S [settling back down on one of the big cushions, hands wrapped around a mug of tea]: I don’t know if it’s because we were out looking at stars, maybe I’m seeing an afterimage, but do those three dots seem to you to be in motion? Moving toward each other, finding each other from different parts of the field.

E: When I worked in magazines, my first job consisted mainly of replacing the triple periods writers would put into their sentences to function as ellipses with the character for an ellipsis—the old programs didn’t do that automatically. I always thought it was weird how a full stop, repeated three times, became transformed into an indicator of gap or suspension. Like the too-muchness of all the certainty had the reverse effect: too much presence equals absence. But now I’m seeing something else in this figure, the head of a nail, times three. I’m imagining hammering a nail into a coffin (something I’ve never, by the way, done). And then hammering again, and then again. And the coffin becoming less solid, instead of more so. The coffin, on the third strike, falling apart.

S: Do you mean literally or figuratively?

E: What?

S: The thing about the coffin and the nail and what you’ve never done.

FOURTEENTH FIGURE

S: Well, that’s just the sign for Aquarius.

E: It is?

[S gave E a disbelieving look.]

E: No, really, it just looks like a zigzag to me.

FIFTEENTH FIGURE

E: Oh! Pillow.

S: Oh, pillow … Are you tired?

E: My cells are vibrating, and yet I feel like I’m already asleep. You?

SIXTEENTH FIGURE

E [as S sleeps]: I have no one to address but you directly, now, figure number sixteen, you oblong, egg-shaped thing. You must be the problem I have to face alone. You must be what I meant when I asked, before, whether it was possible to love someone who doesn’t share your wounds. Someone with different wounds. Nobody has escaped being wounded altogether. This was what I almost spoke to S about, before, when I mentioned something about the glass shards, about grit. About how …

SEVENTEENTH FIGURE

S [as E sleeps]: Well, that’s just not fair, you aren’t even a figure. What are you, a line? O.K., a line.

THE FIELD

E woke to find S hovering above her, meaning E saw S as a figure before feeling S’s presence, and saw the figure of S as a part of the field of figures, not the material room. This was confusing for a moment, and then the confusion resolved. What it resolved into was an unambiguous return to the room—akin to the return at the end of her lucid dream on Leslie’s couch—though this return was accompanied by a peculiar, manic calm beyond any words E knew.