And yet, he’s caught her. Ilka begins driving even when she doesn’t have to—Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons, early in the morning she cruises up and down the freeway from San Jose to San Francisco, looking for an unmarked light blue van. She wants to see him again, she wants his legs wrapped around her waist while his toes massage her spine. She imagines holding him where his arms should be while shaking him until his heavy legs pull her down; she imagines him with arms as they wrestle on the floor of his van, his fingers—real fingers—so tight around her neck the light turns gray.

Did he come into the world unarmed, more helpless than most of us? Or was there some sort of accident—arms ripped from their sockets in a car wreck, arms burned to the shoulder in a fire? Did he lose them in Vietnam to a Vietcong soldier with a knife, or one of his buddies gone mad? She does research in the library on the babies born in Germany in the early 1960s without arms because of a drug their mothers took for nerves and nausea, but he’s too old for that; he’s at least thirty. She never felt his shoulders where the arms should be, so she wonders if he has some sort of residual flipper attached to each one, like the thalidomide babies she sees in medical textbooks, reaching for rubber balls with sprouts of tiny hands. When she closes her eyes, she sees wrists and arms emerging from his shoulder stubs like plants growing in slow motion. His body is outlined in a glimmer of light that remains even when she opens her eyes again, making everything she sees look faded.

That summer Ilka teaches more than ever: remedial reading, English as a Second Language, and freshman composition at six different colleges. Twice a week she drives across the bay to teach in Hayward, where she tells us there’s the possibility of a permanent job. Though her territory has expanded, she doesn’t see the blue van for two months.

Then one night she says she sees him on the road again, but always so far behind she has to drive slowly to let him catch up. She sees him in her rearview mirror, the short hair, the dark eyes staring, even a glimpse of the smile, but when he gets close to her, he speeds ahead, vanishing into the traffic. She ignores the other boys in their vans, who honk and wave as she dodges in and out of traffic after the one van she can never catch.

“It’s like I’m hypnotized,” she says. “I can’t stop.” She’s not smiling now; her face looks thinner, and her wide eyes are swollen.