The optician briefly mulled over truths capable of causing a stroke. They all seemed to him to be straight out of the American afternoon television show Selma always watched. Unlike Selma, the optician did not get a thrill from watching the show. What did give him a thrill was Selma’s profile, and the show gave him the opportunity to gaze in rapture at Selma’s profile from the corner of his eye for forty minutes while she gazed in rapture at the show. It seemed to him that truths capable of causing a stroke must sound like the sentences delivered at the end of each episode just before the theme music began playing, leaving Selma to wait an entire week for the aftermath—sentences like “I never loved you,” or “Matthew is not your son,” or “We’re bankrupt.”

It would have been better for the optician not to think of this because he couldn’t get the theme music out of his head, a melody completely unsuited to declarations of love, and his inner voices immediately began to push him around.

There was an entire commune of voices living inside the optician. They were the worst lodgers imaginable. They were always too loud, especially after ten o’clock in the evening. They trashed the optician’s interior. They were many of them, they never paid their rent, and they couldn’t be evicted.

For years, his inner voices had been pleading in favor of keeping his love for Selma secret. So on the way to Selma’s that day, the voices were naturally in favor of holding back the truth about his love. After all, he was skilled in the art of holding things back, which he’d done very successfully for decades. The voices conceded that without a declaration of love, nothing particularly wonderful had happened, but nothing particularly terrible had occurred, either, and that, after all, was the important thing.

The optician, who always expressed himself judiciously, stopped short, raised his head, and said, “Shut up!” in a loud voice. He knew it was impossible to have a reasonable conversation with the voices. He knew that the voices would grow extremely talkative if he didn’t bark at them immediately.

And if the truth was out, the voices continued unfazed, something terrible very well could happen. Maybe, they hissed, Selma would find this truth—the optician’s bloated, long-cloistered love—particularly threatening or unsightly. And if the optician were to die today, if he were the one intended by Selma’s dream, then the last thing Selma should receive from him was something as unappetizing as his love, unaired for so many years.