“Your story doesn’t work,” Linda told me apologetically, evidently regretting having to be the bearer of bad news—she’s a writer in my ARTS group that I admire and whose judgment I trust. “Seely goes through a sea change after meeting Eben, but we don’t see enough happen between them to make this convincing.”

     Deflated and not knowing how to fix the problem, I relegated the story to a box in the basement.

     But even as a failed story, I would realize when I reread it sometime later, it expresses a number of things that are true about me—more, perhaps, than a successful one would have:

     Seely comes to feel, though apparently I failed to make this clear, that her journals had always been written for Eben, even if she didn’t know it until the moment of leaving them behind. Like her, for most of my life, my creativity has been directed, not at a mass audience, but a private, personal one, whether I was writing a song as a birthday gift for Kita or drawing cartoons on a coffee cup with china paints for Jack, or writing my Hamlet essay to impress my teacher Mrs. Griffith, or fashioning stories to teach Arielle and Michael to read. It has been in context of my relationships that I’ve found the inspiration and motivation to invent—a larger audience was simply too impersonal to excite my imagination. So to me, anyway, it didn’t seem surprising that in the end Seely would leave her manuscript for Eben to read, if he should want to, rather than try to have it published.

     The story also expresses the fact that it was in Cadaques that I came to recognize the limitations of words. I’d always tried to create relationships through language, imagining that if the things I said were interesting enough, I could win people over—the model for this way of looking at things being my relationship with my father, who couldn’t be bothered with anyone he didn’t find intellectually stimulating. It wasn’t until I saw Alana and Aaron’s relationship that I understood that there was another, deeper level of communication that people could relate on, never having experienced it with either of my parents, who didn’t seem capable of emotional intimacy. (Later I rediscovered this in my movement group, dancing with Rosemary and Jobie—that there were things we were able to express to each other though movement that transcended the verbal.) For this reason Seely’s abandoning words to become a painter made perfect sense to me back then.

     And lastly (unless I have an afterthought), while I used to sing for the love of it and to draw out of inclination, I sometimes think I only came to write out of desperation. I’m not at all convinced that if I’d had a twin—separated from me at birth, who’d had a less troubled life than mine—she would have authored anything. Words have simply been my last resort.

       Maybe she felt then that Eben was illumined in some way that now she would never understand or that he was a mirror that might have revealed to her aspects of herself that now would forever elude her. Whatever was true, she felt an aching desolation over her irreparable separateness from him, the loneliness of a shipwrecked survivor on a sea of grief, grasping for a lifeline of meaning. Maybe it was desperation that compelled her to create one, because now, as she paused, a powerful impulse—appearing on the periphery of resolve and swooping down—took hold of her. Suddenly she felt the great weight of her manuscript—and not merely on her shoulder—and realized in the same instant that she could divest herself of this burden with a single gesture.

     She took her leave briefly the next the day—of Alana only, who, when Seely returned some pots she’d borrowed, was mild and noncommittal about her sudden departure. Jean-Michel she couldn’t find anywhere though she searched throughout the town. He must have glimpsed her packing her suitcase, she guessed, and lit off on his motor scooter or sailboat. On the step outside her bedroom she‘d found a note: “I think you leave. A kiss.”

     By mid-morning she was on the bus to Figueras; by afternoon, on the train to Madrid. As she leaned out an open window in the corridor of a passenger car that evening, drinking in the landscape as it darkened, the rush of wind making her eyes water and hair stream, she felt deliciously spare, pared down to the essential. Words had been a vehicle, she realized with sudden clarity—a transport to deliverance, and what they had delivered her from was finally…themselves.

                                                                                …

    Seely sits on a stool in a spotlight of sunshine that pierces the skylight of her studio. She closes her eyes, feeling its warm pressure on her forehead, her cheek… In front of her is a canvas taller than she is, blazing with red poppies. As she wipes her brush on a rag, its stain as vivid as blood—she’s a painter now—she remembers red-beaded anklets and a stormy climb up a hillside a long time ago. And Eben. She still thinks of him at odd moments, and when she does, she envisions him holding a page of her manuscript, now as soft as a rag from handling, by the light of his fire—imagines herself a companion in his solitude. For her, it’s enough to have created this possibility, however remote—for she’d retraced her steps on that distant hillside and left her satchel behind—her ragbag of personal stories—by the side of Eben’s hearth.

