A ten-minute coffee break was called on set, time Laura used to continue her keen, proprietary staking out of those lives she might still be permitted to lead, and those which were no longer possible. She saw the assistant in her puffer coat handing steaming coffees to the crew, indicating that filming would soon begin. Then her more threatening significance, only somewhat obscured by the bulky outerwear: thin wrists emerged from the sleeves, chin-length hair dyed crimson poured from the hood along with a face that was young and patient, ringing with good cheer. Laura, a few weeks away from turning thirty, could not be quite that young again, but she could still wait patiently for the professional milestones that would one day accrue to her, be gracious and charming on her way up, even feign laughter at her co-workers’ compulsively genial remarks before they all headed out for the weekend. Although these co-workers, if you could even call them that, were always rotating in and out of the short-lived gigs that she was also rotating through, and so they hardly seemed worth the trouble.

She’d held down odd jobs for so many years that the cycle had congealed into a routine. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays she wrote ad copy, usually at home with little oversight; the work always took less time than they gave her to complete it. For years she’d written copy for movie posters and viral campaigns (lines like “This Christmas, payback won’t be cheap” and “Love happens when you least expect it”), although for the past few months she’d been reassigned from theatrical releases to the concession stand. Coca-Cola had hired the firm for some contract work and her boss was throwing just about everyone at it. Between these thrillingly lucrative hours of corporate idling, she doctored treatments for other people’s immature attempts at TV pilots or films—students and other amateurs whose hopes outmatched their talents. This she did less for the pay (which was pitiful) than for the vague notion that industry contacts would materialize bearing funds and distribution for one of her own screenplays, several of which inched along in the evening hours—and there they remained. It seemed to Laura that her scripts had begun to grow frail in the dark. Yet still she counted on their eventual unveiling, and on the grandest possible platform: the silver screen. First the festivals, then New York and L.A., then the world would bear witness to her childhood fears, her daily passions and frustrations, her minutely observed existence, all tastefully packaged within, for instance, a buddy comedy or an interplanetary embezzlement plot.

Laura showed these developing screenplays to only one person, her boyfriend, Mark. They’d met shortly after she’d moved to the city, when she was a year out of college and he was beginning a doctorate in psychiatry. Seven years had passed since then, and he still handed back her works in progress gingerly spotted with black pen on sheets printed out on the campus where he lectured once a week. It stoked her delicate sense of accomplishment that, although he was five years older than her, Mark had been attending school throughout their relationship and was only just now venturing into what she conceived of as the “real world,” where she had held court—or at least held down jobs—all these years. “Finally we’re both doctors,” she’d say to him with a one-sided smile like a fake nudge in the ribs.

And yet certain dynamics between them eluded her. Like that all this time, there’d been this other world, the intimate sphere of their relationship, in which she had been the one getting her papers graded.

Mark made every effort to bestow praise on Laura’s work, encouraging her to go forth boldly and gather collaborators for her drafts in the public forum, the marketplace of ideas, social media. “Sometimes it’s good to be pushy!” he would say. But neither of them was. Between them flowed acceptance, calm, and the unspoken expectation of a tomorrow. Also, on any given evening, about a mile and a half of foot traffic. They lived in separate studio apartments, two subway stops away from each other, which Mark insisted suited him fine.

He had asked to move in with her once, but that was years ago. Laura said it was for his sake as well as hers that they lived apart. Her habit of working late into the night might inconvenience him, leave him sleepless, or worse: whatever injury she inflicted upon him could one day be dumped by way of the transitive property onto his patients, whom she pictured as blank, hapless individuals standing in the streets, staring at the sky with enormous cow’s eyes, waiting for anvils to drop onto their heads. They were the ones disasters struck. She was the one who made every effort to forestall a bad result. She was careful with money and steadfast in her creative practice. The desk in which she kept her drafts was a wobbly wooden antique, a fully biodegradable item she’d acquired for next to nothing.

The actors with fresh cigarettes burning began to descend from their trailers, drawing closer to the set like a swarm of lightning bugs. The crew was keeping warm in a smoke shop. The scene would take place outside on the snow-covered street, as well as in a bar down the block. It would be a short film in color, “but it should feel black-and-white, like a paperback novel,” insisted the director, who typically shot fashion campaigns in studios and shifted uneasily in the real snow. Laura rolled her eyes from behind the foggy glass panel of the storefront window.

The idea the director had proposed to Laura, once they’d been put in touch by a photography student of his at Parsons for whom Laura had done a bit of writing, was to shoot the film from the vantage point of an inhuman and ubiquitous force. Something heaven-sent or heaven-bound, which he referred to as “fate.” It was Laura’s job to transform the director’s abstract vision into a storyline that audiences could digest. Not only to write the script, but to communicate its subtleties to the actors and ensure they didn’t get too creative with improvisations. But the director hadn’t been making any of this easy for her.

“A divine force caresses the mortal world,” he had told Laura over Zoom the previous month. (The plot concerned two young strangers who venture out on an awkward first date one snowy Brooklyn night.) He spoke slightly warped English with a mild Parisian accent.

“It’s on account of this divine force, this fate,” continued the director, “that I don’t film the faces of the two young people falling in love at all. I used to be obsessed with faces, but now I’m completely over them. Recently, at my day work, I was experimenting with asking the models to close their eyes or cover their faces with a visually arresting object, such as a vase of flowers or a lockbox. Of course, the clients all hate this. They say, ‘Pierre, please focus.’ They say, ‘The point is not to observe a beautiful young girl holding a pink grapefruit in front of her head, the point is to sell vegan-leather harnesses to wealthy twenty-year-olds.’ I am developing early-onset arthritis from clenching my fists all day. So I will make my own films. You see?”

The assistant approached Laura, holding a hot coffee between two mittens.

“No, thanks,” said Laura. “I’m one of those horrible tea drinkers.”

“Oh yeah, I heard about you guys on the news,” said the assistant. “Real sick individuals. But, no, this one’s mine.” The assistant wasn’t as compliant and bubbly as Laura had assumed moments earlier. In fact, her deadpan tone and lackadaisical manner were a lot like Laura’s.

