No matter how often I played the game, when I looked again my surroundings would be both as I’d visualized them and not. The concrete materiality of the objects was identical but the colors, the quality of light, the atmosphere were subtly different. See, I’d tell myself, you don’t know it all. Things change. You can’t predict how they’ll seem in thirty seconds, never mind till the end of time.

One August morning with sixteen months to the end of the twentieth century, I was more wrong than usual. When I blinked back into the room, a new person was seated opposite me. She didn’t appear to have noticed my twirling around in Megan Groenewald’s world—but while I’d have noticed her anywhere, in east London suburbia she was like an exotic zebra fish that had swum off course.

She wore a short, black-and-white, Bridget Riley–type number. Her build was lean, long-limbed, and coltish; her hair was a shallow sea of inky curls. She had fine, straight features and close-set blue eyes so dark as to glint like pitch. I wanted to introduce myself but the cords that looped from her ears to her Walkman put me off.

Since she was typing like a demon on her keyboard, I flamboyantly increased my own speed. When my document contained more errors than words, I glanced at her. She lifted her head; she had a slight squint.

“I’m Meggie,” I said.

“I’m Sabine.”

“What are you listening to?”

She took her earphones out. Her hands trembled as she passed them over to me; her nails were bitten to such small tabs that her fingers seemed entirely made of skin.

Surprised she didn’t mind me sticking her earphones in my ears, I listened. An expressive male voice sang tenderly to a sweeping accompaniment. Wiping the earphones off with my thumbs before handing them back, I said, “I like it.”

“It’s ‘La Chanson des vieux amants’ by Jacques Brel.”

“Are you French?”

“Belgian. Jacques Brel is Belgian.”

“No,” I said. “Are you French?”

“Belgian,” she said, “but yes.”

Then she added, “Also German, Jamaican, Jewish, Egyptian. It’s a long story—”

“You don’t have to go into it.”

“Thank fuck. I hate this question.”

“People ask me all the time too.”

She frowned. “If you’re French?”

“No, where I’m from. When I say, South Africa, they say, Don’t you miss the weather? I wish I could press a button to answer them.”

She cocked her head to the side, biting her lip. “You are how old?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Me too.”

We looked at each other.

“I don’t know much about Belgium,” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s flat. How about South Africa?”