“Almost,” because I could sense him at certain precious moments, although I denied it and wouldn’t allow him to offer me any encouragement, wouldn’t believe that he would occasionally borrow my body to walk or smell, briefly and breathlessly, or to feel the touch of a soft hand on his cheek.

The “watchers” are everywhere, especially those who have unfinished business with the living. Sometimes they show themselves in a reflective surface—for example as sparkling light on the surface of the sea, in the gleaming chrome of a speeding car, or in a passing glint in an Underground tunnel. Most clearly, though, they reveal themselves to us just before we fall asleep, and we also notice them in opaque, confusing, and fleeting dreams. We think they’re apparitions, but in fact they’re the “others.”

I wonder if you need to be dead to infiltrate the dreams of the living, or almost dead.

I sense four others standing more and more frequently at Madelyn’s bedside, observing her. They pace around the ward, listening here and there for sparks, for breaths, and for news of the outside world. From time to time they vanish, as if they merely wanted to take a lungful of London air, and I imagine their taking the last empty seats on a bus or the tube, the ones passengers usually shun, although they don’t know why.

I must learn to understand this in-between state. Bar-khord. Between everything and nothing.

I once wrote a portrait of a hundred-year-old Persian tutor who, until the early 1970s, taught the children of the Iranian royal family the art of being a king and acting like one. I can still hear the old man’s wry voice and his cultivated Oxford English through the mists of my constantly shifting memories. With the same caution with which you might extend your hand toward a cobra, I had asked him for his opinion on the culture clash between the British and Iranian monarchies.

He pondered my question for a long time, his fine features half obscured in the dim courtyard of his house in Tehran’s old quarter, then replied, “The English language, like all Christian-dominated, Western languages, describes the meeting of two opposites in violent terms, as a ‘clash,’ a ‘crash,’ a ‘rupture,’ or even an ‘attack’—always as hostile and aggressive. It is undoubtedly an effective means of promoting prejudice and fear, for there is nothing better than seeing things as black and white, don’t you agree?”

He slowly raised his glass of mint tea into the sunlight of the hot, sandy afternoon and took a sip. The bright blue light filtered through the slatted roof that created a pleasant shade in the courtyard.