He let go of my wrist and opened the living room door. The optician and I had set up a mattress camp. The optician was stretched out on the sofa. Three mattresses lay on the floor next to him. Marlies was asleep on the middle one. She was completely enveloped in Selma’s comforter. She looked like a giant flowery caterpillar and she snored.

A few hours earlier, when Marlies lay down, the optician crouched next to her in his blue-and-white-striped pajamas and watched as she wrapped herself in the comforter. “Are you going to do it again, Marlies?” he had asked. “Because if there’s the slightest danger that you’ll do it again, we’re going to show up at your house every five minutes, asking how you’re doing.” The optician bent down over Marlies, trying to look like a particularly malevolent imp.

“We’d never leave you in peace again,” he said. “We would unscrew all your locks and smoke the bees out of your mailbox. And every night”—here the optician had to force himself—“you’d have to sleep at one of our homes.” He bent even lower, the tip of his nose almost touching her assaulted hair. “You would, to be precise, have to move in with one of us.” Marlies sat bolt upright. The optician just managed to pull his head away in time.

“Never,” Marlies said.

“Then it’s all settled,” the optician announced, and made himself comfortable on the sofa.

I lay down on Marlies’s right, Frederik on her left. The optician, on the sofa, sat up and reached for his glasses.

“How nice that you were able to come, dear Frederik,” he whispered. “By the way, I found out what the sentence about things disappearing means. Shall I explain it to you?”

“Please,” Frederik answered softly, and the optician explained that looking meant differentiating, that something can’t disappear if you don’t try to differentiate it from everything else.

Frederik nodded but said nothing. The optician looked at him attentively. He couldn’t tell if Frederik now understood the sentence or if he himself was still the only one around who understood. For a moment the optician felt very lonely, as if he lived far away on a tiny planet, his only company a grateful sentence, which felt understood only by the optician.

Frederik was abstracted, it struck the optician, too. He was so abstracted, the optician worried that Frederik might become undifferentiated overnight. He waited until Frederik had shaken out his pillow, then he said, “If you’d like, I can examine the voices in your head tomorrow. There’s a revolutionary new method from Japan.”

Frederik smiled. “They’re not so bad,” he said.

At some point, the optician fell asleep. Everyone but Frederik and I was sleeping. I could hear on the other side of Marlies how he wasn’t sleeping.