“We’re a presumptuous lot, us tea drinkers, but helpful. Can I help you with something?”

“Just wanted to say hi. I’m Sophie. It’s my first time working with this director, and everyone else here.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s his first film,” said Laura, nodding at the director, who was smoking a cigarette while munching on a snowball. “And it could be a one-time thing, if you know what I mean.”

“Right, I gather. Anyway, he wouldn’t want me back—I screwed up his coffee order earlier.” Laura inwardly smirked at the characteristic self-doubt of a woman some eight years her junior.

“Nobody remembers a thing like that.”

“I’ll remember it,” Sophie shot back, unfazed by the hint of condescension, if she’d even picked up on it. “He asked for cold coffee. Cold, not iced. He said it should ‘retain the memory of having once been warm.’ ”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. I panicked and added two sugars. But, oh well. I hear he’ll be turning fifty soon.”

“Mon dieu. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. He’s creased, yet boyish.”

“Here I thought he was just vain. You’re Laura, right?”

“I am. Have we met?”

“That actor guy Dorian pointed you out,” said Sophie, not bothering to scan for him. “He said he doesn’t know anyone here either, except you. I realized talking to him that you and I have a friend in common.”

Laura highly doubted this. She had only a few friends and was a micro-generation older than this woman, which surely meant something in the real world.

“Terry McNaught,” said Sophie.

“Excuse me?”

“Terry McNaught.”

“Afraid I don’t know such a person.”

“I’m not wrong about this. You’re dating Psychiatrist Mark who lives on Halsey Street with the dog with the thyroid issue.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re close with Terry McNaught.”

“No.”

“Terry and I worked together on the student-debt-abolition campaign like a million years ago.”

“That’s cool. But I don’t know this person, so . . . let’s leave it,” Laura suggested, with faux kindness. “You’re mistaken.”

A conspiratorial comprehension dawned on Sophie’s pristine forehead. Laura did not like it one bit.

“Okay,” said Sophie. “It’s early in the relationship. I get it. I never open up about anything unless I feel like it. My family doesn’t even know I drink coffee.”

“And the only thing you know about me is that I drink tea. I’ve been with Mark for seven years. It’s this Terry McNaught character I know nothing about.”

That last comment seemed to send Sophie reeling. She leaned forward and the pace of her words quickened. Laura, absorbed by this sudden change, also bent closer. From a distance the two women in their big coats could almost be mistaken for a single, lurking animal. Then a gasp. And another.

In almost no time Sophie and Laura had managed to untie one knot, only to find a tighter and far more perplexing one at its center. It astounded Laura to learn that Mark was seeing another woman, whose name also happened to be Laura. The affair had been under way for at least two months.

Laura had never liked the way she looked. It had pained her to discover, in middle school, that she did not quite look like anyone else, though it was a pain she hardly registered since it was her conscious wish to be original in everything she did. At twenty-nine, a voyage through her Instagram suggestions would sometimes show her, on other women, her own eyes, nose, or skin tone. Less often her figure and hair. Once isolated, these attributes were difficult for her to picture in concert with one another. She was always flicking the incomplete image of herself away, as if too much dirt had settled here, now there.

This was the regular, self-reproachful state of affairs. But in the days following Sophie’s revelations she had discovered several new ways in which she did not recognize herself.

At first—feeling nothing, yet watching a wall of pain approach against which her psyche might splatter—Laura reasoned that it was necessary to discuss the affair with Mark at his and her earliest convenience. She could even indicate over text that their meeting was “urgent” or “urgent haha.” But then she found that she was incapable of sending such a text. She wanted only to run through the streets waving a flag behind her so white and senseless it blocked out the scenery, the sky.

She let the weekend go by without contacting him. Then, momentarily caught in the ladderlike lines of a crosswalk, she realized she had forgotten what Mark looked like, and the sound of his voice. It didn’t matter much, in any case. He was more of a cause than a person, some way of life that had mattered and sustained her, but was lost, or about to be. How rapidly the rising generation had imposed itself upon her! Yesterday she had been young. Then she was inside his apartment, standing in his doorway. “It’s eleven o’clock,” he said—his robe on, his feet bare.

“All right,” she said. “I can see how a thing like that would happen.”

“A thing like what? I’ve been texting you since Tuesday. I was worried.”

“And that makes it what day now?”

“It’s Wednesday,” said Mark. He was a man of average height with a little round belly and delicate snub nose. The bone structure in his face was all hidden and he smiled easily, which made him look trustworthy. His curly brown hair was thinning on top in the shape of a muddy footprint. None of which Laura could see clearly, because the apartment was dimly lit. Mark had been asleep.

“The day after Tuesday.”

“It’s almost Thursday.”

“But I didn’t come here to enumerate the days of the week, Mark. No. I have serious questions to ask you. Like: where’s the fucking fucking fucking fucking—”

Mark stared at her with his mouth open, as if he had been interrupted. But he hadn’t been interrupted. Perhaps, thought Laura, he meant to show her that she’d interrupted years of his life, that all this time he’d been standing around trying without success to yawn just once.

“Laura, what’s wrong?”

“I know what you know I know! And I feel like a petitioner standing in your doorway like this.”

“All right, yeah, come in. Take a seat.” They settled onto the lumpy gray sofa in the living-room portion of his studio apartment.

He began by telling her a story. At the hospital in the real world where Mark worked four days a week, the nurses had gone on strike. Hospital administrators had warned the staff against becoming discouraged or speaking with reporters at this challenging moment. They urged professional neutrality. Mark didn’t like to be reminded that sickness and death turned a profit. It made him feel ashamed. So when the reporter reached out, he responded. He was off the record, and the reporter wasn’t intrigued by what he had to say, since she’d heard it all before. But she listened. Her name was Terry McNaught. She told him, also off the record, that if he wanted to “plug” into “the movement,” perhaps in a way that wouldn’t put his new job in jeopardy, he could stop by a potluck her friend was organizing later that week. Terry wouldn’t be there, but she could place him on the email thread. Fifteen days later, he rose early to cook a vegetarian chili that traveled with him to the hospital in a little plastic pail that had once contained pickles. Later, it sat, cold and condensing, in his lap on the train to Bay Ridge. When he pushed open the door he felt transported back a decade, to a time when he and everyone he knew was minimally paid and proudly careless with their possessions. The dirty floor was barely visible beneath the immense clutter of half-broken furniture; utensils and cooking appliances were streaked with saucy refuse; and people were packed together, yelling as if there weren’t just two centimeters of void between them. The air was scented with garlic and nutritional yeast. And Laura was there.

