From Girl, 1983, which will be published next month by W. W. Norton. Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken.

There was a student I’ll call John. We went to the same high school for a while, but he’s not pictured in the yearbook. I leaf through its pages, looking specifically for this boy, but there’s no trace of him. I talked to him only once, in the cafeteria. By then more than a year had passed since I had come back from Paris, more than a year since K called on the telephone asking me to come over, more than a year since I ran into Claude one last time at K’s studio, and exactly a year since Eirik came to New York and left abruptly a few days later.

The spring semester of 1984 was my last before starting university. Whenever I went to school, a little more often than the year before, everyone was always talking about John, who seemed to have disappeared so suddenly from the face of the earth. Talked about him in the hallway, talked about him in the classroom, before the teacher arrived. Hushed voices, a constant murmur. I remember thick, dark strands of hair falling into his eyes, his long, lean dancer arms, his upright, elegant posture. I remember that time in the cafeteria, before he was gone, when he carefully rolled out a poster he’d just bought at a dancewear store near Lincoln Center. He couldn’t wait to show me. Show someone—I just happened to be there.

Be careful, he said, we mustn’t spill anything on it!

He laid the poster, now unfurled, on the table.

It was late afternoon; the cafeteria had emptied and was about to close. We’d bought blueberry muffins and black coffee, and he was determined to protect his newly purchased treasure from greasy finger marks and coffee stains.

The poster showed the dancer Judith Jamison, white-clad, performing Cry, choreographed for her some years earlier by Alvin Ailey. Not many can pull it off, John said, because this piece is one of the hardest things the female body can perform. I saw her onstage, he continued, and couldn’t breathe afterward. Have you ever, he asked, have you ever experienced. . . ?

And then he went quiet, looking at the poster, gesturing for me to look at it too and to never take my eyes off it.

Judith Jamison is the reason I came to New York and became a dancer, he declared after a little while. All I have to do is close my eyes and imagine her in her white ruffled dress to evoke her courage . . . courage is the right word . . . the courage of her movements. And then, after a pause: So even though Cry is a work dedicated to the plight of women, I always thought, growing up in Philadelphia, that it spoke directly tome, even though, you know, I’m a guy.

The reason I remember this scene in the school cafeteria is that the exact same poster—the one of Judith Jamison—hangs on the wall in the narrow hall of the apartment I share with my husband, our daughter Eva, and the old dog. It hangs opposite another poster, left to me by my father, of Pina Bausch—she too entirely in white.

Judith Jamison saved my life, John said. I mean, when I was a kid.

We’re still just kids, I said.

What world are you living in? he said.

You’re seventeen, right?

I’m sixteen. We haven’t been kids since we were twelve.

But how did she save your life?

She’s so fucking alive, so full of possibility, I look at her and I’m possible, too.

And then he asked me where I felt most at home, in Oslo or New York.

I’m not sure, I said.

What language do you dream in?

I’m not really sure about that either.

The language you dream in is where you belong, he said.

He rummaged in his duffel bag, took out his warm-up pants and placed them on the table, then his jock, his ballet shoes, his leotard, his tights, his socks, his resistance bands, his water bottle, foot roller, massage ball, can of hair spray, and finally his sweatshirt, before finally finding what he was looking for: another picture, this one silver-framed, of a big white dog.

He’s bigger than the apartment I live in here, he said. You can’t have a dog in New York. At least not this one.

We stood for a moment in silence considering the dog in the photograph.

My dog’s as big as a tree, he said, and gestured to suggest a forest of white birch.

And then he was gone. Perhaps that’s why I remember him. Not because of the poster, but because he went missing. First everyone blamed it on the kissing disease. March–April–May 1984. Mono was the reason he didn’t come back to school. Then it was pneumonia. And then someone suggested that he’d probably gone back to Philadelphia. As May became June, I overheard the school librarian say to one of the teachers that John had AIDS. So now it begins, she said, her voice almost inaudible, and it never ends.