“He watches me dream. He’s a stranger, and he watches me dream. I’ll be, I don’t know, doing something like pouring tea, or even just gazing out a window at a garden or at children playing, and then he’ll be there, watching me—not judging me, not following me, just watching me, the way you watch a play, for the pleasure of it. He’s always the same, although his clothes will vary. He is like anyone you would see in the street, well-dressed, well-groomed, but he’s polluted in his body. He isn’t sick; he doesn’t bring the feeling of sickness with him; he pollutes my dreams with his staring. His staring makes my dreams, dreams for him, and makes me, me for him. It’s like I’m performing for him.”

“Perhaps telling me about him will help you to remember.”

She didn’t answer or meet my gaze, but only lowered her head listlessly and pressed her hand to the base of her throat.

“Or it might ease your mind, at least,” I added. I wanted to help her to believe that everything was fine and that whatever she was experiencing in her dreams, even in her nightmares, was nothing really out of the ordinary, since I always insisted that things be ordinary myself.

“There’s nothing unusual about his stature or his size or his bearing. He’s not old, perhaps he’s young. He has a moustache, brown hair, like everyone. The same kind of clothes. They’re a bit modish… new, tailored clothes. He always has his hat on. It’s a boater sometimes. Sometimes it’s a Homberg, or what do you call them—a Kossuth hat. That’s in cold weather. In cold weather he wears a long coat with a fur collar, or perhaps it’s velvet. And he wears gloves. In warmer weather he dresses lightly…

“You see?” she interrupted herself. “It’s useless. I could be describing anyone. He has no scars, no spectacles, he doesn’t wear flowers in his lapels or any sort of badge, nothing. I simply see the sort of man you pass dozens of times a day on the street. Brown eyes, brown hair, not tall or short or fat or thin. Not young or old. The distortion—the distortion is in the way he looks at me, not in his body, but he is still polluted in his body. But you see he isn’t threatening to do anything to me; you see that?”

“He’s already doing something to you by watching you.”

“Exactly.”

“And this is how often?”