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crushed stone, following a line of carbide lanterns.
    In the summer of 1864, an entire regiment had burst out of the ground underneath the fortifications. The war had almost ended in one day. But General Mahone and Colonel Claiborne and the rest—schoolchildren still recited their names every July on the anniversary of the battle—had thrown the Yankees back, and laid down such a layer of suffocating fire that the Crater filled up to its brim with dead and dying men.
    The Yankees had come up to the surface on a train, pulled by an enormous steam engine. The tracks were still there or else had been re-laid, and Colonel Claiborne walked his horse through the gusting clouds of condensation, until he reached the wagons leading down into the dark. He reached out his gloved hand to touch the trembling metal, while sometimes he bent his head to talk to one of the Yankee officers who led them. There were flatcars for the dogs, who leapt up onto them, and then a couple of coaches for the soldiers. By the time they’d reached the private compartments, Paulina was desperate to dismount; she swayed backward, and when the black horse finally stood still, she let go of the stranger’s belt and slid away into unconsciousness, only partly aware of the concerned voices that surrounded her, the hands that broke her fall. She had a last impression of the stranger sitting immobile on the saddle’s horn, her own face staring down at her with half-amused disdain.
    Then oblivion, but only for a short time. Always she had been a lucid dreamer. This time her dream brought her back into her imagined future, her artificial world in Massachusetts that she had described first in her diary and then later embellished in the library ballroom as she waited for her sentence to be read. Now it was as if she were suspended in hot air, as if she floated disembodied over a scene that she was simultaneously trying to create:
    Too agitated to sit still, as she listened she had ripped the dead boughs out of the trees, snapped them in pieces and then loaded up the bonfire into a roaring, crackling mass, melting the snow into a circle of slush around the stones. She had stripped off her mittens and her coat. Ten feet away, my cheeks were hot. “You don’t know anything,” she said. She had had her back to me, but she turned toward me now, the firelight in her yellow hair, her face in shadow, rimmed with light. She had kept a fag-end in the pocket of her shirt, the remnant of a cigaret they had been smoking as he talked, but now she took it out, looked at it, and flicked it away into the darkness. “Is that how you see me? I know I should be flattered, but this girl—I asked for her to do something, and all you do is make her suffer. Do I look like that’s what I want? She has my name and that is all. And sure, that’s clever she has a twin who’s better than she is. Stronger and fiercer and braver. She has my name and body and that is all. Is this the body you are talking about, the one you’re cutting up with broken glass? Is this it?” she said, moving her palms over her chest.
    Up until this moment I had not taken her seriously. I had thought her outrage was manufactured, part of the joke. What had we been doing except talking and smoking hemp-weed, trying to keep our minds off things? At times I had scarcely known what I was saying, as my thoughts fled back into the town, into the house I had left that morning, and my older sister, and my parents, and Elly with her golden bracelet, moving it up and down along her arm, showing first one niello pattern, then another, the four gold oblongs and the clasp. But now I got to my feet, stood up from the rock where I’d been sitting, dusted the snow off my pants.
    â€œIs this it?” she repeated, and with her back to the fire she fumbled with the buttons of her shirt. She pulled it open to reveal her white underclothes, her pale flank in the night air that