"When I first saw this picture, this woman, seconds from death, I couldn't take my eyes off it. It held me, like a trance. and this whole back-story, this woman's life as I imagined it, her house on Staten Island, the ferry ride to work every morning, it all just flooded over me. I taped the picture to my bathroom mirror, one just like this, and every morning as I went through my own daily rituals, I'd look at it and think about how she started her day just like I am now, just another day: brush teeth, floss, worry about little things, thoughts full of details and concerns.
She pauses. sips her wine. I don't say anything.

"That first picture got ruined. Dennis didn't like it: he said it was morbid. He didn't want to have to look at it every morning. I didn't want anyone else looking at it anyway. I got this one and protected it and put it here where only I would see it. I sit with her on the train ride in the mornings. I talk to her, I guess, and she talks to me. That's how it happened. It started out as this sense that the life I was living was all wrong. I resisted that thought, tried to push it away, but it wouldn't go away: it just stayed there at the periphery, always there just at the edge: office, car, dinner parties, grocery shopping, club, meetings, always there. Then your books," she laughs and looks at me, "your books just threw on the houselights, exposed everything, made everything raw, and that's when it built to the bursting point. It had to do with your books, but it had been slowly building for the three years she'd been talking to me."

"The woman in the picture talks to you?"

We sit in silence for a long while.