For the past four days I could hear you crying downstairs. Everyday I heard the same thing. Everyday I heard you pick up the phone. “Hello?” I heard you say and then there’d be a beat, and then I’d hear you cry out, “No!” or “Oh God!” or “Not again!” and then the receiver would crash back down into its cradle and up would rise a terrifying wail.

I imagined you were receiving news of your family being picked off, one by one, by a sniper on the loose. I imagined you were the exiled queen of Romania and each phone call was one more city fallen from your shrinking empire. After a while I didn’t know what to imagine anymore, and it wasn’t concern that brought me downstairs in front of your door so much as curiosity. I knocked. On the other side of the door I could hear the weeping suddenly stop, like a faucet. I heard the sound of little feet padding across the floor like a cat. I gasped when you opened the door and dared not believe my eyes.

The circumstances that brought me to the apartment above our weeping Niobe are not especially unique, and because I’m not generally in the habit of revealing myself to strangers I’d just as soon keep them to myself if it’s all the same to you. Suffice it to say there you were again, standing in the doorway. “Can I help you?” you asked.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, though to tell the truth you seemed very hardly bothered. Your eyes were dry and you were smiling, and on top of it all that was the difference from the circumstances that had brought me to your door. You were also a different girl, but how uncanny the resemblance! I must have stood there staring for a while before I realized you were still waiting for me to finish my sentence.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I heard crying,” I said. “I was concerned. Did you hear it too? Maybe next door?”

“Oh, no!” you laughed. “That was me! I’m an actress,” you explained, as if that explained everything.

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t really. “Have I seen you in anything?”

“I doubt it,” you shook your head. “My first audition’s tomorrow and—I’m pretty nervous, actually. Can you tell? I really want this part.”

“I think you’ll get it,” I smiled. “You fooled me at least, and I couldn’t even see you.”

“Anyway, I’m sorry about the noise. I’ll try to keep it down from now on.”

“Oh, no!” I said (I think I might have shouted). “I didn’t come to complain! It was just—I was concerned, like I said. But please, keep it up.”

You looked like you were accustomed to getting your way, but you were gracious. “Well, if I’m ever accepting my Academy Award, I’ll be sure to thank you personally,” you said, and it didn’t even sound sarcastic or anything.

After that I tried to time when I went to check the mail so that I might run into you. I’d listen until I heard your door close and then I’d sprint down the back stairs and make it to my mailbox just as you were opening the door. Did you wonder that I always seemed out of breath? I’m sure you were probably on to me. After all, it was a large building and we’d never run into each other before, and there we were three days in a row. Still, like I said, you were gracious and always smiling. Every time you said hello. Maybe you thought I was to be your first adoring fan. Maybe you obliged me like movie stars oblige the screaming hordes waiting along the red carpet. Or maybe you just saw that I was harmless and not worth the trouble.

On the third day I asked you how the audition had gone. “I got the part!” you cried, and I was so happy for you I gave you a hug, and you were so happy you kissed me on the cheek. Then Mister Garner from across the hall came in to check his mail, and for whatever reason we both blushed. I never would have expected it, but when I saw you blush I got to thinking maybe there was more to it all than just the physical resemblance between the two of you. It wasn’t just that you were a reference to her, but a reference unto yourself. Can you understand that? It’s the opposite of acting. It’s existence without precedence, and it’s a glory to behold.

Later that night as I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep I had a picture of you, curled up in the corner with a trickle, not unlike a tear, at the corner of your mouth. You looked up at me in fear. Was I remembering this from my past? Was it a vision of my future? They say déjà vu is just a glitch in the synapses, your brain telling you you’ve seen something before that you’re really seeing for the first time, but then there’s that other explanation—that time isn’t really linear but circular, helical, and how maybe what your brain tells you you’ve experienced before you really have experienced before. Maybe all you’ve really done is jumped a rail.

What I thought as I was lying in bed that night was that maybe the difference between the one and the other lies in how much we trust ourselves. Do we believe in what our brain tells us, what we feel, or must we second-guess everything? Is it time that multiplies or is it merely the figures in our mind? Are we crazy or is everything else?

