If I instructed the rattle man to announce something, it would be a soppy poem. A love poem, with rhymes and flowers, preferably wild flowers. Dedicated, obviously, to Jonás.

Oh, I’m just like all the literature I most despise. Although I do own good books, any bad poem resembles me better.

A seven-hour time difference and the sea in between keep me from sleeping at his side. My ideal notebook, which can do anything, will let me sleep by his side in the land of dreams. By the side of the golden tree which isn’t the one I planted as a girl, though it looks a bit like it.

I’m writing this to make it official. My notebook: my guitar.

You carry a notebook identical to this one, you jot down numbers, addresses, the name of a restaurant, the title of a song. I know because, when we don’t have them open, your notebook communicates with mine; they’re connected by a string like two styrofoam cups.

What made Jonás do a PhD in maths? Was it something to do with his parents, with their jobs – she’s a chemist, he’s a physicist – or with the fact they met in the seventies, at the piano recitals in the university physics institute? I feel like Jonás is following proudly in his parents’ footsteps. Now, for example, he’s in Madrid, perhaps walking down the very streets where his mother used to walk. I feel like I’m wandering aimlessly, or in the opposite direction to my parents’ footsteps. My parents begot two children: No and No.

My brother lives in London. He’s twenty-seven, the age some rock stars died. Jonás’ sister lives with their father. She’s thirty-three, the age The Rock Star died. I’m in between their ages, but I’m with you in Rockland.

An ideal notebook should be waterproof, like the books children read in the bath. You can’t have a notebook getting wet as you wash, like Ulises Lima’s books do when he reads in the shower. An ideal notebook should be able to go underwater. Whether it floats like a rubber duck or swims in the deep like a whale, it needs to be waterproof.

Is this glass of water the dwarf-scale sea between us?

4

4

The dwarf on the block has a three-piece suit, a black bowler hat and a cane. Black shoes polished until they gleam. You could say he’s also the most elegant man on the block.

The dwarf, who’s a different height, who can sit in a chair and not touch the floor with his shoes. Who lives on a different scale. Who lives in a strange sort of margin. Who has the same abilities as you. Who walks down the same pavement as you. And yet.