A starts to reread B’s email. It is now two a.m. Soon, she knows, she will have to write B back. And she will need to exercise maximum caution when choosing her words. She thinks through all her options, all the questions she can ask or neglect to ask: about the Scrabble game, the woman, the cell phone. She rearranges the possibilities in her mind. She does not need to solve every problem now: once she emails, he will have to email back. That will give her another opportunity to respond, and then it will be his turn, and so on for the next four weeks, until he comes home. There will still be time for several more rounds, she reassures herself, as she types Dear B into the reply box.

A Premonition

It was late and I was beset by a black wind. I ducked into a costume store, the only business open at that hour. Inside I was glad to be warm, but the old man behind the counter looked me over suspiciously. There were slick dead leaves plastered to my greatcoat; beyond the shopwindow, trees whipped violently in the wind. I pretended to interest myself in the racks of masks. The racks were arranged in rows: rubbery faces, loose as flayed skin, hung from their hooks like clothing. The faces were frozen in dreadful expressions. I handled one after another. They were clammy to touch, and left a faint chemical smell on my fingers. Some were monsters, others the victims of monsters. Some had blades buried in their heads, for instance. None had eyes, only dark holes, ovals cut out of the latex. These, I understood, were where my own eyes would peer out from the mask. I took down three monsters of a species that I didn’t recognize. Two were hairy, with indeterminate snouts. They didn’t bare their teeth. Their ears were sharp, as if they could hear shrill sounds from far distances. The third was recognizably a man’s face, except totally white and hairless, and where its mouth should be, a seal of flesh. I brought them over to the old man at the counter. ‘And these?’ I said. ‘They are the souls of thieves,’ he said. Immediately I let out a loud laugh. But when the old man did not smile, I realized that he had been serious: I was holding the souls of thieves, these flimsy weights in my hands. Shoplifters who had been caught by the old man and transformed into terrible masks. ‘That’s fine,’ I said. I placed a bill from my pocket down on the counter, in fact the only bill I had—it was more than I could afford, but no matter. I slipped the white-faced mask over my head and left the other two on the counter with the old man, then departed from the shop still wearing the mask. I felt fine. Outside, the thief’s soul protected my face from the wind. My breath was trapped inside it, and my face grew quite hot even. Walking home I felt my neck dampen with sweat. Through the thief’s ragged eyeholes, everything that I saw was an ill-gotten good: the empty streets were mine, and lampposts mine; the dark clouds, too, dissolving off the moon like smoke, they were mine, and the moonlight mine, and the gleaming backs of leaves as the trees whipped. I stole a glance of the river N—, of the bridge rail, I stole a glance of my own hand. There was a great greediness in my looking. At the end of my street, still several blocks off from my house, I paused before a thick tree that I had never noticed before. It was short, not much taller than I, but it held its branches out wide, and they were heavy with leaves black as midnight. I peeled the mask from my head and propped it on the foliage. Its white face sagged, and I could tell that it would fall to the ground. Carefully I worked a branch up through the neckline of the mask, positioning one of its tridents of twigs inside the cavity of the nose. When the mask was secure I stepped back. A wind started in, and the tree swayed. Swaying also in its field of leaves was that white face, bobbing up and down with its branch, like a piece of trash on black water. It even became possible to regard the tree as a creature of fur, out of whose dark pelt a human face leered. ‘There,’ I said, feeling the tree’s gaze on me. ‘There, there.’ In the wind the tree whipped more violently, like an animal heaving itself against the bars of its cage, and I no longer felt safe in its presence. My heart beat hard, I had difficulty breathing. As the leaves roiled, the white face tossed around in the foliage, rearing in what seemed like frenzy, and the whole time it kept its gaze on me. Finally I had to avert my eyes, for in that moment I understood. Everything grew clear, as in a premonition. This was the angel that Death would send for me.