Somewhere between the stages of her child and adulthood, Ine’s mother vanished. Ine could not be sure that her mother did not still live in the house. The garden was kept and the front door would always lock every night at eleven. But her mother was nowhere to be found.

The vanishing was leisurely, her absence heavy at times, minimal at others, its form filling in one deficient minute at a time. It began sometime before Ine’s grandfather, her father, passed away. As he became a magnet, pulling all the scattered bits of himself together, his history, the people he knew, she continued slipping farther and farther from them. Aunts and cousins, people Ine had never met, came to visit them, paying their last respects to her grandfather’s dying legacy. As she watched him exchange his stories, the summation of everything that made him the person he was, his life in history became clearer, more vivid, as he slowly faded into a collection of ghosts.

The visitors were all from West Germany, many of whom had not seen him for many decades. Those who spoke a little bit of English would tell Ine about the days of his youth, the division of the country, the planes, black forms that threw dark shadows and bright flashes over their houses in the middle of the night. At first, her mother would translate the conversations for her, into broken images and half-thoughts. As time past, the stories became more and more fragmented, missing vast expanses of time. By the time the last visitor had left, a half-brother from the Rheinland Pfalz, her mother had receded into the back rooms of the house or the farthest reaches of her garden. When they sat down at dinner, she pushed herself back from the table, distancing herself from the conversation, the stories. The more she listened to her own mother tongue, the less she was able to comprehend it herself. Her translations deteriorated, barely consisting of more than the mention of a relative at such an age, or a friend in such a place.

When asked, Ine did not remember seeing her mother at her grandfather’s service, though she very well could have been one of the mourning women, watching from behind her black gauze veil, amidst the funeral arrangements of modest flora, chrysanthemums and spears of fern. But watching the front of her house, from high above on the cemetery hill, I thought I saw a dark figure moving among the trembling hedges. In fact, of the handful of women there, I am fairly sure none of them were her. There was a particular way she walked, as though she was forever carrying a tray or a basket.

Ine lived alone in her mother’s house for almost a decade. Every morning she awoke with no one beside her, she made her own breakfast, ate alone, locked the front door, saying good-bye to no one as she left for work. She proceeded in this way, alone, for all but a few moments in the course of a week, when she bumped into the mailman on the way out to the car, or apologized to the cashier for taking too long putting away her change. Until one day, while sitting on the floor of the family room of her house, she realized she was not alone.

Ine kept a small heater in front of the television, and would sit before it, every evening or so, fending off the dampness that crept along the subterranean walls. While

sitting there, one Saturday morning in fact, she felt a queer cold pressure on her shoulder, as if someone had passed the hose of a vacuum right over the fabric of her shirt. The force was so strong, she was compelled to turn around. And there she saw a hazy nothingness. She felt it brush her forehead. She could hear it speaking soothingly to her, somewhere from within, in such a way that she could no longer feel the borders of her own skin. She knew it was benevolent, yet it was not supposed to be there. It pulled all the warmth and peace from the room, just to maintain itself in a place that it did not belong. From that point forth the house had a strange air as if, after years of settling into its foundation, it had become unsettled again.

When Ine was only fifteen, she had met a boy by the name of Alex. Alex had no quality that would leave an impression on you, with the given exception of his dullness. He was quiet—but would speak in turn. Intelligent, but not clever. Her grandfather did not approve of Alex. She took him home once and did not see him again, until he came to work in the same office as Ine, to set up their computer network, shortly after the unsettling of her home.

Everyday, for two weeks, he worked in close proximity. Coming into the file room to adjust her computer, eating lunch in the same empty half of the cafeteria under the drafty windows, at half past one everyday. Despite his blandness, he brought a warmth that Ine looked forward to. He was the only one to say good morning to her.

