I pressed my free hand over my mouth, so my father couldn’t hear me weeping. I felt like someone watching a tree fall and thinking, This tree will only really be felled once it’s lying on the ground, and there’s still time until then.

“Its full name is Okapia johnstoni, after the man who discovered it, Harry Johnston,” my father explained, “and you know what? He didn’t even discover it! In his entire life, he never actually saw an okapi, only parts of it, the skull and the pelt. But he never set eyes on a complete okapi.”

“Papa,” I said through the fingers of the hand over my mouth and I thought, Papa, you have to be quiet now. You have to let the world in.

“Isn’t that something?” my father asked. “In her life, Selma saw more complete okapis than its discoverer. Maybe she’s actually the one who discovered the okapi.” He laughed. “How’s she doing? I’ll be there tomorrow evening.”

I took my hand away from my mouth and said, “She died last night.”

Then the only sound was the noise such a sentence makes when it is said very far away from the place where it must be heard.

“No,” my father said. I heard his hand with the receiver sink and then rise again. I heard my father’s voice repeating softly, “But I’ll be there tomorrow evening, tomorrow evening I’ll be there.”

SINCE YOU’RE ALREADY LYING HERE

“Dear Frederik,” I wrote, sitting at Selma’s kitchen table, “Selma is dead. She liked you very much. The only thing she didn’t like about you was your time zone. Perhaps we weren’t actually made for each other. That’s not so bad. None of an okapi’s parts belong together and it’s still extraordinarily beautiful . . .” I wrote no more because the optician appeared beside me and said, “It’s time.”

The optician and I stood in front of Selma’s full-length mirror in the entryway, I in a black dress, the optician in his good suit, which had grown ever larger with time. The optician held his Employee of the Month badge up to his lapel. “Should I?” he asked, and looked at me in the mirror with tear-filled eyes. “Do you think it would be funny?”

“Yes,” I said, and tried to wipe away the mascara that had spread all over my face from so much crying, “very funny.”