In this way I managed to get locked in the archive; I was sitting at my carrel and lost track of time, and suddenly all the lights went out. When I got up, I realized that the entire library was not only dark but also deserted and locked. I banged on the locked doors for a while with no result, then felt my way in the dark into the hallway with the administrative offices, where I finally found a tiny Russian woman reading a microfiche and eating lasagna from a tiny plastic box. She seemed surprised to see me, and even more surprised when I asked for directions on how to leave the building.

“Get out?” she echoed, as if referring to the exotic custom of an unknown people. “Ah, I do not know.”

“Oh,” I said. “But how are you going to get out?”

We drove by another billboard: “Ted Lempert for State Senate.”

“Ted Lempert,” Lidiya mused, then turned to me. “Who is this Ted Lempert?”

I said that I didn’t know, but that I thought he wanted to be a senator.

“Hmm,” she said. “Lempert. I knew a Lempert once—an artist. His name was Vladimir. Vladimir Lempert.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to think of something to say. “I’m reading a novel by Balzac now about somebody called Louis Lambert.” I tried to say “Lambert” to sound like “Lempert”.

We drove the rest of the way to the hotel in silence.

I told her about my freshman advisor, a middle-aged British woman with a kind, weary demeanor, who worked in the telecommunications office and had never once known the answer to a single question I had asked.

“The telecommunications office?” Anna repeated.

I nodded. “I would see her when I went to pay my phone bill.”

“Did she have any other connection to Harvard, other than working in the telecommunications office? Was she an alumna?”

“Yeah, actually, she got an MA in the seventies, in Old Norse literature.”

Anna stared at me. “Old Norse literature? What good is an MA in Old Norse literature?”

“I think it’s useful in telecommunications work,” I said.

“I used to be a student here at Stanford,” the screenwriter began. “Right here. I used to study computer programming. I used to work all night in the computer cluster next door. Then I took a creative writing class to learn how to write stories. There, my teacher assigned Isaac Babel’s story ‘My First Goose.’ This story changed my life.”

I was amazed anew at the varieties of human experience: to think we had both read the same story under such similar circumstances, and it had such different effects on us.