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into sleep, and then I whisper in his ear
    your mama loves you
    even if he’s asleep and doesn ’t hear, because even if he doesn ’t hear, I figure he hears. I whisper it in his ear and figure it makes its way to his brain, and some day years from now when he needs it, it will float up to the surface of his memory and open itself like a time capsule, with the message he especially needs most at that moment. And he ’ll find, to his surprise, he heard it after all.
    Now that the lake has reached the hotel, some things seem urgent in a way I don’t really understand. There have been no more letters from my correspondent. Once Kirk put the pieces of the photo together, he didn ’t mix them up anymore but now sits on the floor silently looking at the tiny figure of the man in the Square. If just once more I had seen the other Kristin’s light in her window, I wouldn’t have involved Doc at all, and I don’t know whether it’s that Doc is so wise that nothing surprises her or that incredulity just isn’t in her repertoire of responses … but when I showed her the photo, she didn’t say anything. She just looked at it a long time, at one point lifting a finger like she might touch it and glean something, before pulling back her hand like it was too sacred. When she finally spoke, it wasn’t until we were out on the lake, halfway to the deserted building, after I begged her to sail out there with me. “Are you certain which window is hers?” was all she said, and of course I wasn’t certain at all, I just thought we would figure it out when we got there.
    I had talked her into going out there with me, and the whole way I kept watching the lake to see if maybe the Hamblin manager had sent the zedcops after us to retrieve his gondola, or if Kirk was still watching our journey across the Big Agua from the Hamblin roof with Valerie and Parker. I hoped he had stopped crying. There aren’t many people out on the lake anymore…. As it’s gotten bigger, it seems to have lost its charm. There have been accidents, people who sailed out and haven’t been seen again. Soon I had to take over at the oars when the lake was too deep for the pole. It took us a little more than half an hour to get to the abandoned apartment building that was once just aten-minute walk away, and then we had to sail around it to dock the gondola somewhere it wouldn’t drift off. Finally we sailed in through the building’s garage, now flooded with only a few feet between the water and the ceiling. There were stairs where once had been a furnace room. We were able to get out where the water met the stairs and drag the gondola up the steps.
    Out on the water I had started to tell Doc everything about the letters I had been getting, but she raised her hand to stop me, like too much information would only prejudice a diagnosis. Truthfully I’m not certain we ever would have known which was K’s room if not for … well, if it hadn ’t been obvious. I had only seen the light in her window in the dark from a distance, when it isn’t that easy to count windows or floors, and from far away outside a building you think that you can kind of guess where something is, and then you get inside and it isn’t so clear. We kept going through one deserted room after another trying to find it before late afternoon turned to twilight, and then we found it and even Doc was impressed for once.
    It was my room, or a version of it. Articles tacked to the walls if not the same articles, books on the shelves with a lot of the same titles as mine, same Proust and Kierkegaard and Dickinson and the Brontes except now mildewed, mixed in with a lot of books in what I guess was Chinese, there was the same photo—except not in pieces—of her lover as a young student standing before the tanks. There was a child’s bedroom except it was that of an older child, about ten with a small bed instead of a crib, anime posters instead of small plastic monkeys … and no sooner do