“Do you listen to music when you go out?”

“Never,” I said. Though I’d hum the shape-note songs.

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “So what do you think about?”

What did I think about? I didn’t think, exactly. I walked. I listened. The warblers, the noisy goatsuckers with their many-noted call, and tyrant flycatchers with their peewee sounds. The faraway yells from the forest as the men felled another tree, the occasional whir of the lumber mill. Thoughts would come in imprecise and indefinable forms. I’d feel old beliefs shifting in my mind, like strange fish deep in the ocean, unable to find the light.

None of this could happen with Lindsay around. I let her question hang in the air. When my frustration became unbearable, I said, “Well, what are you thinking about?”

“Can I be honest with you?”

“Certainly,” I said, ready to find more reasons to dislike her.

“I’m trying to imagine what life here is really like.”

I flashed to the love prayer, the way we all breathed together. Now that I’d felt that faintness once, it remained near to the surface—at any moment, I felt I might fall to the ground.

“You know, all of you. What’s up with all of you?”

I said, “Did you know sheep miss each other when they’re apart?” Queen had told me this.

Lindsay was silent. “What’s your real name, again?” she said.

“Harmony,” I said.

“What was your name before?”

I paused. “I can’t remember,” I said. That was what Bay had told me, when I asked all those months ago.

“Harmony,” she said. “I guess I can see it.” I felt warmth spreading through me.

I decided to tell her about the school-bus-sized bird that could only get itself into the air by jumping off cliffs. I told her that the monarchs took an odd long path over Lake Superior and it was because they were avoiding a mountain that disappeared millions of years ago. These stories of Dice’s helped me stay awake to the strangeness of nature.

I forged recklessly ahead, exposing more and more of myself. I told her I sometimes felt connected to all nature, I could look at a heron or a lamb and feel truly that there was no definite self. I explained that this idea about the definite self reminded me of the bubble room at the children’s museum in my hometown. My mother would trap me in a gleaming fragile column of soap bubble—dunking a hula hoop, which was rigged to a pulley system, in a soap, then raising the hoop by the pulley quickly, but not too quickly, up over my body. For one magical moment I would stand there encased, the colors twirling and dawdling across the bubble’s tenuous membrane. When I kept Dice in mind I could see how my own point of view was a brief, fragile separation.