No, he had never thought of that. But for the rest of his life, in every moment of tragedy or triumph, even now as he sat on the couch beside this shell of her, screening his slides, he thought of nothing else.

“DO YOU remember this, Anna?” Bill Landsmann asked.

He had switched to a slide carousel from a less exotic trip, a road trip they had taken around the western states. As the hours went by and Anna still sat silently on the couch, Bill was running low on travel slides that included her. He gazed up at the hundreds of slide carousels on the shelves and realized how many of them had nothing to do with her, containing only slides from distant countries where he had traveled without her. To Bill, this scarcely seemed strange, because in his mind, when he traveled alone, she was always sitting right beside him. He was used to talking to this imaginary Anna, describing for her everything he saw while he was away. When he returned from his first solo journey so many years ago, Anna’s homecoming kiss at the airport burned his lips, like an angel searing his pink mouth with a glowing coal. It was as if he had been summoned to prophecy. But prophecy fades, he learned as the years passed—the urge to speak might not fade, but the urge to listen does. Bill Landsmann continued clicking through the carousels, prophesying to her, but Anna could no longer listen.