“Too confusing,” interrupted Laura. “Refer to her as The Other Laura.”

Mark nodded, his expression difficult to make out. The Other Laura was organizing the tenants in her building, which was owned by a management company that shared its listed address with a local Burger King. She also worked as an assistant at a museum during the week and wrote poetry, which she read at bars that used Christmas lights liberally. She was excited to meet a psychiatrist. One of her friends—not at the party—was having a difficult time dealing with a host of phobias that included diseases, disease vectors, and potluck-type situations. Initially this was all they’d discussed. When he followed up with an email to The Other Laura, promising to suggest treatment options for the friend, he honestly hadn’t thought much of it—

“This isn’t working,” interrupted Laura again. “Still too confusing. And painful. Refer to her, please, as The Replicant.”

“The Replicant? Laura, I don’t really think—”

“Tonight you must do exactly as I say!” Laura had begun sweating lightly in the poorly insulated room.

It was only after he’d slept with The Replicant for the first time that he began to appreciate the novelty of the thing. Not the physical cheating—although that was new, too!—but caring for another person, and that way, being curious enough to see what would come next. That had never happened, not in seven years. It was clear he hadn’t gone out of his mind or his body, since it was his mind that kept thinking about her, and his body that wanted hers. She wanted him too, and unconditionally. She didn’t mind sharing. In the two months he’d known her, she’d never suggested that what they were doing was wrong or that there was a prescribed set of steps he needed to take. Meanwhile, nothing about his relationship with Laura had changed. They had continued to enjoy each other’s company, and he wasn’t so lonely now when they were apart, which was nearly all the time. In especially happy moments he had even believed Laura wouldn’t be bothered when she inevitably found out; maybe they were just naturally drifting toward an open relationship. She was an artist, after all. They had their own apartments, their own lives, and each other. Now they could invite others in, and be honest about it going forward, as he had not been, for which he was sorry—so very sorry.

“Like, maybe this is a step forward for us,” Mark said. “Ironically, the two of you—that is, The Replicant and yourself—would probably get along.”

“It’s not irony, Mark. It’s just a falsehood. Would you care to know how I feel about all this?”

Mark nodded vigorously. Laura inhaled. The words came to her just as she needed them.

“What I feel is that The Replicant has ruined my life. She invaded my home, took photographs of it, ransacked it, then built an entirely new home that looks exactly like my old one before it was destroyed. Pretty soon she’ll be charging admission and inviting our old friends by, plus all these new people, and getting rave write-ups in the local papers, which are read all over the world, with headlines so fawning they summarize the article for you. And now I have to live in this disgusting, destroyed, fallen world. I’m the human element in the pile of detritus nobody wants anymore. And none of it was up to me.”

Mark said nothing. He was always too accepting of her feelings. Why couldn’t he, just once, stand in her way, beg her not to leave, or at least tell her she was wrong?

“I bet you met her at a bar,” said Laura, finally.

“No—what? Should I give you her email? She can confirm what I’ve said. Why would I lie?”

“I can think of so many reasons why you would lie. To seem like a good guy, for instance.”

“Actually, I did just start doing some mutual-aid work, delivering medicine to neighbors and whatnot. Just, I mean, trying to be an open book about it all and—”

“Shut up, Mark.” Laura wiped her palms on her jeans.

“Okay Laura, sure, you got it. I’m so sorry again. I—”

Then Mark got up and she heard a whoosh like the sound of the tiniest window opening, only it was her boyfriend fumbling with the light switch and suddenly the room was the brightest thing she had ever seen. She had to shade her eyes with her hands and shut them tight.

As she reluctantly peeled open her eyes she saw Mark’s face covered in a fine film of tears, and she felt this couldn’t be him—that he, too, had been replaced. She had never seen his face this miserable before.

Sympathy, though, was out of the question. She despised The Replicant; that was all. And him, by association, for bringing The Replicant into her life.

“Original taste. It means it’s the same everywhere. No matter where you go, you get the delicious beverage you love. And that means what? That the advertising needs to be tar–ge–ted. It means that everywhere you go, you get the same ads you love—or whose quirky humor you approve of, or whose impossible images of success you yearn to live up to—but let’s just say love. It’s shorter. We all have different ideas of what love is, right? Different patterns of seeking, of wanting. But we know it when we taste it.”

The following afternoon, Laura’s boss, Mr. Crankel, was conducting a Zoom training for seven new permalancers. Laura and a couple other old-timers were “supervising,” by which was meant “blinking and smiling” and, if they had slept more than five hours, perhaps giving an occasional nod to the camera. Laura had not.

“Your job,” continued Mr. Crankel, “is to ferret out those differences, build those psychological profiles, locate their social networks. Brains in a jar chattering nonstop, narrowing their tastes and accumulating more of them all the time. We know this, they know this. We’re not fighting, we’re not tricking. Never trick! It says ‘original taste’ on the can, and that’s all we’re giving them. Just in their own words. Now, I don’t envy your task. I’m a manager—I want to solve every problem by delegating. But you’re imaginative—you’re writers. It’ll be easy for you. All right! Let’s open up this Hollywood Squares convention for questions. Anyone else remember that show Hollywood Squares? Just me?”

Bryan T. put a thumbs-up emoji in the chat.

“All right! Bryan T. knows what I’m talking about!”

Laura had heard Mr. Crankel’s spiel dozens of times before, but didn’t remember despising it this viscerally. She wondered how the Laura she had been, the Laura of a few days ago who had spent thousands of hours tinkering in her workshop of consumer egos like she was God of Selling Soda, had stomached it.

