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nor imbecile. Surely, once in the safety of her own home, she could have shrugged the whole thing off.
    The answer is twofold. One, there was the rushing silence of the missing time, the time up until and including the night in the forest, which she could not remember. This effectively rendered her without alibi. The complete knowledge required in order for her to stand straight and declare herself a stranger to the doctor, once and for all—it was not there, she could not defend herself. She could not say for certain she had never been acquainted with this doctor, and she knew it.
    There was another problem, however, something far less concrete, and therefore more dangerous. It was a matter of an ineffable distortion in Margaret’s mental landscape. Just as a man of chronically injured pride believes a bank error in his favor to be a matter of celestial justice, Margaret’s anxiety framed her vision, and she was incapable of understanding the doctor’s interest as fully accidental.
    The result was this: after the doctor’s visit, Margaret no longer stood straight. She went about crookedly.
    On that very first night, she dreamt she was leading a walking tour, but all the city’s buildings were infected. It seemed there was a kind of mold. It was in the walls, even in the stone, and she did not know where the trouble lay. Was it in the atmosphere or was it in the soil, was it growing from within the city, or was it blowing in from the outside—a cancer or a virus?
    The next day she again went to the computer. She clicked farther and farther back in her e-mail account, trying to reach the e-mails from two years before. She was swimming beyond the buoys marking the shallow sea. She found a few pieces of mail from her boss at the tour company dating from March 2003. She clicked backward. The dates jumped. The next set of e-mails was from August 2002. There was a six-month gap.
    She called her boss, a wonderfully correct Englishman, at home. At first he did not understand what she was asking. “Well, Margaret,” he finally said, “that was when you went traveling, wasn’t it?”
    “Was it?”
    “I can look it up in our finances.” He went from the phone and came back. “Yes,” he said. “We did not make any payments to your account from August 2002 to February 2003. I’m remembering now, you went traveling in the East. Something about Odessa, or Yalta, wasn’t it? You told us at the time.”
    “Right,” said Margaret hoarsely.
    “Is that why you called?”
    “I’m trying to straighten things out in my mind.”
    “Is everything all right?” He paused. “I see you are scheduled to give a tour already tomorrow morning. Shall we find you a replacement? You don’t sound well, Margaret.”
    “No, no,” Margaret said. She reflected. She thought she would try something craftier. “I hope I haven’t inconvenienced the company over the years with my—absences,” she said.
    “Absences?”
    “Back then, you know …” She let her voice trail off, hoping he would fill in.
    “Margaret, you’ve always been very reliable. We’ve appreciated that. Freelancers are not always of your kind.”
    “I see. I couldn’t recall whether I had …” She allowed her voice to trail off again, but her boss too was silent, and the moment became awkward. “Well thank you anyway.” She rang off.
    She had never taken a trip to Odessa or Yalta. She was sure of it.
    In the bookshelf she had thirty-seven chronological notebooks in which she copied passages from historical documents and kept records of her lectures and seminars. Again, she began sifting through the dates. Again, she found a hole. The period from August to February had left behind no notes.
    She sat back down in the chair. She thought of the time she had lost. The record stopped, the colors ceased, the numbers jumped and skidded and went dark. To think of the gap was to stick her tongue into the soft, itching place where a tooth has been lost. The effort to