“The stories came out over many weeks of talking. I would sleep with Rhea, wake to find her gone, and call Elena from Rhea’s room. Elena was just down the hall, but it never occurred to us to talk in person. One evening, eating dinner with their father, it came to me that I no longer remembered the last time I had left the apartment. It was a big place by this city’s standards, and it struck me that there was no longer anything outside that required my attention. No friends to meet up with. No courses to attend. My parents had written me off long ago, I figured. My life, it seemed, had shrunk down to the dimensions of this place, this family, these strange sisters.
“We were eating a butterflied lamb prepared by the Magnussons’ cook, Margarite. Their father, who always showed up to dinner very soigné, in a tailored suit, his tie knot undone just so, ate in a brisk, formal manner and seemed to accept me at the table without surprise. ‘Tanner,’ he might say, ‘tell me. Are you a man of the world or a poet?’ I probably told him I didn’t know, that I had always wondered and often felt myself in a sort of purgatory between the two, because he said, ‘Ah, yes. There is a fifth column inside us all, nicht wahr?’
“I didn’t know what he meant, but I asked, if such neat divisions could be made, what he considered himself.
“‘I am a man of the world, Tanner. For now at least,’ he said. ‘I must believe in all of its things … Broccolini. Bushwick. Bikram yoga. And that’s just the bs. It’s breathtaking, really, the things one is expected to take seriously these days.’
“I must have ventured that he felt inauthentic, because without hesitation he added, ‘Yes, yes, I am a fraud through and through. I don’t deny it, I celebrate it! A buggy-whip maker in the age of SUV limousines. What is one to do, what can one do, but embrace the gross anachronistic fiction of one’s own existence? Smile in public, put on a good show. Fine and good. But at the end of the day a gentleman is not a hero to his valet, isn’t it so, Tanner?’
“I wanted him to say more, but just then Margarite came in to ask how we were enjoying the meal.
“‘What shall I tell you, my dear,’ he said. ‘You surpass yourself. You are the progeny of gods — and no minor divinity but the sort that springs fully formed from the skulls of monsters! What is left to say? What are words next to the unknowable thing itself? Oh, they will sing songs of you when you are dead.’
“‘I know what I’ll do when you’re dead,’ Margarite said under her breath.
“‘Very good.’ He laughed. ‘Very good.’ When she had gone he turned back to me. ‘And so, Tanner,’ he said, ‘you enjoy the company of my daughters, do you?’
“‘I do,’ I said. ‘They’re remarkable.’
“‘Ha, yes. “Remarkable,” was it?’ He dabbed his mouth with his napkin and sat back in thought. ‘Well, you have my blessing,’ he said, ‘but I will not do you the generosity of my warning.’ He checked his watch, a practiced move to free it from his sleeve, out of no more than habit perhaps, a certain rhythm of preoccupation. He smiled and said, ‘Margarite really did outdo herself tonight, don’t you think?’
“That was the first night that Rhea did not return. I lay on her bed, ill at ease. Feeling restless, at last I got up to walk around. The apartment was more expansive than I had realized. Tight staircases I hadn’t known were there, doors opening onto skinny branching halls. I was absently inspecting little objets, decorative curios on the shelves and coffee tables, when at the end of a desk I came across a manuscript, neatly stacked and bound in string. It must have been hundreds of pages in all, although it wasn’t numbered. I undid the string and settled down at the foot of a recamier to read. This is how it began: ‘Imagine you speak to fallen angels in a dead language invented by living statues. You are an adding machine woven from blades of grass; this explains your friendlessness, and your comfort with high-caliber handguns. If I told you the dimensions of our lives were one greater or one fewer than you suppose, would you cancel your package vacation to the Dutch Antilles? Would it matter that I lived in bogus clouds of cast-off aerosols, teaching birds to dismantle power lines?’
“It went on like this for pages, mesmerizing, impenetrable. At some point I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew Elena was standing over me. She took the pages from my lap, set them aside, and undressed in the deliberate way of someone alone, folding her clothes as she took them off. I hadn’t seen her since that first day. Maybe I had forgotten her sad beauty, or maybe our conversations had led me to invest greater allure and poignancy in her body, the thin swayback figure, its marble skin untouched by sun. She hadn’t a hint of muscle, the breasts of a boy, a fatiguing melancholy in her sloe-eyed gaze, but she was beautiful, I thought, and we made love, or whatever you care to call it, right there on the carpet, in that corner of the apartment I’d never seen.
“Rhea woke me with a finger over her lips a few hours later. I was at first confused to see Elena dozing next to me, then I remembered what had happened and searched Rhea’s face for any clue to her state of mind. It was its typical mask of amusement. She seemed herself but just to be sure, thinking, you know, I could interpret between you and your love if I could see the puppets dallying, I asked if she wasn’t upset.
“‘About what?’ she said. Only then did I notice she had a heavy jacket on and a duffel bag over her shoulder.
“‘Quo vadis?’
“She laughed. ‘Denmark?’ She said it like we’d discussed it all before.
“I was stunned. ‘When did that happen? Does anyone know?’
“‘Of course,’ she said and looked at me sweetly. ‘Take care of Elena, won’t you? She’s a little directionless at the moment.’
“Time began passing more quickly after that. Elena stayed indoors all day, but I began to venture out through the city. I walked the same streets I had since childhood and hardly recognized them. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I’ve spent my entire life here and, as you no doubt know, this place teaches you nothing if not a profound blindness to the strangeness and horror of people’s lives. We live to validate for one another the insane pretext that this is normal and right, and what are we all searching for but some moment when the world’s gaze falls on our gross, petty lives and says, How special. How hiply thrown together. How baroquely casual. I don’t know … I felt crushed, just crushed, by the profligacy of a single block, the effort of it, the florid misfortune and exhausting Kabuki of other people’s lives. I could scarcely pass someone on the street — young, old, men, women — without falling neck-deep into the idea that at that very moment, like me, they were taking some internal stock of their frustration and misery, of where they stood next to their most extravagant and private dreams. And what were their dreams? Or the trials of their daily lives? Was it presumptuous and condescending to think myself happier than them? But I didn’t. I didn’t. I was not happy. I was just young, vital, credentialed, moneyed … I am not the first person to think these things, clearly, but if it’s patronizing to pretend to understand the trials and miseries of other people’s lives, it is no doubt worse to use this as an excuse never to try. And the greater misery seemed, suddenly, the soulless disregard of people like me — anyone really — and not for other people’s sakes, but for our own. We had reached an inflection point, I thought, the contradictions we had to live with were too great, and in the interest of obscuring them we had abused language to the point that we could no longer speak to one another. We could scarcely leave our tribes.