AFTER G.’S RETURN FROM SWITZERLAND, RAGING HARPIES began turning up at all hours outside his room at the hotel. We would hear them weeping in the corridor. Sometimes a girl might slip a note under the doormat. One evening he went out to talk to one of them, closing the door behind him so that I couldn’t eavesdrop on their conversation. Shouting and crying, then strangled sobs and whispers. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he managed to reason with the Valkyrie, who turned and raced back down the stairs.

When I asked G. for an explanation, he pretended they were fans who had followed him down the street, or that they’d somehow managed to obtain his address, mostly through his publisher (a convenient scapegoat), who apparently was insufficiently concerned about his peace of mind.

Then he told me he was going away again, this time to Brussels, where he had been invited to do an event at a bookshop and to speak at a literary festival. I’d be on my own at the hotel again. But a couple of days later, on Saturday, I was walking down the street with a girlfriend when I saw him, arm in arm with a girl on the opposite sidewalk. Like an automaton, I turned on my heels, trying to wipe the image from my mind. It was impossible. G. was in Belgium, he’d sworn to me he was.