Selma put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled my head onto her chest, on her humid nightgown, and stroked my hair.

“You invented the world,” I whispered.

“No,” Selma said, “that was you,” and those were her last words.

HENRY, THE COACH IS BREAKING

Selma stood in the Uhlheck. She was wearing a flowered, ankle-length nightgown and looking at her old feet in the grass. She stood there exactly as she had with an okapi in the dreams that meant some life would soon be over. But there was no okapi in sight, only the trees, the fields, and the wind that always blew here.

And just as Selma asked herself why she had been put here without an okapi, someone emerged from between the trees, someone who moved without a sound and simply stepped out of the undergrowth. He came nearer, and Selma realized who it was. She ran to him as quickly as she could and wasn’t at all surprised that it was very quickly indeed, that she could run as fast as a sense of time that hadn’t aged.

Then she stopped abruptly, thinking that you can’t just fall into someone’s arms after more than fifty years, no matter how much you want to, because that person might crumble into dust.

“Here you are,” Heinrich said. “It’s about time.”

Heinrich’s hair, which for decades had been light in the afterimage behind Selma’s eyelids, was now black, as in real life, and his eyes were light again. “You’re in color,” Selma said, and then, after a few moments of silence, “and you’re so young.”

“Unfortunately, that couldn’t be avoided,” Heinrich said.

Selma looked around. “I’m old,” she announced.

“Fortunately,” Heinrich said, smiling.

He smiled exactly as he had on the day he turned back to wave at Selma one very last time, on the day he said, Don’t worry, we’ll be together again soon, I know we will, Selma, I know we will.

“It took longer than expected,” Heinrich said.

Selma looked at the Uhlheck. The light was somehow silvery, like it had been during the eclipse.

She stepped closer to Heinrich. “Will you help me?” asked Selma, who had never before asked for help. “Will you help me?”

She spoke as if she were requesting Heinrich’s help taking off her coat.