“Did your family have a housekeeper?”

“Yes. No.” She looked at me, then away, then at me again. “Those were good times. We were lucky to have them. Do you want to have sex?”

“No.”

“Okay. Goodnight.” She stood and walked out of the room.

I took off the white clothes and put on the white pajamas, which were fairly identical to the clothes I’d just removed, stretched out on the white bedcovers, and looked at the faraway white ceiling. I looked across the room at my dirty clothes, drab as they were, the only color in the chamber there except for me. I wondered if there were rooms identical to mine in the compound. I felt fairly certain there were. Then I wondered if I was in the same room I had been in before. If my dirty clothes had been placed on the identical dresser in another room, how would I know? I was lost in the building with no identifying markings on the doors and corridors. Would it matter? If I found out my room was a different one, would it have mattered?

Without Trigo there would be no dreaming, so I tried to entertain myself before drifting off into my dead sleep. The ship of Theseus came to me, a problem that had amused me as a child. Heraclitus, for all his fragments, solved nothing with his puddle jumping. Replace the masts, the hull, the rudder, the sails, every sheet and board and is it Theseus’s ship? Is it the same vessel only because it displaces water in the same spot? Is there a difference in replacing every piece of a thing in turn rather than replacing the whole thing at once? Eigen was occupying the space that she always had, but was she Eigen? If not, where was Eigen?

I had to find her.

I got up and went to the door and found it, to my surprise, unlocked.

4

Once in the hallway one thing was evident. If I didn’t find a way to mark my door, I would never find my way back to it with any certainty. The soles of my shoes were clean, making it impossible for me to soil the white carpet outside my door. I had no pencil, no marker, and no blade with which to cut myself and so mark the door as if in Pharaoh’s Egypt. I tried counting doors, but the corridor appeared endless, crossed as it was by many other corridors, white and all the same. How was Gloria able to find it?

A better, more pressing question was how was I going to locate Eigen? I did the only thing I could think of. I wandered the halls calling out, “Eigen, Eigen,” like an idiot. Perhaps not even like, but as an idiot. Soon I was hopelessly, despairingly lost and puzzled all the more because none of the corridors led to anything that might have taken me out of the building. After coming to believe that I had covered the same hallways several times, never seeing a person or a color, I found myself standing in front of a vending machine. In it was nothing but bag after bag of barbecue potato chips. I had no change, no bills, no cards, as my clothes had no pockets. Though not hungry, I really wanted those chips, if only for the color. I shook the machine and startled myself with the noise and my own aggression. Then I shook it again, more vigorously, with equal success.