Yvonne forced her outside for lunch one afternoon. They sat at Veselka in the chill sunlight of Second Avenue, Ana crouched behind a pair of sunglasses. She ought to see someone, Yvonne said. She ought to get drugs. Counseling. She didn’t have to walk around like that (but what if she wanted to walk around like that? What if she wanted to feel sorry for herself?). Her brother, Peter, kept calling from Long Island, inviting her out. He even drove into the city once—which made Ana feel only worse, the two of them together in his car, with nothing at all to say. All everyone wanted to hear from her was that she was okay. She was coping. She wouldn’t slit her wrists, stick her head in the oven, leap into the East River. But she couldn’t tell them that. And why should she? Why this insistence on being fine, on staying alive, her heart continuing its usual tidy beat?

The only time she felt slightly better, the only time when she thought, Perhaps life will go on, in a different way now—how she didn’t know—was when, at night, she phoned Pars Mansoor. He’d written his number on a five-dollar Canadian bill before he left Trachis Island; and she kept it now on her desk in the lab along with the purple stone. Talking to Pars, more than to anyone else, gave her a glimpse of hope, a crack in the clouds. It was different from talking to Yvonne or Peter, or any of her colleagues or friends; yes, they were sympathetic, shocked, moved, terribly grieved themselves; but Pars had been there on the island all those days, and he understood something else. What had he told her once, that Jews had the corner on guilt, Catholics sin, but Persians were the connoisseurs of grief? That in Iran there was an expression: Gosseh Khordan, to “eat sorrow.” Hadn’t they both eaten the same raw sorrow?

Sometimes when she talked to Pars, minutes passed on the phone and neither of them said anything, but the silences were not unbearable. They were empty vessels, a cup, a bucket that hung, and didn’t need to be filled right away, or ever. She pictured him across the continent in Berkeley, on the other end of the line, the receiver by his ear, a scoop to gather grains of silence. One night, late in her office, she heard twinkling on the other end of the phone.

It must be sunset there, she remarked.

How do you know? he asked.

I can hear it.

She had her feet up on the desk. It was ten at night in New York City.

Hold on, he said.

She heard him move a chair or a desk. Then she heard a very distinct gnashing sound. He was holding the receiver out the window. A second later he returned to the phone.

What do you hear?