The first week he was there, the office had a scheduled vacation—only seeing patients on an emergency basis. Ine never took vacation, and so she had Alex almost to herself. She unlocked the office door for him in the morning and stayed late when he worked late to lock the door again, sometimes walking him to his car, or really walking towards his car, as he did, before pivoting en route, towards her own. The second week the office staff were being trained on the new system. Alex was explaining, instructing, fixing glitches and errors, and seeing much less of Ine. He was leaving soon. On the last day of the week, their conversation, hardly worth mentioning, went something like this:

And with that, he put his hand on her shoulder, patting it lightly, a gesture that was neither a hand shake nor an embrace, but almost a neutralization of both.

Over the next few months, Alex worked through the building, modernizing the filing and records of every practice and clinic in preparation for the advent of the new nursing school, an institute so large that with the first wave of students, Alex and Ine were forced to sit together in the cafeteria.

Every turn in the development of their relationship had been propelled by an outside force, and the final push would be no different. After they had been eating together for several weeks, Alex explained that he would be leaving the medical complex within only a few days, and might be leaving the town altogether.

Like most of their conversations, this small interchange was followed by a long period of silence where Alex quietly ate his sandwich as Ine awkwardly picked at her food, nervous and thoughtful. The prospect of Alex leaving had disturbed her. She was climbing out of her isolation, one step at a time, and she knew his leaving would push her back to the start. Which may have been the reason why this time she took that slight, outside push, and adding her own will, hastily advanced their friendship three steps beyond.

In the evenings, after work, Alex had taken the habit of walking Ine around the side of the complex, to her car. There was a thin layer of stiff snow, glinting with a thousand frozen flakes which covered the pavement like a sugar icing. All afternoon Ine had been thinking about what she was about to say, running the schematics of her proposal through her head, over and over again. She waited in the cold outside the door for twenty minutes, clutching her stomach, regulating her breaths. He walked up to her. She didn’t hesitate.
Ine begin walking to her car, watching the tree limbs flattening against the night sky as she rounded the side of the building. She listened to the snow underfoot. Soon Alex’s footsteps accompanied hers. Neither said anything. The silence put her on edge. She began to think about the sounds you hear, the sounds you make, walking with each season. Walking through dry leaves, progressively dryer leaves, on wet asphalt, the full, thick tap of summer, the shrill, gravelly scrape of early spring, the clack, then the lifeless crunch in mid January.
Ine was seeing a facet of Alex that she had never seen before, a reflective nature that she would have never guessed he had. She would rarely see this part of him again. They continued to walk, turning the corner, watching the moon as if it might disappear. They stopped for a minute, squinting, trying to see what was happening.
As a car drove by they starting walking half-heartedly, pretending they were moving on, not standing with each other idly watching the sky. The moon was full, but mostly in shadow, a glowing, umber-orange shadow. The upper right side had become a glowing white arc.
As she continued to observe the moon, she became aware of the fact that the moon was spherical. It was the first time it stood before her in all of its dimensions, shadowed and illuminated, like a little ball suspended in the sky. She had seen the curve of the face of the moon before, on television, in pictures from the moon landing. She had seen the shadow of the craters with her own eyes. But until now, she had never felt that it was a sphere. It had been flat. But tonight, under the shadow of the earth, the moon was round. It became real.

The ground below felt too close, white and flat like a kitchen floor, the limbs and twigs of the trees were dotted with little clumps of snow, as if they were bits of cotton, added by an unseen hand. They continued to watch the moon as they arrived at her car, and then after saying good-night, watched as they drove to their homes, rounding corners, catching glimpses as they passed under the snowy trees. The white crescent was slowly fading from the face of the moon. At home, Ine sat under her window. By eight o’clock, the moon was gone, leaving a strange, brown circle in its place, sitting behind the slender poplar branches.

Within a week Alex was living with her, staying in her grandfather’s room, sleeping in his bed. The following winter, after Ine slipped on an icy sidewalk, he stayed with her in her bed. They never talked about it, but even after her sprained ankle had healed, he continued to stay with her at night.

