I didn’t want to do at the time. Now this. First the Man with Three Fingers reappears, and now this. I should have done it; I should have poked my eyes out when I had the chance.

“No,” I said and should have left it at that, but with her, I couldn’t leave things. When she sat there, dimples and all, I was compelled. “I mean, yes, of course I’m happy to see you.” I hoped that was all my eyes were saying. “Yes and no.” I was talking too much. “No, I’m not empty. I just learned to let go.”

“Really? And where did you learn that? After all those years, where did you learn that?”

“Self-taught. Maybe it comes with age.” I stared at my hands. They seemed familiar, which was a relief. “You look good. It’s nice to see you again. So soon, I mean. Twice in so short a time.”

“You’re a liar. I could always tell when you lied to me, especially when you were talking to your hands.”

“You make it sound like it happened a lot.”

“It was constant, only you didn’t know it because you had no idea who you were then. And that’s putting it nicely.”

“And now?”

She stood up and moved closer, right next to me; I could feel myself filling and emptying again, like a minor star pulsing in a faraway corner of the universe.

“You just stopped.” She was barely whispering. “All of a sudden, you never got in touch. It was like you had died.”

“I was, sort of, dying. It was death, in a way.” I didn’t mean to whisper, too, but what else could I do? How can you talk normally when someone like her is leaning so close? “I thought about calling, but you know I don’t have a phone in my apartment. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Your office doesn’t have a phone?” She moved back and looked at my desk. I felt my face get hot. We used to talk a lot while I was at the office. I’d shut the door, and Pak didn’t interrupt. If he passed by when I was on the phone, he’d listen for just a moment and then walk away. He never mentioned it.

“Private calls.” My voice was returning little by little, but my face was still flushed, probably my ears, too. “They don’t want us to make private calls from the office. You know that, it’s in the handbook that your section puts out. Only official matters are supposed to take place on official phones. That’s the rule.” I sounded like the book of regulations that sat on the floor behind my chair. “Anyway, what we had to say to each other in those days was nobody else’s business.”

“So what was the other day?”

“That was official.”

She didn’t respond. Then came the question I hoped she wouldn’t ask. “How close were we?”

I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to say we had almost made it, almost crossed the bridge in one sweeping, final move. She wanted to hear that we could have done it. “Close,” I said.

A soft moan escaped her lips. Can a man dissolve? I looked away and considered how difficult and yet how useful it might be suddenly to become nothing more than smoke. When I looked back, she was at the door. She turned for a moment, long enough for one final word.

“Bastard.” It seemed to be her word for me these days. It wasn’t a word I liked her to say. I’d have to tell her that, if I ever saw her again.

I turned the word over in my mind a few times before I realized my phone was ringing. It was the liaison man from the Foreign Ministry. “Where have you been? I’ve tried calling and calling. We could meet for a couple of minutes, it might be interesting.”

“Hot air?”

“Enough. Miss Ban is making pleasurable sounds upstairs.”

“If the car starts, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Otherwise?”

“Give my regards to Miss Ban.”

11

I drove out the front gate. An old lady and a small girl were on the sidewalk across the street. They walked alongside each other, their paces matched by the bow of time. For a while they held hands, then the child moved ahead, just a short burst of energy, a few steps alone, enough to make the case. She stopped and waited for the old lady to move up beside her. They started, paces matched again. Both looked ahead; the girl reached her hand up, the grandmother