THE FIRST TIME I met Helena I spent a long time walking around trying to find her address before I located the correct door; it was a green building in the Atlas neighborhood, French balconies with columns, meanders in the stairwell, a swastika crowning the elevator cage. I climbed the stairs to her floor. It was the week after two big terrorist attacks and I was irrationally tense and dealt with it by never letting myself rest, constantly moving my eyes, registering and naming everything I saw, a small child, a dog, a bus, a tree, a 7-Eleven. I did not want to ride the elevator.

For weeks afterward the elevator was out of service for repairs. Inside the cage the shaft was empty and naked. I took the stairs again. Everything I’d noticed the first time, the meanders, the curved railing that ended and then began again on either side of the large windows, the children's shoes on the doormat on the second floor, the red lamp button on floor three that I had to locate in the murk since by that point the timed light had turned off, it all became familiar and imprinted on my memory so that I soon stopped registering anything. Not the shoes, not the meanders. I no longer read the names on the doors; when I reached her floor, I knew without looking which one was Helena’s.

I had the thought that I’d known already the first time I walked those stairs that it wouldn’t be the last time, that it wasn’t fear that made me note every detail but certainty. I imagined that I had seen the future the first time I was at Helena’s and that what I’d seen walking up the stairs wasn’t what was in front of me but rather an image from my own memory.