He lived with her in the house for nearly two years, guarding her when she slept, walking her to her car every morning. She thought, “He is going to get sick of this. He’s going to be gone one day.” But the Alex we know wouldn’t do that. And she knew that, too. It became clearer which each day. Every night, when she came home, he was still there. She couldn’t be sure that he was actually unhappy, though he never found a job, never had a dollar to spend, never had another friend. He held her hand when he drove, even when she tried to pull away.

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When I was twenty-eight years old, I received a letter addressed to Florenz. To me. Yes, I was Florenz, though I seldom thought of myself in this way. And if the letter hadn’t looked so unusual, in its pale gray envelope and stamps in fifty pfennig increments, I probably wouldn’t have even kept it. But this letter immediately struck me as I pulled it from the mailbox, the sort of official notice that you anticipate, long to receive, that speaks directly to you with a human presence on the other end. A notice that speaks to you the way notices rarely do. I can’t explain how some mail is warm, and some mail is empty. But some sense in me told me that this letter was full, alive, sent with care. The letter itself was cryptic, and I could only gather an inherent meaning from the feel of the paper and the few words I could recall, “Francis”, “Haus”, and “Porzellan”. The next day I took the letter to Miss Anderson, the new receptionist from the medical office, to decipher.

Before I was born my mother received a card from my grandmother in East Germany. My mother had just returned from her last trip to visit my grandparents, and with the growing border controls, she had little hope of returning in the near future. The envelope showed signs that it had been opened and resealed. One line, towards the middle of the page, had been blacked out. Probably something small, a minor complaint, about how the price of butter was too high, or how my grandfather’s job was becoming tedious. This didn’t matter to my mother. What mattered was what was yet intact. Tucked within the card were pictures from her vacation. A family hike in the mountains, a few dim pictures of my grandparents sitting with a flock of sheep.

In the note inside, my grandmother asked her to name me Florenz, after the street on which her and my grandfather lived, where my mother was born and raised. My grandfather had been named after the street of his childhood, and I suppose she wanted to start a tradition. Or perhaps she just liked the sound, the feeling that the name invoked. It was a beautiful name. It didn’t even sound like a name for a baby boy. And in fact, my grandmother passed away before I was born, before she could receive the call that I was a little girl. And so, Florenz became my name, though I have always been called Ine, short for Florine.

In this way, Florenz has become only a legal name to me, cold and unfamiliar. Since my grandfather has died, no one I know has addressed me by it. Mail addressed to Florenz could only be official, a bank statement or a notice. If a caller asked for Florenz, I knew it was no one with whom I would care to talk. I would say that I was not in, or I was in the bath, or had moved to another address. I would say there was no Florenz here. No, this was not Florenz.

The letter was sent to inform me of the remainder of my grandfather’s estate. There wasn’t much remaining of it. The house he had left so many years ago did not belong to him. Just its contents. This is what Miss Anderson and I garnered from the letter as we decoded it on our lunch break, in the file room of the office. I was little help. Except for a few improper phrases I had picked up from my grandfather’s two year stay, I did not know a word of German.

As much as I wanted to visit my grandfather’s home, to salvage what I could from the past he had left behind, the fear instilled by the language and cultural barrier deterred me from making the journey--to again be isolated and alone. To be away from Alex. After over a month of deliberation I decided to simply ignore the letter, discarding it as I discarded much of my official documents, my mother’s documents, in a dark corner of the lower, catchall drawers of her desk. And so the letter was left to slip into the cracks of oblivion, to lose itself inside the internal expanses of the desk frame, until one day, years from now, I would discover it amongst the dust and forsaken paperclips while searching for something else, long after I had ceased to care.

