out. This is my feeling.

They sat quietly a moment.

— I do not mean it as a criticism, she continued. Not at all. Indeed, in some aspects, I also am this way. Yet, it does, if true, present us with an interesting situation. It is for this reason that I asked for you, that I called you back to this case, the case of Martin Rueger. I have just moved him to another town. He has a new identity, that of Henry Caul. He is settling, finally. Soon, he will finally be settled. I wonder, examiner 2387 who masquerades so well as a Hilda, I wonder — do you want to join him?

The young woman raised an eyebrow.

The examiner coughed.

— I suppose it is in some way disingenuous of me to ask in that way. Of course, you have been given the task. You have your orders. You’re on this train heading to the village. You will do it. But, there are two ways in which it might be done. That is the essence of the offer I make to you. Two ways.

— I can tell you about it. I can tell you what it was like for me, and,

— Please don’t speak, said the old woman. I will know it all by your choice. Be patient. The world isn’t the place we are told to live in. It is another place entirely. We have both more choice, and less, than we are supposed to have. I will tell you a story about a play I once saw. Perhaps it will make things clear.

~ ~ ~

THE PLAY I ONCE SAW; OR, THE ONION KNIFE

Once, I saw a play in a city that no longer stands. This was the city of my birth. It was entirely demolished in the war. Every last brick of every last building was actually made to vanish by a single bomb. There is a sort of crater there now. I’m not joking. There is a kind of viewing platform, a boardwalk of sorts. You take the train to a little hotel town — a set of hotels that are perched where the boardwalk begins. Then, you go off down this wooden pier, out over the crater. The boardwalk extends all the way to the very center. It is far — maybe six or seven hours’ walk, so most people ride bicycles. At the very center there is a little shop that serves drinks and sandwiches. You can sit and look down into the crater. There isn’t anything to be seen there at all of what was. The city itself is clearly gone. In fact, when I went, I had a feeling similar to when I saw the Grand Canyon. I thought, my, how the world can be. This destruction was so bloodless it has come to feel like one of the great works of man. Of course, thirteen million people died beneath that bomb.

In any case, I lived in that city, and on one of the old streets that ran down by the courthouse, there was a theater, the Chamber Pot. I used to go there to see plays. I was a young woman, quite your age, actually, and I enjoyed seeing plays. I felt that there was in them the power to change the world. In such a mood, I went with a young man to see The Onion Knife, a new play.

The theater was very small. There were three rows of seats — maybe twenty could sit there. Then there was a small stage, about the size of a parlor. The actors took the money through the front door of the theater — there was an aperture, and gave you pieces of paper with a word on it. Each word matched a word on a sheet they had inside — and could be used once, so you couldn’t cheat and just write the word on other sheets to get more people in. Also, you wouldn’t want to. It cost almost nothing.

We had brought some cognac with us in a little metal flask and we got seats on the end of the first row. I had a fur coat then, and I was very proud of it. Often, I wouldn’t take it off. I would wear it under inconceivable conditions, just in order to be seen. I had gotten the coat at a very low price in a store because there was a hole in it where someone had been shot. Apparently this thrift store would get clothing from the police ministry — evidence clothing that was no longer necessary. Yes, someone had been shot in my fur coat, but I wore it anyway. That’s the sort of girl I was.

~ ~ ~

The lights dim. A man comes out in front of the screen that protects the stage from view. He is wearing a shirt and vest and wool trousers. He holds up a card that says, Cecil. Then he very deliberately moves the screen out of the way, revealing a small kitchen and a kitchen table. At the kitchen table sits a young woman. She is holding a sign that says, Lily. A buzzer goes off and both signs drop to the floor.

CECIL

When your husband returns, I swear I will…

LILY

He is not going to return.

She holds up a letter.

He says he has found a new life in Perugina. He will stay there forever.

Lily and Cecil dance happily all around the room. Someone plays the fiddle offstage.

CECIL

Then I shall make you my wife, and we will live happily forever.

LILY

But…

CECIL

But, what.

LILY

But, there is still the matter of the onion knife.

