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I selfishly want my mother to live. Not because I believe in life or in existence or we should be here as longer than we have to. But rather, I want her to live because there is so much I want to do for my mother. I want to accumulate all the wealth I can so I can give my mother the lighthearted, blithe, debt-free life she deserves.

As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do—I think it’s fair to say—is take that limited pallet of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways. Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement.

However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.

“Did you know that? The two of us are nothing more than someone else’s shadows.”

What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might—there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.

I was no longer a seventeen-year-old boy. Back then, I had all the time in the world. But not now. The time I have now, and the ways I can use it, have become so limited. What I sought now was the gentle warmth that lay inside, beneath her defensive wall. And the rhythmic beat of the heart that lay pulsing beneath. At this point was I asking for too little? Or too much?

In my forty-some years, was this the true state of affairs of my life until now? What was the starting point, and where did the destination lie—if indeed there was one? The more I thought about it, the less sure I was. At a loss was more the right expression.

“I’m used to waiting,” I’d told her. But was I, really? My breath hung there in the air like a white, hard question mark. Was I used to waiting, or was it that I just wasn’t given an alternative? And what is it I have been waiting for all this time? Did I really grasp what it was I was waiting for? Was I simply patiently waiting for it to become clear what I was waiting for?

“True. But I think that although that way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for García Márquez himself it’s just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them.”

“In [Marquez’s] stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one,” she said. “Like that’s an entirely ordinary, everyday thing.” “People often call that magical realism,” I said.

My first thought was that we were having a massive earthquake. But it was no earthquake. The shaking was coming from inside me. The shaking inside me was merely projected in the external world. I rested my elbows on the desk, covered my face with my hands, and closed my eyes. I slowly counted to myself, patiently waiting for the illusion to pass.

I had a vague memory of having seen this cabin. I’d been here before . . . but when and where I couldn’t recall. An overpowering sense of déjà vu hazily numbed my entire body, as if some unseen foreign object had infiltrated the blood coursing through me.

“I think the wall surrounding the town is the consciousness that creates you as a person. Which is why the wall can freely change shape apart from any personal intentions. A person’s consciousness is the same as a glacier, with only a fraction of it showing above the water. Most of it is hidden, unseen, sunk in a dark place.”

“Sometimes. I’m just a beginner at living alone.”

That’s not something now. Not something that’s from this place here. It’s something that’s already lost, already disappeared somewhere. I was just arbitrarily overlapping two separate images, from different times and different places. Not exactly the right thing to do.

“When I drink wine, I always wind up wanting to hear what other people say.” She chuckled. “Though you don’t say much about yourself, do you.”

Time seemed all jumbled together inside me. The tips of two different worlds were overlapping, ever so slightly. Much like the mouth of a river at high tide when the seawater and river water flow up and down, back and forth, and mix together.

“So you liked solitude from way back then?” “I don’t think anyone likes solitude. Anywhere, I think,” I said. “Everyone’s looking for something, for someone. The way they do, though, is a little different.”

“While I was living there, I went to that library every day and read those old dreams. I don’t recall how many of them I read. But the number wasn’t important, since the number of old dreams was nearly infinite.”

All of that gave me what you might call a metaphysical, strangely muted sadness, a little different from losing someone alive. There was no pain in this loss, just pure sorrow. The thought of a deeper state of death made me feel, even more closely, the certain presence of nothingness. So close that if I reached out, I could almost touch it.

nothingness, never to return to the earth again. A sorrowful thought. Like suddenly losing a dear friend to an accident. But from the first time I met him, he was already someone not of this world. A dead person, in short. If his soul were to (once again) vanish forever, didn’t this just mean that a person who was already dead goes on to an deeper state of death?

The face of this man who was a consciousness with a temporary body.

I gazed into her eyes. Like searching the depths of a clear mountain spring. And I said, “You’re not her. I know that. The you who lives here doesn’t dream, and doesn’t love anyone.”

Which world should I belong to? I couldn’t decide.

The tiniest parts of the mind that can’t be removed, like seeds, remain, and quietly grow inside the shadows. So the town finds them, collects them, and seals them inside special containers.”

“While people are still young here, the body and the shadow are ripped apart. And then the body is exiled outside the wall as something superfluous, something harmful. So the shadows can live peacefully. But even if the body is banished, its influence doesn’t totally disappear.

“Echoes of the mind?”

“I think old dreams are like echoes of the minds left behind by real people, people who’ve been banished from the town in order for it to exist. Real people are driven out, but it’s never completely perfect, there’s always something left behind. Those remnants of the mind are gathered together and tightly locked away in special receptacles called old dreams.”

“My shadow seems to be dying,”

DAY AFTER DAY I read old dreams in the back of the library.