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was simultaneously freezing and baking. Where the light hit I could see the freckles on her skin, her shoulders and her upper arms. But when she unbuckled her belt and slid her jeans over her narrow hips to show me her white cotton underpants, that was too much.
    â€œI am a real person,” she said, “not some story. Why do you want to hurt me?”
    And then, after a moment: “I said I wanted a love story. Where’s the boy? When does he show up?”
    When does he? How could I inject him in? Deliberately I watched her face, stared at her face, watched the tears drip. I was so panicked, I didn’t even ask myself what they might mean. They were just water on her face. I stared at her bright hair, her nose and chin. Then I came toward her, arms outstretched, not knowing what I would do if she hadn’t raised her palm to keep me away. “Shush, she is watching us,” I said, referring to the end of this last installment, trying also to make a joke as I glanced up into the smoky, spark-filled sky. My eyes stung, and then I was crying also, not in recompense or punishment for anything I had said or done, but for the same reason, finally, that she was upset with me, because of the not-knowing. This story was too close to the original, and it could not but remind us of what we’d seen: the great steam engine burrowing into the icy dyke and the explosion. It was true, I could not invent anything. Then we had run away, or she had run away and I had followed her. Perhaps she blamed me for that, for her own cowardice. But there was nothing we could have done. The dyke had held or else it had not. Either the college boys and the militia had managed to seal up the hole like General Mahone at the Battle of the Crater, or they had not.
    â€œI think about you too much,” I said. “You’re like a crowd of people.”
    Crying, she smiled. “Where did you get the name Adolphus?”
    â€œMy mother told me that was what my grandmother wanted to call me. It is a family name. Whenever I complained about anything, she said it could have been worse.
    â€œBut he’s not the one,” I said. I came to her now, and together we did up her clothes. She was shivering with cold, or something.
    It was true what she had said, or almost said. Always at the last moment, my thoughts about her turned to violence. Maybe it was because she was older that I found it hard to touch her, or even think about touching her in the way I wanted. Sometimes I would think about what to do. I would gather my courage, reach out my hand. But at the last moment the gesture would go astray. A caress would turn into something more aggressive, a tap or a punch on the arm. Something that could be disclaimed or misunderstood. So now I was happy just to touch her in this brusque way, fastening her shirt, pulling it up over her arms, I’d never seen this much of her. How beautiful she was!
    â€œWhat do you mean, a crowd?”
    â€œIn my mind.” And it was true: images would unfold in rows like paper dolls. Who knows? Maybe more than two, which she would find out as she penetrated into the steam-filled bowels of the Yankee kingdom, where doubtless they had perfected a way to duplicate entire human beings, grow them in steaming vats. And here?
    â€œMaybe just one,” Paulina said. “Just one. Just one.”
    My eyes stung from the smoke. I did not reply directly. “When I was two or three years old,” I said, “my parents took us to the island of Ceylon. My father had a job teaching physical science in the capital city, at the university. We had a driver named Reuben, and he used to give us plates of milk, my sister and me, to feed the cobra at the bottom of the garden. This was before Elly was born. And I remembered looking down into a circular blue pool and watching the elephants swimming at the bottom, holding on to each other’s tails. For a long time this was my earliest memory,