However, this would not be the case. No sooner had I decided to bequeath my share of my grandfather’s estate to the German government, did I receive another letter. This letter was also addressed to Florenz, but this time, by human hand, and this time, its warmness inside the envelope--a light blue one, with a fringe border of blue and red--rang clearer than before. The letter read as follows:
I had never met Gertrude. She was one of the few relatives that had never visited, that I had not heard mention of in any of my grandfather's stories.
At first I let the application sit in the drawer with the two letters. After a few weeks, I began filling it out, fulfilling the requirements one at a time. I didn't acknowledge it then, but now I see that I was inching towards my break--testing my ability to be again without Alex, to function outside of Alex.
The passport took over ten weeks to arrive. I had mailed in my photographs and the application on the fifth of March. I waited patiently for the first month or so. For the first five weeks. Six to eight weeks I was told. Easter passed. I went to the sunrise service, held outside. It was so cold that year that the spring rain had turned to snow. There was an inch of snow on the empty chairs, assembled on the lawn beside the cemetery. There were only three other people, besides the pastor, in attendance. We stood in front of our chairs and shivered to ourselves under the floodlights, waiting for the service to start. I thought about my passport, how they had asked me to send two pictures of myself, but I had thought that they meant two different pictures. In one picture, I smiled, the other, I frowned, and neither looked like me, or how I imagined herself to look. “That must be the problem,” I thought. “They think the pictures are of two different people.” I had taken my sweater off between shots. The assistant pastor finally arrived. The sky grew a lighter shade of black. The pastors conversed for a moment, one pointing to his watch, the other clasping his hands together in the wide sleeves of his robe.
Inside was bright and dry, but cold. The heat had just been turned on, and the building had sat empty since the evening of Good Friday. I could hear the electric baseboards clicking as I walked down a side aisle. I sat towards the back, but upon sitting down, I realized that everyone else had sat together, in the front. I stayed by myself there, feeling isolated and out of place, for about two minutes. I looked around. The stained glass windows were slowly becoming illuminated. The door to the narthex opened, and another parishioner came inside. She sat down in the front row. I decided then that the embarrassment of sitting in the back of a large church that now housed a total of seven people, for an entire service, far outweighed the momentary embarrassment of standing up, moving to the front of the building, and seating myself among the rest of the congregation. When I reached the front of the church, I smiled at the latest arrival, still adjusting herself in her front-row seat.
The assistant pastor rang a bell. I smiled at her again. And then Alex appeared. He looked concerned. He was wearing his winter coat over his pajamas. He motioned for me to follow him, and so I stood up once more, and left the building.
It hadn’t arrived yet. It should arrive any day now. I hadn’t told Alex that I was leaving, because I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to leave, because I felt that there was a chance that if I did, I would also not want to return. Over the past few weeks I had fantasized about the trip, imagining that it would be my grand escape. It would change me, and I would stay there, learn the language, attend the university for free. Sometimes I imagined I would meet a handsome man. I would marry him. I saw him clearly, a smiling man, perhaps thirty-five years old, older than Alex, with blonde hair, pale, ruddy skin and large, german teeth, practical like a cart horse. And less immediately, I felt, in the recesses of my vision, an image of our children, three girls, all looking like Heidi, with colorful dresses and hair ribbons, running barefoot on the mountainsides, making flower necklaces for the herds of goats.
I thought for a second. If I told him no, if I lied, there was always the chance that he would be the one to answer the door when the mailman delivered it. Or worse yet, he would find it, actually see it, hidden among my things, concealing it. Not just concealing it, but concealing the whole process of getting it, the thought, the intent. A secret with the young man on the phone.
It took me a minute to gather my thoughts. I started walking towards our house. I could tell he was suspicious, but I didn’t know how to assure him. I didn’t want him to know about my Aunt, or my plans of visiting her, or visiting my grandparents' house. It was my dream. My goal. My secret initiative. I didn’t want to share it, to tarnish it with outside expectations, or comments, or ideas about it. I wanted it to be mine alone.

He ignored me. He had his own secret now. “I’ve closed my bank account. One month. I have enough money, you can quit your job. I think we should go for just one month.”

Alex had taken initiative. I couldn’t say no. It had been my idea. I thought I would have more time before I had to face it. It was only across the border. An hour away. The photograph in the passport frowned up at me. The sweater pulled at the throat too tightly.

