At that moment I hear footsteps below, and see him hurrying underneath into the street. The twigs tear past on my way down, scratching my face and arms. I jump the last part, land hard, and begin to run. At the top of the block I see a figure turn the corner, but by the time I get there there’s no sign of him, and the quiet street ends in a wide and busy avenue. Traffic speeds past. A bus groans to a halt, and it seems possible he’s on the other side of it, but when it pulls away the sidewalk is empty. I look into the only place that’s open, an all-night pharmacy on the corner, but there is only an old woman leaning on her cane among the boxes and bottles, patiently waiting for her prescription to be filled. How could he have just disappeared like that? I think, angry at him and at myself. Though maybe the real question is how I managed to follow him so far.

No place in tel aviv is ever far from the sea, and when I find my way to it and get my bearings, I realize I’m closer to my father’s apartment than I’d thought. The sea is different in the dark, more vast and alive, filled with intelligence. When I get to the rock jetty behind the old shuttered discotheque, I see a group of men casting their fishing lines off the end into the black water. I watch for a while, but nothing comes of it. I wonder whether I should go home and wait for the stranger. But I feel he won’t come back, not tonight, and not tomorrow either, just as I also feel that a decade will pass, and I’ll have children of my own, before I finally change the lock.

By the time I return, it’s past midnight. I check the stranger’s room, but it’s empty, as I knew it would be, the bed neatly made. My head feels heavy, and a feeling of exhaustion comes over me. I strip off my clothes, dropping them in a trail in the hallway on my way to bed, as I’ve always done when I’ve lived alone. The shutters are closed, and I inch through the pitch-dark and collapse on top of the covers. Only then, lying still with my eyes open, do I hear the rhythmic breath of someone already asleep in the bed. I scream out, arms flailing, and my fist sinks into something soft and warm. I grope for the lamp, and when the bulb flares, I see the stranger sprawled out in his undershirt, mouth half open, abandoned to sleep just as before. He couldn’t have gotten home long before me, and yet he’s already so far from the shore of wakefulness that neither my scream nor my fist has roused him. Heart pounding, I snatch my T-shirt from the floor and throw it over my head. I mean to shake him awake and demand an explanation for everything, to tell him to get out of my bed, or my father’s bed—at the very least a bed that isn’t his, for his is down the hall if it is anywhere at all. But just as I’m about to grab him by the shoulders, a powerful chill comes over me. Suddenly I’m afraid to disturb him, as if he might have been sleepwalking all this time, as if waking him might unsettle a balance, causing something to cease or fall still forever.