“Which is very practical,” Dr. Maschke said. “That way he can be searched for everywhere.”

He looked at us the way Martin used to look at me when he was waiting for applause after pretending to be a world champion weight lifter.

Behind the postcard rack on the other side of the street, the smoking stopped and the optician’s foot appeared, crushing a cigarette butt.

“I really have to go,” I said. “Would you like a ride, Marlies?”

“That’ll be the day,” she said. She shouldered her package and walked off.

“Could you give me your Buddhist’s address?” Dr. Maschke asked.

“That’ll be the day,” I said, and ran across the street with my letter and fell into the optician’s arms.

Late in the evening Selma, Elsbeth, the optician, and I sat on the front stoop. We had spread the blanket from Selma’s sofa on the steps. The optician had read that there would be an especially high number of falling stars tonight.

Selma, the optician, and Elsbeth had put on their glasses and bent their heads together over Frederik’s letter for a long time, as if it were difficult to decipher.

“I don’t want to affirm anything of the sort,” I said. “That’s just stupid. And I can’t transform it, either. What on earth is he thinking?”

The optician stood up and grabbed one of his books on Buddhism from the kitchen; he hoped to find guidance in it for situations where affirmation is withheld.

He put on his glasses, leafed through the book, then read aloud: “In life, one thing is important: establishing intimacy with the world.”

“Intimacy with the world,” he repeated, “isn’t that beautiful?” He underlined the sentence again, even though it was already underlined.

Elsbeth stuck a Mon Chéri in her mouth.

“We could try tricking him into love,” she said, because she figured that since love can’t be transformed, then we’d have to transform Frederik. “There are a lot of ways to do it. For example, fingernail scraps stirred into his glass of wine will make whoever drinks it absolutely mad with love. You get the same effect by secretly mixing a rooster’s tongue into his food. Or by hanging a chain of owl bones around his neck.” Elsbeth pondered. “It might work with canary bones, too. I think Piepsi would understand.”

Elsbeth’s canary, Piepsi, had died that morning.

“Or”—Elsbeth took another Mon Chéri—“you could give Frederik a piece of bread you’ve found. Then he’ll lose his memory. He’ll forget that he doesn’t want to confuse everything.”

I imagined tricking Frederik into love the way we tricked Alaska by hiding his medicine in a ball of liverwurst.

“You could carry some verbena dug up with a silver spoon,” Elsbeth suddenly remembered, “then everyone will love you—including a specific person.”