“I’m the boring one,” said Gaspar. “Not you. You care about people, you want to change things, you don’t lose hope over stupid stuff. Everyone loves you. Same as my uncle. I can’t think of anything better than that, truly. Nothing.”

Marita kissed him. Gaspar took off his backpack and took a deep breath.

“I left Hueso,” she said. “I want to be with you. Do you want to get back together with me?”

Setting up a house could bring some relief. It had worked the first time: ride out the constant headache by trying to get a table into the kitchen. Ignore the dreams and hallucinations by painting a wall with a roller, up and down, right to left, tape on the door moldings so they wouldn’t get spattered, the penetrating smell in his hair and on his skin washed away in the afternoon shower. Choosing lamps and fearing electrocution while he stood on the penultimate step of a lopsided ladder. Now that he was having what the neurologist called déjà vu—and what he preferred to call memories—at least once a day, he was setting up house with Marita. Rented, for now, at his uncle’s recommendation. You have a lot of cash and a lot of houses: take your time, you need to choose well when you buy. So now there he was, painting the walls purple, a purple house like Paisley Park, that was Marita’s dream, and, after painting, two cups of wine while they sat on the floor like in a TV commercial, installing programs on the computer. When she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, he disentangled himself from her legs and stared at the ceiling and felt the exhaustion of sex and the unhappiness like a weight around his neck. That Marita was there only brought him moments of relief, pleasant pangs. He didn’t want to describe for her the visions that made him so afraid. He wasn’t going to tell her, he didn’t tell her, that he couldn’t go back to the actual house where Adela had disappeared because they’d demolished it, but he went back almost every night in dreams and searched for her desperately behind hundreds of doors. The dreams were terribly long, like full-length movies; Gaspar didn’t know if normal people had such long dreams. The neurologist had said he was experiencing visual and emotional flashbacks from a dream or a series of dreams. That was his latest conclusion. He had déjà vu of dreams. Gaspar had asked, how can that be, and the doctor had told him it was rare, but entirely consistent with epileptic symptoms, that it was unusual but not unheard of, and on and on. Vicky agreed. Marita said it seemed like a science fiction plot, straight out of Philip K. Dick. How can you have déjà vu of forgotten dreams? Sounds like you should get a second opinion.