“Hello?” she called from the bathroom. Now her voice was unmistakably annoyed. “I couldn’t understand anything you just said. If you didn’t want a drink that’s fine, but can you make yourself useful and get one for me?”

Of course it was the guest lecturer, I thought, as I moved away from the bed, from the suit jacket, back toward the desk. Because who else would it be? This was exactly the kind of bizarre and mysterious rendezvous she would prefer. Here was a person who was not content to arrange a meeting in the customary way, in a regular place—one’s office, say, or a coffee shop. And yet, I could not quite say that she had arranged this rendezvous. I had come here of my own accord, for no other reason than the overwhelming sense that the answer to all my questions was here in this hotel.

“Yes, of course,” I called in the direction of the bathroom, and then I smiled to myself, a small, private smile, because I had just set the briefcase down on top of the desk, its gold buckles gleaming in the waning light. I opened it and removed the paperweight.

Now I approached the cabinet and turned over one of the glasses. The briefcase! I thought. The suit jacket! Dusk creeping into night! Everything that held meaning was here in this room! How could I have stayed away so long?

Here was the red thread that had run through my whole existence. All that wasted time, I thought, as I tonged ice into a glass and poured gin over it; how lamentable, herding myself from one confusion to the next, when the answer had always been here in this hotel room. But! I scolded myself. Now is not the time for self-reproach! Holding the glass of gin in one hand and the whale-shaped paperweight in the other, I leaned my shoulder against the bathroom door and pushed it open.

I hadn’t been inside the bathroom on my previous visit, so it would not quite make sense to say that something had changed. Still, as I stepped into the small, slightly steamy room, I had the distinct impression that I had crossed some more significant threshold, as if I had woken into a universe that was in every detail a copy of my own, but, in some essential way, different.

And this feeling, nebulous as it was, was somehow unrelated to the central unexpected feature of the bathroom, the main surprise it held, which was that the woman in the bath was not the guest lecturer. Despite the voice, which I’d thought I recognized, despite the lavender suit jacket, the woman in the bath, though she was also a blonde, also a big-boned woman, a nude woman who filled the small space amply, was not the guest lecturer; she was Kirstie.