Music started up somewhere. The piano was playing itself, and the kids with the china cups were on percussion, a yard-sale orchestra, cutlery and plates, doorstops and old telephones chinking and clattering in perfect time, an odd and delicate, off-kilter, handmade sound. Novo and I spun, and the garden spun, and even with my eyes wide open this was suddenly not a Saturday-morning house-clearance giveaway at all, but some kind of extravagant masked ball, rich with elaborate costume, the sky over our heads heavy with sparkling chandeliers. Bright anoraks became cloaks, and the women in them poured champagne out of watering cans. The knotty old couple glinted with diamonds. Mrs. Midler’s earrings caught the light as the girl wearing them leaned in closely to her partner and poured her smile into his eyes and lifted her chin to laugh. Novo held on to me and we turned with the crowd in the garden in ever-tightening rounds, the air bristling with the sweep and whisper of gowns, the flattened grass sighing, the dance pulling more and more of the world into itself like a whirlpool, quicker and quicker, snapshot and time travel and film set, until what began as a slow circle got spun out and ramped up, feverish and chaotic.

Novo turned me and turned me and that was when I saw Henry Lake at his window, watching. He was rooted to the spot, the only piece of stillness in that whirlpool, the only one of all of us and everything that wasn’t moving. I looked for him again as we spun and there he was, and a third time, and a fourth. A statue leaning out into the air, his face a dull stone, his mouth open, his startled eyes.

“Wait,” I said to Novo.

“Too much?” he said. “Too Cinderella maybe?” and the music changed suddenly to something distorted and industrial, something played on vacuum and food processor and megaphone and iron poker. Berlin nightclub, the sky low and solid as a ceiling, and the crowd changed suddenly, cornered and edgy, closing in, drawing together, hot with effort, claustrophobic, breathless, sweating. Their eyes looked like Charlie Parker’s eyes—quick black buttons, all reflective, absorbing nothing. I shook my head. “Stop.”