Eyes focused on his shoes, he walked briskly forward, watching the white column of his own breath form and reform over the flashes of gold in the concrete. Each footstep was placed squarely in front of the next, and even the slightest movements he made expertly concealed his splitting headache. It was to be a good day if it killed him.

The streetlights were off. No cars passed him by. The road was black and dry. He turned off the sidewalk and took a path perpendicular to the road. Within minutes he was surrounded by naked trees. There were thoughts in the air, fish composed of the rainbow transparency of soap bubbles. They were swimming between the knots of wood, seminal spirits impregnating the trees with dreams of motion. He reached out to grasp one of the creatures as it flowed by. His fingers slipped into a fist without resistance. He grunted and shook his head. They were not there. There was nothing there. It was a good day. It always had been.

The forest gave way, and the path opened up onto the grand lawn of a hidden conservatory. There were no students, no angry scribblers or passionate composers. The grass rose from the soil a sour yellow. Vines curled around proud columns. The girl approached from behind. It was her again. The one he had not quite remembered to forget. She spoke in a whisper into his ear, her favorite way to speak.

“Those ceilings were raised to protect students from the rain. And so the paint that flaked off from the top would have a long time to spin before it was walked on. But mostly to stop the rain.”

He listened. As soon as he heard her voice his fists had clenched and his headache had worsened.

His words tripped over one another as he said, “It’s been a long time between us.”

“The students left first,” she continued. “They wanted to feel the rain. Then the teachers left. They had forgotten what rain felt like. Aren’t you glad the skies are so clear, today?”

He could see the white cloud of her breath gliding by his cheek. Her words were patient, and they came smoothly from deep within her lungs. The muscles in his neck were straining against one another. Some of them wanted to see her face.

“Wouldn’t you forget you were falling, if you fell from high enough?” She laughed at her own question, and he could not hold back a pained smile. If her syllables were warm against his thoughts, her true laugh was a white iron.

“We all realized they had nothing to teach us,” she said. “Nothing that could be taught. So we left.”

“What about the door?” he asked.

She giggled.

“What door?” she said, playfully. He sighed.

“The door we were to walk through,” he said, and added after a pause, “together.”

She tried to hide a small gasp of surprise. She turned it into a yawn. But he had already heard what it was. There was a glint of triumph in his eyes. But it could have been the sun skipping off the moisture around the iris.

“You are such a bad liar,” she said, trying to sound bored. He began to walk away. She was offended now and nothing he said would reach her, so he would say nothing, his favorite thing to say.

He was halfway across the lawn when she called out, telling him to stop. He kept walking. She added please. Her tone was desperate. His pace was steady. Then she called his name. He stopped immediately and turned around. She was still, her arms at her side, far enough away that he could only make out the contours of her feminine form, the colors of her skin and hair and clothes, and the way her body shook as if assaulted by a current. He wanted to run to her. But it was never that simple.

“I’m sorry,” she called out.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he said back.

“I can’t keep dragging you through my stories. It’s killing you.”

“I’m alive,” he said.

“We’re dying,” she said.

“We’re alive,” he said.

“I wish I could understand you,” she said. He turned, and began walking again, slower this time.

“Where are you going?” she called after him. His pace quickened. Soon he was passing through a gap in the buildings of the conservatory. When he was confident that she could not see him anymore, he stopped. He had only been walking but he was out of breath. He sat on a nearby bench and tried to think of where to go next. He sighed, and looked up into the air.

The day was fading. Bloody sunshine saturated the western sky. He gazed into the distance. He let the colors soothe his headache. Then he stood up suddenly, and set off westward on the brick pathway. The sun was setting directly up ahead, so that the glow of the atmosphere seemed to emerge from the building that rose before him. He walked faster. He reached a door. He pulled it open and stepped in.

His eyes adjusted to the murky inside. There were rows upon rows of shelved books. A look of terror crossed his face, and he spun around and tried to open the door. It had locked behind him.

He began to run through the stacks, authors and titles falling behind him in frantic alphabetical succession. The words were too thick here. The language was dead and believed itself alive, forcing images and ideas and emotions to burst from the pages like vengeful ghosts from the grave. The black forms circled him like vultures. His legs were pumping acid into themselves and still the stacks went on. The vultures exploded into hundreds of bats. The bats into thousands of flies. His vision was clouding, and he could hear only the static of the insects whirling through the air in the delight of insanity. They began to crash against his body, biting and scratching at his exposed skin. A trail of blood was now marking his path through the shelves, as he made turn after turn in an attempt to elude his tormentors. Then he could not run anymore, and he began slamming his body against the walls of literature, smashing hundreds of insects at a time and mixing their blood with his. Soon he was soaked in gore and still the flies were coming. He fell to the floor, assuming the position in which he entered the world.

There was darkness. There was the distant echo of a dull explosion. There was the howling and the cold that took the place of the buzzing. There was light again. The flies and the gore had evaporated. Every part of his body sung with relief, and as he heard the laughter of the girl he had not quite remembered to forget, even his headache cleared away.

“I told you to stay away from my stories.”

He looked up into her eyes. She smiled down at him. His open wounds, forgotten completely, disappeared into scarless flesh. He tried to stand, but fell back to the floor.

“You’re still too weak,” she said. “Stay down for a while.”

He stayed down. He saw for the first time where they were. He had reached the end of the stacks, and here at the far side of the library, sunk into the brick wall, was an elegant purple door, decorated with lit candles and a leaf-green frame, and covered in thousands of tiny poetic inscriptions scrawled across at random like graffiti. Beside the door was a massive rupture in the brick wall through which poured a frigid wind. Night had fallen like a curtain of the deepest blue, and white pinpoints were beginning to burn through the folds.

“I gave you another way out,” she said. “Because we can’t both go through the door.”

“No,” he said.

She turned and walked up to the ancient threshold. He was writhing on the floor, trying to stand, crawling toward her, reaching out. She raised a small fist, and knocked three times.

“No!” he screamed.

A seam appeared in the middle of the door, and a faint golden light shone through. There was a creaking of rusty hinges as it swung open. He was regaining his strength. He was pulling himself up with the shelves, books tumbling down around him as he fell over himself, screaming her name over and over in a voice threatening to crack into falsetto. She turned toward him. For an instant he saw her in all her pure, modest beauty, framed against a night jungle swarming with fireflies. He was on his feet. She stepped backward into the wilderness. He stumbled forward. She smiled. He threw out his arms to her. The door slammed shut. His hands struck flat against the primeval wood.

He fell to his knees, breathing heavily. He stayed there for a time, his nose not an inch from the purple door, his body throbbing and his mind utterly silent. The candlelight danced in the cold wind from outside, and the shadows followed the flame’s childish whims. Unable even to summon tears from the oceans of violence within, he rose from the threshold, and walked through the fissure in the brick wall into the calm void of winter’s night.