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lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life’s almost-anagram. And now my earliest exercises in the art, my prentice falsehoods, had come back to undo me.
    I woke at five in spectral rain-light, not sober yet. For a second I expected Magda to give her familiar moan of mild complaint and turn over in the bed with an oceanic heave. I reached out a hand beside me to where she was not; the sheet there had a special, faintly clammy chill that I knew I must be imagining and yet was convinced I could feel. I lay with eyes still shut and lit my wake-up cigarette, then rose and walked barefoot into the living room, my dead leg thumping on the maple boards. I am not of an apocalyptic disposition, having seen so many worlds seem to end and yet survive, but that morning I had the certain sense of having crossed, of having been forced to cross, an invisible frontier, and of being in a state that forever more would be post-something, would be forever an afterwards. That letter, of course, was the crossing point. Now I was cloven in two more thoroughly than ever, I who was always more than myself. On one side there was the I I had been before the letter arrived, and now there was this new
I,
a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar. The house had a tense and watchful aspect, as if resentful of my intrusion on its furtive doings at this unaccustomedly early hour. Phantoms of shadow hung about, trying not to be noticed. A window streamed with rain, and opposite it in the room a patch of wall rippled like dark silk. I stopped still and peered into the gloom, seeking a focus; there were times when Magda was there, a palpable presence, but not now, and the shadows were shadows only. From the garden I could hear the rain beating on the leaves and into the clay, and I pictured it, falling down straight and shiny as wires through the windless dawn.
    The coffee machine was still at its diarrhoeal labours when the rain stopped abruptly. I never got used to the weather on that coast, it was always too orderly, too arranged; there the spring with its discreet matutinal downpours followed by days of seamless sunlight had none of the unpredictability, the flushed feverishness, of the springtimes of my youth. Arcadians complain of the climate, in their relaxed, wry way, but to me these conditions hardly constituted weather at all, product that I am of Europe’s bleak northern lowlands with their ice storms and slanting rain and skies of tumultuous cloud endlessly unscrolling eastward. I took my steaming mug into the breakfast nook, easing myself awkwardly between the bench seat and the table. The drenched garden, tousled and glittering, had the abashed look of something picking itself up after an unseemly tussle. There would be mist on the bay for half the morning, until the sun was strong enough to burn it off, as the weather forecasters would say. I like that phrase,
to burn it o f,
the figurative, brisk assurance of it. Out there on that coast the elements are something to be patronised; even the not infrequent earthquakes are a sort of huge communal joke. In the first months after we moved into the house I used to love to sit like that of a morning, looking out on my avocado tree, my peach tree, at the humming-birds busy about the bush that I think is called hibiscus, listening in a state of tingling bliss to the early-morning news on the radio, impatient for the end when the risibly solemn-voiced announcer would inform me of what the day had in store for me, the highs and lows of temperature—never too high, never too low—the breezes pacific and soft as breaths, the fog’s standing mirage. It was like being promised a succession of lavish and wholly undeserved treats.
    I went off to the bathroom, and when I returned, haphazardly shaven and putting on my tie, this time Magda
was
there, in her old grey