     Once she woke up and heard the faint sound of chopping. Then suddenly the sun was shining through the entrance…and the sleeping bag beside her was empty. There was newly chopped wood by the hearth, so she made a fire, heated water for tea, and pulled off chunks of bread from a hard loaf for her breakfast. Still hugging the blanket around her, she climbed the terraces behind the hut to inspect the morning. From above she could make out the vineyard, but Eben was nowhere to be seen.

     When the sun was high, the day warming, she made her way down to a string of clear pools she’d spotted from her lookout. Encircled by boulders, the largest was barely six feet across. She pulled off her clothes and laid them out on a rock, stuffing her socks into her shoes, then stepped gingerly in among the skating water spiders. Her first step raised a billow of brown silt that turned the water murky, and she nearly slipped on the slimy rocks of the pool floor. She waded up to her waist, feeling faintly disappointed that the pool was so mucky, then rubbed herself briskly with the chill water before climbing out again to dry off in the sun.

     She’d donned her shorts but not her top when she heard footsteps behind her—and turned to see Eben. Her first thought was to grab her bra, but then she wondered if that would seem prudish. Not just Alana but her roommates too—and many of the other expatriates—were always naked at the beach. He sat down near her, necessarily, because there wasn’t much room on the only flat rock. When he asked her how she’d slept, she grimaced before answering, remembering the sensation of the rocks underneath her wearing through to her bones. And then she did something she would regret. She reached out and gently pushed his snarled hair out of his eyes. He jerked back slightly at her gesture, saying “It’s waxy, isn’t it.” Only moments later he stood, stammering that he had to get back to work.

     For the next hour, on some steps near the shelter, Seely tried to write, but found herself becoming impatient—words were so balky, so gallingly inadequate, she fumed to herself. She wandered, explored—and each time she left the shelter she became lost in the maze of terraced hills…only to stumblingly find her way back again. She fetched more water from the stream in the earthen jug. Finished off the pear yogurt and cheese she had in her satchel. But the longer she bided her time, the more certain she became that Eben had receded from her, like a tide that wouldn’t rise again. As she gazed around at the dusty slopes, she felt a piercing sadness, experiencing their loss before she’d even taken leave of them.

     Finally, in the mid-afternoon she rolled up her sleeping bag, took up her satchel, and with the crude map Aaron had drawn her, started her long trudge back to town. When she reached the first bend and turned back for a last look, the hut was already indistinguishable from its stony backdrop.

This is the end of the factual bulk of my story, and the beginning of the fictional ending.

     Sitting inside the hut again, she noticed the patch of landscape through the entryway going dusky gray. Though it was clearly too late for her to head back now, he asked courteously, “Would you like to stay to supper?”

     She couldn’t help studying him as he worked—poured water from an earthen jug into a couple of bowls, scoured them with dry grass, and measured out handfuls of rice for the pot. He had beautiful hands, long-fingered and deft, and did everything with a slow deliberateness, a total absorption and economy of movement that struck her as wonderful. When the rice was cooked, he added onions, tomatoes, garlic, and a crumbled sprig of thyme he’d picked on their walk. After they ate, in silence, he made them tea, and as she sipped it, she found herself growing drowsy, her eyes heavy-lidded from the smoke.

     Partly to revive herself, she asked him a question that had occurred to her earlier. “Your mother must have been young when she died. What did she die of?”

     “She drank,” he said.

     “And your father? What was he like?

     Now she saw a shadow fall across his face—and immediately regretted her question, wanting to snatch it back.

     “He used to…hurt my mother,” he answered.

     The next moment she felt such a rush of tenderness for him, it made tears start in her eyes, a protectiveness so fierce she ground her teeth. It was as though a stone had abruptly been pried away that had blocked a wellspring in her heart, and now she felt flooded with feelings so intense, it was all she could do not to cry.