The two part and stand some feet away from one another.

CECIL

Oh, the damned onion knife. The onion knife. Why do you have to harp on it? Haven’t I given you enough things? Haven’t I done enough for you? And all it is with you is — the onion knife, the onion knife. You’re like a drooling madperson in an asylum, sitting by a freezing windowpane on a March morning, pressing the side of your face to the glass and muttering, onion knife, onion knife, onion knife.

LILY

You lost the onion knife. I told you, never touch the onion knife and then you went and lost it.

CECIL

I brought it to work with me. You gave me a lunch that day: a little piece of cheese, an old piece of bread, and a very small onion. I noticed that there was an onion in my lunch. I brought the onion knife with me.

LILY

And you did not bring it back.

LIGHTS

~ ~ ~

A Third Person Who Has Not Been Seen, Appears On Stage With A Piece of Paper That Says:

IT IS THE NEXT DAY

Lily comes in the front entrance of the theater. She makes her way over to the screen that again hides the set. She takes out a piece of paper and hammers it into the screen with a long nail. She goes further down and does it again and again. The paper cannot be read by the audience. She goes behind the screen.

Five minutes pass.

The front entrance of the theater opens. Cecil enters. He goes onto the stage and walks along the screen, stops. He peers at the paper in horror. He tears it down. He runs along tearing all the papers down. He turns to the audience. Tears are on his face. He composes himself and carefully removes the screen to reveal the kitchen again. Lily is sitting at the kitchen table, happily reading.

CECIL

Lily? Are you out of your mind?

Cecil runs to her, waving the paper.

LILY

No more than you.

CECIL

(almost weeping, reads from the paper)

Lily Caldwin has lost her onion knife. It has a serif G inset in the handle. It is worn but extremely sharp. Please return it to 3 Welton Rd. for a reward. That reward is: Lily Caldwin will lie down with you.

LILY

I think the onion knife will reappear pretty soon, don’t you?

CECIL

Lily? How could you? You won’t do it, will you?

LILY

Find the knife.

CECIL

I love you, Lily. You can’t do this. I lost the knife, but it shouldn’t be such a…

LILY

Find it.

~ ~ ~

A Third Person Who Has Not Been Seen, Appears On Stage With A Piece of Paper That Says:

IT IS THE NEXT DAY; CECIL DID NOT WANT TO GO OFF TO WORK BUT HAD TO; LILY IS THERE ALONE

A knock on the front door of the theater, another knock, another knock.

LILY

(from behind the screen)

Can someone get the door?

An audience member rises and gets the door. At the door is an older man, perhaps fifty, slightly fat. He enters, somewhat apologetically, looking at the crowd. He clearly sees the crowd, and bows to them. He is carrying an onion knife, which he holds up as if in explanation. He goes up on stage and knocks at the screen.

LILY

Come in.

The man moves the screen aside to reveal the set of the kitchen. The kitchen table has been pushed to one side, and there is a mattress laid out on the floor. The audience sits immediately before the stage, so the mattress is immediately before their eyes. Lily is lying on the mattress. She stands up.

Do you have the onion knife?

The man presents her with the onion knife. She leaps with glee. She runs about, back and forth, happily. She throws her arms around the man suddenly and then runs away again to put the onion knife into a wooden block that hangs from one wall. She admires it there.

MAN

There was the matter of…

LILY

Oh, yes.

She comes around to the front of the stage and helps the man off with his coat, which she places on the table. She helps him off with his vest and with his shirt. He sits down on the mattress. She removes his left shoe and right shoe. She removes his socks and his pants. She puts all these things on the table and then she comes to the front of the stage.

LILY

(with great joy)

The onion knife!

She unbuttons her dress slowly and removes it, setting it down by her feet. She removes the plain white underwear she is wearing and sets that, too, by her feet. She is completely naked, and possessed with a feverish sort of happiness.

The onion knife!

She turns from the audience to the man, and lies down with him on the mattress, where she fulfills her promise. The audience stays to watch or leaves, as they may prefer. The play is concluded.

