Every minute fell like a sledgehammer. She wanted to get up, wanted to go to him, if only to press a hand to his shoulder to assure him she was there still, but she fought the impulse and fought it again. And then, just as the church bells tolled the hour, he suddenly shifted around in his chair, glanced over his shoulder at her and began to laugh. Laugh! And not just a titter or a cackle, but a booming full-chested roar of a laugh that just kept coming and coming till he had tears in his eyes and she was on her feet and flying to him, crying out, “What? What is it?” And absurdly, “Are you feeling it?”

He tried to get up, then sat heavily. The laughter caught in his throat. “I feel, I feel”—he was struggling to get the words out—“light . . . headed . . . dizzy, maybe. And”—here he laughed again, sharply, more a bark than a laugh—“gay, gay, Fräulein, and why would I feel gay?”

She was standing over him now, barely able to breathe herself, and she did the only thing she could think to do: she touched him, ever so lightly, on the forearm. He rotated his head to stare up at her, his question still hanging in the air, and she saw that his pupils were dilated like the pupils of the dogs in the laboratory trials he’d told her about, so wide open they drove all the color out of his eyes. Normally, his eyes were the color of caramel; now they were black, shining and black, and she made a mental note of that so she could write it down later, and why did she have such an ache in the pit of her stomach and why was she thinking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

“I must . . .” he began, then laughed again, waving an arm in front of his face as if he were conducting an orchestra only he could hear, “must . . . record . . .” In the next moment he took up his pen and very slowly and meticulously wrote a single line in his notebook: 17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of ataxia, desire to laugh.

She’d drawn her hand back when he’d begun waving his arm, and she wasn’t so much thinking that this was the first time they’d ever actually touched, aside from brushing past each other in the performance of their daily routines, but of what he’d written in the notebook. Ataxia, anxiety. Would he need an emetic? A tranquillizer? Should she call a doctor?