Agreeing to think it over was the same as saying yes, of course. It brought Alice temporarily into the apartment, anyway. She ferried the blind men in and out with their belongings, cardboard boxes of utensils and condiments, heaps of braille magazines, black suits in dry-cleaner plastic.

Alice and I didn’t talk, though. We listened to Evan and Garth. “Correction,” Evan would say, “Tuesday, the appointment. The potluck dinner.”

“There isn’t any appointment Tuesday,” Garth replied smugly. “It was moved to Wednesday. The application deadline was moved back a week. It has to be postmarked by midnight Thursday.” Smiling mysteriously, his voice full of pride, he delivered the payoff. “The potluck dinner stands alone.”

Alice and I were left alone just once, and then our talk was wound down, entropic.

“There are calls for you on the machine,” I said.

“You mean the students with the tutorial thing?”

“Yes.”

“I called them.”

Silence. “So they have to be driven everywhere,” I said. “The blind men.”

“Only with their stuff. They take the bus.”

“Or walk, I guess.”

“Yes.”

“The city is like a giant maze to them.”

“Yes.”

Silence. “You’re listed in the winter catalog for a course called ‘The Physics of Silence.’ ”

“Yes.”

“Lack, I guess.”

“Yes.”

Her yes was a wall. I had lived inside the circle of Alice’s silence, before. Now I stood utterly outside.

When Evan and Garth were installed she vanished again. The blind men took over, began redefining the apartment. Everything was knocked over, handled, repositioned. Dishes started piling up precariously, unrinsed, scabby with bits of egg, jam, and mustard. Briefcases full of braille were unpacked across the couch. Conversations rattled away over my head.

“What would you do if you found out I’d been lying to you?” said Garth suddenly.

Evan turned. “What do you mean?”

“What if I’d been lying about the precise location of certain objects?”

“Have you been?” Evan sounded a little panicky.

“What if I had? You’d be living in a world of my imagination. Huh. Think of that.”

“We already discussed this. Ms. Jalter had a word for it. Delusive conditioning. It’s not fair.”

“I didn’t say it was fair.”

“Well, it’s not.”

Evenings Evan usually dug in with a braille physics textbook on the couch, while Garth sat on the guest-room bed and listened to his portable radio on headphones. I washed the dishes and paced onto the porch, to contemplate the night. I couldn’t relax with them in the apartment. The blind men listened too hard. It made me too aware of my sounds, the scuffling of chair legs on hardwood, the flutter of turned pages. Each visit to the bathroom was a disaster, urine pounding into the bowl, ear-shattering flush.

If I’m lonely, I thought, I should at least be alone.

Lack, that week, refused a ski cap, a conical washer, and a pair of pinking shears. A curly lasagne, a twist of macaroni, a strand of nonskid spaghetti. A volume of Plutarch and a postcard of Copenhagen. A Robertson-tip screwdriver, a ball peen hammer, and a sundae spoon. Blueberries, oysters, calamine lotion. A photograph of the Rosetta stone, a gold-leaf cigarette case, and a concrete block. A lens cap, a hat tree, and a slice of chocolate cake.

He did, though, accept a slide rule, a bowling shoe, and an unglazed terra-cotta ashtray. A felt hat, a fountain pen, and a pomegranate. A Heritage Press reprint of The Hunting of the Snark, and an onyx replica of the Statue of Liberty. Pistachio ice cream in a porcelain dish. A bead of mercury.

Also a spayed female cat—a grizzled lab veteran, piebald from scratching at taped-on electrodes, named B-84.