~ ~ ~

— I KNEW THE GIRL, said Emma. Of course, I spoke to her about it later. The older man was actually her lover — in real life. He was also the director. The girl was the playwright, and the actress both. The husband from the play was just an actor they had found. This act of lovemaking in public, it might seem shocking now, but it wasn’t so much pornographic at that time as, well, it was revolutionary. It was a reclaiming of the body.

They sat in silence for a minute.

— I’ve always felt, said Emma, that people misunderstand consequence. Anything really can be the consequence of something else. That’s our human gift. So, when someone loses a paring knife, well, who is to say what will happen?

Hilda laughed at that. Emma laughed, too. They laughed together.

— At the time, said Emma, I thought that it was funny, but I also thought it was serious. Now, I just think that it is funny. Well, enough for my story about consequence.

She sighed deeply.

— Now I am going to present you with a choice, my dear.

~ ~ ~

THE OLD WOMAN went out into the hall and when she came back, she was carrying a little leather box.

She sat down.

— Hilda, she said. There is much to say, and little time. Martin Rueger has been renamed. He is now called Henry. Henry Caul. He is a scholar; that is his identity. He lives in sector B73, the sector we are even now approaching. I regret to tell you that he has been fogged since you knew him. He has lost function. You have gone through our training, so you know what the task of marriage is. You know that an examiner of excellence, feigning a role, may participate in a life in this way, acting as a sort of custodian for one who is somewhat absent. You know that it has been arranged for you to come and see Henry, to meet him again, and all going well, for the two of you to cohabitate. You are to become Henry’s permanent custodian, for I will soon be gone.

— Henry loved you. He really did. And I believe that you, well, I said what I believed already. For you, with your inclination, to be custodian to him: it is clear that you can perform this task, and well. But can you be happy? Before, when you knew him, you could be equals. You could speak, he could answer. Perhaps he was confused — but he was also lacking information. Now, well, as you will see, he is changed.

— It is one choice, a choice you can make, to arrive in this town now, as you are. Your name is Nancy. You are to act as though you do not remember being Hilda. You are to act as though you do not know that you ever met a Martin Rueger, and certainly, you will receive Henry Caul as an entirely new person — one whom you will demonstrate affection for. You will win him over, and you will become his custodian. The train is even now approaching the town. This is the life you will lead, and there is something false in it.

— However, I offer you another choice. If it is true that you did love him, that there was something there, then perhaps it remains. Perhaps you would like another chance, a new chance. This is my offer: if you agree, I will inject you.

The old woman opened the leather case, and there was a hypodermic needle inside, a needle and a small clear bottle.

— You will wake up and you will be just Nancy, not an examiner, not a Hilda, nothing but Nancy. I will bring you to the town and you will recover in a separate house. When you are ready you will be brought to our home. You will reunite with Henry, and the two of you will share a new life, unencumbered.

The young woman stared at the needle as if she had never seen such a thing before. She reached down and shut the box. Tears ran down her face.

— No, she said. I can’t. I can’t.

She put her head in her hands and wept.

The old examiner stood and went to the door, the box under her arm. She slid the door open and stepped out into the passage.

— Oh, wait, wait, come back, cried the young woman. Come back. I think I, I think…

Her eyes raced helplessly back and forth over the shabby train compartment in a dry and awful panic. She flinched away from, but then looked up at the old woman, who stood, paused in the doorway. The train was coming to a halt. They were arriving.

— I think, I…

The old woman loosened her features. She stood a bit straighter. She spoke in a voice unfamiliar.

— Hilda, she said, darling, you were very sick and you almost died.

Hilda sobbed.

— Hilda, look at me.

She took Hilda by the chin.

— You were on the edge of death and you were rescued. You were rescued.

The old woman shook her head and a sad laugh fell from her. The train came to a halt. They had been in the wastes where there was no one, but now, but now…

Outside the train, voices cried out, one to another. A village of voices, men, women, calling out as if in human speech.

But another voice closer, closer, was saying, what do you choose. Hurry now, hurry now, what do you choose.