     They didn’t speak again. He stacked the plates neatly next to the dying fire and put a block of stone in front of it so she wouldn’t stick her feet into the embers in the night. Fully clothed, she folded an unzipped sleeping around herself, pulling a blanket over too for added warmth. Though she didn’t mean to watch, she glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye as he stripped, his wiry body as thin as a starved child’s, and stepped into his own sleeping bag.

     The next moment the fire flared unaccountably, casting the huge three-pronged shadow of the tripod on the stones above them, as though they themselves lay under it, within the fire. A moment later, just as abruptly, it went out.

     In the silence that followed, as she lay in a darkness as opaque as obsidian, she listened for Eben’s breath—and imagining she could hear it, she fell into his rhythm with her own.

     Then, as she felt herself on the brink of dreams, Eben moaned softly in his sleep. She had a sudden impulse to reach out and caress him, to brush his snarled hair from his forehead, then to kiss him, her lips only barely grazing his—then to gather his frail-seeming body to hers and be gathered too, each possibility opening onto another, and with each opening, her need quickening, until she was left quivering from the effort at restraint. It struck her suddenly that all that had dampened this articulation of desire before had been the forbidding starkness of his expression. But now in the featureless darkness, its clamor was so loud she was afraid he might hear it even from the distance of dreams.

     She passed the night feverishly, only barely and briefly sleeping, dreaming when she did of the mingling of bodies, losing, for long intervals, what little sense she had of what was real and what wasn’t. Then the darkness passed, and for hours, it seemed, a cold gray light filtered through the hole in the dome. She shifted continually, holding out in one position or another as long as she could, until the rocky earth under her felt like it would wear through her skin to her bones, and as she turned, she kept tucking the sleeping bag around herself to keep out the little drafts of cold air that plucked at her like curious fingers. Whenever she glanced at Eben, all she saw was a tuft of black hair sticking out of the top of his sleeping bag.

     For several minutes she stood in the path uncertainly, watching a veil of rain drifting toward her from the distance. She’d said she wanted to stay, so Aaron had drawn her a crude map with a few landmarks, then he and Alana had headed back without her. On impulse, she turned now and began to make her way, terrace by terrace, straight up the hill. When she couldn’t find the stone steps that connected tier to tier, she climbed the walls, chafing her hands in her hurry, and, as she went, a strange elation caught her up and bore her, like a wave, on its crest. The wind rose, whipping her hair across her eyes and mouth, stinging. Prickly brush snagged her clothes and tore at her bare ankles, drawing blood. She saw the red droplets strung along scratch lines like red beaded anklets, but she clambered on.

      At last the rain began to fall in big, splatting drops. She reached a sharp jut of rock like the prow of a ship, and though the footing was precarious, she stepped out onto it. The rain was pummeling her now, yet she stood there, face upturned, as wind- and water-battered as a carved figurehead, and threw up her arms to the sky with a rush of pure joy. She felt herself immortalized then, wedded to that place and moment, her face like the marble visage in a fountain, splashed forever by the rain.

                                                                               …

     When she reached the shelter and stooped in the doorway, Eben greeted her pleasantly, without a flicker of surprise. He’d built a fire, and the hut felt as warm as toast. With an almost courtly solicitude, he propped her shoes near the fire to dry and draped a blanket over her. Soon she was damply snug beneath it. Together they stared at the fire for a long time. She only glanced at him once, noticing the coarse black bristles in his nostrils. With his disheveled hair and firelit eyes, he looked like some gently mad mystic.

     She realized then that she was hesitating to speak because she was afraid of startling him away, like some chary animal, with her first word. Or worse, that she might wound him with some thoughtless remark, he seemed so fragile and unfathomable. He’s like something wild, she thought, a deer, an antelope…or, no, an okapi, a creature she’d read about as a child, so reclusive it wasn’t discovered till this century in the depths of the African rain forest.

     At last she ventured, “This reminds me of the shelters I used to build as a child out of a card table and blankets.”

     “In a garden?” he asked after a pause.

     “Yes,” she answered, surprising herself, for it hadn’t been, but the idea pleased her.

