It was quite late when we woke up, dusk if not dark. Liv was asleep on the sofa in the living room, her shaggy hair all spread out over the cushions in tails like the ones on her mice. Silver called me over to the window and we looked down and across the back of No. 17 to Selina’s guests disporting themselves in the garden. Max’s guests, I suppose I should say. Some were sitting on the bulbous white-metal garden furniture, all were drinking wine or brandy—we could tell by the glasses—and two, a man and a woman who looked enormously old to us, were dancing. Faint ancient music came out from the open French windows, and they were dancing, this aged couple, some long-lost dance, a quickstep, Silver said it was, or maybe a foxtrot. The moon that had disappeared so early the night before now showed itself in the pale lilac sky, a shape like a segment of an orange, its light unable to compete with Selina’s bright lamps and the dazzling blue circular element that hung on the wall to kill mosquitoes. From high above I imagined them dashing themselves against it, the sizzling sound as it electrocuted and destroyed them, and I shuddered.

There were no mosquitoes on the roofs. They never fly so high. The music reached us distantly and the carefully muted civilized laughter of elderly academics who hated to disturb the neighbors. It all seemed remote, a different and unreal world, the same place Guy sometimes took me to, where all the people were unlike me and Silver, and all the things they did nothing we’d ever care to do.

“Can you dance?” I said.

“I’ve never tried. I expect I could learn if you really wanted me to.”

“I don’t want to dance,” I said. “I want to hear your story.”