It was January. The city outside had grown dark. Lights were beginning to come on in the buildings outside the hotel room’s giant window, little panels of offices and apartments with people glowing in them, leaning over to draw the blinds. He stepped backward, keeping his eyes on the slide projector as if it might wander away, and reached along the wall to turn out the lights in the room. As he fumbled for the light switch, he jumped as he noticed his own figure reflected on the room’s giant windowpane. With relief he turned out the lights, setting the slide projector’s power switch in his line of sight as his eyes adjusted. Crouching next to the machine, he turned on the power, alarmed by the sudden lion’s roar of the projector’s fan and the blinding square of white light on the wall, burning like fire. When he pushed the button to change the picture, he found himself kneeling before a giant projection of Vermeer’s painting Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.

The slides continued, a vast selection of paintings from the Rijksmuseum, tiny scenes and crying prophets. The final slide shone pure white light, with Leora’s tiny handwriting inscribed right on the slide film—handwriting that was actually legible when projected to hundreds of times its actual size. All it said was, “Thank you.”

With Leora, there was no need for “work,” for “issues,” for “compromises,” or even for a “relationship” at all. Leora was simply a light. And he was a square of slide film, and she shined herself through him and made all the things inside him appear, not as strewn bricks around his feet but as a clear image projected on the screen of his life, something he could point to at last, after so many years of darkness, and say, without thinking, “Here I am.”

“HERE I AM,” Yehudah heard his own solid voice announce. The customer looked up to see him strutting back into the room, his hands full of black leather pouches with white labels. “There’s a whole range of cuts here, so you’ll be able to tell the difference.”

“Not including the unkindest cut, I hope,” Jake smirked.