“What would you call that?” asked Pablo, unconsciously beginning to sketch the thing on a blank page of his notebook.

“I’d call it a tower,” Marina said, cocking her head to the left as she considered what she was looking at. “Or a pillar, or pedestal. But a hollow one.”

She laughed. “I don’t mean that to sound so symbolic! I just mean it’s taller than it is fat, and it just doesn’t seem … solid, somehow. Fragile—or fallible, that’s the word that comes to mind. Though I can’t see any visual evidence for whether or not I’m right.”

Pablo laughed too, a single wry huff.

For a minute, Marina continued to look at the tower or pillar or pedestal, trying to force herself to imagine it as a solid thing, while Pablo scratched away in his notebook.

“Here,” he said, sliding the book over to Marina. “This is how that figure appears to me.”

WAITING

You may have noticed how much time people are spending waiting for something to occur, or waiting, perhaps, for something to be revealed. When E was narrating, she apologized for not telling a story in a satisfying way. But of course, the story of waiting is as old as the sun. So no apologies here.

You may yourself be waiting, for instance, for news from other quarters, parts of E’s world that have apparently fallen away: from the bookstore clerk (or from both bookstore clerks, the one with the cherry lips and the one with the forgettable name but the memorable hands); from the husband and the wife or the wayward daughter, or any of the mentor’s (now we can say Marina’s) clients whose numbers remain undialed in E’s phone. You may be wondering what happened to Giorgos the Greek, or what became, finally, of the capitalist. You may be wondering whether you’ve seen the end of the News Reports.

You may be waiting for E to be handed back the narration.

You may be waiting for something else.

If you resist or even resent being told what you may be waiting for, you aren’t original, which is another way of saying you aren’t alone.

If you enjoy it, you have company too. We switch back and forth, most of us, between awaiting and providing stories, something graspable to give us hope.

We switch back and forth with each other, the analyst would remind us, but also with ourselves.

Forget hope. For something graspable at all.