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Her apartment was pleasant and bright and clean. She didn’t have many things, but everything was neatly arranged. There was
a quilt on the bed, her books stood straight on the shelf, and there were no dirty dishes in the sink. A vase of yellow daffodils
sat on her kitchen table.

“You keep it so neat.”

“I like to know where everything is.” She paused for a moment. “Just in case,” she added.

“In case of what?”

“Intruders.” She turned the radio to a classical station. It was a piano piece, intricate and relentless. The person played
with such cold, passionate precision that I felt uneasy. The music threatened to slip away from the pianist’s fingers into
chaos, yet never did. There was a kind of ruthlessness in such playing. We listened for a few minutes, and then Andrea turned
off the radio.

“I hope one day you’ll play something for me,” I told her.

“I can’t play in front of people,” she said, bending over to untie her shoelaces. “It makes me nervous, and I begin to make
mistakes.” She slipped off her shoes and put them in the closet.

“We have the same taste,” I said. “I have the same shoes as you do.”

“Yes,” Andrea said. “I already noticed that. Thank you for taking me shopping.” She led me to the door, and as I turned to
say good-bye she was already closing it behind me. Then I heard the click of the bolt turning.

During my second week at the colony, a writer invited all the artists to his studio one evening to celebrate his birthday.
I arrived late, just as he blew out the candles. I poured myself a glass of wine and sat down alone on the couch. An artist
gazed at me sympathetically from across the table. I smiled at her and cut myself a piece of cake even though I didn’t want
to eat it.

The artist, whose name was Karine, asked me how my work was going, and I nodded my head, eating the cake messily with my fingers.
Then she asked, “Do you have a boyfriend or a husband?”

“Neither,” I replied.

Karine tilted her head, studying me closely. “How funny that you should be so concerned!” she said. I was startled to see
a black spot on the blue of her iris, as if she had held a pen to her eye and stained it with ink.

“Look over there at Elise! Isn’t that funny?” She pointed to a poet who stood to the side wearing a plastic brace around her
stomach. I thought she was wearing it to be unconventional until Karine told me that Elise had cracked her back a week before
while Rollerblading. “Every time I see her wearing that thing, I want to laugh,” she said. “Is this your first time at the
colony?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I thought. You’ll find it interesting here. Of course, that’s what makes it painful too, but why else do people
keep coming back year after year? We tend to poison our own well here, but you shouldn’t take it personally.”

When I got up from the couch, I knocked over an empty beer bottle that someone had placed on the floor. Martin paused in the
middle of his conversation to look at me. “Susan,” he said, as if he were trying to steady me, and then he turned away to
talk to another writer.

I went over to the table and refilled my glass of wine. “Are you okay?” the host asked me. “You look as if you’re about to
cry.”

“I’m fine,” I said, but the question defeated me. I picked up my coat and headed for the door. I found Andrea sitting by herself
on the steps outside.

“Are you leaving?” she asked. “I’ll go back with you.”

We walked along Irving Street in silence. A lone car passed, and everything paled under the headlights. In the momentary glare,
we seemed to be the stark negatives of ourselves. It was a relief to be outside, away from the heat of other bodies and the
sound of other voices. The car passed, and in the darkness I could expand again. The stars were cold pinpoints of light separated
by darkness, and I remembered as a child wanting to pluck them from the sky like jewels. Now as I gazed at the sky, I knew
I was seeing the light of dead stars.

Andrea too was silent, and I looked at her face with its wide, blunted cheekbones. She had an immunity, a deep-rooted stubbornness
never to smile in order to please others. Her invulnerability resided in her lack of feeling. When I thought about what was
inside of her, I could never think literally—organs and blood—but thought of cold, vast space, like the night sky above our
heads. Was that what Andrea was like? Or was it like falling through an emptiness?

“So what do you do with yourself all day?” Martin asked me. He was carefully untwisting the ends of foil around the tilapia.
“Not done yet,” he said, poking at the fish with a knife and then putting it back in the oven.

I sat at his desk and pressed a few keys on his Underwood. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean that you stay in that box of an apartment of yours and rarely crawl out.”