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Ine spent a week picking through her clothes, before she had the courage to pull every item from the closet, throwing it into the large duffel bag Alex had brought when he first moved in. She left the hangers strewn on the floor, leaving a physical link between the empty clothes rail and the new home--the old cabin.

She bought new sheets. Certain things she could take, but the sheets were all old. Old, embroidered and monogrammed, with a history that belonged at her mother's house. She wanted to leave as much there as she could, as if she could just slip back into the empty house, at any time, completely unnoticed, as if nothing had changed. The beds made, refrigerator full.

The one unnecessary thing she brought with her was a family album. It was of a sweet, mossy green color, leather-bound, with transparent paper between the pages. She remembered how her grandfather had unpacked it from his suitcase, when he first arrived.

After Ine's great grandmother had died, her grandfather had decided to move to the states to live with her mother. He also left his entire house--the only things he took were his clothing, a few toiletries, a bible. And the green album. As he pulled it from the layers of clothing in the case, he looked at Ine for the first time. He could feel as she was watching him, and he looked almost ashamed, as if he was embarrassed to have brought anything with him at all. “Für deine Mutter,” he said. For her mother. He put it down on the bed before her, patting it with his hand. She wanted to open it, to look inside, but she could not interrupt his unpacking. It had taken on a magical feel, like a sacred ritual of sorts. Years later, when he was dying, he had her mother retrieve the album from her room. He turned to the back of the book, pointing to a set of pictures, of him, her mother, her grandmother, sitting on a grassy hillside. They were surrounded by sheep.

Ine and her grandfather could have elaborate and detailed discussions regarding any topic, but did not communicate in a language that anyone else could understand. Her mother could translate her grandfather's thoughts to her, and her thoughts to him, but it was the words left untranslated, these words and sighs and slight gestures of hand between translations that housed the meaning of their conversation. Their secret language proved profoundly useful. Her mother’s presence continued to wane throughout his stay, and they were eventually left with no other medium of communication, and no one else with whom to communicate. I can tell you what was said, but I cannot tell you how it was said. In some languages, certain words and concepts lack a parallel meaning in another, and you are left floundering in the wrong tongue, scrambling to pull significance out of inadequate diction and inexact phrasing. I can only give you an idea.

And so, as he lifted the transparent paper from the photographs, he spoke to her.

He turned to Ine, shifting in his seat. His eyes become unfocused, glancing about the room, before resting on a certain spot on the wallpaper, where the edges had begun to curl inward. As he talked, her mother talked over him occasionally, translating a word or phrase, so that in the end, she heard him tell the story in two streams, from two perspectives that came together, overlapping and passing through each other.

He tapped his forefinger on a picture of himself, leaning over one of the sheep, as if to inspect him, or talk to him, as he often talked to the neighborhood dogs, Yes. You’re a nice dog. Yes. Guter Hunt.

Ine knew that it was not long after the trip that her grandmother passed away.

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The first thing I did, when we arrived at the cabin, was put on new bedding, straight out of the rectangular plastic cases. New sheets in the front bedroom for Alex. New sheets in the large bedroom for me.
“Those are it then? I thought there were drapes, too.” I should have thought of this when I was at the department store. I could have gotten a set to match the sheets. “I should have gotten a heavier set, winter coming and all.” Another layer of the home I had forgotten, I thought. In the old house, the shutters were built into the window frames. My mother insisted. I went into the kitchen to look around, sending Alex to the car to get the rest of the things. I heard him return a few minutes later, staggering down the front hallway, carrying a heavy box.

“Alex?” I called. “I thought I heard you in here.” I saw one of my plates, or one of my mother’s plates rather, sitting in the corner, broken in half. I looked around for a moment, before looking up, and there I saw Alex, hanging from the ceiling. But not really hanging, per se, but crouched, like a bat, on the wooden underside of the upper floor. He sat there, knees hugged to his chest, shaking slightly, his shoulders moving up and down, or rather, down and up. I had never seen him so upset.

