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Just stay with me awhile, okay?”
    So I stay awhile. Not speaking, not trying to conjure some soothing platitude, not faking it. Just staying.
    T HAT NIGHT , I DREAM OF THE T HIN W OMAN.
    She is sitting on her own in an otherwise empty lecture hall, the same one where I teach my first-year course but altered, widened, its dimensions impossible to estimate as the walls to the right and left dissolve into darkness. I stand behind the lectern, squinting at her. The only lights are the dim ones that illuminate the aisle stairs and the two blazing-red EXIT signs at the rear doors, distant as cities across a desert.
    She sits in the middle of a row, halfway up. Nothing is visible of her but her face. Diseased, malnourished. A black-and-white newsreel face. The skin ready to tear open over her nose, the tops of her cheeks, the brittle jaw. It leaves her eyes to bulge out from their sockets as though fighting for escape.
    Neither of us speak. Yet the silence is full with the sense that something has just been said aloud that never ought to have been. An obscenity. A curse.
    I blink.
    And she’s standing in front of me.
    Her mouth opens. The bared throat papery as a discarded snakeskin. A rank breath passing up from within her and licking against my lips, sealing them shut.
    She exhales. And before I can awaken, she releases an endless sigh. One that forms itself into an utterance that grows in volume and force, until it billows out of her as a kind of poem.
    A welcome. A heresy.
    Pandemonium . . .

4
    I ’ M THIRTY THOUSAND FEET OVER THE A TLANTIC, THE ONLY PASSENGER with his reading light on in the first-class cabin as Tess dozes fitfully beside me, her closed journal on her lap, when for the first time since the Thin Woman visited my office I let my mind turn to what could possibly await me in Venice.
    Yesterday offered such a variety of curveballs it’s been difficult to decide which to field first—my best friend’s terminal illness, the once-and-for-all failure of my marriage, or why an emissary suspected to be from an agency of the Church would offer me a pile of dough to visit—well, visit what ? The only aspect of my expertise she specifically cited was my knowledge of Milton’s work. No, not even that. A demonologist .
    Even here, in our floating Boeing hotel, I don’t feel comfortable following this line of thought, however absurd. So I return to my reading. A stack of books all belonging to what, in truth, is my favorite genre. The travel guide.
    I am the sort of bookwormy fellow who has read about places morethan he has visited them. And for the most part I’d rather read about them than visit them. It’s not that I dislike the far away, but that I am always aware of my own foreignness, an alien among natives. It’s how I feel, in varying degrees, no matter where I am.
    Still, I’m looking forward to Venice. I’ve never been, and its fantastical history and storied loveliness is something I’m eager to share with Tess. My hope is that the beauty of the place will shake her out of her current state of mind. Maybe the spontaneity of this adventure and the magnificence of the destination will be enough to return the brightness to her eyes.
    So I keep reading the blood-soaked back stories of the city’s monuments, the wars waged for land, for trade, for religion. Along the way I note the restaurants and sites that stand the best chance of pleasing Tess. I will be the most well-informed, customized tour guide for her that I can be.
    The trip has already been sort of thrilling. Tess telling Diane about our plans just this morning (she asked few questions, the calculations of how all this would give her some unexpected time with Will Junger playing across her eyes), and then the harried packing, the trip to the bank for euros (the Thin Woman’s certified check cashing smoothly into my account), and the limo ride out to Kennedy, the two of us giggling in the backseat like school friends playing hooky.
    Because