I hustled ahead of him to the stone steps, eager to hide myself in the machine-infested waters. But getting out in front was a mistake: I couldn’t track his focus and there was no way to take the jagged staircase briskly. In the water, I relaxed, the freezing gel encasing me, providing a half-transparent privacy. Marek dove in beside me.

All around, skinny arms and legs jostled, heads that had been shaved until the skin complained with pimples. Bodies dropped from the sky. Wherever I shifted, they followed, as if, out of all the people in this quarry, they were aiming for me. I flinched away from the crowd.

“Marek, cześć,” cried a boy, his neck and face dry above the water line, his crown of curls bouncing. He dog-paddled toward us, the skin on his back flexible over muscle, like he had the body of a seal.

“Cześć, Jakub,” Marek said, already scanning the water for subsequent friends.

“Hey, you’re American,” Jakub said when he reached us. His face was rounder and sweeter than anyone’s, his flesh elastic. He looked either fifteen or twenty-five. He had a surprisingly sexual quality of movement, so languid in his body that it was as if he controlled it precisely: his own personal flesh robot. I wanted to stroke his springy skin, to pull close to him in the water, to feel against me all that exuberant ease. A pang shot through me for Rosie. She would never guess that I’d consider a man this way. I’d never shared my fascinations. They’d expose too much.

“From New Jersey,” I said. How could he tell from just my shoulders and plastered hair? But everyone in the water was absolutely Polish. The features were part of it—broad, pale—but more than that, a certain common toughness or privacy of expression. This was unfair thinking, but it was like if a body landed on them, if they landed on a body, such was life. All tortures had happened here and more lay on the horizon. The air was dense.

“New Jersey,” he said. “So exotic, yeah?”

“Very.”

“This is our visiting scholar from Princeton.” Marek spoke the name of my school as though the royal word was proof Jakub had already messed up. “Ms. Daisy Hoffman.”

My cheeks prickled and I ducked below the water before Marek or Jakub read my expression. My name rattled through my head, that lacy, gross flower. Submerged, the cold held me in its dark, lapping green. Marek and Jakub’s voices turned bubbly and remote, their bodies dangled, decapitated smears peddling expertly. I longed to hide there until I suffered brain damage.

“Daisy?” Marek called, in his rich voice. “Ms. Daisy?”

I popped to the surface, smoothing down my bangs. “Nice water.” I was trembling. How could they stand this icy chill? How could they regard each other with such studied calm, as though under the surface they were completely still?