As she emerges from the bathroom, lowering her silky briefs (inspired choice), he feels himself slipping helplessly, gratefully, into another false forever. The artworks on the gray walls are mostly cheap reproductions of clichéd landscapes, but one of them, a dark woods with mysterious depths, seems to speak to his thoughts. He’d hardly noticed it at first, blinded as he was by raw desire, but now it strikes him as a poignant image of time’s shadowy infinitude. “Isn’t everything an image of time?” she asks, kicking off her slip-ons. She has switched from tight pants to skirts with snaps at the waist, and has given up her bra along with her boots, time being of the essence. Sticks with the silky briefs, though. They have been meeting weekly under the station clock and, as if they were strangers, walking at a distance from each other to the hotel, looking askance. Then, the door closing behind them, they throw themselves at each other with wild abandon, ripping off their clothing, biting and grabbing, seized by a force outside themselves. They are strangers, but they’ve discovered such perfect harmony, they feel they must have known each other long before they met under the station clock, which could be said to have engendered their sudden, yet timeless romance. Over coffee, she tells him that she always believed that there were crystalline moments in each life when that life changed utterly, irrevocably. His intrusion in hers was one of them. “I know,” he says, his eyes damp with sincerity. “It was our destiny.” They are sitting in the small café near the Railway Hotel, arranging their next rendezvous. A baroque adagio is playing on the café sound system. “In a movie I saw,” she says, sipping her cappuccino, “the lovers believed they were reenacting former lives, compelled by a kind of genetic memory.” “Interesting,” he says, though he’s not really listening. Her restless hand is on his thigh, fingering the cello part in the adagio, and he’s wondering if there’s time to dash back to the hotel. In the elevator, there’s another couple, false smiles on their flushed faces, evidently into a crystalline moment of their own. They trade empty opinions on the weather, which neither he nor she has even noticed. Perhaps it’s a rainy day: That would suit the occasion. But for all they know, the sun is shining. “The weather’s so changeable,” she says. “When it’s not just more of the same,” he says. The other couple, nodding in agreement (“That’s so true!”), leave the elevator on the floor below their own, allowing them just enough time to lurch into a kiss and mad frantic squeeze of body parts. So, that much over when they reach their room, they can get right on with flinging off their clothes and setting the bedsprings to squeaking. “We forgot to close the door,” she gasps, clasping him tightly with her arms and legs. “What?” He is thinking about the driving power of love which obliterates all else. Then he hears the amused chatter in the hallway. He nods grimly at the people gathering outside the door and shuts it. “You can see the train station from here,” the woman says, standing at the window. Gazing down at the rails coming and going, drawing apart, then joining up again, she finds herself thinking about the thread of life, with its curious little knots along the way. Of course those are two different things, rails and thread, but she knows what she means, even if knotted rails do make a disconcerting image. She is quite lovely, poised there at the window, a meditative frown on her pretty face, her bottom glowing in the half-light. He is in love with that bottom, and says so. “It’s what there is of magic in the world.” “Doesn’t your wife have one?” “Probably. Definitely doesn’t glow, though,” he says, “to the best of my recollection.” She joins him in the cramped shower stall, bringing her magical bottom with her, and he soaps it up. He tries to guess her age by its bounciness. Does she want to know this man any better than she already does? No, but to have his soapy hands on her is very nice. Her husband never does this. She closes her eyes and lets his hands do whatever they want to do. “Beautiful!” she whispers, as he slips his fingers into hidden places, but he is already feeling time’s implacable pressure. “How much longer do you think we have?” he asks, as the shower cascades around them. With her thumb and index finger, she measures the length of his penis. “This long,” she says, and pirouettes away, humming a children’s counting song. “Oh! I feel like I’m in a dream!” she gasps. She takes his hand to pull him out of the shower, and they begin to dance, bouncing onto the bed and off again, whirling around the room to her humming. He didn’t know he could do this. She brings out the best in him. At the head of the stairs, he lifts her and springs down a step, then she lifts him, and they swing fluidly down the stairs like that, past the front desk, and out the lobby door into the street. Probably they should have put their clothes on, but they can’t stop now, they’re too caught up in their wondrous affinity. Traffic stops for them. An audience gathers, applauding. They leap and swirl down the street as if the dance were leading them, creating itself with their hopelessly enchanted bodies. They are completely lost to the moment, which they both hope will go on forever, but it doesn’t. Isn’t that his wife’s car up ahead, stalled in traffic? “I think we should go back,” he whispers. The dance is over. As soon as it ends, they become aware of their nakedness, and stumble awkwardly back down the crowded street and into the hotel lobby. It’s full of laughing people, as is the elevator, which stops at every floor, the doors opening to new audiences each time like parting curtains. In their room, they hurriedly dress and pack. “Omigod! We can’t come here again!” “No, but where? I just couldn’t bear.…!”

Checking in at the Park Motel on the highway, she says, “Look at that clock on the wall! It’s like the one in the train station! I feel spooked!” “I think the train clock has old-fashioned Roman numerals,” he says, “where this one has only dots.” “Are you sure?” The motel cabin is ultra-modern with no closets or drawers, but it does have a condom dispenser and a minibar. The small TV on the wall is running with the sound off. Vehicles are chasing each other on it. There are crashes, explosions, collapsing buildings, flying bodies, the usual. She stands at the window, looking out upon the peaceful country scene. It’s lovely, but she misses the cluttered alley, the tangle of railroad tracks beyond. The king-size bed vibrates silently when a button is pushed, so they tear off their clothes and throw themselves on it, grabbing and biting with wild abandon, etc., but he doesn’t feel up to it. “Probably I’m only hungry,” he says, shutting down the restless bed. It might help, she thinks, if the springs squeaked. He calls room service and the receptionist tells him the kitchen is closed. “Closed? It’s still lunchtime! Is it ever open?” “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” He slams the phone down. “We could take a bath,” she suggests. The whirlpool tub is big enough for four people, which provokes a thought neither of them expresses. They turn on all the nozzles and squat in front of the surging sprays of water. Maybe time just is, he thinks, and we flow. He sighs. This isn’t working either. “I know, let’s go for a walk in the park,” she proposes, turning off the water. “If in fact there is one.”