     Gradually, cautiously, she began to chat about herself, as Alana did with Aaron, talking enough for both of them, but the things she said she chose carefully, turning them over in her mind first, like prudent gifts she was selecting for a stranger. He sat quietly, his head cocked in a listening attitude, his eyes on the fire, nodding and occasionally smiling. Between glances at him she realized that he looked markedly different from his brother to her now. How could she, she wondered, have ever seen them as identical? With more practiced eyes, she saw the nuances of feature and expression she’d overlooked before.

     Eventually he asked her a question or two, naïve and topical, about the place she came from, so she dared—between long silences—to ask him a few too. He considered each one a long time, and when he spoke, his lips trembled and his eyelids half-closed with the effort. In brief, garbled rushes of words, he told her his story, the story Alana had never heard. He and Aaron had grown up in India, playing in the streets with the native children, and developed their speech as a way of excluding grown-ups. Their father was English, their mother Spanish. When they were teenagers, their parents had taken them back to England, where they had worked as models until her death.

     “What was your mother like?” Seely asked.

     “She was…gentle,” he answered.

     By now the rain had subsided, so when Eben went out briefly, she stripped down to her bra, holding her damp sweater over the fire, rocking it from side to side to dry. By the time he got back, she was lying with her legs extended diagonally over the fire, her toes precariously gripping a sooty rock at the back of the hearth, drying the back of her jeans. “Would you like to go for a walk?” he asked formally. As they emerged from the shelter, she stuck her arm impulsively under his nose. “I smell like a smoked pork chop!” she exclaimed—before it occurred to her with chagrin that he might be a vegetarian.

     They walked around the hill, she in her wool blanket and he in a gunny cloak with the hood pulled over his head, looking more than ever like a shepherd of antiquity. The hills receded in graduated shades of gray while the setting sun, not too fiercely bright to look at now, shifted down behind strips of cloud that streamed like banners across the horizon.

     “Is that the ocean?” she asked suddenly, pointing at a blue haze beyond the hills, though it was in the wrong direction.

     When he nodded, she realized for the first time that they were on a peninsula.

     “Aren’t you cold?” she asked, pulling her blanket more tightly around her. He shook his head. It crossed her mind briefly that she should leave, should have left already, if she was going to find her way back before dark, but she brushed the thought aside.

     As they strolled back around the slope, he repeatedly stopped to watch the narrowing rim of the sun. “It’s a wonderful evening, isn’t it?” he said finally.

     One afternoon she emerged from the “heladeria” with a small scoop of pistachio ice cream on a huge, brittle cone and ran directly into Alana and Aaron. They were taking provisions to Eben, they said, and asked if she would like to hike out into the hills with them. Though she tried to answer nonchalantly, she felt her cheeks burn.

     They took a little-used road out of town—so stony that it twisted her ankles and quickly wore her out. After an hour she stopped to empty her shoes of the pebbles that had gotten in through the holes in the toes and took a long look behind her. Cadaques appeared no bigger than a pile of bleached shells beside the ocean. Even a few miles out of town, civilization seemed eerily remote. The steep hills were uninhabited, terraced in stone from bottom to top—for growing olive trees, Alana told her, a thousand years before. Still, arid, and hot, they were covered with sparse, thorny vegetation and stood like overgrown pyramids, anachronisms from another age.

     Eventually the three left the road and stumbled along the winding paths that crisscrossed the dusty, monotonous slopes, each like every other, until Seely knew she would never be able to find her way back alone. When she’d just about given up hope of ever reaching any destination, she rounded a bend, lagging behind Alana and Aaron, and saw a green corn patch growing between two olive trees. A moment later she spotted the hut: tiny and square, the barest of shelters, it was only as tall as a man, built of the same stone as the terraces, so that it was camouflaged by the hills all around.