It must have given her a sense of well-being, she thought, to presume she could figure people out, entire groups of people, over the course of a project that never took longer than a few weeks to complete. She used to picture subway cars like those she occasionally took to meetings with Mr. Crankel at a café in Midtown that he liked because they always played Sting. The walls of the cars were covered with ads aimed at captivating a particular kind of person, and everyone on the train had the seed of that particular person somewhere inside themselves. It needed only a little water and soil to take root. They were a fascinating swirl of passions and organic materials, these strangers who rode the train through her mind. Twistable souls, sentient fizz.

This wasn’t creative work, and Laura never confused it with the pages she kept in her drawer. It was a living. Artists have to make do somehow. But really, thought Laura as she stared at her laptop into twenty hungry eyes, the advertisements had supplanted the words in the drawer. They had become the only words, all anyone ever saw. And she didn’t regret them. In fact, she had come to accept them, and more: she felt powerful in her indifference toward them, which was like a splinter of the divine indifference that offered people everywhere no choice but to submit to their fates.

“Bryan T., am I running this seminar, or are you? Just kidding! Don’t worry, I’ll only be taking up another forty-five minutes of your time, max. Let’s turn to page sixteen in the employee manual.”

Laura had skimmed the manual so many times it felt like something she herself had written, believing every word. She minimized the window in disgust and clicked over to an unsent email. It was intended for The Replicant. Or maybe for nobody; she hadn’t decided yet. The thought of sending it had kept her up all night. In the morning she had cut fifteen hundred peevish words down to an elegant, contemptuous five: “Let’s talk, Laura to Laura.”

On the one hand, she didn’t want to learn a single additional fact about The Replicant, and on the other, there was no denying her sudden, all-consuming presence in Laura’s mind. Not to mention the unraveling of her seven-year relationship, although she found it easy not to think of Mark. She was already in the habit.

She imagined the conversation she’d had with Sophie playing out for all eternity, the life she thought she was leading being continually, casually mistaken for another’s. Mark bragging about “Laura’s” accomplishments, saying things are going really well with Laura and I’ve never been happier. And his most tactless friend, Justin, the volelike fellow with the baseball-cap addiction, would ask, Whatever happened to that other Laura? Just another Laura. Was this her destiny? The fantasies felt nauseatingly real. They were violating, unacceptable, and all the more so because they did not explain the terror that occasioned them.

Her face on her computer screen, caught in the gaze of her webcam, was mercifully small, its eyes frozen in desperate concentration. Scanning the pages of an employee manual for dear life, one might assume. She was hitting send. It was done. But the unacceptable feeling only intensified. She recalled the existence of Pepsi, how bad it tasted when compared with the real thing.

A few days later, Laura awoke to the sound of her cell phone ringing. She could see on her phone screen that it was six in the morning. Still dark out. She’d been asleep for only a couple of hours and yet felt entirely ready to get up, continue on to the next thing. These days she wasn’t living her life so much as keeping vigil over it. She hardly rested. Ambient dread had raised her defenses against loneliness, sleep, memory, longing—only fixations penetrated, whatever kept her alert and moving. It was the director calling.

“Hello? Laura?” He sounded positively thrilled, as out of step with the hour as she was.

“Good morning!”

“I was going to leave you a message. What an unexpected pleasure it is to hear your voice! We’re surfing on the same wave, you know? I was just going over the final edit of our little film.”

“Ah, the little film. Tell me.”

“It’s beautiful, Laura. Just ten minutes long, but your dialogue is so radical, so real. When we pan to the pattern of the tablecloth and the wineglasses moving swiftly over it as the narrator gives five dictionary definitions of ego death? That destroyed my mind.”

“Pierre, merci beaucoup. I’m touched.”

She was sitting on an email from The Replicant, who had responded within an hour of Laura’s reaching out. This haste seemed somehow shameless.

“A new idea came to me in the middle of the night. It is my greatest passion and I am quite eager to share it with you, Laura. Can you come over sometime?”

“How about now?” said Laura. She felt that were she to linger in bed a moment longer she might wind up staying there all day, glued to a hypnotic sense of disbelief in her own life.

The director lived in a narrow L-shaped apartment in the Village with floor-to-ceiling mirrors on three walls. No windows in the living room, very clean, with black leather furniture and ficus plants that were louche and aquatic beneath soft sprays of track lighting. On the walls—a mix of exposed brick and stucco—hung what appeared to be large, blurry photographs of coiled galaxies, although they might have been platters of recreational drugs served up on vinyl; there was no way to know. The atmosphere was charming, crass, and rather technical.

Pierre greeted Laura wearing black pants and a loosely draped button-down printed with Le Monde headlines. “Please keep your shoes on,” he said. “Unless it is your preference to take them off. For my part, it is my preference to sweep.”

She gave him her coat to hang in a closet. He returned carrying what looked to be a pair of black mourning veils. “If you’d like,” he said, “we could wear these veils. It is actually something very cheap you can buy at any mall. You put them on like headbands. They are part of my experiments with face blindness.” Laura thought, Could I sue him for this?

They sat in the breakfast nook, she on the leather love seat, he on a leather folding chair. Laura found herself wondering what sort of sporting event one would bring such a chair to. Open-air competitive body piercing, perhaps. She gazed into the mirror behind the director and could hardly make out the slopes and planes of her countenance beneath the black web of cheap netting. For the first time in years she did not immediately avert her gaze. The reflection satisfied her. On the other side of the window, the sky was turning a violent red.

“Please excuse my sloppy shirt and bag eyes. I have already been up for hours arguing with my colleagues, friends, and cousins. The Parisians awake while we remain sleeping, and I like to get right to it.”

“What do you argue about?” asked Laura, hoping not to find out.

