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She glides to the skink, pausing to kiss him on the forehead. A scalding torrent covers her hands until she has to pull away. Her hands feel clean, pink and soft, as if they had not journeyed through life with her, but rather just appeared, newborn and fierce.

“You know,” she says. “I rather like modern art.”

A patriarchal smile gouges across his shapeless features. “Of course you do, honey. That’s sweet.”

And again: knob turns, water scalds, her fingernails feel like wet plaster.

He smiles again. “I love that you have your own view on things, you know that hun?”

Seated at the table, his hands are tearing his napkin to shreds. He pauses, and looks down as if embarrassed, before carrying the fragments in the palm of his hand to the waste bin.

The theories he has been spouting irritate her, burrowing down beneath her skin. She can feel them there. Factual accuracy had never been his problem—he wasn’t a whiz kid exactly, but manages well enough to remember the important dates and names. But when he tries to implement those cellular facts into his more ambitious theories, disaster struck. Fact was welded to fact with no concern for coherence or truthfulness, resulting in theories that lurched and stumbled, brutal amalgams of miscalculation and self-devoted fervor.


Grocery shopping always brings pleasant distractions. Today she is unable to remember her reason for coming, so she just wanders, basket swinging from her hand, examining with great care the labels of items she knows will remain unbought.

The linoleum floor reflects the fluorescent lights, bathing the carefully arranged produce and the flashy packages in an antiseptic glow. She finds herself vaguely reminded of hospitals, the immaculate drab whiteness. The center of health where the damned flock.

She passes by faces of every conceivable type—young, old, loved, lost, bitter, oblivious—but still feels that someone is missing, or that she has been left behind.

An employee approaches her, and says, “Ma’am. Do you need help finding something?”

She stares at him for a moment, and then leaves in a hurried rush.


Her husband is now gone to work: moving with an awkward strut like a self-styled dandy. She pictures him out there, skipping like a stone across the surface of the world.

She runs a bath. Standing to her knees in the water, she winks, then sneers, at her double hanging in the mirror across the room.

She sits in the tub, leans back, closes her eyes, and thinks of nothing at all.


The dream comes slowly. The house is gripped in a long quiet, so that when Emily enters she has a vague recollection of mausoleum and funeral marble.

From the great oaken double doors runs a lush Turkish carpet depicting whirling dervishes, which fades into the borders of the room. Her eye is immediately drawn to the blood mahogany staircase leading upwards in sweeping arches like the abutments and buttresses of gothic cathedrals. These stairs, through a strange trick of angle, twist imponderably upon themselves in a series of helical pirouettes, so that the whole room is amphitheatred by the ornate balustrade. And dancing upon this railing are endless refractions and reflections of age and misery, all weeping to the rising notes of a violin.

She thinks it the most horrible place she’s ever been, yet cannot bear to leave.

The music is replaced by an echoing silence. One of her younger selves comes down and clasps her hand, and they begin to dance. A cheerful dance, with kicked heels and blushing laughter, which becomes more feverish and delightful, even as the antechamber begins to fill with water from an unknown source.