I saw books with wings flying through the air. Sentences fell from them into the water and glittered like ash. One dropped into my hands, and I read, “Madness is a low balcony looking out at the sunset.” I found myself sitting among the pages of my first novel, written in my early twenties, at a time of war and the agony of power outages, when the roar of the generators drove me to madness. I turn that sentence of mine over in my hands, and suddenly it is a balcony. I am sitting upon it, trapped inside a scene that repeats endlessly. Behind me is a house haunted by mourning. Its cracked walls guard vacant rooms, and the wind whistles through its brittle doors. I know I’m not one of the people of the house, and I’m only here because its owners have entrusted it to me. Why in the world would they entrust me with a ruin when they are dead and I have no weapons and no strength? I am standing guard over a heap, a wreck, over something that does not return.

I hear a step behind me. Paralyzed, I start trembling. The sound of two heavy feet shuffling over the tiles, dragging through the dust piled thick in front of them, etching a long gash in a field of loss. It is Lazarus! I hear him wandering inside the house of the forsaken, and I fear he might reach me and invite me to join him.

“Our beloved N is sleeping, and I have come to wake him,” he will say to his sisters. A lump rises and gets stuck in my throat like a leech. It begins turning and boring. It plants itself, turns, and bores deeper. The two sisters of Lazarus are crying. They call to him, “Let him float in the mist!” If only I had a sister who would pity me, a sister who would wash my wounds with her tears and dry my feet with her hair. One who would pour expensive perfume over me and celebrate me. If only I had a sister to give me bread to eat and water to drink, and who would smooth my hair as I lay my head back upon the stone.

Lazarus approaches. “Don’t come!” I scream at him. “Don’t come, and don’t look at me on the balcony! I’m not here. I don’t want to return. I don’t want to wake up. Let me stay buried here, in my head, where the earth contains me, where the dust envelops me.”

———

“N, why did you kill me, N?”

He was right above me: his head on my head, his torso over mine, each limb paired, his eyes in my eyes, and his mouth to my mouth. Not more than a few centimeters separated us. He repeated the question:

“Why did you kill me, N, when I was your protagonist?”