“Two thousand balloons aren’t very heavy either,” I said. “Why would anyone do that?”

“Do what?” the optician asked.

“Blow up two thousand balloons with the single breath of a blue whale.”

“I don’t know,” the optician said. “Maybe to have decorations. For a celebration.”

“Why would anyone want to celebrate?” I asked.

Selma stroked my forehead again and again. Her small fingers occasionally brushed my closed eyelids.

“The heart of a blue whale only beats two to six times a minute, presumably because it’s so heavy,” the optician explained. “A blue whale’s heart is also unimaginably heavy. It weighs more than a ton.”

“Martin could lift it,” I said.

“He could even lift ten fully grown blue whales,” Selma said, “all at the same time. Ten fully grown blue whales piled one on top of the other. Heavy tongues and hearts included.”

“Martin is not fully grown,” I said.

“That would be almost two thousand tons,” the optician calculated, and Selma said, “He could do it easily.”

“I don’t want to grow up,” I said. For a while, the only sound was the ticking of the alarm clock.

“I know,” Selma finally said. “But we’d be very happy if you decided to grow up anyway.”

“That’s true,” the optician said. He cleared his throat several times, but whatever was stuck in his throat would not be cleared. The optician gingerly stroked my cheek, slowly and gingerly, as if he were sounding out a particularly difficult word in a sugar package horoscope. “You have no idea how happy we’d be, Luisa, if you decided to grow up after all. My dear child,” he said quickly and softly, the way you rush to finish saying something before you start to cry and can’t say any more.

I opened my eyes. Selma and the optician smiled at me in the dim light of the bedside lamp. Tears were streaming down the optician’s face. They rolled out from under his glasses and down his cheeks.

I looked around. Selma’s bedroom, the entire world, was as small as the stomach of a blue whale. Selma stroked my forehead, again and again.

And again.

IT’S LIKE THIS

Frederik had appeared six months earlier, the day Alaska disappeared. The previous evening Selma hadn’t closed the door properly, and in the morning it stood wide open and Alaska was gone.

The optician supposed he had gone off in search of my father, who had been traveling almost constantly. Selma believed Alaska had run away because we were too caught up in ourselves and had noticed him as little as we noticed the landscape.