She is adjusting my tie, manipulating hand movements that look like sign language, smoothing it there, twisting it here, until it forms something comprehensible that I continually fail to replicate. Whenever I look away and back the tie reverts to its former state, and sighing, she fixes it again. Against a mirror we are shut against, framed by its framelessness. I am wearing a black suit and pants tapered at an odd angle, and she is invisible. I stare into myself as she looks beyond.
Do we really need to go, I ask. "Yes," she says, "you will like it there". This is the voice that urges me to go on, to wear suits and tie ties to events that require them. I get in the car. One door opens. I adjust the mirror, a pair of dice dangling from it, catching a glance of the back seat. She leans in, and giggles, the mixture of microcosmic rushes of air and saliva a good sign. The wheels begin to move, of their own accord. This is wrong, I say. I do not know how to drive. I am ignored.
The headlights illuminate a tree-lined path that narrows into a house as the car gradually disappears. We are out of it, and as if parallel to a row in a plowed field, we walk in tandem. A spark of static electricity is what binds us together.
"One thing," she asks. What, I say. "Don't introduce me, whatever you do". Why, I ask. We are framed by the lights of the place, there is a garden, a fountain. The light collides with the left side of my face, my right shrouded in darkness. On her face there are no shadows, only a faint glow. The features on her face do not coincide with the rules of physics. The light seems to come out of nowhere.
"I am not real," she whispers. And then vanishes. I looked back the path we came, and found that I had forgotten my shoes, trapped in the middle of the night.