"You're not going to answer me, are you?"

"Well, the contest is rigged, in my opinion. But I guess I'll say the future. My real answer is the present."

"Me, too. The future. Which do you like better: this world or the other?"

"A real life-or-death decision, huh?" he joked.

"This world or the other?"

"This world," he said. "This world all the way."

He closed the refrigerator and winked at her, taking two big steps across the kitchen floor.

And then it was night, and she was in bed, and she fell asleep right away for once, though the next night she lay awake for hours thinking about what it would have been like if the two of them could have had a child (and here was a question: if she could have given their child a certain amount of each of the five virtues – health, kindness, intelligence, charm, and beauty – how would she have distributed them, and in what proportions?), and the night after that about the hotel where she had died, the quarantine at the edge of the parking lot, and the warm glow of the vending machine in the lobby.

She wasn't exactly sure when the heart stopped beating.

It might have been a few nights later, when she got up at two o'clock to walk around in the blue half-light of the apartment and heard a dripping sound that turned out to be the icicles melting outside the window. It might have been the next morning, when for the first time in weeks the sun came out burning hard and the birds reappeared from wherever they had been keeping shelter. It might have been the day after that, or the day after that, or even the day before. All she knew for certain was that there came a moment when she realized she could no longer hear the pulse that had accompanied her every waking moment for so long, and she felt as if something had died.

It happened like this: She was handing out newspapers with Luka when there was a short lull in the traffic, and suddenly it was quiet enough for her to notice the stillness in the air. She realized right away that something was wrong, something was missing. A fist seemed to tighten inside her stomach. "Listen," she said to Luka.

He fell quiet for a moment, then whispered, "What is it I'm supposed to be listening for?"

"It isn't there anymore."

"What isn't there?"

She gave him a hint: "Bump, bump. Bump, bump. Bump, bump."

His expression shifted through three distinct stages – first confusion, then dawning recognition, and finally, as the weights tumbled into place, full understanding. "Hey, you're right," he said. "It's gone."

"I know it's gone. I knew it all along."

"You 'knew it all along'? What does that mean?"

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to say that she had known since the beginning of their conversation – that that was all she had meant – but the truth was that she had something deeper in mind, something she couldn't quite pin down, and she didn't want to lie about it. "I don't know. Honestly. I didn't realize I was going to say that."

"Understandable," he said. "In fact, understood."

First she smiled, and then suddenly she found herself fighting back tears. She turned away from him so that he wouldn't notice. It had something to do with her sense that nothing was permanent, nothing would last. Hearts stopped beating. People put guns to their chests. There was no one and nothing she could ever know well enough to make it stay. It had been one of her chief preoccupations during the last few years of her life: the notion that there was not enough time left for her to really get to know anyone. Most people would say it was ridiculous. She understood that. She was only in her mid-thirties, after all. But whenever she would come into contact with someone new, someone whose stories she didn't already know by heart, sooner or later that person would start talking about days gone by, and she would get the sad, sickening feeling that too much had already happened to him and it was far too late for her to ever catch up. How could she ever hope to know someone whose entire life up to the present was already a memory? For that matter, how could anyone hope to know her? The way she saw it, the only people she had any prayer of knowing or being known by were the people who had been a part of her life since she was a child, and she hardly even spoke to them anymore. Just her mother and a friend or two from high school, and that was about it. As for everybody else she met, well – there were too many shadows behind a person and there was too little light ahead. That was the problem. And there was no force in the world that would remedy the situation. People talked about love as a light that would illuminate the darkness that people carried around with them. And yes, Minny was capable of loving, but so what? As far as she could tell, her love had never improved things for her or anyone else, so what good was it? She could never rely on it. It weighed no more than a nickel. It was only after she died and met Luka that the vistas of time seemed to open back up for her, and she began to think that maybe she could know someone else as well as she knew herself – that her love might be enough to make a difference, after all.

But sometimes she would start to feel the death in things again, and that old doubt would come washing back over her, and she would fill with the terrible familiar fear that nothing had changed at all. She could never be whole in the eyes of anyone else. No one else could ever be whole in her own eyes. She had known it all along.

"Are you okay?" Luka asked her, and when she nodded, he said, "You seemed to be someplace else there for a minute."

"I'm all right," she said.

She wouldn't ask him the question. She wouldn't let herself.

The traffic had picked up again, and there was no longer enough silence in the air for them to listen for the beating of the heart. They handed out the last of the newspapers. Then they walked back home over the wet sidewalks, the flattened grass, and the heaps of melting snow.

It was another day of reading and staring out the window for Minny, cut off entirely from the world. Usually Luka would ask her to come along with him while he scouted the city for reports he could use in the newspaper, but she had come to sense when he wanted to be alone, and today was one of those days. It could be a pleasure to walk the pavement with only your own thoughts for company. She understood that.

After he left, she opened the window to air out the room, and the trickling sound of so much ice and snow melting seemed to enter the apartment from all directions at once. If she had closed her eyes, she might have imagined that she was standing in the middle of some tropical cave, the moisture of the forest percolating down through infinite layers of stone to drip into a hundred little pockets of water. But her eyes were wide open. A few people were walking by down below with their jackets slung over their shoulders. Clumps of snow fell from the trees and the hoods of the cars, astonishingly white in the light of the sun. A couple of birds had landed on her ledge and then flown away. She could see the hieroglyphs of their footprints in the snow.

She must have gone back to the couch and fallen asleep after that, because soon Luka was standing over her with his hand on her forehead. Occasionally, in the middle of the day, when all of the pressure had fallen away, she would sit down to relax for a few minutes and open her eyes to find that she had dozed off for half the afternoon. It was one of the side effects of her insomnia.

She kept her eyes closed. She knew without thinking what Luka was going to say, because he had said it so many times before: "Wake up, Sleeping Beauty."

"What time is it?" she asked.