She was in a school, a classroom; the sort of classroom she hadn’t been in for almost ten years. There was a blackboard, dozens of carved-up school desks and chairs, and a large broken clock on the wall. There were no students there, but in the front of the room, a blank white screen was pulled down, covering part of the blackboard. Toward the back of the room, on a small table, sat a slide projector. It occurred to Leora that students in schools now had probably never used a slide projector before; if a slide projector were to appear in a school again, none of the students would know how to operate it. Fortunately, however, there was someone in the room who could. Seated on a vinyl couch against the room’s back wall was Bill Landsmann.

“MR. LANDSMANN?” Leora tried to shout, but her voice failed to carry. There was no way to make herself heard, she discovered, except by whispering. She had never whispered to Bill Landsmann before. “What are you doing here?”

For a moment she regretted her question, turned red, panicked, afraid of what the answer might be. But then Bill Landsmann whispered back, “You shouldn’t worry, Leora. I don’t live here. Only my slides do—and our friendship, yes?”

Leora began turning redder than the dinosaurs in the lost zoo. Bill Landsmann softened his verdict. “It was too difficult for you, then. I know that,” he said. But then he stood up, cleared his throat, and raised his voice. “Who knows what you might have found out about me? Or what I might have found out about you? What do you really know about anyone, other than what they choose to show you?”

She stood motionless in the water. Bill Landsmann leaned forward and switched on the slide projector, and Leora was alarmed by the sudden lion’s roar of the projector’s fan. Bill Landsmann walked to the side of the room and turned out the lights. The square of white light on the wall fluttered gently in the room’s heavy waves.

Bill Landsmann began clicking the slides by, one after another, monotonously, each one shivering with the tension of the water. All of them were blank.

He recited no script. Instead, after the entire slide carousel had been completed, he emptied the machine and held out his hands, filled with the little blank squares, like piles of windows with their blinds drawn.

“These are yours,” he said. “You can fill them with whatever you like. But you have to find someone to show them to.”