“It’s not what that matters, but why. I think we are too similar, too familiar. Same field, same age, same family. I’m like everyone else in my generation. We work hard, nurture our delusions, we are aesthetes, we want to be excellent, but we can’t come together. And I am the same! I don’t want to join in with them. Just like them, I’d rather compare myself to something outside—to the millennials, for instance, who entrance and repulse me. Not you, Laura, I’m speaking broadly. I think that what I am trying to say is something like this: I am obsessed with alienating myself from people!”

“Is that why you make movies?”

“For me, film goes both ways. I devise my vision of alienation, and it brings me into contact with other people, many of whom I enjoy very much.”

“Ah, well, in that case: What was the idea you wanted to talk about?”

“What I propose is a feature film based on the myth of Baucis and Philemon. Has this ever been done? I think that possibly, unbelievably, it has not! And now, what Godard did for the Odyssey, what Sciamma did for Eurydice, I want to do for these two old people who did not recognize the gods when they showed up at their door, but welcomed them in anyway. I want to uncover new dimensions, place the story in a new context, create new psychologies. Of course, we all know what happens to Baucis and Philemon, and the lesson we’re supposed to learn, every schoolchild knows.”

“They, like, burn to death, right? In a fire?”

“Laura, Laura—no. All their neighbors die in a flood devised by the gods who are disappointed in them and, frankly, a bit insecure. But Baucis and Philemon get turned into trees. Why? Actually, that’s my first agenda item.” The director retrieved a miniature notepad from his shirt pocket and began turning the pages with his right pinky.

“What is?”

“I have it here written down: item one. discuss with laura: why trees?”

Laura had pulled up Ovid’s Metamorphoses on her phone, finding that the veil obscured her vision less when she stared up close at an object that generated its own light. “It says here,” she said, “paraphrasing—that Baucis and Philemon were a poor, elderly couple, and yet when the gods Jupiter and Mercury showed up at their door disguised as beggars, they lavished them with all the hospitality they could muster. The gods revealed themselves to the couple and led them to a hill, where they watched their neighbors, who had all shut their doors against the strangers, drown. Baucis and Philemon were rewarded with a temple in place of their former modest dwelling. It says that the gods let them ask for anything they wanted and what they wanted was to tend to the temple and to die at the same hour. So when death eventually came for them, the gods decided—um, for some reason—to turn them into trees. A linden and an oak. Sounds like a bargain for the gods.”

“When you command such inordinate power, you get everything at a bargain. Isn’t that the way of the world? Whereas the people of the country paid dearly for their moment of selfishness. The gods went disguised as strangers, as supplicants, yes, but then they went on a murderous rampage!”

“I’d like to be a tree. Plenty of sunlight, wind on my face,” mused Laura as she adjusted her veil. “No bank account, no more struggling along.”

“Nihilism. That’s one option! I think, though, that you don’t become a tree because you’re tired of living.”

“No?” she said, disappointed.

“Laura,” he said, with a hint of concern, “I feel certain that people do not become trees by waiting around to become trees. But why trees in the first place? I don’t have the answer.”

Laura shrugged, frustrated, yet she maintained the confidence of one who cannot be seen sweating lightly from the forehead. “Maybe a warning,” she said after a while.

“Meaning?”

“For the Romans. So that whenever they leave their—erm—temples, or wherever they lived—”

“Houses, Laura, my god.”

“Whenever they leave their houses and see trees they’ll be reminded of the story, its lesson.”

“Which is?”

“To welcome the stranger, right? Or else obliterate country, kin, and yourself.”

“Okay, interesting. That is not what I was thinking at all. My inclinations were far more agricultural. Now I am seeing the story in a whole new light! So what do you say? Do you want to work with me on this? It will take six months to a year to fundraise and meanwhile we can continue these discussions on a regular basis. All of them generously compensated by me, of course.”

This time Laura did not hesitate. “For sure. I can see myself devoting a lot of energy to this.”

Over the following weeks, several of Laura and Mark’s mutual friends began to realize something was up. And who or what had tipped them off? Possibly it was Laura, operating on a minimum of sleep and crossing one bridge too many to attend several casual weekend gatherings in a state of mean intoxication, telling anyone who would listen that there was someone running around the city with her exact same life.

If it wasn’t Laura who tipped them off (which it totally was, and loudly), then Mark strolling into the party with a small white-haired woman on his arm did. Either way, such bold-faced confirmation left no room for doubt, which was somehow also the exact amount of room required to encourage endless speculation among this information-saturated and intimacy-starved social set.

Laura thought at first that The Replicant didn’t look her age, which Mark had told her in a polite and infuriatingly long email she did not respond to was twenty-five. At that moment, drinking in the face and body of this woman with burning eyes, Laura chastised herself for failing to stalk her on the internet, find out everything about her, and build one of those psychological profiles she’d once prided herself on. It hadn’t occurred to her to do so. She’d trapped her firmly within the confines of a brief email correspondence. The Replicant had represented to her a blank, and—since she equated youth with beauty and beauty with her own perceived lack of it—a taunting, youthful blank. But this woman wasn’t particularly beautiful; the hue of her hair wasn’t indicative of youth—it gave her an ageless, elvish quality. And she was unguarded, neat, like a gleaming set of tools that might repair, adjust, and take the measure of you.

Mark’s eyes teemed with feelings of tenderness that fled the moment he caught sight of Laura. She felt for the arm of a couch that wasn’t there and stumbled a little. He made no move to assist her—not because he didn’t want to; he couldn’t. After little more than two weeks of his copious messages and her silence, he was stunned to discover that he was already unlearning her, that he couldn’t intuit in a given moment what she wanted from him. That vivid sense of service had been his reason for staying. He had been able to give her what she wanted without knowing where the desires came from or how he recognized them. Laura had always said that wanting was better than needing, because it was a product of the imagination and the driver of all ingenuity, artistic or otherwise. But why did that make it superior to needing? Mark wanted to know. The mind inventing things to want, chasing them, letting them become elusive, like a kitten playing with a piece of string—this was all familiar to him; in fact, it was shop talk. It seemed harmless enough on the surface. Yet a life guided by this precept flashed by in moments of critical distraction and disintegration. The rind, the integument, but never the soft, vital substance they protected. He needed things he had not even begun to want.

