Although I was angry with her, my vanity was primped by her obvious advance planning. “Gee, I’m flattered that for once you’re making the arrangements for me, Vera.”

“Don’t be. I don’t drive, so I have to keep my passport with me for identification,” she explained, sticking a fork into the soufflé of my ego.

I snatched the passport from her hand.

“What are you doing?” she snapped. I weaved around the room and she followed me, trying to retrieve it.

“I just wanted to see if even somebody who looks like you takes a lousy passport picture,” I explained with a laugh, but my real motive was simply to get her off my bed.

The photo in the passport had been taken a couple of years earlier, and I thought Vera actually looked a little nicer back then. She’d worn the same striking hairstyle, but there was a softer look to her face, as if she hadn’t read any of her reviews yet and still wasn’t certain if she’d make it.

I read her name aloud. “Edna Drisch Vernon?” I exclaimed with glee. “Edna?! Ohhh, Edna!”

“Give me that back!” she spat.

“Place of birth Hackettstown, Pennsylvania, nineteen-oh- my!”

Having accomplished my purpose, I let her grab the passport back from me. She stuffed it deep into her bag. “C’mon, Ray,” she groused. “Jack always takes me back. He has to. I’ll make him take you back, too.”

I shook my head. “No, Vera, not in Panama, not in this room, not as long as Jack is alive and you’re still his wife.”

I opened the window closest to my bed, as I do most nights. I have to feel air moving across my face or I can’t sleep. Although my room was one flight up from the lobby, the grounds of the Claremont rose alongside the hotel, so there was only about a five-foot drop from the window to the paved walkway below. I peered outside to make sure no one was there. “Come on, Vera, I’ll let you down gently,” I said.

She waved me off, put on her shoes, stepped over the sill, and smoothly lowered herself to the ground. My guess was she’d done this somewhere before. She took quick, assured steps along the walkway, which was glossy from being hosed down for the night. Without looking back at me, she made a one-fingered gesture in the air whose meaning in this particular context seemed paradoxical.

I went to the door, snapped off the overhead light, and returned to the window, drawing back the curtains as far as I could, in order to see what had so interested me earlier this evening: the floating city I’d whimsically named Atlantis, whose illuminated central tower reflected deep into the water, so that it looked as if the island had been speared through its heart by Neptune.