The one redeeming feature of the apartment was a simple brass chandelier suspended over the apartment’s only table. Sometimes, if she was working on a story for her magazine but didn’t want to have to sit in her cubicle late at night, she would come home and set up her little computer on the table, typing into the dark under the moonlight of the chandelier. The chandelier had a shiny globe at its base, and if she glanced up at it from her seat, she could see her own reflection on its round surface as if looking through the wrong lens of a telescope. She noticed that she was shrinking deeper and deeper into the apartment, whose walls in the reflection curled in around her like a white wooden frame soaked in water until there was a bend in the wood. Sometimes, when the story she was working on proved particularly dull, she would reach up to the chandelier and give it a little spin. The fake electric candles on its crown would twirl around like a carousel, projecting shadows on the walls that would stoop and spin, lengthening out of control so that the carousel horses grew to hideously large proportions and then shrank to frighteningly small ones, their giant horse-mouths laughing at the poor imaginary children riding them, forced to grow and shrink with them.

Leora knew that she was supposed to be in the prime of her life, delighting in every turn of events, rejoicing in all the new people she would meet with each new Melanie who signed the lease. But in the time she had lived within that twisted white frame of walls, she had suddenly become older. Her face was hardening into a portrait, a chemical combination of lights and darks trapped on an old-fashioned slide film and cast in the shadow behind her on the apartment’s curling white walls. She became a projection.

And then, one Monday morning in the darkest days of her third winter on Amsterdam Avenue, she finally found the tefillin.