When I had washed and dried the dishes, I made my way down the long hallway to the bedroom, undressed, and wandered into the bathroom to brush my teeth. With the light off, in the mirror, my naked torso was pale and luminous, soft in the middle and punctuated by two dark, disk-like nipples, a sparse V of hair between them. How repulsive I had grown in my middle age.

Did I already have a glass of water on the nightstand? I did. I turned on my reading light, got into bed, and reached for my book, a Swedish police novel I had recently begun. The chief detective was a divorced man with unhealthy eating habits and a weakness for Maria Callas. It seems that every detective novel I read now features this policeman, whose nationality varies, but who is dependably bitter and divorced, opera his soul’s only worldly solace.

3

Despite my good intentions, over the next few days I made very little progress. I worried away at several far-fetched ideas about the initials MC, with no success.

And still I clung to the message in the horoscope. Perhaps it could still be true that I had set something in motion. And I was right. Still, it was not until several weeks after the open house that I made my next measurable advance.

I slept badly and woke before dawn that morning, then rose and ate a bowl of cereal in the dark. The panes of the bay window were covered in a thick blackness, with condensation clinging to their insides. I had hoped to catch the sunrise going over the reservoir—that can always give a welcome boost—but a thick fog had blanketed the valley, like a layer of cotton wool, and the day slid in gray and melancholy from the night, with little fanfare.

I made an uneventful pot of coffee in the break room, and as I was walking back to my office with my second mugful, I put my hand out reflexively to the inside of my mailbox, where my fingers brushed against a single sheet of paper. It had not been there when I’d left the day before.

It was a flyer printed on peach-colored paper, advertising a performance of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder at the hospital. The first in a series of lunchtime concerts, it said, and dimly I remembered that there had been a series like it before, several years ago, which I had never attended. And why not? I wondered, as I stood in the quiet hallway, steam rising from my coffee. I appreciated classical music, unlike the majority of my colleagues, and one could not have asked for a more convenient location. A concert, I thought, pleased by the idea, at lunchtime. A performance of the Kindertotenlieder. It seemed just the kind of thing I would enjoy. I looked at the flyer again and saw that the date of the concert was Friday, the very next day.