“I crawled out tonight to come here, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Martin said, abruptly getting out of his chair. He began swearing at his smoking oven, and I felt my vision
blur and the room get smaller. He wasn’t nice at all. A tyrant. Martin peered into his oven and slammed the door shut.

“So you still haven’t answered my question,” he said. “How much of your time do you spend thinking and how much of your time
do you spend doing?”

I jabbed at a key with one finger. “I’m sick of thinking. I want my mind to be empty.”

“Why would you want that?” he asked. “That happens when you’re dead. When you’re dead, you have all the time in the world
for your mind to be empty.”

“But don’t you like to sleep?”

“No. What a waste of time.” He told me that when he slept, he left the radio on, tuned to the BBC. He didn’t want his mind
to rest. As he slept, he would hear about all the things going on in the world. His mind would be absorbing words and places.
Like Ulaanbaatar, which was the capital of Mongolia.

This struck me as funny and admirable and also a little sad.

We ate the tilapia, which was excellent, and then Martin poured each of us a cup of coffee. “Do you think,” he said, placing
the sugar bowl in front of me, “that we are just lazy or overly scrupulous as writers?”

“Both.”

“That’s the problem with you. I’m always trying to make distinctions, and you’re always collapsing things together.” He picked
up the letter opener from his desk and used it to stir his coffee. “I’m sick to death of earnest writing,” he said, rapping
the metal blade against his cup. “Do you hear that? Everyone hits the same note. It’s always about sadness. How sad I am.
But try saying ‘abyss’ three times with a straight face. These morbid writers who can only write about their mother dying!
What I want to know is why is everyone so depressed? Hardly anyone ever writes about joy anymore. You know why? Because it’s
harder to write about joy. It’s easier to hit the note of sadness than anything else.”

We talked for several hours, and when I finally glanced at my watch it was two a.m. Did he want me to go? He pointed to the
narcissus that an artist had given him, a cluster of tiny white flowers framed by long slender leaves, the roots supported
by smooth gray and brown stones. It reminded me of the artist’s work, which also had that kind of simplicity and neatness.
He turned off the light in the kitchen. “See how the flower appears?” he said. “At first, you can’t see anything. But then
you see it emerge.”

“What do you mean?”

He turned the light back on. “Look at the flower,” he said. Then he turned off the light. At first I saw nothing, only darkness,
and then the narcissus took form. It seemed to be growing white. “Did you see it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Martin flicked on the light.

“Do it again,” I said.

Martin turned off the light, and in the darkness we watched the narcissus take on its luminous shape. It floated before us,
the ghost of a flower. “Whose is it?” he said. “Who gets to use this?”

“It’s yours,” I told him. “You observed it.”

“How about whichever one of us writes it first?”

“All right.” I looked at him. “It’s because of our eyes.”

“Our pupils are adjusting.” He turned on the light. “Isn’t it interesting to think that our pupils aren’t really black?” he
said eagerly, taking a step toward me. “It’s just emptiness. There isn’t anything there, just a hole.”

I couldn’t help but stare into his pupils. “I hadn’t thought of it like that before,” I murmured. I didn’t want to go, but
it seemed I couldn’t stay. He stood near me, looking both formidable and innocent in his white T-shirt, and I wished him good
night.

In my studio, I climbed into bed and stared at the crumpled tissue on my night table before turning off the light.

It was quiet in town. The tourists had not yet arrived, and many of the stores were still closed from the winter. I had spent
the entire day in the library, surrounded by rows of dark and bright spines, and when I stepped outside, the afternoon had
disappeared and the sky was the color of a bruise. The sea glimmered darkly. I could see bare patches of shore under a few
cold lights, the relentless electric glare of them.

In my story, the mannequins had changed into more sensual clothes. I had worked over my sentences for so long that they had
acquired a fateful sound. Now everything was sealed under a layer of varnish. If I changed anything, the rest would begin
to crack.

I found Andrea sitting on the futon in my studio. “The door was unlocked,” she said. “The wind blew it open.”

I had left my diary open on my desk, and I wondered if Andrea had glanced at the pages. If so, she would know that my thoughts
were trivial and cruel.