The next day it was you who came to knock on my door. You’d just received the script but you were having trouble getting into character. You wanted to know if I would read with you. Yes, I said, of course I would.

The extent of my own acting lasted all of about half a minute, and this I can tell you about because I don’t even really remember it. I only know the story because my mother would always tell it whenever she had guests over for dinner. I must have been about six, and I was supposed to play the Thanksgiving turkey in the Thanksgiving pageant. I was supposed to walk out on stage after the pilgrims and Indians had made their peace, presenting myself before them and the audience as their feast, a white dove with cranberry sauce and stuffing. Only I refused to go out. “They’re going to eat me,” I kept saying. “They’re going to eat me,” and no assurances from the director or anyone else could convince me otherwise. The pilgrims and the Indians went hungry. Peace stalled. It was past the pilgrims’ bedtime.

You had brought the script with you and you showed me the scene, the lines you were supposed to read and the lines to be read by me. I read it and thought it was safe to say you wouldn’t be winning your Academy Award for this particular role. In the movie we were lovers, or at least we had been. You lived with and supported your mother—an act of charity as most people saw it, but as I had soon discovered was just an excuse for you to swipe her pain medication—though that hadn’t stopped me from falling in love with you. The script described you as “a femme fatale in every sense of the word.” That is, I suppose, femme, as in woman, and fatale, as in fatal.

“I never asked you to fall in love with me,” you were supposed to say. “I never made any claims to being the girl you seemed to be looking for.”

Then I was supposed to cry, “But what about the letter?”

“The letter wasn’t meant for you!” you were supposed to shout back. Then the script directed me, or rather my character, to sock you in the jaw.

You had pushed to the side the little coffee table by the futon, creating a makeshift stage in the center of the living room. I was happy to have vacuumed the night before. “Okay,” you said. “Are you ready?”

I nodded.

“Okay.” You took a deep breath to compose yourself. You wrung your hands. You looked over to the side, out the window, and then you said, with discernible antipathy, “I never asked you to fall in love with me. I never made any claims to being the girl you seemed to be looking for.”

“But what about the letter?” I asked, but you shook your head. “Don’t just read the lines,” you said. “Try to emote them. Feel them.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “Let’s try it again.”

You squinted your eyes and pulled your hair back in a ponytail. “I never asked you to fall in love with me,” you snarled, this time with even more disdain. “I never made any claims to being the girl you seemed to be looking for.”

I wilted, but fought back. “But what about the letter?” I cried.

“The letter!” you sneered. “The letter wasn’t meant for you!”

I stepped forward, my fist raised, but then I lowered it of course because we were just acting, because you don’t really do things like sock people in the jaw when you’re acting.

You seemed disappointed. “Don’t be afraid,” you said. “I won’t feel it. I’m acting.”

“What?” I cried. “I’m not really going to punch you!”

“Please,” you begged. “I need you to do this for me, for my character. I need to know what she feels like. It’s important.”

“But can’t you just imagine it? Isn’t that what acting is? I don’t see how punching you in the face will bring you any closer to your character—”

“Because it’s going to make you feel bad, isn’t it? Because I need to know what it feels like to make you feel bad. Please,” you said. “Please.”

Of course it wasn’t so hard for me to get there. After all, isn’t that what actors do? Don’t they cull from past experiences to inform the scene at hand? When the actress weeps over her lover lost at war, isn’t she really thinking about the kitten that was run over when she was ten years old? I could do this, I told myself. “Okay,” I said. “I’m ready.”

“I never asked you to fall in love with me,” you growled. “I never made any claims to being the girl you seemed to be looking for.”

“But what about the letter?”

You shook your head. “The letter wasn’t meant for you,” you purred, and then I did it. I socked you in the jaw. You crumpled to the ground, crawled backwards on your hands and knees to the corner and curled up in a ball. A drop of blood appeared at the corner of your mouth. I looked down at you in horror. You looked up at me in fear. Or maybe not. You were always such a good actress. They should have given you an award a long time ago.

“Line?” I asked.