“Oh, oh, right. . . . Just a year, actually. Before that I was living with this friend of mine, you know? Another woman.”

“Really? Actually, now that you mention it, I remember there used to be some girl who'd answer the phone every once in a while when I called. What's she doing now?”

I told him a peculiar lie. “She married. She ran off and left me.”

“That wasn't very nice,” he said, laughing.

He lay there on his back. I watched his broad chest move.

Suddenly, quite casually, I asked him a question.

“Do you think your wife would be mad if she knew?”

His face stiffened a little, then gradually softened into a smile.

“Not at all. Of course if she were conscious it's pretty unlikely that this would have gotten as far as it has, you know, so you can't really tell, but if she could see the position I'm in right now, and if she could see what you're like, I doubt she'd be mad. That's the kind of person she was.”

“A wonderful woman?”

“Yeah. I really think I've been blessed where women are concerned. I mean you're wonderful, and she was a wonderful woman too. . . . But then she's no longer in this world, is she? Not anymore.”

Hearing him make this statement in his sleepy voice scared me, and I fell silent. For some reason those words made me shiver. Then as I lay there watching, my boyfriend drifted off to sleep, all alone, his breathing calm, and I stared at his closed eyelids, and listened to those deep breaths, and it began to seem like I might see all the way into his dreams.

A single consciousness wandering all alone in a distant night.

“You start matching your breath to theirs, slowly, those deep breaths,” Shiori had said, “maybe you're breathing in the darkness they have inside them. Sometimes I'm thinking to myself, You mustn't go to sleep, even as I'm dozing off, having some terrible dream.”

Shiori, it's really true, isn't it? I think lately I've started to understand. I think maybe as I'm sleeping next to him, stretched out here like his shadow, maybe I take in his very being, his heart and mind, just like breathing in the darkness. And maybe if you keep on doing that, if you come to know lots of different people's dreams, like you did, maybe you reach a point from which you can't return, and maybe that weighed down on you so heavily that in the end there was really nothing you could do but die.

No doubt it was because I was thinking about all this immediately before I tossed myself into sleep—charged in the way I always do—that I dreamed of Shiori that night, for the first time since she'd died. I could see her perfectly clearly. Everything in the dream seemed absolutely real, it was all as vivid as the world before my eyes.