     She ducked into the chest-high entrance and found to her surprise that the interior was dome-shaped, like an igloo, the flat slabs of rock spiraling up to a hole in the middle of the ceiling. The opening was glutted with cobwebs, and sunshine filtered through it in a dusty shaft. Below it hung a pot, apparently to catch the rain. In the dim light she saw that the reed mats that covered the dirt floor sloped up to a shelf of rock displaying some dubious treasures—a turtle shell, fox’s skull, and jug of dried grasses. Candles sprouted from jags of stone, the hardened paraffin dribbled down to the ground. In one corner was a hearth—an area set off with stones—where a teapot rested on a tripod. In another, a dark cloak loomed like a specter above a loosely folded sleeping bag. When she emerged, Alana and Aaron were already far down the hill.

     She found them in a tiny vineyard, Aaron pulling ferns from around the grapevines, which were thigh-high and spring-green. Most of the bracken had already been cleared away and raked into piles. Pausing by a diminutive garden, she fingered a burst of white flowers on a smooth stalk. “What’s this?” she asked.

     “Onions,” said Aaron as he shed his shirt and vest and set to pulling up the remaining weeds. His sinewy dark torso looked as hard and impervious as the stone all around, made of nothing so mutable as muscle and bone, she thought.

     She and Alana sat on boulders by a tiny stream, watching the clouds crowding over the hills to the west. It was quiet except for the intermittent whoosh of the wind, like the sound inside a seashell, and the occasional croak of a frog or chit-chitting of a bird. Soon flies began to circle and settle on them in droves, drowning out wind, frogs, and birds with their buzz. At first they tried to whisk them away but eventually surrendered lazily to the raucous intrusion. Half an hour passed, and still there wasn’t any sign of Eben. “We’d better get back,” Alana sighed. “It looks like a storm.”

She got to the “panaderia” right before it closed and bought a couple of long, skinny loaves of bread for Alana’s supper, then dropped by Jean-Michel’s to take a shower. The water came out in a tepid trickle from an apparatus like a dangling telephone receiver on the wall. In the mirror she looked unfamiliar to herself, with her tangled hair and sun-dazed eyes. Her face actually seemed paler after hours in the sun, but her freckles stood out now, a smattering of dark flecks that would fade by morning. She rubbed her cheeks, wishing she’d had some flattering make-up; she’d found a few hard little lipsticks in the shop by the post office, but their bright colors had looked garish against her pale skin.

     Aaron, Alana, and her roommates were already crowded around the table when she arrived. Victoria, a handsome predatory-looking brunette with sharp, pretty teeth, kept her arm like a tether on Denny, who looked like a teenager. Gwynne, a bawdy, snub-nosed Irish girl, with features skewed to one side, clowned like a vaudevillian. The dinner was already well underway—two bottles of wine drunk and the table littered with breadcrumbs—when a knock came at the door. Seely was picking blood sausage and unchewable bacon out of her second help of garbanzo stew. “That must be Eben,” said Alana. The reclusive brother, thought Seely, home from the hills.

     She twisted around in her chair as he entered, more from politeness than curiosity. The very next instant, however, she became completely disoriented, as dizzy as though she were seeing double, for Eben was dark and disheveled, dressed in a rumpled shirt and white satin vest, baggy corduroy pants, and jute sandals. He had the same odd, pointed face, coarse black hair, and aqueous green eyes that had so startled her on first encounter—he was Aaron’s identical twin. As she gaped at him in disbelief, she began to shake, feeling herself snatched by undertow of improbability that was carrying her where it would.

     He seated himself at the foot of the crowded table. Seely moved her plate to the table corner and sat on the diagonal to accommodate him. She found herself tongue-tied, flustered, whenever their knees and elbows collided. He held himself stiffly as he ate and apologized with formal courtesy after these bony encounters, sputtering in the same telegraphic style as his brother. The one is the mirror image of the other, she thought, as she ogled them surreptitiously. She couldn’t detect a single distinguishing characteristic, except that Eben was unkempt—his hair snarled around his swarthy face and his violet lips even more tightly compressed than his brother’s.

