It goes on being very quiet. This is what the pieces of paper buy.

This was the thought: that it would not be necessary to make phone calls for a very long time.

I stacked up the notes again. There was bewilderment and joy. Dust floated in a beam of light. I had tried so many sentences on the kinship system, and received so many sentences in return—if there were sentences that would extract cheques or even duly completed forms from the system, I had failed to find them. But here was a transaction I had managed. I had replied to each sentence with a sentence, and the sentences had brought us to a hotel room, connected bodies, transferred a duty-free bag of notes.