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What’s that thing again, that word?
    Dasein
, whispers Elf. She half smiles. Being there.
    Yeah, that! Please! I sit down and then stand up again. C’mon, I say. You like books with
being
in the title, don’t you? Please. I sit down next to her again and then put my head on her stomach. What was that quote on your wall? I ask.
    What quote? she says.
    On your bedroom wall, when we were kids.
    You put the fist in pacifist?
    No, no … that other one, about time. Something about the horizon of being.
    Be careful, she says.
    The piano?
    Yes. She puts her hands gently on my head and keeps them there as though she is resting them on a pregnant belly. I can feel their heat. I hear her stomach rumble. I smell the Ivory Snow scent of her T-shirt that she has on inside out. She massages my temples and then pushes me off her. She says she doesn’t remember the quote. She tells me that time is a force and we must allow it to do its work, must respect its power. I consider arguing that she herself is disrespecting that power by attempting to sidestep it but then realize she might already have made note of that and is talking to herself as much as she is talking to me. There is nothing to add. I hear her whisper yet another apology and I begin to hum a Beatles song about love and need.
    Remember Caitlin Thomas? I say.
    Elf says nothing.
    And remember how she barged drunkenly into Dylan’s hospital room at St. Vincent’s in New York City where he was dying of alcohol poisoning and threw herself on top of his beleaguered body begging him to stay, goading him to fight, to be a man, to love her, to speak, to stand, to stop dying for god’s sake. My sister says she appreciates being compared to Dylan Thomas but apologizes and asks me again to leave, she needs to think. I tell her all right, I’ll leave but I’ll be back tomorrow. She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named—when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion towards the people who invented the concept of “telling time.” How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.
    But Elf, I say, just because you have no use for the systems that help us measure our lives doesn’t mean that our lives don’t need measuring.
    Maybe, she says, but not according to some bourgeois notion of time compartments. That’s a fascistic arrangement of a thing—time—that’s naturally and importantly outside the realm of categorization or even definition.
    Actually, I am okay with leaving right now after all, I say. Sorry to have to leave class early, Professor Pinhead, but I’m running out of time on my meter. I bought two hours and I think they’re up. Speaking of time.
    I knew I could get you to leave, she says. And we hug and I begin to tell her that I love her before words become impossible and we simply breathe together in each other’s arms for a minute, before I go. Before I have to be elsewhere.
    I check my messages while I descend the hospital stairs two by two to the exit. A text from Nora, my fourteen-year-old:
How’s Elf??????????????????????? Will broke the front door
. And another from Will, my eighteen-year-old son who’s in his first year at NYU but whom I’ve commandeered to stay with Nora for a few days in Toronto while I am back in Muddy Waters:
Nora told me her curfew is four am. True? Give Elf a hug from me! The shower drain is plugged from N’s hair
. And a text from my oldest friend, Julie, who is expecting to see me later that evening:
Red or white? Give my love to Elfie. xo
    The last time my sister tried to kill herself was by slowly evaporating into space. It was a furtive attempt to disappear by starvingherself to death. My mom phoned me in Toronto and told me that Elf wasn’t eating and she was begging her and Nic not to call a doctor. They were desperate. Would I come? I went directly from the airport to