And we set out driving for the mill, and in the distance ahead of us, we could see the storm receding. We are pursuing it, I said. Then she reminded me of the storm map that she had bought me, and we fell to speaking of my room in the boardinghouse again. Have you, I asked the interlocutor, has anyone ever done something for you so completely beyond all possibility of repayment that you just stand there agog, helpless in their presence? That is how it was for me. When I brought her to my room, there in the shabby boardinghouse, a place where half the windows were boarded up — rooms in which people still lived were boarded up, a boardinghouse because people stayed there, but also, because it was falling apart, it was held together by shabby boards — I brought her there, showed her my room and its absence of things, and she in all her good grace was pleased, delighted, fell even more in love with me, and went off. That it should have happened that way was amazing, but what happened next was this. I went to work at the antiques store where I had a position, and when I came back at night, expecting the same — some pieces of cheap paper, a pallet, a chair, what I found was this: I had given her a gift, I had presented my life to her as numerous notes on paper, taped in the absence of things, as shadows of a sort, in order that she could see whom it was that she had met, when she had met me. For a long time, I had hidden my things, my gathered physical life from her, but finally I had gone to present it to her, and I had failed, I had waited too long, my things were gone; yet, I had created this simulacrum, and given that to her in its place. Knowing her capacity, I knew that she could take my descriptions and hold them all gently up together at once, and that she could feel what the room had been like, and judge me. I wanted that judgment and so I had given that gift to her. Then, she had come back in the days following, she had come back, and, she must have had some help. I don’t know how she did it, how she could have performed such an action, but, using my meticulous descriptions, she searched through the city for each and every one of the belongings named and described on my sheets of paper. Using the descriptions, she matched each to an object as like to it as possible. She brought these objects together, and set them down, each and every one, in the place I had said they should be, and recompleted the room that had been stolen. Somehow, she had stolen into the room, bypassing the lock, and she had replaced every one of my things. A framed photograph of a lunch counter, endlessly continuing its perspective off into the bottom right, a hundred stools or more, punctuated again and again and again by a neatly dressed sodajerk with a white hat. A small painting of a rat, in the Chinese style. An old fountain pen, half size, with a notebook into the binding of which the pen fit, and in the binding of which there was a small pot of ink actually bottled and held fast. A large Spanish folding knife, tied in a cloth and hanging from a nail. A pair of glasses of extremely heavy prescription, useful as a magnifying glass. An empty birdcage, with a bone flute propped in it. A small crank phonograph, nonfunctioning, and two cracked records. A suit of clothes, finely embroidered, for a child, hung on the wall. A map of the Maginot Line. A canvas bag on a peg full of broken ivory piano keys. A Venetian rooster mask. An old-fashioned bullhorn, hung by the window, half painted red, half painted green, with the number 71 in white emblazoned on the green side. I had worked in an antiques store for a long time, and had built up a small collection, a fine but small collection. Somehow she had scoured our city, and perhaps sent out to others, who could say, and had found something like to every thing I had once owned. To these she added one item: on the table, she left all the slips of paper in a tall glass jar, and on the jar she put a note: love, let us replace every imagined thing with a real thing. She did not even need to be there to see my happiness. She was at her parents’ home. I went immediately there, and she disclaimed it. She smiled to herself and said, someone else must have done it. Do you have another lover?
The mill was largely broken down. We stopped by the road and crossed a field of thistle and weed to reach it. As I did, I paused at the threshold, but she plunged in. From room to collapsed room, she went, eager, possessed with the power of the adventure. I went after, looking for her in bedraggled and shattered chambers. Though in many places, an old mill like this would have become the site of drinking, of vandalism, it was here so far from anywhere that it was only what it had been — a mill that someone had walked away from, or died in, that time had settled upon with all its weight. The glass in the windows was old, and thicker at the bottom. The mill wheel had fallen off, and part of it could be seen slumped down into the water. We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise, I thought. Immediately, I heard her laughter through a space in the walls, and I felt — lightness. What a fool I was to think such sentiments. Here I was in a derelict mill and I had humanized the structure in the most paltry way. My mind was so limited, I thought. Where I, standing in the mill, felt only grief at my own impending death, a death that was half a century off, so distant it could not even be conceived, she, on the other hand, felt buoyed. Standing in the mill, she felt the delight that a world could be, and that in it, a mill could be, and that in order they should fall this way — world, mill, and then her standing in a mill, with myself a room distant. I went to where I thought she had been, and it seemed I was mistaken. She was not there but on the roof, actually overhead. She had been watching me. I climbed up with her, and we sat on the mill, and wherever we went within it, it broke more, and we left it worse than when we had come. I said that to her, and she said, it has had some friends, now, though, or at the very least acquaintances. Without us, it would simply have sat this evening watching the road. Then she laughed again, it is almost a koan, what is the use of an old broken grist mill. We were quiet for a while. I could see she had suddenly been overwhelmed. She was dizzy, and sat all the way to the ground, so I told the interlocutor. I should say she fell, but it was slower than that. Are you all right? We should go back, now, she told me. Suddenly, I can hardly stand. It is night already. A moment ago, it was plain day, and now, night. It isn’t as dark as that, I said. Come on. We went back across the field, and though she had skipped to the mill in and out of the high grasses, she now labored as though under a yoke. I lifted her into the car and got in beside her. She regained some strength there, spread out in the car where we had had so many fine times. I once thought, she told me, that I would be a diver. My aunt went on a world travel at age sixteen, my mother’s sister, and in Mexico, she leapt from a cliff and died. She was in a group with others — nine other sixteen-year-olds, all from my mother’s town. They all jumped; the guide jumped. It was deemed safe. Every one of them survived but her. She was found in the water with her neck broken. I was young when my father told me this story, so Rana said. I had been looking at old pictures, and I found one of her, there, actually on the cliff, in a bathing suit. The photograph was taken moments before. It was found in the camera of one of the other children. It seemed to me from the picture that she would be a wondrous diver. The other children were gangly or squat, ill proportioned. She was a sort of swan, just perfect — the sweep of her at sixteen was marvelous. I felt, seeing this picture, that she possessed the utterness of this word, diver. Yet, my father said to me, so Rana told me, that in jumping off that cliff, she had ended her life. I wanted to be a diver, too. I told him that. I stood there, a child, looking at a picture of my father’s sister-in-law, his own cousin, who had died, the sadness of which he had borne for decades, and in the moment of his relating to me the tragedy of her death, I said, I want to be a diver, too. That is how I was as a child. I want you to know that, Rana told me, so I said to the interlocutor. She sat there, stunningly beautiful, in this beat-up old car. We were parked there in the mountains, where a mill had been built by a river, where the river had mostly gone dry and the mill had broken down completely. This place where people had lived had become completely overgrown. She and I, this wonderful girl, Rana, and I, had adventured there, and taxed her, taxed her to her utmost, and now she, terribly, vengefully beautiful, sat with her knees to her chest in the car, telling me of her childhood idols, and her childhood impudence. I think, I told her, that you would have made a spectacular diver.