She looked at Tengo, gently stroking his testicles. “Do you get the mood so far?”

“Sure, I do.”

“It’s just a one-room cottage. Very simply built. It has a little kitchen, beds, and a dining area. There’s a woodstove in the middle, and dinner for four has been neatly set out on the table. Steam is rising from the dishes. But there’s nobody inside. It’s as if they were all set to start eating when something strange happened—like, a monster showed up or something, and everybody ran out. But the chairs are not in disarray. Everything is peaceful and almost strangely ordinary. There just aren’t any people there.”

“What kind of food is on the table?”

She had to think about that for a moment, cocking her head to one side. “I can’t remember. Good question: what kind of food is it? I guess the question isn’t so much what they’re eating as that it’s freshly cooked and still hot. So anyhow, I sit in one of the chairs and wait for the family that lives there to come back. That’s what I’m supposed to do: just wait for them to come home. I don’t know why I’m supposed to. I mean, it’s a dream, so not everything is clearly explained. Maybe I want them to tell me the way home, or maybe I have to get something: that kind of thing. So I’m just sitting there, waiting for them to come home, but no matter how long I wait, nobody comes. The meal is still steaming. I look at the hot food and get tremendously hungry. But just because I’m starved, I have no right to touch the food on the table without them there. It would be natural to think that, don’t you think?”

“Sure, I’d probably think that,” Tengo said. “Of course, it’s a dream, so I can’t be sure what I would think.”

“But soon the sun goes down. The cottage grows dark inside. The surrounding forest gets deeper and deeper. I want to turn the light on, but I don’t know how. I start to feel uneasy. Then at some point I realize something strange: the amount of steam rising from the food hasn’t decreased at all. Hours have gone by, but it’s still nice and hot. Then I start to think that something odd is going on. Something is wrong. That’s where the dream ends.”

“You don’t know what happens after that?”

“I’m sure something must happen after that,” she said. “The sun goes down, I don’t know how to go home, and I’m all alone in this weird cottage. Something is about to happen—and I get the feeling it’s not very good. But the dream always ends there, and I keep having the same dream over and over.”

She stopped caressing his testicles and pressed her cheek against his chest. “My dream might be suggesting something,” she said.

“Like what?”

She did not answer Tengo’s question. Instead, she asked her own question. “Would you like to know what the scariest part of the dream is?”

“Yes, tell me.”

She let out a long breath that grazed Tengo’s nipple like a hot wind blowing across a narrow channel. “It’s that I might be the monster. The possibility struck me once. Wasn’t it because they had seen me approaching that the people had abandoned their dinner and run out of the house? And as long as I stayed there, they couldn’t come back. In spite of that, I had to keep sitting in the cottage, waiting for them to come home. The thought of that is what scares me so much. It seems so hopeless, don’t you think?”

“Or else,” Tengo said, “maybe it’s your own house, and your self ran away and you’re waiting for it to come back.”

After the words left his mouth, Tengo realized he should not have spoken them. But it was too late to take them back. She remained silent for a long time, and then she squeezed his testicles hard—so hard he could barely breathe.

“How could you say such a terrible thing?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Tengo managed to groan. “It just popped into my head.”

She softened her grip on his testicles and released a sigh. Then she said, “Now tell me one of your dreams, Tengo.”

Breathing normally again, he said, “Like I said before, I almost never dream. Especially these days.”

“You must have some dreams. Everybody in the world dreams to some extent. Dr. Freud’s gonna feel bad if you say you don’t dream at all.”

“I may be dreaming, but I don’t remember my dreams after I wake up. I might have a lingering sensation that I was having a dream, but I can never remember what it was about.”

She slipped her open palm under Tengo’s limp penis, carefully noting its weight, as if the weight had an important story to tell her. “Okay, never mind the dreams. Tell me about the novel you’re writing instead.”

“I prefer not to talk about a piece of fiction while I’m writing it.”

“Hey, I’m not asking you to tell me every last detail from beginning to end. Not even I would ask for that. I know you’re a much more sensitive young man than your build would suggest. Just tell me a little something—a part of the setting, or some minor episode, anything at all. I want you to tell me something that nobody else in the world knows—to make up for the terrible thing you said to me. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“I think I might,” Tengo said uncertainly.

“Okay, go!”

With his penis still resting on the palm of her hand, Tengo began to speak. “The story is about me—or about somebody modeled on me.”

“I’m sure it is,” she said. “Am I in it?”

“No, you’re not. I’m in a world that isn’t here.”

“So I’m not in the world that isn’t here.”

“And not just you. The people who are in this world are not in the world that isn’t here.”

“How is the world that isn’t here different from this world? Can you tell which world you’re in now?”

“Of course I can. I’m the one who’s writing it.”

“What I mean is, for people other than you. Say, if I just happened to wander into that world now, could I tell?”

“I think you could,” Tengo said. “For example, in the world that isn’t here, there are two moons. So you can tell the difference.”

The setting of a world with two moons in the sky was something he had taken from Air Chrysalis. Tengo was in the process of writing a longer and more complicated story about that same world—and about himself. The fact that the setting was the same might later prove to be a problem, but for now, his overwhelming desire was to write a story about a world with two moons. Any problems that came up later he would deal with then.

“In other words,” she said, “if there are two moons up there when night comes and you look at the sky, you can tell, ‘Aha! This is the world that isn’t here!’ ”

“Right, that’s the sign.”

“Do the two moons ever overlap or anything?” she asked.

Tengo shook his head. “I don’t know why, but the distance between the two moons always stays the same.”

His girlfriend thought about that world for a while. Her finger traced some kind of diagram on Tengo’s bare chest.

“Hey, Tengo, do you know the difference between the English words ‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’?” she asked.

“They’re both adjectives describing mental abnormality. I’m not quite sure how they differ.”

“ ‘Insane’ probably means to have an innate mental problem, something that calls for professional treatment, while ‘lunatic’ means to have your sanity temporarily seized by the luna, which is ‘moon’ in Latin. In nineteenth-century England, if you were a certified lunatic and you committed a crime, the severity of the crime would be reduced a notch. The idea was that the crime was not so much the responsibility of the person himself as that he was led astray by the moonlight. Believe it or not, laws like that actually existed. In other words, the fact that the moon can drive people crazy was actually recognized in law.”

“How do you know stuff like that?” Tengo asked, amazed.

“It shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise to you. I’ve been living ten years longer than you, so I ought to know a lot more than you do.”