He doesn’t know my name; doesn’t remember my face. Every day he asks: “Are you the woman in white from yesterday? I think there was one yesterday.” I listen to Eva tell him those stories; what a time it must have been, on the brink of so much. How can he not know this? He is young and handsome, the way men get when they start to gray, an angular classicism. His mind shouldn’t be so decrepit. These other drones in here, okay, they’ve slipped away. I see them, blank and ghost-eyed, fortunate their bodies move to permutations other than thought. Or is it? I don’t know. But he is younger and should not be so lost. He tells me every day about Kurt and Vera. They’re the only alive things in that brain of his. I listen and imagine as he repeats their story under his breath. I am good at that. As a child I played make-believe, running through hidden passageways and lurking beneath windows, spying on neighbors with pocket cameras and decoder rings. Life is best understood in whispers, not in laughter and loud voices; we carry with us the secret things that quietly wear us away.
