WHEN I AWOKE THAT MORNING I FELT INVIGORATED, as if I had taken some sort of root tonic that had cleared and cleansed me and set me aright. With Melissa still asleep, I rose quietly. As I entered the bathroom to piss and shave, I saw there was a calm and sanguine smile on my face. For an instant I did not recognize that smile as my own, that figure in the mirror as myself. It was good to see me.

I pulled on my pajamas and went into the kitchen to make oatmeal and coffee, enough for the two of us. It was not so warm in my place that bitter winter. My big old banging gas-guzzling HydroTherm MultiPulse AM100 heating boiler had finally broken down irreparably the previous year, and I had ended up replacing it with a fancy new wall-mounted, energy-efficient Lochinvar Knight. This was a nine-grand mistake. I should have had the old boiler rebuilt from the concrete up. But that would have taken brains. All I had was hindsight. The new boiler was so energy-efficient it didn’t give off any heat to speak of. After Con Edison came to inspect it and I got my energy-efficient residential gas rebate and tax-credit authorization, I had the energy-efficient wiring disconnected, and the damned thing still did not work worth a damn. I got more warmth from the little twenty-buck space heater I kept on the end table by the couch than I did from my five radiators. The new could never replace the old. This was true of all things. But the old boiler had pulsed and clanged and banged its last. The concrete in the base of its tank and the cinder blocks beneath it had rotted clean through and the water that seeped through them flooded the boiler closet. How I yearned for the old antediluvian warmth that I had known. But on this morning the chill did not bother me at all. I didn’t even feel it.

I sliced a banana into the simmering oatmeal, added some raisins, a nutmeg, a bit more cinnamon, stirred in buttermilk, stirred in butter, a little chestnut honey. She had crept up behind me, barefoot and wearing my robe. I asked her how she liked her coffee. Cream and a little sugar. I had no cream, only milk and half-and-half. Like most Americans who asked for cream, she meant milk. I asked her if she wanted a shot with it. Her “no, thank you” was enwrapped in a low sleepy giggle. I poured out the steaming oatmeal into bowls, the steaming coffee into cups. I turned on Rachmaninoff again. What’s good for the dark of night is good for the morning light.

Who said that? Why did it whisper of ancient Egypt? Was it from the Pyramid Texts? The Book of the Dead? No, I had never read or heard those words before. Nor had I ever said them, written them, or thought them before.

She was looking at the wound on her leg, the red cicatrice of her broken skin and the livid swollen flesh around it. She seemed rapt by it as she ran her finger gently over it.

“Do you want to kiss it?” she asked.

I bent over her, lowered my lips softly to her thigh. This gave me no pleasure. I did it to please her. She closed the robe over the scar and returned to her oatmeal.

“Do you want to put something on it?” I said.

“Like what?”

“Peroxide. Ointment. I don’t know.”

She did not respond to this. Instead she asked me about the music. I told her what little I knew about it.

“I was fooling with you last night,” she said.

I was taken aback. I asked her what she meant.

“Thomas Paine,” she said. Her eyes danced with a sly playfulness. “Common Sense.”

“Oh.” I felt a sense of relief, and my spirits brightened again. “I should have known. History major.”

“Ancient history,” she said. “But I remember him from high school.”

I gestured to the open doors of my library. “I’ve got a wallful of books in there on ancient history, ancient writing, ancient mythology, ancient everything. The shelves on the left.”

My library had been carefully gathered together over the course of a lifetime, and in the course of a few years I had for the most part lost interest in it. Had I sent her through those doors, to those books, because I was experiencing the spark of a renewed closeness to them, a rekindling of my sense of their importance to me and to my life?

She went into the library, but, as I saw from where I sat, the cuneiform tablets on the wall immediately facing her caught her eye and she went directly to them.

“When are these from?” she asked with her back to me.

“They were put out to bake about four thousand years ago,” I said. “Sumerian. Third Dynasty of Ur.”

“What do they say?”

“They’re an accounting of cult offerings to a god of war called Shara, from a temple in a Mesopotamian town called Umma.”

“Can you read them?”

“No. Can you?”

“No.”

She seemed transfixed by them. Only after some minutes did she turn to browse the shelves of books I thought might interest her. As she left the room, she paused to peer through the glass of the case that held the books that I had written.

“You’ve written a lot of books,” she said.

“Yes and no,” I said. “Most of the books in there are just different editions and translations of one book or another. Most of them I can’t even read. Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Swedish, Dutch, this, that, the other thing. I can’t understand a word of what’s in most of those books. They just have my name on them. They just look good.”

As I said those last words, I was thinking of how good she looked, standing there in the light of day that spilled from the northeast through the library window. Once again I was struck by doubt. Why had she come with me? What had she seen or sensed in me? Maybe I should just ask her. But not now. Not now. My questioning doubt left me as quickly as it had risen.

In our ways we all are gods or goddesses, even if we be forgotten in the end. Better not to dwell on our powers or attributes or the offerings and sacrifices made to us.

For a long time I had felt grim mortality closing in on me. Now, on this morning, in this moment, I felt that something lay before me, forthshining and resplendent. And in this moment, on this morning, that was all and enough.