Mabel was talking with Jonathan Strasser. That was what her ears told her. Her mouth also seemed to be participating. He was saying words. She was hearing them. She said something, but he kept saying something, and more than once. What? What? She tried to pull herself upright, but her arm or her hand was numb. Well, she did have a phone in this hand. What? Had he said that or had she?

“Are you asleep?” Oh, that was him. Mother Teresa, she’d been napping. Her column. The algae.

“No,” said her newly arriving pride. “I just got back from the dentist.”

“The dentist?”

“Novocain.” She had to get away from this pillow and off the sofa. “Hold on.”

She uncoiled herself and looked for the clock. Not there. She pulled herself over to the computer and looked in the lower right corner. It was one-forty. “Yes, can you please come back in about five minutes? I have a call,” she said to the empty air. “Right. Absolutely.” She drew out some silence, moving some papers on her desk, giving herself a ten-second count.

“Jonathan!” she finally said into the phone, and remembering her Novocain ruse, she added a left cheek of marbles to her voice.

“I’m so sorry. Look, you sound terrible. Maybe—”

“I’m fine. Fine. It wasn’t root canal. Just a filling.”

“That’s good.”

“I should be talking normally any minute now,” she said, losing interest precipitously in her acting foray. She looked at the clock.

“So how are you?”

The rumors of loyalty to ill wife were wrong, and look: she’d napped herself into a baffle.

“Good. Good. Say, listen,” Jonathan Strasser said.

“Say, listen”? That was not the locution of a man tempted to reinterpret vows. “Uh-huh,” Mabel tried.

“This may sound strange.”

“Nothing sounds strange to me,” she said.

“I guess you’ve heard—from Don, I mean—if …” began Jonathan Strasser.

She could feel her lungs puncture, a sewing needle opening her chest. A sound like air leaking from inner tubes came to her.

“… about my problem.” She gasped, stunted, impaired into meekness. He continued, “The report. That I gave to Don.”

No love walked here. No desire. Her radar was antique. It picked up caterwauls and train whistles.

As if on a sickening carousel, she remembered talking to him by the bookcase at the dinner party. What night was it? What month of the summer? Was it hot enough for air conditioning? No, it was fall, it was September—yes, it was two months ago, hot enough for summer, but Labor Day past. She slowly remembered how most of what he had said that night fell outside recognizable channels of thinking. It was happening again. Maybe this meant something of import. That he could so rearrange her senses—it had to mean something.