My first response was to run as far away from the phantom Alex as possible, in hope that when I returned, if I returned, he would be gone. Instead, I froze in my position for a moment, before summing up the willpower to wave my hands around his head, as if to check for some kind of invisible supports. When I was satisfied that he really was suspended against the ceiling by no trick or illusion, I asked in a very calm voice, “Alex, what are you doing up there?”

He looked around the corners of the ceiling, and then, barely astonished, looked down at me and replied, “Me? What are you doing up there?”

I had just started cleaning the kitchen in preparation for dinner. Whoever had stayed here last had left very little food, except for a few packets of ketchup and a few cans of tenyear- old soup. The soup had corroded the cans, and they sat on the shelf in a half an inch of hardened black sludge. I had yelled at Alex to bring in the box of dishes, after finding some strange stains on the remaining paper plates, and was waiting for him to return from the car.

I was not sure that I still regretted my decision to come here. I was hopeful about the new surroundings, our adventurous move to the wilderness of the Pacific coast borderland, when I heard a crash in the hallway. I walked into the end room. That was what I was doing there, but I still didn’t understand what Alex was doing up there.

For the past few years, or maybe since I met Alex, or at least since I received the letters, I had not been myself. I was all right sometimes, but I remembered a time where I had felt happy, I didn’t remember a change, but I knew this wasn’t that time. It had gotten to the point where sometimes I thought I was actually being nice, and he thought I had some underlying intent, and I wasn’t sure then if I did, and if I did, if it was the same that he thought I had. I had intended to get away alone, but I hadn’t made a change by myself, so I made us make a big change together. And now I realized, that if it wasn’t for me, he would be cowering on the floor in his own apartment, and, more likely I thought, maybe not even cowering at all. He would be sitting on his own sofa, reading his own books, staring out his own window, regardless, it would be his own doing. I had dragged him all the way up here, and as ridiculous as it seemed, I had to get him down.

I was becoming more and more nervous, but Alex seemed to be worried about other things, and I wondered if he even understood that he was somehow attached to our ceiling. I speculated what it must be, the gravity of the sun somehow just overwhelming the pull of the earth, holding him ever-so-gently against the wrong side of the floorboards. I wondered if he opened the window and climbed outside, if he would fly straight into the sky, and how strong was the pull, how fast would he vanish. Maybe it wasn’t simply that the sun’s pull had, through all these miles, overcome that of the earth. Maybe the earth’s pull had just ceased to affect him at all. He was just going to fly off the face of the earth, not into the sun, not into anything at all, into infinity. He was so upset about the plates that it didn’t occur to him that if he were to ever leave this house, it would inevitably end in catastrophe. I had to keep him from flying away. I thought a moment.
He didn’t move.
After a minute he stood up. I looked up at his face, less than a foot from mine, yet I was beginning to feel a gap between us, almost insurmountable, but still growing. “Quickly now,” I said grabbing his arms that were now extending uncertainly towards me as well. As I held my head straight up and grasped his arms, I noticed the empty cardboard box, sitting on the ceiling of the hallway, just beyond the door.

I plummeted head first towards the floor, and if Alex hadn’t been there to grab my legs as I dove past him, I might have been knocked out for more than a few moments. When I woke up I was sitting on the guest bed, Alex on the chair beside me.

I fell asleep and immediately was transported into the family room of my mother's house. I stood, beside the couch and the heater, watching myself as I sat on the floor. I reached out to touch the hair of this detached entity of myself, but I could not reach far enough. My arms were somehow constricted. But fortunately, in dreams, you can will what happens. You have a thought, and it manifests itself as a dreamed reality. As soon as I thought it, the other of myself stood up, turning around. I looked terrified, and my consciousness flitted between selves, morphing from one to the next as characters often do in dreams. I told myself to be still, that I was harmless, and that I would do nothing, but I could not articulate any words. I reached across again, just to feel if I was real. As soon as I pressed my own forehead, the dream dissipated, and I found myself tangled amongst my blankets, my face resting on the back of my hand.