The truth is, I said to the interlocutor, she was perfectly right. When she mentioned the possibility of bats, I did not entirely believe her. I thought she might be speaking metaphorically, or just exaggerating a childhood memory that would never need to bear any proof. However, when we lay there on our backs, looking straight up into the night sky, bats flew past. They flew past. A fabric of stars such as you have never seen, impossibly far, and yet spread before you so clearly, all from right to left and up and down. You felt it had been placed there, so particularly were all these distant objects put into relation to one another. And then — bats, just inches away, tearing past. She said that it would happen, and it did. The bats flew past — not one or two, but dozens and dozens. It went on for at least an hour, just at sunset. I can’t believe it, she said to me, clutching at my arm and pushing against me. She pulled herself up until she was on top of me, and her nose pushed into my cheek. She said, all these years and it is just the same, the bats pass overhead. I imagine they come out of the same caves, they live in the same colonies. I imagine these bats are descended from the bats that I knew, the bats that passed just inches above my face on summer nights fifteen years ago. Once, she said, my brother and I set out one morning to go and find those caves. We told my father. We put on our coats and packed a rucksack, and set out, and there on the porch, where he was sitting, reading, we told him we were off to find the caves. He bid us goodbye and told us that if we found them, there would be a choice then. It is the choice that people have when they find the thing for which they are looking. Will you come back. Then, my father said, you should decide in our favor, in what I would call our favor, in favor of the continued life of our family, and come back. You should not stay there with the bats. I will definitely stay with the bats, my brother said, if we find them. In that case, said my father, I take back my blessing. I hope you wander lost for some hours, and then stumble back here in time for supper. Of course, Rana continued, that is what happened. We had an idea of waiting until dark and using a flashlight to judge the direction of the bats’ flight, but we grew afraid as the night started to fall. When supper came, we were both to be found at the table. I assume, then, my father said, that you did not find the bats, as I hope that you are now, and will always be, a man of your word. This he told my brother, regarding my brother’s proposed domiciling with the bats. You have to understand, Rana said, that all of this is very funny. To my family, it is very funny. It is also something we never would laugh about, or talk about, or even mention. I only tell it to you now so that you can get to know me better. I want you to know me. She threw herself onto me, biting and scrambling with a feigned indignation.
In the morning we woke early, as everyone does who sleeps outside, and she said that she felt strong. This was a thing that sometimes came, whether she felt strong or weak, and we would change our plans accordingly. In the city, I had seen her every day, but not all day, and I imagined, standing there beside her at the hunting lodge, that I had not had the whole picture. She had, in the city, as a way of course, saved her strength so that she was always feeling strong when she saw me. The other things that she said she had been doing in the day, perhaps she had not been doing all of them, or at the very least not with her whole strength, and with breaks. Now, though, in the morning, we stood there in the morning light looking off down the mountain, she had her strength, so she said, and we were to walk in the town. This I told the interlocutor. Where the town was, it was positioned nearby the hunting lodge. Her father, being a boy at the time, had romantically been drawn to places not in the town. His parents had both died in the town. He preferred, then, living with his aunt and guardian, to move to a place beyond the town. Yet, he wanted to be able to observe the town. He had lived there all his life. The town was what he knew. He wanted to be near it, and yet to be apart from it. He took up residence in the hunting lodge, and modified it, with his own plans and the help of architects. He built the porch out into the trees. He raised a platform on the roof. He extended the back to reach out over a stream, so that there is a room actually in the house through which a stream flows. Rana told me all this as we walked into the town, I explained. She loved her father dearly, I could tell. How did it happen, I asked, that his parents died. My grandparents, she said. Yes, your grandparents. Sitting there, speaking of grandparents with a man who looked like my own grandfather, I felt an odd resonance. Perhaps once, I would have said it out loud, actually confronted this person to whom I was speaking, explained it to him, but I was weary and I felt very old. That, I did say out loud. I said to the interlocutor, I feel old. It’s the thing that is most often said to me, he replied. But it isn’t you that is old. You aren’t the thing that needs to change. It’s that you are overcome by your situation, by the way the world has descended on you. There is much in you that is young and new — and not just in you. In any person, even the oldest conceivable person. That’s what it means to be living — to engage with the cacophony of objects. The interlocutor handed me a cloth to wipe my face. Can you repeat, he said, the last portion. You were speaking very quietly and I couldn’t hear you very well.