It’s worth mentioning here an incident which had occurred before David’s visit to the library. This was during the short time that he had been alone in his room in the cottage.

For David, a migraine was a production in three acts. First came the aura, with its visual hallucinations and sense of impending doom. Then came the pain. Both of these he had already experienced on the bus.

What generally followed the aura and the pain can best be described as the uncanny. David would feel displaced, as though his mind were out of sync with his body. This feeling would last several hours.

There is a place between consciousness and unconsciousness, when you are neither asleep nor awake. You are aware of your surroundings, but your body is still motionless. Each of us has passed through this place. Most of us take little notice of it. Before fully awakening, David would often find himself stuck in this bardo. It was part of the migraine experience.

David had dumped his backpack at the foot of the bed. He had laid the wooden box on the night table and flopped onto the mattress. He allowed the darkness to envelope him as he gave in to the crushing fatigue.

When David had awoken, he had no idea about the passage of time. It might have been ten minutes or two hours. His ears were filled with a sharp buzzing, like that which he had heard on the bus. Only, this time it was much louder.

David could feel that he was laying on his back. He felt his own hands on his chest, fingers interlaced. But when he opened his eyes, what he saw didn’t mesh with what he felt. Both of his hands lay motionless not on his chest, but at his side. It was as if each arm had a twin—one visible, the other invisible. Yet the phantom hands and arms felt more real to him than the dead weights attached to his shoulders.

David willed his right hand to rise from his chest, and to approach his face. He brought the palm of this phantom hand against his cheek. His face and fingers tingled together as he brought his fingers through his own forehead.

His eyes still told him that his whole body continued to lay motionless. He wondered what it would feel like to grasp something with the phantom hand, an object apart from his own body. He reached toward the night table.

As David reached in the direction of the wooden box, the buzz intensified. His not-a-hand rested on the box’s surface. He heard a voice utter a single word. Somehow, he knew the voice was only in his mind. Yet, it was also audible, the voice of a child:

Focus.

What if he took this further? If his not-a-hand could penetrate his own body, was it possible for him to extend his fingers to within the box? He willed his grip to tighten around the object. The buzz intensified.

And then it was over. Was it his racing heart, his rapid breath that had grounded him? He was now himself, laying on his back in a silent room. He turned his head. The wooden box lay inert on the bedside table, where he had left it.

David sat up. His eyes turned to clock on the wall. Forty five minutes had passed since he had flopped down on the bed.

“Do you have WiFi?”

David recognized the new arrival as Sharon, the girl who had sat next to him on the bus.

The Librarian shook his head. “You can send email,” he said. “But even that is batched only once a day and sent to the mainland by dial-up.”

“You gotta be kidding me!” Sharon pouted.

By “mainland,” the Librarian referred to anywhere south of the fjord. Bent Fork was not on an island. But it felt like an island. And the residents took pride in drawing a distinction between Bent Fork and everywhere else.

“What about the whiffle box?” David wanted to restore the original thread of the conversation.

“Yes. That,” said the Librarian. “Let me show you both something.” He drew two seats up to his desk and beckoned them to come sit down, which they did. He then pulled his own chair next to theirs. The chairs formed the points of a tight triangle. Ariadne was in their midst, locked in battle with a length of yarn she had found on the floor.

The Librarian found a pen and a sheet of paper in one of the desk drawers. He cleared an island of space on the desk and rested the paper on it. Then, he drew two ovals on the sheet of paper. “Suppose each of these ovals is a body of water,” he said. “If you were a fish in this lake here…” He pointed to one of the figures he had drawn. “You would be confined to this lake. The other lake would be off limits.”

David nodded. He hoped there was a point to all this.

“But, supposing there was a flood. The two lakes would become one,” the Librarian continued. He flipped over the pencil and erased part of each oval. He then connected the two figures with a pair of lines. Now the two lakes had a passage of water between them.

“The whiffle is that waterway between the two lakes,” said the Librarian. “It is neither one lake, nor the other.”

David was trying to take all this in. He knit his brow, as if the physical effort could help him make sense of what he was hearing. The Librarian marked two points on the paper, on opposite sides of the waterway.

“These two points,” he said, “used to near each other. They still are, in a strictly Euclidean sense. Yet, now they are also very far apart.”

David decided he had become completely lost, somewhere around the word “Euclidean.” The Librarian must has sensed his exasperation. “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?” he said.

David sighed. “What’s a whiffle?”

The Librarian nodded. He redirected David’s attention to the diagram. “This area here in the centre. This is the whiffle. It’s in a state of flux: sometimes dry land, sometimes water.”

David got out of his chair. He had had enough. The Librarian rose also. He gripped David’s forearm.

“The two whiffles are like two ends of a string. They are really the same whiffle. It depends on where you are—or when.”

“Oh!” Sharon exclaimed. David had nearly forgotten she was there. She was now the only one seated. David turned to see her sliding the whiffle box apart in her hands. She separated it into to two open compartments. Sharon held one half of the box in her right hand and the other half in her left.

“It opens! How about that?”

That’s when everything went dark.