as well. The effect of the two of them dancing together in the mirror was hypnotic. She often lost track of time watching it, the movements of her double blending in with her own, and she often went on longer than she should have, pushing herself to the point of exhaustion. On one of these occasions, after he knees had given out she collapsed onto the rug, gasping for air and feeling as if something inside of her had broken.
"You're very good," said a voice. She stirred, fighting through her exhaustion to look around her, although somehow she knew that she was alone.
"Where are you?" she said, her voice hoarse. She coughed once, roughly, and sat up.
"But you shouldn't push yourself so hard," continued the voice, and this time Camelia understood that it was coming from inside of her.
"So it's finally happened," she said, smiling.
"I guess so."
"It's not so bad." She lied down again and stared at the ceiling, folding her hands across her stomach. "What should I call you?"
"Anything's fine."
"Then I'll call you George," she said. "If that's alright."
"Any particular reason?"
"George was the name of an imaginary friend I had when I was 4. He lived under the stairs."
"Fine by me."
"Well George," she said. "What shall we talk about?"
The voice laughed soundlessly, and Camelia's smile widened. Later, she wrote that as she lay there on her back and spoke with this voice she felt as if she was floating, adrift on a vast, nameless ocean, and that her mind was drifting also, down strange pathways that she had no words to describe. She wrote that at least it wasn't boring, because the last thing she wanted at this point in her life was to be bored. "After all," she wrote. "I don't have long to live."
She stands in the alley, leaning against a brick wall. It's snowing, and she watches the flakes fall through the glare of a lamp at the end of the street. They move into the sphere of light, for a moment, no more, and then they disappear, replaced by others that may as well be the same. Her breath emerges from her mouth in a small puff of steam, dies away - and then she breathes again.
It strikes her that she must be crazy. It isn't a new thought. She's had it many times over the course of her life, most recently after she started talking to the voice. She has always been different, or else it's her way of looking at the world that's different, and the way she speaks about it. Coming home from school when she was a girl, crying, because something she said or did caused her classmates to laugh at her, or worse, to pull away, her mother told her that she was just more sensitive than other people, and Camelia held onto that word, 'sensitive', keeping it close to her heart, or else brandishing it like a glittering shield whenever she was at her lowest. "I'm just more sensitive," she said to herself, and took comfort in what that implied, that she had access to things that other people didn't, in tune with invisible currents of energy that they either weren't aware of, or else consciously ignored.
As a child she was easily distracted, and had been prescribed medication to help her focus. For a time she went along with it, taking the pills diligently until her second year of high school; it occurred to her that she didn't like the way she felt, her thoughts reduced to pale, bland things, as if her head was stuffed with a heavy wad of dry plaster. Getting off the pills caused her some discomfort, sitting in class all day forced to pay attention, until at last she learned how to manage herself, and her thoughts, refusing to talk about the strangest or most unusual ideas that came to her, especially the ones that had to do with her views on time. Those seemed to be the most disturbing, especially when she mentioned the feelings and impressions that arrived from what other people insisted on calling the future, but which to her was nothing more than an extension of the present.
"I'm not psychic," she wrote. "It's all just there, like it's written down, but if I say something is going to happen and it does, and if that something is bad, they'll blame me for it. So I might as well just allow it, which is always the right choice anyway."
And now, standing on her own in a back alley in Northside, staring at the passage of snow through a small corona of light, she thinks that if she is crazy it isn't doing her any harm; she still manages to get up on time in the morning. She pays her bills and has a close group of friends. She calls her mother once a week. She eats well. In fact she feels fine, better than she has in quite a while.
"Well George," she says. "If this is being crazy I guess it's not so bad."
The voice doesn't answer her, and she starts to make her way out of the alley, but stops when she notices the passage of her shadow across the wall next to her. Her face tightens, and she extends her left arm, watching as her shadow does the same. She lifts her other arm and bends forward, her neck craned so that she can see how her shadow responds on the wall. She straightens out and extends first one leg, and then the other, bringing her feet in line. Finally she throws up her hands and arches her back, jumps, and lands on both feet, smoothly curling herself into a ball.
