I begin checking the faucets each night before I sleep. I tighten first the cold and then the hot water, placing my hand beneath each and counting to ten before checking the next. It becomes a ritual. I repeat the process until my skin aches, until blisters form. I chant to myself: left, right, left, right, and if I am interrupted I begin again.

I drag Simone from room to room. I have her press her ears to walls.

‘You can’t hear that?’ I ask her, but she just shakes her head.

No, no.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

I try to rationalise the happenings. I tell myself that her hearing must be failing. I remind her that in our old apartment she could never hear our elderly neighbour. How each night his snores would carry through the walls of our bedroom.

‘I believe you,’ she says. But when she turns her hand over and places it against my forehead, checking my temperature in the way a mother would, I push her away.

‘I’m not sick,’ I tell her.

‘I didn’t say you were,’ she says.

I storm up to the en-suite and run myself a cold shower. The water takes the air from my lungs, the cold like a thousand fists along the length of my back.

I imagine Simone in the kitchen watching a news bulletin on the sickness. Reading the tip line number off the screen and dialling it to report my symptoms. I see an unmarked van appearing in the late afternoon and men in surgical masks running up the driveway to take me away.

I stop the shower, open the door and lean into the hallway. I listen for her muffled voice but the house is silent. I close the door and sit on the floor, my body warm against the freezing tiles.

‘This is ridiculous,’ I say.

It’s then that I hear running water. Louder than usual. Heavier.

I look up to see that the shower is still dripping. I step in and wrench the handle down. In my anger I try to pull it off the wall but I slip on the wet ground and smash my knee into the floor. I cry out and punch at the wall. A small piece of tile chips away and a cut forms across the skin of my knuckles.

I hold my balled fist and watch as my blood mixes with the water at my feet. It creates spiral patterns that circle the drain and then disappear. I squeeze the wound and watch as fresh droplets fall and spread.

I’ve seen this before, I think.

I’ve seen this before.

XXIV

We continue with the sessions, though they seem increasingly futile. The television shows the same montage on endless repeat. Looted storefronts, tower blocks ablaze. Bodies jumping en masse from bridges. Crowds surging and being pushed backwards at international airport terminals. The deafening chorus of impassioned and as yet unanswered prayers.

In the car I listen to a telephone interview with a young girl trapped deep inside the quarantine zone. She says her parents are upstairs dreaming. That she will soon be dreaming too.