Laura had steadied her body but not her vision, which seemed to swing just above her head like a chandelier. “Oh no,” she said. “I’m way drunk for what’s happening here.”

“We can go,” said Mark. “There was a miscommunication. I couldn’t get in touch with you. I was worried but I understood why you wouldn’t—I understand—”

“Cease and desist your ‘understand.’ I am the person who’s been left, so I am the person who understands! You should understand less!”

“I have a feeling I’m about to.”

“You are right! As right as rain when it rains for years—no, days—and I just want to say that I’m good good good. Don’t worry, just cause you see me, and I’m falling down, don’t worry, cause I’m allll about trees now. I’ve been reading about the gods. That’s right—the gods. They’re gonna come down from heaven and be quite disappointed in you, Mark. The gods will be like, What a fucking joke Mark is, laughing at you in your temple where my house used to be. What I’m saying is I got a new job, it’s great, I’m fine, and—hmm—I need to speak with your representative.”

“Laura, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The other partygoers had begun to give the quarrelers a wide berth, as if to grant respect and privacy in this difficult time—although really, what they created with their lowered voices and oblique stances was a stage.

“I need to speak with your Replicant.”

“Please don’t call her that. It’s not her name. She won’t respond to it.”

“Hi,” said The Replicant, extending an arm and a hand toward Laura. “It’s so good to meet you!”

“What,” said Laura. “You’re kidding.”

“No, really, I think we should talk like you suggested! Sorry if I wasn’t clear about that in my email.”

“You were clear!”

“There’s no time limit on this. If you want to get to know me, if you’re curious, you know where to find me.” Laura felt The Replicant’s words being drilled into her skull.

“Because of you I make no sense!”

Here Justin, volelike, butted in with his trademark forced laughter. “Kinda think it’s the whiskey, Laura.”

“I’m preaching the gospel of existentialism, Justin. I’m being uprooted, that-a-one over there is living in my temple. It’s all in the Bible.”

“What’s all this about the temple?” asked Mark. “And the—the trees, was it?”

“Sorry, it’s in the Meadowmorphoses, is what I meant to say,” said Laura. “My bad. Does anyone know—okay—does anyone know whether Ovid had a last name? Or was Ovid his last name?”

“I think it was just Ovid,” said Mark’s white-haired date.

“The way you’re just The Replicant,” shot back Laura.

“No, my name is Laura.”

“And my name is Laura.”

“And your name is Laura. It’s a popular name.”

“And Mark’s a popular guy,” said Laura, aiming once again to pierce the wobbling night with a clear blow against her alarmingly sober enemy.

“Not really.”

“No, you’re right about that,” said Laura, growing contemplative. “He doesn’t have the people skills. But then, I never did either. Clearly. I need to be sleeping in a bed now. Where can I find you when I’m conscious again?”

“Hmm?”

“You said—Laura, you said, ‘You know where to find me.’ ”

“I do administrative work at the natural history museum Sunday through Thursday. Just drop by, I can pretty much always take a break. Come tomorrow. I literally have nothing going on.”

“You work at the natural history museum?” said Laura, as if every word were a hurdle she was taking her sweet time stepping over. “The American Museum of Natural History?”

No more than sixteen hours later, Laura found herself staring up at the massive stone steps of the museum. She’d taken a cab home, slept, absorbed five alcoholic beverages into the fabric of her being, eaten a soft pretzel, and drunk a Snapple purchased from a street vendor. Laura called the woman (she was trying to be charitable and phase out addressing her as The Replicant), who was only too free, but was around the corner at the planetarium. “It’s a lot brighter over here,” the woman advised cheerfully. Much of the building was made of glass and the sun poured through it. “Good for the days that arrive after long nights.” Sure, thought Laura, if you want your head to explode.

They met along the perimeter of the Big Bang exhibit. A single-file line of visitors was making its way through it at an excruciating pace. Billions of years flew by with each step, and they didn’t want to miss anything.

“I see you don’t work in the sharks department,” said Laura. “Too bad.”

“Pardon?”

“There were all these pamphlets and signs in the main lobby for the museum’s special exhibit on sharks. Their slogan was ‘to be great is to be misunderstood.’ Pretty compelling, given the subject matter.”

“Oh yeah, you write ad copy, don’t you?”

“I do. It’s not my true calling to stand back and admire the handiwork of museum signage, but it’s a living. I swim with the sharks.”

The woman took a step toward Laura, who was squinting into the sun.

“I’m more interested in your kind, to be honest.”

They went through an unmarked door into a looping administrative corridor that contained nothing but filing cabinets and vending machines. Laura soberly examined this woman whose existence had so rudely ripped her from slumber for many a night. As they continued their small talk, Laura noticed that the woman had a way with people that was frank and intuitive. It was a bedside manner for the wide awake, or whoever had need of it. This woman was nothing like Laura. Nonetheless, Laura was on guard for the essential thing they surely must share, whatever it was that compelled the woman to follow in her footsteps, to covet and then co-opt her life.

“I don’t want to give up Mark,” blurted Laura, suddenly, but not passionately.

“I don’t want you to, Laura. I’ve never wanted that.” The woman was very cool, but not inert. This seemed to be the conversation she most wished to have.

“I want you to give him up, though.”

“I see. It causes you pain that I’m—”

“It doesn’t cause me pain,” interrupted Laura.

“All right. Well. I’m not giving him up,” said the woman.

“But I was there first!”

“You weren’t first. We’re adults. It’s too late for that. But okay, by your logic, the holy sequence of events, maybe I’m second. Or maybe you are. Maybe time is running backward!” the woman proclaimed with an insolent flourish. Laura thought spending too much time around the Big Bang exhibit was detrimental to a hardening twenty-five-year-old brain.

“You’d have to be nuts to think that.”

“Let’s just refrain from talking about the hard knocks of life and who has a right to love whom as if we’re all standing in one long cosmic line, is all I’m saying.”

“Fine, have it your way. But I do love Mark.”

