“It could have happened to anyone—a step put wrong in a dream...” he said. He spoke the following words as if he were no longer aware of my presence. “How do you avoid putting a step wrong in your dreams? Where any step is a wrong step? I might have gotten carried away, but now I think it was the opposite. I wasn’t paying close attention. I got lost. I couldn’t find my way back into my own dream. I went on and on, searching for it, only getting myself more and more lost in other people’s dreams... And they’re so interesting, so much more interesting than mine ever were, mainly because they are other people’s dreams; it’s impossible to look away. I have to watch and go on watching, seeing. I don’t even care if they see me—what can any of us do about that?”

The school bell rang. Suddenly, I couldn’t find Ernest. It was as if he’d kept going, turned a corner, slid into a shadow, but we were out in the middle of a plaza overflowing with the blinding light of day. He’d somehow gone away, but I felt as though he was still very near, present, unseen.

I didn’t see him again. The baptism ended with that bell. I escorted Sylvia home as arranged and then returned to my own apartment. There was a letter waiting for me there, on the official stationery of a small country town I had never heard of before, informing me that Amelia had been killed there in a traffic accident. The signatory was the town clerk, who had been an eyewitness to the accident. She had attracted his notice because she’d seemed dazed and nearly fainting, weaving down the sidewalk like someone struggling with a heavy, unbalanced burden. Then she tripped, stumbled, blundered out into the street directly in front of an accelerating truck...

They found a letter from me in her bag, and, as I was the only contact they could find, it was decided that I should be the one to receive formal notice of her death. I remembered what Ernest had said the very moment she died:

“There’s no need.”