The elephants at the circus, magnificent feet crowded onto a striped stool, balancing their tremendous weight against the fear of the bull hook, their dark eyes as impenetrable as the boy’s, their trunks hanging delicate and expressive, as soft as soft penises, but more interesting. The sacred cows, endlessly grazing the concrete, looking for the pale shafts.

I’m in India and it might be morning—the shade has lightened now, no longer sepia but something else. I sleep for a while but I can still see everything, open eyes painted over my closed ones, and in the cage it’s just me and the boy, spinning slowly, the leather ball spinning with us, and then the boy is gone and it’s just me.

My sister collapsing against the wall and sliding down it in the hospital corridor, sitting on the shining floor, and me sitting next to her, knees up, staring at the opposite wall, tiled in Lutheran green. A nurse handing each of us a paper cup of water, which we drank obediently and then got to our feet and took the elevator down to the cafeteria. Then outside to a big field where she screamed as loud as she could and we took sips of our malts and then she screamed again. We went back in and up the elevator and her son was there with his dad, watching cartoons on the overhead TV, and he drank his malt and, many years later, in art school, made me a beautiful porcelain teapot with small strange cups to go with it.

The telephone is on the bedside table under the awning of the lamplight. I reach for it and dial Emma in the room next to mine.

“My door is locked and I need tea,” I say.

Minutes later a key is turned and an Indian man enters with a tea tray and Emma. She pours it for me but what I want is the sugar, and I empty packet after packet into my nephew’s delicate cup. Not my nephew’s, sorry. But it is Emma, and I’m sitting up now while she makes her own cup.

“I was sick,” I tell her, and it’s true, I was, but I’m not now. Now I want that fucking lamp off and the shade open. The Indian light floods in, illuminating the marble floor, its black veins, the silver teapot with its knotted napkin, the linen hotel robe that Emma is wearing and that we both buy and bring home with us for reasons of flatteringness. Underneath it, I see London and France.

M. on a restaurant patio in Nice, early morning, before the plane to Corsica, plates of loose eggs and an assortment of fruit cut into cunning shapes. Little Eiffel Towers and Arcs de Triomphe.

“You could have a fever,” Emma says.