“Okay! So talk to Mark about Mark. He says you don’t call and he’s worried about you. He’s worried about you going through life without the shearling slippers you left at his place and, frankly, he’s worried about you wandering the streets in no shoes at all. Laura, I don’t know you well, but sometimes it’s as if I’m dating your mother.”

“I wear shoes! Tell him I wear shoes, the kind that can stand up to city streets and snow.”

“Tell him yourself!”

“Okay,” said Laura, slumping down into one of the chairs. “Okay.” The woman had been seated for some time.

“I read a poem of yours this afternoon,” said Laura. “I went online and looked you up.”

“Which one?”

“It was called ‘Human Head in Fishbowl.’ ”

“What did you think?”

“The title was misleading. I also heard you do some activism? In your apartment?”

“On Earth we call it ‘tenant organizing.’ ”

“Well, a conference room in the planetarium feels like neutral ground.”

“Between what and what?”

“Between Earth and, you know,” Laura gestured widely with her hands, “the big mystery of it all. The omega. The Bang. The infinite something above and below our heads that’s taking forever to curl up into nothingness.”

“And here I thought you were just mocking me.”

“Well. I sort of was. Sorry.” It dawned on Laura that she really was sorry. She was growing fond of this woman. Her persistence, her consoling streak, her argumentative streak. Perhaps one day, months or years from now, the woman’s existence would cease to torment her. “Actually,” Laura found herself saying, “I think I admire what you do. In theory, at least. I’d like to do something like that myself someday.”

Laura wasn’t sure if she meant it, but it seemed to give the woman a certain license. She spoke earnestly to Laura about her life for a long time. Her despondency, her credulities, her joys. There was no wonderful slogan, perfectly articulated platform, or sense of righteousness held on to firmly enough that would bring about the world she wanted. But here was this world and, somehow, she was trying to catch its eye, to hold its gaze a little longer each time. Belief, she’d decided, was what she was after, to believe in as much of the world as she could. Mark’s trusting smile, the senselessness of fate, the drift of the stars, and the price of love.

Six months passed, then a year. The director had raised the necessary funds and was several weeks into a new health regime that prohibited all exercise yet demanded that he remain standing for as much of the day as possible. This required incredible amounts of cold coffee. He was walking, talking stimulant soup, and looked better than ever. “The secret is my own blood,” he liked to blurt out. “These days it mostly pools in my legs and feet, but nobody can tell!”

The first day of filming was the high point of this creative venture, which, while not exactly arduous, had, up until then, taken many confounding turns. Laura, never wavering in her commitment to follow the director through his labyrinthine process, still privately considered a few of his sharp turns to have been inadvisable. At the top of her list were the two months they had wasted trying to adapt Baucis and Philemon into a movie musical. There was to be a magnificent number with the townspeople in matching spandex outfits bitchily slamming their doors in unison to an ever-swelling melody.

The angle they’d settled on was much more achievable in terms of budget and scale, and a better match for Laura’s own writerly sensibility. It would be a modern interpretation, no music. Baucis and Philemon are living off Social Security in an illegal basement apartment in Sunnyside, Queens. Philemon was laid off six months ago from the local paper where he had worked for fifty years as a city hall reporter, during which time Baucis cultivated herself as an eccentric—first fortune-telling, then designing wearable art, then straight-up hoarding. There isn’t a takeout box or magazine that passes through her doorway that she doesn’t try to repurpose as a belt or a hat. The ceiling leaks. The rent is impossible to scrape together, but so are thoughts of leaving. They’re content with each other and at the same time unutterably lonely, since nobody, not even the delivery workers, not even the women with faces like fresh produce who canvass for the city comptroller, can bear to cross their threshold.

Baucis is hard at work crafting a small, companionable dog out of a week’s worth of amNewYorks when two miserable-looking individuals dressed in togas knock on the door and ask if they can come in for a bit of a lie-down. So far, these two troublesome and filthy strangers haven’t found any takers, but Baucis and Philemon welcome them in, no questions asked. Later, after the rest of the city’s inhabitants have been wiped out by a colossal storm, Baucis and Philemon issue their requests to the gods and are granted, first, a floor-through loft in Chinatown. Their lives become incredibly chic! But there’s no one left in the city for them to share their good fortune with. Occasionally the gods stop by, blast some ABBA, go on elysian benders that leave no residue of human suffering, and complain about their terrible kids, who are going to live forever.

In the film’s final scene, Baucis and Philemon undergo their ultimate transformation. Philemon is reading an Alberto Moravia novel while Baucis pours them two bowls of Grape-Nuts—courtesy of the gods—for breakfast. She tries shuffling to the fridge for dairy-free milk and almost falls over. Her feet are rooted to the ground. Philemon, his back to her, is frantically knocking over tables and chairs as his legs turn to wood. The change takes hold rather slowly, allowing time for physical comedy and dialogue.

“I am a pious woman,” wails Baucis. “I always try to have faith. But oh, that it has come to this! To see every neighbor washed away, and have nobody to invite over to our gorgeous apartment—and then, on top of that, to be turned into trees! Philemon! You’re eerily quiet—are you even listening? Don’t you have anything to say?”

“I’m shrugging,” says Philemon.

“And if a tree should shrug in the forest?”

“What forest? We’re downtown.”

“I wish I could see your face.”

“Eh, I’m glad you can’t. It would be too much for me just now.”

“But there is no later. Oh, Philemon! Just answer me this. Why is this happening to us?”

“We asked to die at the same time. In retrospect, I might have amended that request, but the gods probably thought they were giving us a real treat. They’re a lot older than us, you know. I wouldn’t put it past them to have outmoded concepts about what people are into these days.”

It went on like that for a while, with sulky French camerawork and Borscht Belt delivery. The director had rehired that same young woman, Sophie, to handle the coffee and lunch orders. She was running every which way, blowing on his coffee and wielding a clipboard. Laura respected her near-athletic ability to feign having a lot on her plate at any given moment.