“Do you want some tea?” I asked.

“No, I just want to sit here.” Her hands rested in her lap, and her eyes were glassy and strange. It seemed as though she
hadn’t moved for hours.

“Andrea, is everything okay?”

“Well, I think someone was in my apartment.” She spoke in a neutral voice and sounded unsurprised that such a thing should
happen to her. “My stuff was moved around. It was very subtle, but I notice small details like that.”

I asked if I should call the police.

“What’s the point? There isn’t anything missing.”

“But why would anyone break in?”

“Well, you know, maybe they were looking for something. Like the number of my checking account.”

“You should ask Steve to change your lock.”

Andrea shrugged. “I guess.” We fell silent, listening to the wind as it shook the windows. Finally, Andrea rose from the couch.
“I’m going to bed now.”

“Do you want to walk across the breakwater tomorrow?” I asked.

She stood silently in the room, studying the only painting on the wall, a still life of fruit and flowers. I thought she hadn’t
heard me, but then she turned and looked at me sadly. “All right,” she said with a little smile.

“That painting was already here when I came,” I said. “Do you think it’s any good?” In truth, I felt a little sick whenever
I looked at it. It was supposed to be a still life, but the things in the painting threatened to move if I stared hard enough.
The apples, pears, and grapes were anemic in their thin wash of color, floating above the bowl without touching it. Beside
the pale levitating fruit stood a vase of orange and purple zinnias, their faces heavy and luxuriant yet detached from their
stems. At any moment, a brilliant orange head would fall into the bowl—and then what would happen?

I told Andrea that I didn’t really like the painting.

“It’s something to look at,” Andrea replied.

The next morning, Andrea and I walked to the breakwater at the south end of town. Huge irregular stone slabs formed a seawall
that ran straight across the bay and ended at the tip of the cape. Though the topmost stones appeared to be flat, once Andrea
and I were actually on the breakwater they dipped and slanted like badly crooked teeth. I began jumping from one rock to another,
but when I turned around, Andrea was far behind, halted on a rock and staring down at her feet.

“Andrea?”

“Yes,” she said, taking one cautious step. She paused and examined the rocks carefully.

“Do you want to go back?”

She shook her head. “I just want to make sure of the rocks.”

I walked back and held out my hand. She took it, and we proceeded across the breakwater like this, stopping and starting,
in a slow and painful crawl. We passed by stones where seagulls had feasted, littered with iridescent shards of mussels and
the half-eaten, translucent bodies of crabs. Toward the end of the breakwater, we saw more abandoned, shipwrecked things—fragments
of painted wood, a plastic detergent bottle, a Styrofoam cooler. I was relieved when we finally stepped off the breakwater
and began climbing the dunes, past long stems of beach grass that had traced circles in the sand. We went over the rise, and
there all at once was the vast glinting blueness of ocean, a deeper blue more piercing than the bay. Andrea and I sat down
on the beach with our faces toward the sun, and I felt pleasantly exhausted, listening to the sound of the waves.

“Do you see microscopic things in the sky?” Andrea asked me.

I looked at her and laughed. “What did you just say?”

“When you look at the sky, do you see things like tiny black threads?” Andrea paused, squinting. “I guess they’re distortions
of your eye. It’s like you have to look a certain way at the surface of your eyes.”

I stared at the sky, so bright and pure, its blueness verging with the sea. I saw nothing at first. Then I stared harder and
narrowed my eyes. Black filaments, like strands of hair, rose and fell into the ocean. I blinked, and the black threads swooped
like a flock of birds.

“There are also these points of light,” Andrea said.

I looked until the sky began to sparkle slowly. Little crosses or stars. I laughed and told Andrea I was seeing visions. I
felt happy in the way you do when another world has been opened to you.

“This is how I occupy myself when I’m feeling bored,” Andrea said.

I stretched out and closed my eyes, sinking further into the warm oblivion of sun and sand. My eyelids could not shut out
the radiance, and I felt I was dreaming, my body turning into light and air. When I opened my eyes, I saw the same view of
beach and sky, more vivid and distinct than anything I could have imagined or remembered.