LENA

It started with a photograph.

Not the photographer's photograph, not the one that had arrived through Dana Fitch with its long-lens distance and its weaponized framing. A different one. An old one. A photograph in a frame on the third shelf of the study bookcase that I had been looking at, in the peripheral and unexamined way I had been looking at many things in this apartment for four months, since approximately the second week of October when I had understood that I was going to be spending a significant amount of time in these rooms and had begun, without deciding to, to learn them.

I had learned to...