She watched the winey beauty of the Midwest. She was in the living room of the poet couple and their roster of amanuenses. All are tantalizing because drunk. Everything is sex. The poet Loudermilk is propped against the mantelpiece. Clare might like to die for him, or, she thinks, perhaps she will kill him. Thank god she does not write poetry. He and his “cool, dim Easter / Basket” are so beloved. He’s rewriting the rules of the poetry game with his fresh prosody, his striking neologisms. Or is it the prosody that is striking, the neologisms fresh? “These are the poems of our time,” Clare overhears one besotted second-year say.

Meanwhile, there doesn’t seem to be anyone resembling Halloween’s Troy.

Just before midnight there is an exodus.

Clare stumbles out into the frigid grid. Lawns are spiked with frost and with detritus. The building Clare lives in has an enormous mansard roof. The whole thing is a rectangular mushroom, a brutalist mausoleum.

When Clare was in college, there had been a very few people for her, people she had known. She does not understand why now, but these people did not touch her. Or, they may have touched her in a physical sense but in no other. They were like her, even sometimes a lot. It felt like looking through a glass partition into a room in which there was a mirror. Clare danced behind the glass partition and was reflected. A friend was on the other side of the partition and danced, too. Their reflections looked similar. So they danced—together.

Clare could not tell if she was alone. Of course Clare was not alone! Just look at this dancing. But her confessions were muffled, especially if she tried to shout them through the glass. The friend gyrating in the other room, visible through the partition, leaned down and helpfully turned the music up.

“This is life,” Clare told herself, and went for a walk with her notebook. Her mother called and reminded Clare that she, Clare, was definitely not having any issues. Clare was well! If Clare happened not to be well, then Clare should consider disappearing from the face of the earth, because if Clare was not well then she would be dead to her mother, who had long since had enough.

Clare pondered these entailments.

She went for another walk. She wandered for hours and did not do the assigned reading for her courses. People in the wealthy suburb raked their lawns and clambered, complaining about life’s dullness or its complexity, into SUVs. Astonished, Clare watched them. Their faces coordinated perfectly with the landscape. They knew just where they were. Meanwhile, the United States wrung its hands about its war. Astonished, Clare stood in the sale section at Urban Outfitters and watched a celebrated visiting professor, a writer, shop. The visitor, caressing a cardigan with studied nonchalance, seemed to wish that Clare was not observing her.