The first thing we shared was a book of poems by Mao Tsetung, bought in an antiquarian bookshop. We read it at night, in his room, our warm, naked bodies covered by the duvet. Red Christmas lights hung from the walls of the room, and we thought we were in a transparent cube suspended in midair, from which we could be seen by anyone.

NINE

They put us outside beneath a damp, watery sky. All we had to shelter us were a few umbrellas—gas heaters our sole source of warmth. A very bright light was angled toward our table, and the smoke from the roasting meat clung insolently to our hair.

I wanted to go, I wondered what the hell I was doing there.

“Meeting important people”—that’s what my condition requires me to do. But my mind and body mutiny.

As far as I’m concerned, the people sitting around this table, assailed by the damp and the smell of roasting meat, aren’t important. I couldn’t give a crap about that actor; that editor can go fuck himself, thank you very much; that photographer can squash herself into one of her own pictures and live inside it forever.

This is what all we humans do: we stay trapped inside our creations, our worlds … and no one can save us from our worlds, no one can drag us out of them.

While they all raise their glasses to my success and a thousand more to come, I repeat just one thing in my head: Go fuck yourselves, the lot of you, you horrible ass-licking cunts.

I’d just like to see the look on your faces if I showed you my pussy.

I grip Thomas’s hand as I whisper to him, “Take me away from here, now.”

TEN

I’m eating salted crackers. Over there, some delirious jazz pours from the stereo and outside it’s raining. My hips are so wide you can rest your elbows on them.

My voice is hoarse. Massimiliano was here this morning, that Neapolitan friend I told you about a few times: sometimes he comes to see me and when he smiles I can’t tell if he’s sad or what.

“I’m frightened,” I whispered to him.

He looked at me compassionately, embarrassed, and said, “Of what?”

“I’m frightened that he might betray me …,” I replied.

“What makes you think that?”

“Nothing … it’s just a feeling.”

He looked at me and nodded, and I immediately understood what he was thinking.

I screwed up my eyes as tightly as I could and screamed, “Do you think I’m crazy?!”

He said I was getting reality muddled up, that the world I thought I lived in wasn’t the real world.

“Open your eyes, Melissa. You’re creating a reality that has nothing to do with the reality around you.”