     “One day Vicky and I were on the train,” Gwynne giggled, pausing to plug yet another cigarette into her long amber holder, “and a couple of ‘maricones’ came and sat across from us—beautiful gay boys. And they looked at us so smug and pleased with themselves, as if to say, ‘Eat your hearts out—we know how gorgeous we are,’ that I got cross and grabbed Vicky and said very loudly, ‘Come on, love, give us a kiss!’” Here she puckered up her lips at Seely, who was closest, and petted her hair to reenact the scene. “And when she pulled away, I said, even louder, ‘Why not, sweet? Don’t you think it’s time we came out of the closet too?” Here she grabbed a pinch-full of Seely’s cheek and kissed her roundly on the side of the mouth.

     Eben smiled for the first time, then laughed a soft, taut laugh.

     “I love to see you smile,” Alana remarked gently. ”You don’t smile much, do you?”

     “No,” he said, ducking his head.

     “And Seely,” she went on, “You haven’t said a word all evening.” Seely gulped and was about to make some excuse when Denny, who had drunk himself to sleep, lurched off his chair. Aaron caught him just before he hit the floor, and he and Victoria laid him out on cushions under the front windows. From there he intruded on the conversation with rattling snores.

     That evening Seely went back to Jean-Michel’s early, while the others adjourned to a bar. She couldn’t sleep, though; for hours she thrashed around in her narrow lower bunk, banging into the walls like something imprisoned in a jar. Finally she pulled on a shirt over her nightgown and tiptoed up to the top floor. From the balcony she could see a glow from the main street, where the bars stayed open all night, and hear the sound of revelers.

     To tell the truth, Seely wasn’t as self-sufficient as she tried to appear. She’d all but abandoned her manuscript, her past life having come to seem as irrelevant to her as it was to the parade of passing acquaintances who struck up conversations with her at the Café Maritim and who, finding her socially awkward and shy, moved on. In fact she’d become unmoored, her sense of identity receded from her, as nebulous now as the horizon line beyond the bay of Cadaques. She’d look in the mirror and puzzle over her own image. She knew she was foundering among ragged longings, aches, and ambiguities, a set of feelings and circumstances she didn’t understand.

                                                                                 …

     She stood on the farthest rock and bent to put on the plastic sandals that would protect her feet from the sea urchins on the ocean floor, then tightened the rubber band round her long plume of fair hair, encircling it a third time. As she poised for a dive, she glanced in the direction of Cadaques, its distant buildings like a disordered stack of white boxes on a shelf. This was always a long, paralyzing moment—between the known and unknown, self-possession and abandonment—whose spell she doubted each time she could ever break. For this moment she came so late in the day, when the air was chilly and all the bathers had gone home. If her leg were to cramp, if a current were to carry her out, there wouldn’t be anyone one to save her, no witness even to tell what happened.

     She slammed against the water, as into a wall of ice, her muscles clenched and breath locked in her chest. When she tried to float on her back, she inhaled nosefuls of stinging water, the sea was so choppy. She paddled around, growing numb, until finally, resolutely, she swung right arm over left and headed out toward the horizon.

     Half an hour later she clambered out again. The only warmth of the day was left in the massive gray slabs of rock that angled diagonally into the sea. She threw her towel aside and pressed her body against the heated stone, hugging it, cleaving to it, as to the body of a lover, feeling her rigid limbs dissolve. From time to time she shifted her cheek, trying to find a smoother spot on the rough stone. As she grew drowsy, she imagined she could distinguish all the varied and minute sounds that comprised the wild stillness around her.

     Late one afternoon she rounded the small cove on her way to the Flat Rocks on the end of the point. Catalan matrons in bikinis, their breasts like huge urns, lolled on the stony beach, while wiry, naked children and half-starved dogs scampered among the beached fishing boats.

     She climbed a steep staircase built into a bluff that rose from the road and sat on a landing near the top, arms dangling between the railings. The ocean stretched deep blue to a fuzzy zone where it merged with the paler sky. You never see the line between sea and sky in Cadaques, she thought, only that misty band… And she squinted at it for a time, trying to see where the division came.

                                                                                  …

     “Jean-Michel’s tiny living room, up four flights of steep steps, is airy and bright,” she wrote, “like a lookout from a masthead over a sea of terra cotta roofs. There are unraveling wicker chairs with stained cushions, a thicket of empty liquor bottles crowding one corner, pipes with their ends chewed littered on the table and mantel, and a standing bookcase of dusty French books, not one of which had ever been opened, I suspect, since the day it was stacked.”

