Outside an enormous hotel feathers and bright white blossoms were falling and blowing against the windows and along the rugs which lay at the entrance. The security guard, usually posted there to hold the door and make conversation, was on this occasion absent. The few cars that passed moved slowly, as though the drivers wished to overhear as much as possible of a discussion between two female students who stood near the edge of the curb, no doubt unaware that just below their feet there was a drain into which debris spun and disappeared. An aging actor stood against the bricks, now close to tears because he believed that everything the students were saying—and, really, only one of them was speaking, though the other made it clear that she was waiting for her turn—was meant for him.

“You draw courage,” the student said, “from the fact of your own presence, because you find yourself here now. But I was here yesterday and the day before, and you were nowhere around, and now no matter how assuredly you impose yourself it will be your absence that will win out. Your presence is counterfeit.”

Worst of all, he had been here yesterday—he had been here every day, for however long he’d been coming, out of anticipation of just this kind of accusation. Two weeks ago he’d stayed for so long that the security guard had finally instructed him to leave. He didn’t know what difference it made—in all the time he’d been coming he was certain no one had so much as glanced in his direction. But he had obeyed and gone away.

The student continued: “Every time you speak my obligation to repeat myself is doubled. I’m more susceptible to what prolongs these discussions than you are. Years ago, I admit, you had me fooled—your mistakes were charming to me, and your indecision resembled a faith which I envied. But as soon as I came to recognize that you were, in fact, imitating me I executed the about-face against which all of your complaints have hurled themselves ever since, like mice which have grown so fat during their excursions that they can no longer pass into their own crevices. Now they’ll pose as rats, or as dogs, but no one will be fooled and they’ll be destroyed or banished by morning.”

These things would never make reliable memories, and this was what he wished to convey to the students, neither of whom seemed to find the conversation interesting. He longed to go home and stand at the window, listening for the whistle of the tea kettle, laying out the pages of the newspaper and allowing the day to roll to its conclusion. Even if he tore himself away now he would bring these unseemly circumstances with him, from which all the privacy in the world would refuse him insulation.

And by the same token if the students had been speaking to him there would have been little to say except that they resented their depiction—that none of the hostility embedded there was attributable to anything except his anguish, and they disbelieved in that. “Those are not my words,” they would have said, “or if they are my words it’s only because your stance, as dejected eaves-dropper, has confined me to filling a prescription. Even now I can’t offer comfort—you couldn’t accept comfort from me. Do you consider how long it will take to recover myself? Even if I ignore you I do so with the involuntary implication that I mean you harm, and I mean you no harm. I mean harm neither to you nor to myself. I too would prefer to be at home, eating and drinking and tailoring an existence which has—harmlessly—nothing to do with you. But I discover that I don’t have a home to go to, unless you invent one for me.”

So he emerged from the place where he had for so long been standing and the students became quiet and watched him as he approached. One of them took an abrupt step backwards as though he had reached out to caress her face. But his hands were, as always, at his sides.

He said, “Why won’t you come back with me?—why do you pretend to be strangers? Every day I return to this hotel hoping that you won’t be here, though in every case I know that if I wait long enough you’ll come—both of you—and another layer will be added to a drama which none of us finds useful. Or, anyway, I don’t. I can’t use it; it’s something that I’m committed to undergo—a penalty, I imagine, but I no longer know what my misdemeanor could have been. If you’ll come back with me now we can discuss it—or else we can sit in a room together without discussing it, without discussing anything, and whatever needs to be revealed will reveal itself. It’s something you could do out of kindness. I know that you’re tired of revisiting the same crises—you must long ago have stopped believing your own words, and so have I, although neither of us has done very much toward learning how to put an end to them. If you like, you can look through my diaries and see yourselves depicted there. It might be amusing to you, and it might be a valuable release to me.”

By now the traffic had become heavy. At the intersection the lights were going red, yellow, and green, and there was the sound of horns. Until now the students had said nothing to the actor, but when one of them began to speak it was as though she may have been speaking, secretly, all the time he had been making his appeal.

“To me you sound like someone who has an appointment every morning at one hospital, where he’s cured, and then every evening goes to a second hospital to be reinfected. Until this moment I only half knew you existed. I still don’t know your name, and I don’t want to know it. It’s bad enough that you believe you know mine. No one ever says: ‘I’ve given this person a name.’ It’s something, rather, which gets repeated so many times that it’s finally believed.”

In that instant the actor believed that the student’s face had changed; wrinkles had formed beside her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Suddenly she was not a girl but a woman, her eyes milder and the lids not so heavily distended. Even her hair had changed. It might be behind such a transformation that he would escape. He pretended to cough and turned, moving toward the traffic.

Late that night he warmed himself in front of a small fire which he’d made just outside of a construction site ensconced by a bright-orange rubber fence. He had thought for nearly an hour of making a fire and sitting, postponing the return to his apartment, and when he had, finally, begun to gather sticks, it had been with nearly crippling uncertainty. Now that the sticks were burning and he watched the shadows changing against the back of his hand he forgot that uncertainty and tried (because he was aware of the forgetting) to forget with it the hours he had spent outside the hotel. And, really, none of it had occurred as he remembered it, and he knew, and he was relieved. Had those students spoken to him—had they been there at all—he may have been condemned to create some part of himself that would remain there forever. As it was, he couldn’t estimate how many nights he’d taken a room in the hotel, standing at the window until the earliest hours of the morning, gazing down as though he might catch a glimpse of himself on the sidewalk, or searching for complicity in the faces of those he was able to see, passing back and forth near the entrance. Sometimes a figure would move close enough to the building that he could no longer keep it in view, and there was some element of this which he wanted to keep. He had no intention of sleeping here—something would allow him to go home—but he would stay for a while and wait for the fire to begin to go out. When that time came he would scatter the wood with his foot and tiny orange lights would emerge from the ashes. They would shuttle toward the sky and vanish.