When he stood up again, his body was a silhouette against the fire, the darkness only the brighter reflection of the fire's red. 'I saw a dog on the dunes yesterday,' he said. 'It was as if it was wearing a dog-collar, I think.' He turned away, his steps quickening as he made his way toward the sea. I watched him, remembering the animal on the cliff. I knew what he meant. A collar. I got up and walked to the fire, stirring it with a stick, and the sparks, flying up, seemed to mimic the pattern of the firefly's flashing. After that I sat there with my hands on my knees. 'You're very tired, aren't you?' A voice, and I looked up at him. 'You should go to bed,' he said. 'I'll come with you now.' He put his hand on my arm and leaned in close to me. His breath was sour on my skin. 'We're only a couple of miles from Sóller, but a world away from here. All you have to do is follow me,' he said. 'Get some sleep, and we'll make a start tomorrow.' I looked up at his face, felt his shadow over me as he stood there beside me, his hand on my arm. A strange voice, the voice of a man who could see the world as it truly was. 'Don't you like your bedroom?' he asked, and for a moment, as he said it, I saw the other man again and again in my mind, walking down the passageway with those words on his lips. 'Don't you like your bedroom?' I had been so sure it was him, even though I had never seen his face. 'We'll change rooms, if you prefer,' he said now. He stood there, his palm heavy on my arm. 'I'll come with you now,' he said. As I moved my legs he took his hand away. 'OK,' I said. 'But I need to make a call first.' I got up and pulled the mobile phone out of my pocket. It was dead. I opened my phone's message box. It was the first one I had received: the man telling me it was him. The number of times he must have looked me up on the net. All it had taken was his photograph and my name. I turned off the phone. I looked at it in my hand. The words seemed to burn into my palm. The fire in the distance was now a red glow. I heard his footsteps. And I knew that if I turned away now, everything would change again, and something in me stopped me. My head, so long in a fog of pain, was beginning to clear. For a moment, at least, it was not just my head: a part of me seemed to have caught up with my head. # I lay on the camp bed in a sleeping bag with a towel beneath my head to stop it banging off the iron bedstead. Every now and then I heard the sound of the sea, though I could see only darkness, and the sound was muted, broken by the noise of the tide. At some point I had fallen into a sort of half-sleep, in which I felt I was falling through water, a soft darkness below me, and in that moment I thought of my dreams, how my dreams seemed to take on an almost tangible presence, moving through my sleep like a soft, dark shadow. And yet, I thought, in some way that was still dreamlike and indistinct, I was beginning to think. But it was the beginning of a thought, not a thought itself. A thought in the form of a question. It was as if a part of me was waking up, or as if a part of me was stirring, and something inside it, something I had known for a long time without knowing, was beginning to stir too. I lifted my hand to my mouth and licked my lips. There was something in the taste of them that seemed to have been sucked clean and hard, as if with my tongue I were trying to draw out of my mouth the essence of my dream. And it was from my mouth, from the words I had forced past my lips, that I woke in the darkest night, thinking of an old man, a man who could not be forgotten, though the words that had passed between us had only been the sound of his voice. It was not the words that had woken me – nor was it the face or the voice: it was the fact that the voice – or a voice – which had been there had not really been there at all. I remembered a line of poetry I had once read: 'As if we were the people in a play who have walked into the wings and left the stage lit only by our own breath and our own words'. It was the breath and words I remembered, this idea, as I lay there on the camp bed, with the tent's silence around me and the water moving softly on the beach below. The light was so faint that, looking through the tent flap, I could not tell if there was a light in the sky or only the reflection of the sky in the tent roof. But it was the voice I thought of most, those few seconds in the dark, and it seemed to be calling out to me from far away, far away, and far, far away. But I knew that there were not any words. The silence was there too, and the feeling that things could be spoken without being said. Perhaps, as he himself had written, 'it was from that which has no shape that our words shape themselves'. Perhaps. But the shapes were not the shapes we would choose; they were the ones we would otherwise miss. For the words were always present, and always present to form a part of our shape. 'There is no such thing as a shape, only a shape we see,' he had said. And it seemed to me then that it was as true of a word as of anything else, but it was not true in the way that a thing could be true of itself. The voice became part of me in a way that I had never thought it might be. Perhaps it was part of me already. How else was it that I could know it so well that I felt my body listening for it, to make sense of it? As if it were part of my memory. My memory that would begin now, in this silence, in this dark. If it had not been for the image of the fire, I might have thought that the silence in the tent had been caused by my imagination alone. But the fire was real. I had seen it as I had fallen asleep, and now it seemed to linger in my mind like the taste of something sweet on my lips. # A few days later, once I had started my own story, it was as if I could remember everything. I began to think about him, not as a memory, but as if he were still a part of my life. I wondered how that could be possible, and how, in spite of everything, I could feel that I had really seen him, though his words still seemed to belong to a different world. We talked for a while, as people do after an accident or a shock, in the beginning trying to find a beginning, in an attempt to make sense of the new silence that had settled in. At least I think we did. 'It seems so simple now,' he said. 'I can't believe we were so blind, it seems so simple now. It seems so easy now.' He stood over me then, and I was still at a loss to understand what he meant. He looked at me. 'We're lost in this world,' he said, and he put his hand on my shoulder. 'We're lost,' he said again. I thought of my book of his words, the ones I had had translated into Spanish. 'If we're lost,' I said, 'then perhaps we're not in the real world but in one where there is no beginning or end. It's the sort of world where the stories of others are stories about themselves.' It was only a theory. I had come too far to have a theory about such things, though I suppose my talk of stories had drawn him toward it. 'And in that world, there would be no silence,' he said. 'It would be made up of words and stories.' I shook my head. 'But it's as if we're lost, aren't we? Isn't that the problem?' He smiled. 'I think I'd like to be an immigrant in that place,' I said. He laughed. 'We're lost,' he said again, and he smiled, looked at me for a while, perhaps trying to be certain that I was not mocking him. But he did not appear to be mocking. 'The truth is we don't know anything about him,' he said. 'And we don't know what we're going to do.' He seemed to hesitate. 'We have to learn, don't you think?' he said. It sounded as if he were worried about something. Or that maybe he thought he was talking to someone else. His voice seemed to rise higher in pitch. I looked at him. He stood there as if he had not moved from where he had been standing by the door of my room in the hotel.