The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls

Most nights, when they could not be together, they talked on the telephone. The conversations were different every night, and yet they felt as though they were in the middle of a single much larger conversation of which they could not now remember the beginning. Neither of them had ever held a conversation like this before. They had a language in common, but in talking to each other they found another language neither had spoken before. It was a difficult language, and they did not speak it well. They used the future when they should have used the past. They stumbled over possessives. She became his in the masculine gender, and he became hers in the feminine gender, and then they became frightened, because without normal possessives they would have to learn to love each other in a different way from the way they had loved other people before. They wanted this, but the wanting sometimes weighed on them so heavily that they felt they had no words and no feelings left. Some evenings, it all seemed quite easy, but when they were tired, they distrusted their own voices, and each of them hated the other for having allowed them to hope.

Nothing so frightening as hope. To get away from hope and fear, they would tell each other stories. There were plenty of stories to tell. They came from different generations and different countries. They knew many of the same things, but never knew in advance which of the same things, and had lived in many of the same places, but never at the same time. Telling the stories, they would never say, this means this or means that, or, this is part of my archive, keep it safe. Every story was just a story. Sometimes, the woman wondered if Scheherazade had felt like this. Just telling one story after another, making them last till dawn, so she could escape for another day from hope and fear. When would they ever tell each other the real story they would have to tell, sooner or later? She would begin to feel furious. But at other times, the sound of her lover’s voice was like the trace of his hand on her body, and lay as deep inside her. Then she would forget her fury, and would want only his voice and his hand, and the traces they left upon her. She would wonder, how could I have thought I knew what wanting meant, before this conversation began?

One evening, as they talked on the telephone, her lover told her a story he had read when he was young. The story was about a man who could walk through walls. The man enjoyed his gift. He went into fortresses and bank vaults, and read secret files in locked offices. Then he fell in love with a woman who was married. He used his secret gift to visit her, and no one knew when they were together. One day, just before dawn, he held her in his arms until she was asleep. Then he rose and tried to walk through the wall of her house. It was not until too late that he realised that his gift had deserted him, and he found himself stuck fast.

After he had finished the story, the man said that he often felt like that, as though he was caught in a wall. The woman did not respond, because the way he had told the story frustrated her. It was incomplete, undeveloped. Then, without waiting for him to continue, she told him a story about what happened to the woman after her lover disappeared into the wall:

She did not understand why her lover did not return to her. She thought he had met with an accident, or that he had simply, for some whim, deserted her. They had always met in her room. Now, when she was in that room, she wanted above all things to run out of it into the street. And when she was in the street, she could think of nothing but of how to return to...