She dreamed that she had a dream about something she should remember. In the dream that she was dreaming she had, she was opening the door to a room, and something important was happening on the other side of the door. She could feel herself leaning into the truth concealed by the door, but she couldn’t fit the key into the lock fast enough before the dream she dreamed she was having ended because she dreamed of waking up, outside in the snow, standing in front of a window reading the letter about the key. This dream made her impatient, because after all she’d already read the letter in a different dream, or what she had thought was a dream before she seemed, at times, to be in possession of an actual key which actually did open the door to room 306. But in this dream, anyway, she was impatient to get back inside the hotel. She hurried through the falling snow as best she could, taking small steps in an unwieldy pair of shoes, ankle boots, really, which she didn’t recognize as her own but liked immensely just the same, holding up her long skirt in the snow, a skirt she didn’t recognize either.
And then she suddenly found herself standing outside the door to her own room, and she pressed her ear close to the wood, listening for noises. It was in her very own room that the important thing was happening, the thing that had been in the other dream. She was spying on someone, she realized, but she didn’t know if it was herself or someone else. What did she think was going on behind there? She heard a man’s voice, and then the low, muffled voice of a woman and recognized in a hot wave of embarrassment that she was listening to two people having intercourse, but she didn’t know if it was herself she was listening to. She was mostly curious to know who the man was, so she began very quietly to fit the key to the lock, and it was the fear of finding out something about herself, something she didn’t want to know, that woke her from the dream of turning the key in her own door to watch the couple, whoever they were, and when she jerked awake in bed, sitting straight upright, naked, she quickly looked down to find out if she was with anyone, if she could still catch herself in the dream.
No one was there. There was the impression of a head on the other pillow. The sheets were tangled on that side of the bed. When she put her hand to the mattress, on the other side from where she slept, it was warm to the touch.
But she was confused about who might have been there. She was alone in the room, and everything was white. All she could see was snow, everywhere she looked, as if she were flying through a whole world of snow where nothing was solid, where she was weightless and suspended. She knew she hadn’t eaten in a long time and she felt so light in both her body and her mind that it was as if she didn’t exist at all. She had been dreaming, hadn’t she? Of what? She couldn’t remember. But she was awake now, or she thought she was awake, if that word meant anything anymore. She rose and stood naked in front of the mirror. Julia. Julia was the woman in the mirror. And as had been the case lately, when she stood in front of the mirror, there were other Julias—each just a little fainter, each just a little further removed—reflected behind the first Julia, but there was no mirror behind her to create the reflections. And as always, when she stepped away, the women in the mirror followed her, one by one, each just a fraction of a second behind the one before her.
Slipping on her nightgown, she found that the key was in her hand, and she moved to the door and used the key and passed into the hallway. She was hungry, that was all she knew, and not necessarily for food, though food would do. She floated down corridors and through rooms and up and down stairways and narrow passages, cold and light, like a faraway star. She did not find what she was looking for. She never did. She had been in this corridor for years.
Once, as she was moving weightlessly, almost invisibly (was there anyone to see her?), she felt something clutching at her, pulling her, and she turned around to see a black upright telephone on a small gilt table. The telephone emitted a faint crackling, or possibly she felt it under her skin.
She picked up the phone by its stem and held the mouthpiece in front of her. Staring into the air of the hallway, focusing on nothing but the empty space there, she raised the receiver to her ear. She could hear someone breathing, and she could hear herself breathing, too, into the mouthpiece.
“Is it you?” a voice finally said.
It was the voice of a child. Or it was the voice of a man with a child’s voice contained inside it. Again she felt something pulling her, as if she were being held back from a place or a time that she was going toward. For a moment she was confused, and her breath came up tight in her throat, and she held her hand over her mouth. She was listening to the breathing, which seemed to come from somewhere deep inside herself.
“Is it you?” the voice said again.
She could not remember how she knew the voice, but it tugged at her, it stole her breath, it carried her heart away, and she knew, somehow, the answer to the question. “Yes,” she said. “It’s me.”