“Guess what?” he said. “You missed me. I already went on.” She saw now that his black T-shirt was wet with sweat around the collar. Part of her was relieved; she did not feel like playing the fan tonight.

“I’m sorry to hear that. How did it go?”

Charlie grinned, put his hands together in prayer, and looked up at the ceiling. “Terrible,” he said, laughing. “But it doesn’t matter. I lived through it.”

A beer arrived. Charlie thanked the waitress with familiarity. She squeezed his shoulder as she left. Ana was surprised to see him drinking, the foam caught on his upper lip. She could not associate religion and pleasure; they were back to back in her mind, walking away from each other, like dueling gunfighters.

Why had she come here? The smell of the place, years of watery beer and old smoke, seemed to be rising up from between the spaces in the wood floors, seeping out of the old, cracked chairs.

“This is a cover,” said the woman on stage. She strummed a few chords, and Charlie exclaimed: “Oh, this is a great song. She does this—yeah, it’s—she does this beautifully.”

The woman on stage closed her eyes and began:

“You are the light in my dark world. You are the fire that will always burn.…”

Ana watched her. The woman strummed, her voice swelling: “When I can’t stand on my own …”

Ana wanted to turn away from the woman, the guitar on her absurd belly. She was rocking, her eyes closed, in what could only be described as rapture. But Ana felt a kind of heat, and sadness, too. She glanced at Charlie. If he was moved, he didn’t show it.

The singer repeated the line, and dove down inside it: “You are the light”—until she came back around the other side quietly—“in my dark world.” And then she opened her eyes. Shook her hair. Exhaled. It struck Ana as obscene all of a sudden, that they should be all together for this moment. It would be better to experience it alone, with the blinds drawn. People clapped. Ana felt her cheeks redden.

“I should go,” said Ana.

“Really?” said Charlie. But Ana had her coat on already.

“Okay, I’ll walk you.”

“No, no. You don’t have to—”

“I know.”

They walked past the bars, the restaurants, through the bodies going in all directions. Charlie was carrying his guitar in a padded case on his back, turning at an angle to avoid hitting people with it. Ana was aware of how tall he was next to her compared to James.

When they turned south, onto a residential street, Charlie said: “I always liked these windows.” He pointed to an old mansion, a huge house with colored glass leaves curling in a vine around the doors. It had been divided into apartments; a row of ugly silver mailboxes, things found in a skyscraper, stacked up by the doorframe.

Ana tried to imagine going home right now, tried to picture herself in the living room, surrounded by toys and sippy cups. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“Not far,” said Charlie.

“Can I see it?” He glanced at her quickly, flickering, and nodded.

They had to turn around, retrace their steps.

“I like those windows, too,” said Ana as they went past the house again.

Charlie’s house was only two doors down from College. The noise of the street spilled over onto his lawn. Two front seats of a car were on his porch in the place where a nice café set should go.

Seeing Ana’s glance lingering upon the seats, he said: “That’s not mine.” Charlie unlocked the door. “Those guys have the front apartment. We have the top.”

“We”? thought Ana.

Half of the hallway, large and smelling of rotten food, was taken up by a pile of men’s sneakers and boots.

Ana walked up the creaky stairs. The banister wobbled.

As soon as the apartment door opened, Ana saw the “we.” A man played a video game on a couch, connected by a long wire to a console in the center of the room. The TV blared gunshots and “Incoming! Incoming!”

“Hey, dude,” he said, his voice coated in gumminess.

When Ana could separate the hallway and the sticky little gamer from the space, she saw that the apartment was actually warm and clean. The furniture was cheap but minimalist, and shelves of books tidily arranged lined the walls. Art books. Philosophy. Several different editions of the Bible.

“Ana, this is Russell. Russell, Ana,” said Charlie.

Russell nodded. “I’d get up. I’m not usually this bad, but I’m killing here …,”he said.

“Don’t bother, really,” said Ana. “Nice to meet you.”

Charlie led her into the kitchen. He shut the door behind them, muffling the sound of missiles.

“Ambush!” screamed Russell. “Die! Die!”

Charlie said loudly: “Tea? Wine?”

Ana found a place for herself at the kitchen table. It was white and empty but for a stack of newspapers and a bowl of oranges.

“Wine, if you have it,” she said.

“Russell lost his job,” said Charlie in a low voice, uncorking a bottle of red. Suddenly, he looked at the label: “I don’t know too much about wine. Does this seem okay?” Ana glanced at it. It was from a winery in Prince Edward County that she had visited once with James, years ago.

“It’s fine. What was his job?”

“He worked at the university bookstore.” Charlie passed her the glass. “Cheers,” he said. “Wait—it sounds like we’re celebrating the fact that Russell lost his job. Let’s think of something better.”

“Okay. To music,” said Ana. She felt like James, like she was doing an impression of James, his impulsiveness, his ability to be touched by things.

“To music.” They clinked. The wine was good.

“Do you worry he won’t be able to handle the rent?” asked Ana.

Charlie shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “He’s an old friend. I’ll carry him. He’ll be back on his feet.”

“That’s a nice idea, but you probably make very little money, if you don’t mind my saying that,” said Ana.

Charlie laughed. “This is true. My father points out this fact to me from time to time.”

The word “father” peeled ten years from his face.

“Charlie, how old are you?”

“Wow, first my salary, now my age!” Ana was struck by how much he laughed. It filled his spaces like breathing.

“I’m twenty-eight,” he said. “I’ll be twenty-nine next month. Then thirty. Aah!” He raised his hands like he was going down a roller coaster. “It’s weird to think my mom had three kids by thirty.”

“My mom had me at thirty,” said Ana. She finished her glass of wine.

“How much did she drink, your mom?”

Ana paused. “You know about that?” Files. Everything in files.

“She’s pretty young, and alcohol-related dementia is common. And when she first came, I don’t think she ever told me a story that didn’t take place at a party.” Now Ana laughed.

“God, is that true? She’s declined a lot in two years, hasn’t she? I haven’t heard her tell a story in a long time.”

Charlie nodded. “What are you thinking these days? How are you doing?”

“Oh, well, you know, mostly I’m not thinking at all,” said Ana.

“What do you mean?” His head was turned, close to hers.

“I don’t know. I think I have dementia, too. There are things I can’t remember.…”

“What kind of things?”

“About my life. About what I was trying to achieve.”

“Wow,” said Charlie, and he laughed. “That sounds awful.”

Ana laughed, too. “It does, doesn’t it? I don’t know what I’m talking about, really. I guess you’re around that all day, nobody making sense.”

“Well, sometimes. Mostly they make sense to me, though.” Ana noticed that he drank slowly. “When I started doing this work, I thought I was prepared for it. But I had times when I would see things—I’d see this, you know, decay—and I’d think: What’s the value in this? What’s left here? But you see them every day and …” He stopped.

“And what?”

“You don’t feel so scared. You think you stop living because you fragment, because the mind gets less reliable, but you don’t. There is something primal in there. There’s something that eclipses the damage. There’s this instinct for life. It’s, you know …” He paused again.