But it must be a police station. Behind one of the room’s many doors was the cell where Rustem had been held—narrow, windowless, cinder-blocked, and painted a light blue. The room had a thin-mattressed metal shelf for a bed where Rustem had lain for hours, his head swimming, fitfully sleeping at times, at other times just staring at the wall or the oval light fixture in the high ceiling. A civilized cell—clean and warm, with a drinking fountain he had used, and a toilet—but a cell.

Then this man had come and opened the door and led him down a short hallway to this place.

The man had not handcuffed Rustem. He was not the least bit worried Rustem might be violent, or might try to escape. He simply stood in the doorway and said, “Come along, then.” A stocky man in his fifties in a corduroy field jacket, gray at the temples, one hand in his trousers pocket, like someone’s dad come in to wake them for school.

He sat across from Rustem now, the brass lamp over the table lighting his heavy hands around a steaming glass of tea.

“Do you know why you are here?”

“I was drunk,” Rustem said. “I remember having a few beers at the Pera Palace bar, and then deciding to go out. I must have ended up—well, when I was picked up I was somewhere on the Golden Horn, I remember. A park. Throwing stones into the water.” He smiled at the memory—at his own idiocy. “Throwing stones” hardly captured it. He had been removing rocks the size of watermelons from a small breakwater, walking them to the end of a rotting dock, and hurling them out into the waters of the horn, then screaming obscenities after them.

Two police had come and taken him into a van. Very polite.

When had he gotten so drunk? How had he gotten down there to that place on the shore? The night, after leaving the Pera Palace’s bar, was a smear of unconnected images—bars and clubs, snatches of music and conversation.

“What time is it?” he asked the man.

“Oh—sometime just after dawn. You slept a few hours. Feeling all right? Can I get you some aspirin, some tea? Both?”

“Both, I think.” Rustem shook his head. He still felt a bit of the alcohol—but also fatigue and confusion—and the Gray, which he had avoided for years, was looming. That was it. That was why he had gotten drunk. Why he had gone down to the Pera Palace bar in the first place. To escape that feeling, which he had called “the Gray” since it had tried to swallow him up in his early twenties. It had been gone so long he had nearly forgotten about it. But now it was back again.