There was a person called Ester Nilsson. She was a poet and essayist with eight slim but densely written publications to her name by the age of thirty-one. Self-willed in tone according to some, playful according to others, but most people had never heard of her.

From the horizons of her own consciousness she perceived reality with devastating precision and lived by the understanding that the world was as she experienced it. Or to be more precise, that people were so constituted as to experience the world as it was, as long as they did not let their attention wander, or lie to themselves. The subjective was the objective, and the objective the subjective. That, at any rate, was what she was trying to prove.

She knew that her quest for an equivalent precision in language was a sort of fixation but she pursued it anyway, since every other ideal made it too easy for those who tried to cheat or evade the intellect; those who were not as scrupulous about how phenomena interacted and how they were represented by language.

And yet she was obliged to acknowledge over and over again that words remained an approximation. As did thought, which although constructed of systematized perceptions and language was not as reliable as it claimed to be.

The dreadful gulf between thought and words, will and expression, reality and unreality, and the things that flourish in that gulf, are what this story is about.

Since realizing at the age of eighteen that life ultimately consisted of dispelling melancholy, and discovering language and ideas all by herself, Ester Nilsson had not felt any sense of unhappiness with life, nor even any normal, everyday depression. She worked steadily at decoding the nature of the world and of human beings. She had pursued her studies in philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and since completing her thesis, in which she attempted to bring together the Anglo-Saxon and the French traditions, that is, to apply the minimalism and logic of the analytical school to the Continental school’s grander assumptions about life, she had been working as a freelance writer.

From the day she found language and ideas and realized where her mission lay, she renounced expensive living, ate cheaply, was always careful about contraception, only traveled rationally, had never been in debt to the bank or to any private person, and did not get herself into situations that forced her away from what she wanted to spend her time doing: reading, thinking, writing and debating.

She had been living like that for thirteen years, and for more than half that time in a quiet, harmonious relationship with a man who left her in peace while satisfying her physical and mental needs.

Then she got a phone call.