He was still having trouble breathing. I told him I'd be happy to go with him.

But I didn't find anything, either. It was a perfectly ordinary dorm room, with a desk and chair, a bed, and a chest of drawers. It wasn't particularly neat and clean, nor was it messy. The traces of the student's life had been left just as they were. The sheets were wrinkled and a sweater was draped over the back of the chair. A notebook filled with numbers and symbols lay open on the desk, as if he had got up from his studies for just a moment to go get something to drink.

The bookshelf held a mixture of travel guides, mysteries, and books on mathematics. The calendar on the wall was still turned to February, with notes jotted down here and there-"Ethics paper due," "Seminar Party," "Tutoring"-and above a line drawn from the fourteenth to the twenty-third, "Ski Trip."

"What do you think?" the Manager said, glancing around the room.

"I'm sorry," I said, without looking at him. "I see the room of a normal, well-rounded student, but I can't tell much more."

We stood for some time without speaking, as if we thought the missing student might suddenly reappear if we waited long enough. Finally, the Manager spoke again.

"He disappeared on the thirteenth, the day before he was due to go skiing. He was so excited about the trip. He was learning to ski, and I suppose he was just getting to the point where it was fun. When I told him I liked to ski myself, he wanted to know all about how I did it-what kind of boot I wore on my fake leg, how I held the poles. There was something very innocent and childlike about him when it came to things like that."

I ran my finger over the square marked "13" on the calendar. The paper was cool and rough. A pair of skis was propped against the bookshelf, still in their cover. A ticket for the overnight bus to the ski slope was tucked into the pocket of his bag.

"There was something special about the fingers of his left hand," the Manager said. His gaze was fixed, as if he were trying to recapture the image of the boy that lingered in the room.

"His left hand?"

"That's right. He was left-handed-he did everything with his left: combed his hair, rubbed his eyes when he was tired, dialed the telephone. He also made delicious coffee, and he often invited me in for a cup. We would sit together right here." As he said this, the Manager sat down in the swivel chair at the desk. His leg made a loud creak.

"He would show me how to solve math problems. Simpler ones that anyone would find interesting, ones that had to do with everyday life: how a mountain as huge as Mount Fuji could be reflected in something as tiny as an eye, how to move an enormous temple bell with your little finger-things like that. I had no idea that you could use math to figure out that sort of thing." Though I was still standing behind him, I nodded and he went on.

"He'd always start by saying, 'It's pretty simple if you think about it this way…'; and no matter what kinds of naïve or stupid questions I asked, he never lost his patience. Actually, he seemed to love the questions. He always had a sharp pencil in his hand, and he'd scribble down numbers and symbols as he explained what formula he was using and why. His handwriting was rounded and neat-very easy to read. And in the end, a simple solution would appear, as if by magic. 'Pretty interesting, isn't it?' he'd say, smiling at me as he underlined the answer."

He took a deep breath before continuing.

"When he sat there with his pencil in his hand, he seemed to be spinning a beautiful web rather than just writing numbers. The strange mathematical symbols he wrote were like delicate little works of art, and even the regular numbers seemed extraordinary. I drank his coffee and listened to his explanations, and the whole time I couldn't take my eyes off of the beautiful fingers on his left hand. They were constantly in motion, as if moving made them happy. It wasn't a particularly masculine hand. The fingers were pale and slender- like exotic hothouse flowers. But each part seemed to have its own expressive quality-as if the nail on the ring finger could smile, or the joint of the thumb was shy."

His tone was so passionate that I could only nod. I looked once more at the things that had been left in the room-the pencil sharpener and the paper clips and the compass that the boy's pale fingers must have pinched and rubbed and held. The notebook on the desk looked expensive but well worn. It occurred to me that the wrinkles in the sheets would probably never be smoothed out, the sweater never put away in the drawer, the mathematics problems never completely solved.

The Manager began to cough again. The sound was so forlorn that I thought for a moment he was sobbing. The cough echoed in the empty room.

The next day I went to the library to learn more about the boy's disappearance. It was a small branch library in one corner of a park, the kind of place children go to find picture books. But they were able to get me all the newspapers from February 14, and I went through the articles in each local edition. The papers formed a sizable stack on the table in front of me.

There had been various noteworthy incidents that day. A housewife who had been painting her bathroom had died after being overcome by fumes. An elementary school student had been found trapped inside a refrigerator that had been left at a garbage dump. A sixty-seven-year-old man was arrested for swindling women he had pretended to marry. And an elderly woman was taken to the hospital after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. Apparently, the world was full of complicated matters that I'd never dreamed of, but all these horrible misadventures were little more than fairy tales to me. What mattered at the moment was the boy's beautiful fingers.

No matter how much I read, however, I made little progress with the mountain of newspapers; and no matter how many articles I scanned, I found no mention of those hands. My own fingers were black with ink and my eyes were stinging. There were any number of poisonings and asphyxiations and swindles, but nothing to point me in the direction of the boy. I could tell from the light coming in the window that the sun was going down.

I don't know how long I was there, but at some point a man carrying a large ring of keys appeared in front of me.

"We're closing soon," he said, sounding apologetic.

"I'm sorry," I said, gathering up the newspapers. It was pitch black outside.

When I got home, there was a letter from my husband. The bright yellow envelope, the foreign woman on the stamp, and the unfamiliar letters on the postmark all reminded me that the letter had come from someplace far away. It was hiding at the bottom of the postbox.

The letter was long, with a detailed description of the large house where we would live in the small seaside town in Sweden. There was a market on Saturday mornings where you could get fresh vegetables, and a bakery near the station that made delicious bread. The sea, which was always stormy, was visible from the bedroom window, and squirrels came to play in the garden. It was a very pastoral sort of letter. And then on the last page there was an itemized list of things he wanted me to do:

Renew your passport.

Get an estimate from the moving company.

File a change of address form at the post office.

Go to say good-bye to the boss.

Go jogging every day. (You need to be in shape- it's damp and cold here.)

I read the letter several times, stopping here and there to reread a line and then going back to the beginning when I reached the end. But somehow I couldn't really understand what he was trying to say. The words-"market," "squirrel," "passport," "moving company"-were like obscure philosophical terms. The formulas written in the missing boy's notebook seemed much more real to me. The notebook held the reflection of the steaming coffee, the left hand, the Manager's watching eyes.