     He also had a few amenities rare in Cadaques—a small TV propped on a rickety stool, a cassette player and hodgepodge of jazz tapes on a ledge by the fireplace, and a typewriter with a French arrangement of keys that was proving to be her undoing. At Alana’s suggestion she had approached him in the shop where she bought pear yogurt and ‘galletas’—cookies. He’d said yes, she could use his typewriter, but only in his home, and offered her one of his extra bedrooms gratis. No, in exchange for light housekeeping, she’d insisted, so there wouldn’t be any strings attached.

     He’d invited her into his life—took her on jouncing, teeth-rattling motor scooter rides up and down the cobbles of Cadaques and on afternoon sails so languid a gust of wind was an event. For her part, she threw herself lustily into her role as charwoman, scouring away his years of bachelor sloth, considering self-importantly that she was restoring an antique. The layout of his apartment was even more improbable than Alana’s: it had the requisite four stories, but the kitchen was on the ground floor, so meals had to be piled in a basket and carried up three flights of stairs to the living room. The second and third floors contained two diminutive bedrooms each, as bare as monastic cells, whose dimensions were the length of their built-in bunks cubed.

     She sat at his typewriter now, the satchel with her manuscript on the floor, kicked aside by her restless, twitching foot. After spending a quarter of an hour mistyping the first few sentences of her paragraph, she got up, huffing with aggravation. The room opened onto a balcony with a low wall, where she came to stand, facing other balconies where drying clothes on lines spread and flapped like bird wings in the wind.

     “Jean-Michel,” she’d written. “Mild, indolent bachelor with a comical bird’s face—beak nose and receding chin. He lives off a small inheritance, he tells me…gads his life away, I tease him, among his toys—his pipes, motor scooter, tennis racket, and dilapidated sailboat. He rarely deigns to speak English, which he considers a technical language suited only for discourse among scientists. His attitude toward me is amused and condescending. I’m a typical American, he insists, always busy and bothering about something.”

     That night she dreamed she was standing by a window, gazing out at a forest so dense and dark she couldn’t see beyond the first row of trees. Then, from out of nowhere, two birds appeared, one iridescent red, the other green, their feathers glinting like jewels. They each had a copper cone tied to their abdomen like a phallus, and they fluttered in the air at eye-level, performing an intricate courtship dance. As she watched them, she started to shiver with the conviction that these birds weren’t imaginary but real, though they didn’t exist in any reality she knew.

     Then she was seated in a glade in the forest at twilight with strangers, all of them holding hands, waiting expectantly for the one who would complete the circle. When a statuesque figure glided out of the woods, a shadow whose features she couldn’t make out, she found herself quivering in anticipation of whatever was to come. The figure sat down opposite her and, after a hesitation, joined hands. There was a moment of stillness…than suddenly she felt her consciousness explode out of her body with a force that sent it flying at light speed along a lateral plane. She became a seemingly infinite expanse of energy, her sense of power so overwhelming that the next instant she contracted in on herself with terror, whirling like a tornado, spinning out of control—as though she’d become chaos itself.

     She woke up abruptly—it was still dark—and saw the objects around her suspended in the air for a moment before resuming their usual grounded orientation. When she glanced over at the bed next to her, with a desperate hope that she wasn’t alone—that Alana’s roommates had arrived in the night—sure enough, the neighboring bed bulked with a comforting presence. Relieved, she fell back to sleep and didn’t wake up until dawn. But this time when she noticed the adjacent bed, she saw the covers were tightly bound and knew with certainty that it had never been slept in.

     In the days that followed, she wondered why she had never run into Alana and Aaron together before because now she saw them everywhere. They rarely touched in public but walked and sat so close together, concentrating so fixedly one another, they couldn’t have seemed more passionately entwined if they’d been entangled in each other’s arms. To watch them seemed prurient, she thought—like peeping—their love was so exposed. And the feeling that took root in her and burgeoned was a scalding jealousy