He couldn’t remember. Not just what he dreamed. He couldn’t remember dreaming.

“Well, what are you not dreaming about, then?”

“I know you’re trying to be helpful, Phil, but maybe this is one of those things that will work itself out over time.”

“I think I’m onto something though. Okay, name five things that you’re not dreaming about.”

“Phil, don’t you realize that any five things will do?”

“Okay then, name five.”

“Why? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Okay then, so name four.”

Fire began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

“Okay then, three.”

“Phil, stop … please.” He was laughing hysterically now.

Nan came out to her window and shook her head at them.

“Okay, name two.”

“I can’t think right now.”

“Okay, name one then. Name one thing that you haven’t been dreaming about because you’re scared of dreaming about it.”

And Fire heard himself say, “Sylvia.”

Then suddenly, as if seized by a falcon, his soul was picked up, yanked up, ripped from his body and taken way into the sky, above the clouds, across the time-and-space divide, and he saw their affair laid out on a timeline, and witnessed the moment when he decided to protect his feelings by trying to forget. As soon as he’d written her that goodbye letter, he saw, he had willed her memory away, putting to use that psychic muscle that adolescent girls often use to will away their periods because they’re afraid of becoming women.

Now, sitting on the bench beneath the apple trees, smelling the unctuous aroma of the fallen fruit, he lived again the feeling that washed his body when she appeared at the door in her sarong … barefoot … molasses dribbling over her toes. Oh, he thought, as the hairs on his body curled over and began to massage his skin, I miss her so. I want her now. I want her here with me, on this bench, so that I can cradle my head in her lap and have her talk to me, about anything, in any language, even if it’s one that I don’t understand. He began to inhale the smell of her hair, which was strange because there had been no memory of it until now, as he thought of holding her and rocking her in the back of the cab. As he thought about this her sweat began to bead his lips like dew. When he had actually kissed her, he hadn’t smelled or tasted anything. Now he was getting a kind of scent like … or was it? Each time he tried to name it, it caught a breeze and flew away.

That afternoon, Fire went to the London Graphics Center in Covent Garden and bought some supplies. He stayed up working into the night.

When Phil left for New York, he carried with him a very special gift.

Phil called Sylvia as soon as he checked into the Fulton Inn. He’d taken Fire’s advice and decided not to stay with Ian.