‘It’s time for you to go,’ the woman says.

I stare at the therapist.

‘I can’t just leave you here,’ I say to the woman.

‘I’m not staying, dear. It’s time for me to go too. We’re just headed in separate directions.’

XXXVIII

The therapist wanders lazily out of the hospital and I follow behind her. I feel a swirling beneath my navel. A mixture of arousal and fear. She steps into the street without so much as a glance and I call out to warn her but of course it’s deserted. It will remain so for a long time, likely until the wilderness reclaims it.

She slips into the back seat of my car and I get behind the wheel. I look at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘What do you want?’ I ask.

‘I want you to drive,’ she says, picking at one of her cuticles. So I drive. We are alone in the world now. I wind the window down and hear nothing but the steady thump of rubber on asphalt.

‘Is there anything more terrifying than the absence of sound?’ I ask.

‘Is there anything sadder than spending your days longing for it?’ she responds.

In the back seat I watch her recline.

‘Am I sick? Is any of this real?’ I ask.

She sighs heavily, leaning her head back to stare at the sky through the rear window. ‘All of this time and you’re still asking the wrong questions.’

‘I don’t understand what you want.’

‘Let’s try a memory exercise,’ she says, clapping her hands together in frustration. ‘What’s the first thing you can remember about the day Phineas died?’

Outside I can see the last rays of sunlight filtering through the treetops and am surprised to find that we are no longer on the highway at all but a winding mountain road bordered by pine trees on both sides.

I search my mind desperately. ‘I don’t know. I got up with him. We made breakfast. Simone slept in. She’d been away at a conference and got in late.’

‘That’s good. What else?’

The act of remembering is physically exhausting, like working an atrophied muscle. I feel the sting of memory. ‘When Simone got up she suggested we go to the beach, since we hadn’t seen much of each other lately.’

‘You’re paraphrasing.’

‘This is pointless.’

‘I want to hear you say the words,’ she says.

The memory is distant. I pull it through the pink of my mind and it sinks in, like dental floss against gums. The taste of iron fills my mouth. ‘She said she dreamt we were at sea. She wanted to spend the day by the water.’

Outside the trees grow immeasurably tall, their tips reaching as if to pierce the sky. The sides of the road now walled off completely by endless woodland. There are no road signs, no houses. No parked cars. Everything we pass is swallowed by darkness. I see the world a few feet at a time, illuminated by my headlights.