Most of the time [Tonsure] walks in the darkest night. Now and again, a wavering finger of light flutters across the darkness, teasing him with the outline of a path. Hopeful, he runs toward it, only to find himself in another maze. The hope that night must give way to day allows him to continue, and he tries to guess where a more permanent light might break through—a crack, a crevice, a hole—but the end of night never comes.)

Early on, I met these students, Duncan’s unwitting accomplices in esoteric, possibly meaningless, research. They made no particular impression on me: a formless row of fresh-scrubbed faces attached to identical dark blue uniforms. The eyes that populated those ruddy faces sparkled or flared or reflected light according to the intensity of their ambition. Some students stared defiantly at you. Some let you stare through them. Still others looked away, or down at their feet—every foot hidden by proper white socks, sheathed in black, brightly polished shoes. They smelled like soap and sweat. Their voices cracked and buzzed and sang out with equal innocence and brashness. In their uniformed rows, I could not tell the poor from the rich, the smart from the stupid. Thus did Blythe Academy serve as an equalizer of souls.

Never once did I think to challenge that semblance of equality, to search for that one variant, that one mimic cleverly made up to resemble the others, but actually of a different species altogether. (She was just another student in so many ways. You shouldn’t think that she was other, or different. I was the mimic, if anyone was. I threw off the balance in that place.)

Mary’s presence, when I look back, first resonated as a faint music vibrating through the strings of my golden metaphor: a resonance neither sinister nor angelic. In that respect, she reminds me of a character in a novel by Sirin. She exists on the edges of the pages, in the spaces between the words, her name unwritten except in riddles: a woman’s green-and-gold scarf on Duncan’s apartment desk, sudden honeysuckle in a glass in his school office, a puzzling hint of cologne during lunch. A half-dozen passive yet sensual details a jealous wife might hoard—or that a sibling might half-remember with amusement, but later revisit harshly.

Duncan never mentioned Mary during that time. (She was my student, for Truff’s sake! Why would I mention her? You make this all sound so tawdry yet ethereal. Is it possible she just escaped your myopic powers of observation? Is it possible you were so continually drugged and drunk that you noticed no one? You should strike all of this from the record. There’s no reason for it and no one cares. I don’t even care anymore, except the now-dulled sting that you tried to undermine my relationships rather than support them.) Curiously, though, Duncan’s postcards began to contain more personal information than our lunchtime conversations, possibly because of Bonmot’s presence.