The sound of coarse laughter causes her to straighten. Behind her is a middle-aged man, dressed in a large, dirty coat, and ragged jeans. His beard is thick and matted, and in his hand is a half-empty bottle of wine.
"What're you doing?" he asks. "Dancing?"
"Yeah," she says.
"Back here?"
"Back here," she agrees.
"I ask you something?" he says.
"Sure."
"You seen anything weird in this alley?"
"Weird?"
"Like a ring, on the wall or wherever, or a dead bird, anything like that?"
He is obviously drunk, but she answers him soberly, because it's clear to her that he's also very serious.
"Nothing like that," she tells him. "Never seen a ring."
The man nods and takes a step forward, stumbles, and then rights himself, nodding again.
"You're lucky," he says, starting to move away. When he's nearly out of the alley he turns once, briefly.
"You keep it up now!" he calls back. "The dancing. This is a good place for it. There should be dancing in every alley."
Camelia watches him go and then returns to her apartment where she makes herself a cup of tea. Drinking it, she pictures the way her shadow looked on the wall, and hears again the sound of the man's laughter as he came across her dancing.
The next day, a Sunday, she buys a small camera and a projector from an audio-visual store near 2nd Bridge. Once home, she sets up the camera and films herself dancing. When she's finished she uses editing software that she downloads illegally to cut the footage into segments. The resulting images, which she projects onto her curtains, are jerky, and disjointed, nothing like a dance, but rather (to her eyes at least) an expression of the time that a dance might occupy. She smiles, her eye twitching faintly, and sets the video to play on a loop, gazing at it absently until her phone rings. Startled, she reaches across the couch and answers it.
"Hello?" she says. In front of her the projection continues to move over the curtains, self-repeating, like a wash of static.
"Not very graceful is it?" comes the voice. Camelia nearly drops the phone; she can hear it now, no longer confined to her head but the voice of a real person, talking on the other end of the line. She pictures a small, dark room, very much like her own, and in it a man holding a phone up to a head without a face.
"George?" she asks.
"If you insist," says the voice. It sounds different from the way it did in her head, older, and more careworn.
"What are you doing on the phone?"
"Just thought I'd check up on you."
"That's nice."
"You're doing well?"
"Very well George, thank you."
"And you're working on an art project I see."
"I wouldn't call it art."
The voice snorts and, forcing herself to move, Camelia switches off the projector, relegating the shock of hearing the voice to the back of her mind, something that she'll deal with l
ater, if she finds the time. She gets up and takes the phone with her into the darkened kitchen, putting the kettle on the burner. It is a gas stove, and she's forced to grope around awhile in the dark for the box of matches before she succeeds in getting it lit.
"There was a man in the alley last night," she says.
"What'd he want?"
"He asked if I'd seen anything unusual."
"And what did you tell him?"
"That I hadn't noticed anything."
"I think you'd see a lot of unusual things, living in this part of town."
"You're the most unusual thing in my life George, and I don't think it's anyone's business but mine."
"That's true," says the voice, almost sadly.
"Are you alright George?"
"Don't worry about me."
"Oh George," she says, and is cut off by the screeching of the kettle. For a moment the sound fills the small apartment, floor to ceiling, and then she switches off the gas.
"Just haven't felt like myself lately," says the voice.
"Hm," muses Camelia, pouring the steaming water from the kettle into a mug. She reaches into the cupboard for a tea bag. She has at least a half dozen different types of tea, and in the darkness she can't see which of them she's chosen, not that it matters. She brings the mug with her back to the living room and sits down. She takes a short sip of the liquid, which is now no longer water, but is neither quite tea, and sets the mug down on the low table in front of her.
"You're probably just worried about the end of the world," she says.
"What?" asks the voice.
"George,