It’s said that when someone dies, their life flashes before their eyes. That must happen very quickly sometimes, when you fall out of something, for example, or when you’ve got the barrel of a gun under your chin. As the door was closing behind Frederik, I thought at the speed of a life in free fall that Alaska had gone in search of adventure even though my father had denied that he had any capacity for it. I thought that it may be impossible to judge anyone’s level of adventurousness if you’ve known them for too long, that a person’s adventurousness can only reliably be assessed by someone who happens to stumble out of the underbrush. I thought, as I watched the door closing, that Frederik had said he had decided to follow this path, and I thought that I’d never decided on anything in my life, that things just happened to me. I had never really said yes to anything before, I’d only ever said no. I thought that you shouldn’t let yourself be intimidated by an overstuffed farewell, that you can, in fact, escape its jaws, because as long as no one dies, every farewell is negotiable. Faulty doors on a local commuter train are not negotiable, but the closing of a door decorated with an unseasonable autumn wreath certainly is. And at the very last second, before the latch fell, before a life had time to pass before anyone’s eyes, I leapt forward and stuck my foot in the doorway.

“Ouch,” Frederik said, because the door had hit his forehead.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I need your phone number.”

I beamed at Frederik, because I had finally let the world in, and that alone was so extraordinary I simply didn’t care if the world were to say, “Get lost!”

Frederik rubbed his forehead. “Phone calls are very complicated. In fact, we never get calls.”

“Give me your number anyway.”

He smiled. “You’re very stubborn,” he said, something no one had ever said to me before. He took a pen from his pocket. “Do you have a piece of paper?”

“No.” I held my hand out. “Write it here.”

“One hand isn’t enough,” he said.

I turned my arm over. Frederik took hold of my wrist and wrote his number on the inside of my forearm. The pen tickled. Frederik wrote and wrote. The number reached from my wrist almost to my elbow. Almost all the telephone numbers I knew only had four digits.

“Thank you,” I said. “But you’re already late, so you really should go.”

“Goodbye, then,” Frederik said. He turned around and closed the door.

“Come, Alaska,” I said, and after we’d walked away, when we were some distance from the House of Contemplation, the door opened again.

“Luisa,” Frederik called, “what’s an okapi?”

I turned around.