“Then give me a better reason,” Selma said. “Give me just one reason in the entire world that is better than this one.”

“I’m sorry,” the optician said.

He took his change purse from his jacket pocket and handed her four marks. Selma inserted them into the vending machine and pulled the handle of the first silver-colored compartment. It didn’t open. First Selma pulled, then she yanked the handle. Then she yanked all the other handles, my head bouncing side to side on her back. None of the compartments opened.

“Piece-of-shit vending machine,” Selma said.

“Let it go,” the optician said, “I have some.”

“You do? But you don’t even smoke.”

“Apparently I do,” the optician said.

He took a pack and his lighter from his trouser pocket, tapped out a cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Selma. Selma inhaled deeply, all the way to her belly button. She leaned her free shoulder against the vending machine and closed her eyes.

“Glorious,” she said.

Selma smoked the entire cigarette leaning against the vending machine with her eyes closed and her see-through rain hat on her head, and the optician watched her. Selma’s beauty was the only beauty that hadn’t been packed up and taken away, and a dozen opening lines from the letters flashed through his mind during the span of the cigarette. He looked into the darkening sky. Above the optician spread a vast expanse in which bright points would soon appear, and there wasn’t any way whatsoever to indicate that they had been seen.

Selma opened her eyes, threw the cigarette butt on the ground, and crushed it thoroughly. “I had no idea you smoked,” she said.

The optician almost replied, “There are quite a few things you don’t know, Selma, quite a few,” but his inner voices accosted him and he swayed to the right for a half second. “Definitely not a good time,” the voices said, and for once, they were right.

Selma and the optician returned to our house. Selma swung me from her shoulder to her stomach—by now she’d had quite a bit of practice—and stretched out with me on her bed.

The optician sat on the edge of the bed. He had never sat there before. Selma’s bed, the bed in which she occasionally dreamed of an okapi, was narrow. A flowery quilted coverlet lay over a puffy duvet.

Selma switched on the lamp on her night table. A folding traveling alarm clock in brown imitation leather sat next to it, ticking loudly. Over her bed hung a painting in a gold frame that showed a boy with a shawm sitting happily among his lambs.