After work, she and Sophie went to a nearby dive bar. It was mobbed with Christmas lights; Laura wondered how often they held poetry readings. The laminated menu taped to the wall was stocked with the usual cheap alcoholic concoctions, plus the occasional witticism and curiosity. They each got a Helen’s Face. It was pineapple something.

Sophie hadn’t changed much, or at least the first impression she’d made had yet to dissipate. The red hair and deadpan delivery. Her presence here in this bar, a facsimile of every bar Laura had frequented in her twenties, served as a portal back to a period Laura could remember but no longer touch; the scenery was familiarly arranged, but the dreams, sensations, and illusions had vanished. She no longer looked at this woman and imagined what she herself had been and might become. Instead, Laura saw a woman, a relative stranger, whose flagrant presumptions had unwittingly changed the course of her own life, or perhaps only hastened that change. And she saw that whatever she, Laura, would become next was anyone’s guess.

For now, she was tired. Going weeks without talking to anyone who wasn’t her boss, returning from marathon brainstorming sessions to the modest apartment that never accommodated visitors, and collapsing at the end of the day from the work she threw herself into with frantic diligence and tempered bitterness. She’d taken the works in progress out of her desk and placed them on the floor of her closet to be trampled on by empty shoes. It was obvious to her now that someone else had written them. Meanwhile, she was working more hours than ever for the ad agency and the director.

Sophie grimaced at the sweetness of the drink, then sucked it all down. “Something else next, yes?”

The conversation felt carefree despite the lack of intimacy between them—like a cold reading of a script that sends the actors into fits of giggles. Laura even managed, without much effort, to ask Sophie if she’d seen Mark and his girlfriend around.

“Other Laura?” said Sophie, kindly. “They’re not really in my crowd, more adjacent to it. Yes, I saw them, but only once.”

“I haven’t seen him in almost a year. Either of them.”

“Does that mean you met her?”

“Once or twice. When I first found out. Where did you see them? How did they seem?”

“Like two assholes in love. We were in the woods, so that was probably enhancing the effect. People suffering extreme emotional states can so easily fly under the radar in this city, don’t you find?”

“I’m living proof of it! Perhaps I should pour myself out into a glen someday. But how did you come to discover them in the woods?”

“A retreat of sorts. It was organized by this collective I’m a part of and so are they. I hadn’t realized Mark joined until I saw him there. The group is decentralized, totally offline. I’m sure there are more of us in this city than anywhere else, but the larger East Coast meetings happen upstate. It’s funny—you show up and half the attendees are brushing phantom ticks off their fitted tees and the other half come prepared not merely to pass the night in the great outdoors but for Armageddon itself. Everyone wears black, regardless.”

Laura laughed, carried away by the strangeness of this world Sophie was building, picturing her ex-boyfriend, who’d once read The Atlantic with genuine concern, sitting in a mud patch plotting the revolution. “Somehow I can’t imagine you in that situation,” she said.

“What, in a fitted tee?”

“Huddled around a campfire planning subversive pipeline demolitions.”

“Oh no—it’s nothing like that! We don’t discuss major actions at chapter meetings. The retreats are more like group therapy.” Sophie pushed her four inches of ice to the corner of the table. “And now you’re awfully quiet. May I ask what you’re thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” said Laura, majorly tipsy, “I’m thinking it would be easy for me to despise your Luddite, hippie ways—”

Sophie cut in: “We’re not hippies. That’s an important distinction and I must insist upon it. That would be like calling Lou Reed a hippie.”

“My mistake, my mistake. You’re in the In Dreams Begin Responsibilities crowd—I get it. And on the one hand, it is easy for me to dismiss you. But on the other—and I mean this—it all sounds far too clandestine and exciting for you to be telling me about it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because my life is boring. It’s sad. I’m closed up tight, in the extreme.”

“Is that true?”

“Yeah, it is. What do the Marxists have to say about boredom and sadness?”

“Well, for starters, they agree on very little. In an ideal world, the one we’re all trying to bring about, probably none of us would have ever met one another in the first place. Who needs the headache?”

“I think I may be living in that world,” said Laura. “Hence the boredom.”

“Somehow I think we’re living in the same world,” said Sophie. “Hence the sadness.” Suddenly Sophie dropped her pensive expression. “I just remembered I have something incredible to tell you!”

“What is it?”

“Baucis and Philemon are hooking up!”

“What?” exclaimed Laura, then, bashful yet with boundless hope, added, “Is it—is it because they’re married?”

“No. Remember they introduced themselves to each other on set today? I dashed into the supply closet earlier—during that long break when Pierre announced he was going out to eat a donut ‘experimentally’—I was searching for coffee lids, and it turned out to be a pretty weird closet. It branched into a back stairwell, and I could hear moans coming from around the corner. Then whispering, and what I can only describe as rustling. They’d removed their arm branches and were embracing freely, hands-down-pants and everything. But they still had their enormous head canopies on, which forced them to get creative with the angles. In full costume and makeup. It was beautiful! To see them twisting around each other, sighing heavily, laughing. You could tell they thought it was hilarious, even through all that sexual energy. It was like the only living trees in the world had found each other. It was fate!”

These last words stayed with Laura long after she and the other patrons had vanished one by one and the bar had closed for the evening. On the train home: “It was fate!” Putting away the late-night salsa and chips: “Fate!”

Alone in bed, she felt a long way from anyone else’s romance, anyone’s fate. Sleep eluded her. Recently, she’d taken to prefacing stories about her recent past with “when I was young,” in preparation for turning thirty-one. It was a cruelty to herself, she knew that. But it was so hard to answer any of her own questions, and sometimes it felt better to believe the best of life was over, a belief no story about lusty seventy-year-olds licking green dye off each other’s bodies could dislodge. Why find someone? Why lose them? Why does this pain last so long? Why this embrace and not that one? Why go on? Why fall in love with the world? Or just one person? Why die? Why change?

The apartment felt dreadfully small. From her bed, she could see nearly all of it without turning her head. On her desk were the supplies laid out for her next day of work. Behind the closet door lay her old ambitions, entombed. In the kitchen a modest window framed an assembly of stars anyone could see and invent stories about, beginning with their names.