He smiled at me—Hey, Little Bear.

Hey.

For a moment I wondered if we were going to kiss. Maybe just a peck on the cheek. Or even a hug. But as we stood there in front of each other it became clear that we were not ready for either. We probably wouldn’t be for some time.

Okay, he said.

I’ll be a whole new me when you get back, I said.

Please don’t be, he replied. I smiled. He then turned, and walked out the door. And I watched as he climbed into his car, the car that would soon be our car again, taking us to the supermarket, and appointments, and to visit Ashley on campus. Ashley sat in the front seat, waiting to go. I watched Paul knowing that, good to his word, he would be back in forty minutes with more boxes containing his things, which would soon merge back into the collective holdings of our house, and become indistinguishable again from my things. I watched as they pulled out of the driveway, and drove off down the street, before closing the front door, and returning to the silence of the house. Though of course it was not silence. I could hear the wind rustling the leaves outside. The purr of the refrigerator in the kitchen. The ambient thrum of the air conditioning as it passed through the ducts. My empty stomach made a sound like a motorcycle on the highway at a distance. I should make myself some toast, I thought.

I then remembered, with amusement, the look on Paul’s face when I told him that I had finished The Magic Mountain, and it occurred to me that I actually had no clear memory of the book’s final lines or images, and suspected that I may have fallen asleep before the actual end. I reached into the pocket of my bathrobe, and pulled out my phone. I found The Magic Mountain in my audiobooks, and scrolled to the end. I connected the phone to the Bluetooth speaker in the dining room and pressed play.

Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit, while enhancing thy simplicity, granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done.

The narrator’s voice, as familiar to me now as an uncle’s voice or an ex-lover’s, filled the room. I leaned back against the dining table, and told Google to turn the volume up by two.

Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount? And then, after a dramatic pause, the narrator concluded with Finis Operis.