And on he’d go, weeping, and avowing that we are one, and you are me and I am you. “Go look in a mirror. Find a mirror. There are mirrors all over this castle. I want you to look in a mirror. I want to see you in the mirror.”

And so I stood in front of a mirror from time to time and let him look at me, remembering Kapetria’s description of him with his green eyes and red hair. Could have been your brother or your cousin, is that what she said?

“When I first saw you standing before Akasha,” he said, “I saw me.”

If I slept, we dreamed, and we were in Atalantaya and the language was all around me. We walked the gleaming streets together, as people came out to greet him, touch his hand. It was balmy and sweet there like it is in New Orleans in springtime and the banana trees were vastly bigger and primal sending their knifelike leaves sky-high over us. The buildings did shine with the luster of pearls. But these dreams faded fast when I opened my eyes.

One night I dreamed a man and a woman were talking together in the ancient language. I couldn’t see them, but I was hearing them, hearing her voice and his voice; it seemed they’d been talking forever, and I had the distinct impression that if I did listen with the utmost focus, that I could crack the language. The secret lay in the repetitions. I felt I knew now the word for “behold,” the word they said so often—lalakaté.

Then it was morning. I woke up, found I wasn’t in my coffin, that I had fallen asleep on the marble bench beside it. I’d done that often lately, fallen asleep on the hard cold marble, not bothering with the comfort of the coffin as though I were a monk sentenced for his sins to sleep on a hard pallet. I saw my phone lying on the floor. Out of the charger. No battery. I remembered that I’d put it in the charger, then put my right hand under my head and gone to sleep as the world sang Lauds above.

I stared at the phone.

“It was you talking to her!”

No answer.

I sat up and picked up the phone. I checked back and there were the calls. All day long, calls one after another, until the battery had gone out, seven distinct calls.

“Don’t bother,” he said. Anguish. “She has no solution for the severing of the ties. She is working on ‘what she has to work on now,’ she says.”

“How did you do it?”