Victor won, as he often does, and as he was dumping the letters back into the drawstring pouch, I began to cry. At first Victor didn’t notice, but at last he glanced up, and a look of surprise crossed his face.

“It’s only a game,” he joked.

I tried to smile and shook my head. I wanted to tell him about what I’d realized about the Arbus photographs, about the old woman in a wheelchair who lifted a witch’s mask to her face when the shutter clicked, maybe to protect herself from the photographer’s acute gaze, or send back to Arbus an image of herself, or to throw a wrench into the eternal chain of reflections between two people who gaze upon each other and see, in the stranger looking back, a startling image of themselves. But I said nothing. Victor kneeled in front of me and wiped a tear from my cheek.

“It’s okay.”

“I’m scared,” I whispered.

“It happens,” Victor said, taking me in his arms, and yet unwilling, even for a moment, to be anything but pragmatic. “A necessary scourge, natural or man-made, that comes through periodically to control the population.”

I looked up at him. I knew he thought that I was frightened of whatever it was that we were waiting to hear news of, the thing that might threaten the very air we breathed and the life we’d grown used to. And maybe I was. Or maybe I was just tired and drunk, fed up with the argument in my head—for or against a life with Victor—that all this time later was still unclear. It was already midnight. The glasses smeared with fingerprints were still on the table, holding the last drops of wine from the place Victor might have come from had his father not moved to Paris to become a doctor, beginning the chain of events that would lead to Victor’s childhood spent in the shadow of L’Hôpital Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, his youthful interest in plagues and infectious diseases, his passion for the Middle Ages, his teaching job in America, and, finally, me. One of the candles sputtered and went out, and Victor leaned away from me and blew out the other. He lay on the rug and pulled me down next to him, and we held each other in the blue glow of the television.

And then we fell asleep, sprawled there among the Scrabble letters and the empty wineglasses, and when I woke up again, the sky outside was already starting to lighten. My right hand had fallen asleep, and when I touched it with the fingers of the left the sensation was chilling, like touching the hand of a dead person. I untangled myself from Victor and shook it until the feeling came back. I had a headache, and my mouth was dry, so I got up to get some water from the kitchen. When I came back, the television was mutely flickering, and in its light I saw the gas mask lying on its side by Victor’s face. I picked it up and turned it over, and then I slipped it over my face. It was snug inside, safe like a catcher’s mask, and I lay down on my back, blinking up through the eyeholes. I wondered how long it would be until we knew what it was we were going to need to learn to protect ourselves from, or if it was too late, if the only ones who would survive were those who had been training all the while, with reflective clothing and superior lungs. Maybe whatever it was had already seeped through the cracks of the windows and the door. But I was drowsy, and too tired to object. Without turning to look, I moved my hand until my fingertips touched Victor’s cheek. Then I closed my eyes to wait, grateful for what was left of the dark.