" I thought about that counselor I'd seen earlier today. I imagined her waking up and coming downstairs and finding someone has broken into her house, some small boy has been pushed through a window and has opened the door to thieves who've stolen her—her what? It didn't matter what; I just wanted to be able to imagine for a moment, on the face of someone who'd seemed to know better than I could how to decipher what was happening in my life, a passing shadow of the world I felt so close to and which she, and her husband who sang in the shower, who could speak a language I couldn't, and all the other people in the world whose lives were still so whole and simple and unmysterious, lived so very far from. "