I noticed a framed photograph on the wall near the desk that looked familiar. I stepped toward it. A young Alura Straczynski, taken from the neck up, her shoulders bare, her head held at a dramatic angle. Where had I seen this photograph before? Yes, in the Mayan slate frame in Jackson Straczynski’s office. But there was something else that tolled familiar in the shot. The texture of her skin, the blank backdrop, the angle of the capture, the way the camera seemed to caress her features. I hadn’t noticed it when I had spotted it before but now it seemed obvious.

“Tommy Greeley took this,” I said.

“Why do you think so?”

“I’ve seen other examples of his work.”

“Have you indeed?” That damn smile again, as if she knew exactly what I had pinned to my bedroom wall.

“What is this?” I said, looking around.

“This is my studio.”

“And what do you do here?”

“Whatever I choose,” she said. “This is my sacred place. Sometimes I dance naked. Sometimes I paint.”

“Naked?” I said, staring once again at her. Her smile seemed strangely knowing.

“If I choose,” she said. “But most importantly, I write. My journals. Recording my life with complete honesty is what I consider my most important work.”

“Life into art.”

“Yes, like we talked about. But it is more than just the glistening surface, Victor, though I want the surface to glisten. No, I have to admit to a grander ambition. I want to travel deeper, into the murky realms that have always seemed to defy exploration, into the very heart of what it means to be a woman. Some spend years in analysis to peer there. I have spent a lifetime with my journals, recording and rerecording, sifting, analyzing, distilling. Searching for that one unmentionable truth at the very bottom.”

“The last thing,” I said.

“If that’s how you want to put it. And my studio is the tool I use to get there, so to speak. The ax for the frozen sea within. I sit here and the world comes to me, just as you have, dear Victor, and whatever happens in this loft is my raw material.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come over here and I’ll show you,” she said.

She moved toward the tall writing desk, almost glided there, and I followed, as if impelled by some unknown spell. She put on her glasses, took up the pen, a fine fountain pen with a golden nib.

“Stand closer,” she said, and I did, until I could feel the heat off her shoulders, smell the fresh scent of her dark hair. Standing beside her as I was, I could lean forward and peer over her shoulder onto the pages of the journal. She dashed the pen in the air twice, put the date and time into the journal, and began to write in a careful and lovely script.

Victor Carl has come to visit. He is wearing his suit, his hideous red tie,

“Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong with my tie.”

“Shhhh,” she said. “Just read.”

his thick black shoes. They are the shoes of a schoolmaster, or a parish priest, that is why I like them. They fit him so well: sturdy, earnest, plain, a little grubby. His shoes, in fact, are a main component of his charm. He seems angry that I have been holding back secrets. But of course I have been holding back secrets. What is a secret if not something wonderfully dreadful that is held back? But he has secrets too, this Victor Carl. He looks at me as if he is unable to force himself to look away. He looks at me, as if he were looking through me, or at least through the surface of me. Is he trying to see my soul, or something less metaphysical? The way he stares at me has created an electric tension that I find delicious. Is that what this is all about, our need for others in our lives, not for comfort but for the tension in the real that mirrors our own inner conflicts?

“What are you doing?” I said.

“I am writing as truthfully as I can,” she said. “I seem always to be more honest on the page than I ever can be with the spoken word. The barriers are lowered when I write. You want the honest truth, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then read,” she said.

He asks what am I doing. I am transferring the moment into something concrete. Like a photograph captures light, I am capturing all the flitting moths that normally pass through our brains and disappear into the smoke of the past, all the sensations, emotions, ideas. Here, in my words, they are caught, mounted on the pages as if with pins through their wings. Later I will elucidate what I have written, revise, analyze, relive again what is happening here and now, the familiar and yet unique frisson when two separate individuals first start rubbing up against each other.

“This is too weird,” I said.

“This is too weird,” he says. It makes him uncomfortable to look into the mind of another so closely. I don’t blame him. It is uncomfortable for me to see my own thoughts and emotions, my own pallid yet unquenched desires, my own mortal failings lying naked on the page. For him it must be some exquisite torture. But it is having another effect too. I feel him over my shoulder. First he looks at the page, then at the nape of my neck.

“Stop it,” I said. “I’m not,” I said, even though I was, even though I couldn’t stop looking at both her neck and her words, and I very much didn’t want her to stop writing. There was something drawing me out, her very presence so close, the heat from her body, the words that seemed to cut so close to her bone, my obsession with the photographs from her youth that had captured me from the first.

There is something in his so-called quest for the truth about Tommy Greeley that I hadn’t understood before, but it came to me today in a thrilling burst of insight. It was in the way he was staring at me. He was like a man searching for a memory. On his tour of the studio he stopped at one of Tommy’s photographs, one of the series taken decades ago and described fully in the missing journals. He examined it as if it were both familiar and strange to him. I don’t know yet if he has found the missing journals, but I believe now he has seen the other photographs. He has found at least part of my puzzle. And if he has seen the photographs, I have no doubt but that he would feel what Tommy was feeling, he would be captured by the images the way Tommy was captured by the flesh.

Yes, I am right. It is flowing from him, the mesmerizing fragrance of unwilling desire.

He is something of an empath, this Victor Carl, he has a startling intuition. That is what I wrote about him in my prior entries and I feel it even more strongly now, that unique talent of his. In that way I suppose we are something like twins. Can you imagine a blind man and blind woman reaching out their fingers to touch each other’s face, to explore and see, to learn and capture and possess. That is what we would be together. The promise is enough to send shivers into my very core. I want to deliver myself to him as if he were a knife cleaving me to my essence.

He is leaning over my shoulder, reading this, and I feel the urge to turn my head. It wouldn’t take much, just the slightest turn, and then our lips would brush, would touch, our lips would touch and another line would be crossed. The lines were so impenetrable at one time, like walls, before Tommy, but now, with each line, I approach as if I am running downhill and hurtle it with ease. And with each line crossed I feel myself getting closer to the ultimate truth. For where does truth lie if not in the shattering of boundaries? And I sense Victor Carl feels the same.