Bahr said: “During my relationship with Irene, I fell in love with life again. For the first time in a long time, I stopped my obsessive fretting over death.”

We were standing in New Square, watching a street artist sketch a young couple who stood frozen in place for the duration, their motionless lips parted in a pair of joyful smiles.

“Time was suddenly precious,” said Bahr. “I loved life, like they say in songs. Which is why I started to suspect that it wasn’t Irene I was in love with. An ex of mine had taught me that true love—or true happiness in love, rather—means you wouldn’t mind dying right there and then, on the spot. And this, too: that you can love yourself and your lover, or you can love your lover and the time you spend together, or you can love yourself and the time you spend together. Like, in every relationship, there’s a third wheel, which is time. And in my relationship with Irene it was the third wheel that I loved.

“That said, love is a matter of degrees. With Irene, say, I was on the tenth floor of a skyscraper: far from the earth below, but further still from heaven.”

The couple before us seemed enthusiastic despite their paralyzed pose, but for all the skill in her brush-work, the artist’s movements were robotic and the smile of encouragement which she threw out from time to time seemed forced. Of course, that was only my impression. I could have been wrong. We watched them all for a while—the painter, the couple, the canvas—then we moved on.

Bahr was still talking:

Maybe that’s why it all ended one freezing morning at a deserted lake. The tears that came to my eyes that day didn’t come from inside. They were more like smoke, smoke from the cigarettes we tried as teenagers before we knew to draw it down into our lungs, leaving it to drift and spill from our noses and throats. What does it say about all the joys we shared, the walks and the films and the celebrations, if at the end of it all I couldn’t summon a single heartfelt tear?

And what about the games I played with little Adam? I could see him in my mind’s eye as I stood there by the lake. Like he was like a little doll. The world was suddenly unreal. Adam and Irene and I were unreal. Put it like this: keeping a bag by the front door had done something to my heart; there was some flaw in there that stopped it from working as it should. Anxiety eating away at the walls of its chambers like water at rock. A quick glance tells you nothing’s happening, but it is.