The optician managed to hold Palm up for a full minute but ran out of strength. He set Palm down without letting go, and Palm did not let go, either. With Palm in his arms, the optician first dropped to his knees, then sat down.

They stayed that way for a long time: the optician leaning against the railing with his legs extended, Palm with his torso resting diagonally on the optician’s chest. Palm’s eyes were closed and he didn’t move. The optician sat crookedly, half on Palm’s Bible. This wreaked havoc on his disks, but the optician saw no way of changing his position without disturbing Palm.

He stroked Palm’s hair. The liquor bottle lay at his feet and he could easily read the label. Only then did the optician notice that the night was surprisingly bright from the light of the moon, the illuminated body whose path Palm had once known so well.

IT WAS YOU

Then things stopped going smoothly. Selma became agitated, turning from one side to the other in bed. I had made leg compresses for her and tried to lay the wet washcloths on her calves, but she kicked them off and the letter openings that still lay on her bed grew limp.

Alaska sat at the foot of Selma’s bed. He watched me run back and forth, sit on the edge of her bed, then run back and forth again. He watched me as if he had an important question and regretted not being able to ask it.

The optician returned. I didn’t notice how disheveled he looked because I only had eyes for Selma, whose bed we perched on only to jump up again in order to do something that didn’t need to be done. Our sense of time disappeared. Maybe it was two in the morning or maybe time had shifted forward or backward, we had no idea.

Selma’s eyes were watery. Perhaps the first thing to go was one’s eye color. She dozed off, she woke again, her hands clawed at the sides of her bed as if she wanted to hold on to it tight. Then she suddenly gave us an irritated look, as if she didn’t know who we were, and said, “I’d like to speak to my son.”

I put my hand over my mouth and began to weep. At that moment, I’d have given everything I had to be someone else, to be a receptionist who could connect Selma with her son immediately.

For four hours, until dawn broke, Selma tossed and turned in bed; for four hours she didn’t recognize us, and then, at the last moment, she recognized us again; she took my hand and I laid my thumb on her inner wrist, on her pulse like before. Selma’s heartbeat raced; the world raced just before it was about to stand still.