The raja crumpling his newspaper just enough to look over it, cigarette dangling. No response from either man. Us turning on our heels and ignoring it, walking back inside the compound, along the ancient white plaster wall with elephants painted on it, the fresco images cracked and disappearing, the elephants’ riders still fairly bright and distinguishable—the big boxlike saddles had been re-gilded somewhere along the way—atop the animals, imperious men in pillbox hats. A parade of elephants, their ponderous ghostly bodies fading into bare plaster, their legs gone the way of umbrella stands.

The grounds of the Udaipur hotel, shaved and magnificent, the cultivated shrubs and the men on their knees cultivating them standing up as Kathy and I go past. She greets them in Hindi and they reply, then they follow us slowly, hanging back, to make sure she gets up the ramp to the breakfast room, another man opening the door with a flourish, a white cloth over one arm like a maître d’ from an old movie or a cartoon. Completely empty, a sea of linen and small jars of marmalade. I order dry toast and a yogurt, Kathy everything, including eggs. Tea, in a silver pot with a white napkin tied around its handle, and as soon as I pour it I know something is wrong.

Not an inkling, a knowledge. Suddenly I’m encased inside myself and something is in there with me, malevolent.

I have to go, I tell her.

And I leave her in the restaurant, Emma still asleep, with only the cartoon maître d’ and the shrubbery men to get her back to her room.

Cutting through the low prickly grass, me and the thing, and across the pea gravel, up the wide marble steps, around the corner, and into my room, close the door and lock it, crawl onto the bed, me and the thing and the thing is getting bigger, forcing me into a corner of myself, on top of the spread, the pillow only half under my head, the bedside light still on from before, shining down into my eyes. Close them. No, open them. Closed, it’s just me and the thing, whatever it is. Open, it’s me and the thing and the light, bearing down. For hours I can’t reach up and turn it off, can’t raise the hand that would do it, can’t shift my head enough that the light isn’t shining in my eyes, can’t do anything but lie there, trapped inside myself with the thing.

Once I think I’m going to throw up and am suddenly wringing wet, even the bottoms of my feet. I try to groan and can’t; I try to roll over and I can’t. I’m reeling without moving. Then it begins evaporating and the shivering begins, all internal, the barest movement. I still haven’t turned my head. This is worse than death. This is all the suffering I’ve ever heard about or seen wrapped into the silent package of me. The beautiful thing about death, I realize somewhere along the way, is that it would happen, but this is somehow not happening, it’s more like a place than an event, and all I can do is exist inside it. Time has stopped, I’m completely motionless, waiting, like an image in those old daguerreotypes of the men sitting against the backdrops, still and unsmiling, staring blankly into the slow process of being created, hats in self-conscious hands. Only I’m being uncreated.