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Before she realized it, Ferdinando’s penis was erect, as stiff as a rod. She’d never seen one so huge. He took Miu’s hand, and placed it on his penis. He caressed her and licked her from head to toe. He took his own sweet time. She didn’t resist. She—the Miu in the apartment—let him do whatever he wanted, thoroughly enjoying the rising passion. From time to time she would reach out and caress Ferdinando’s penis and balls and allow him to touch her everywhere.

Miu couldn’t drag her gaze away from this strange sight. She felt sick. Her throat was so parched she couldn’t swallow. She felt as if she was going to vomit. Everything was grotesquely exaggerated, menacing, like some medieval allegorical painting. This is what Miu thought: that they were deliberately showing her this scene. They know I’m watching. But still she couldn’t pull her eyes away.

*

A blank.

*

Then what happened?

Miu didn’t remember. Her memory came to an abrupt halt at this point.

“I can’t recall,” she said. She covered her face with her hands.

“All I know is that it was a horrifying experience,” she added quietly. “I was right here, and another me was over there. And that man—Ferdinando—was doing all kinds of things to me over there.”

“What do you mean, all kinds of things?”

“I just can’t remember. All kinds of things. With me locked inside the Ferris wheel, he did whatever he wanted—to the me over

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there. It’s not like I was afraid of sex. There was a time when I enjoyed casual sex a lot. But that wasn’t what I was seeing there. It was all meaningless and obscene, with only one goal in mind—to make me thoroughly polluted. Ferdinando used all the tricks he knew to soil me with his thick fingers and mammoth penis—not that the me over there felt that this was making her dirty. And in the end it wasn’t even Ferdinando any more.

Not Ferdinando any more? I stared at Miu. If it wasn’t Ferdinando, then who was it?

I don’t know. I can’t recall. But in the end it wasn’t Ferdinando any more. Or maybe from the beginning it wasn’t him.

*

The next thing she knew, Miu was lying in a hospital bed, a white hospital gown covering her naked body. All her joints ached. The doctor explained what had happened. In the morning one of the workers at the amusement park had found the wallet she’d dropped and worked out what had happened. He got the Ferris wheel down and called an ambulance. Inside the gondola Miu was unconscious, collapsed in a heap. She looked like she was in shock, her pupils non-reactive. Her face and arms were covered with abrasions, her blouse bloody. They took her to the hospital for treatment. Nobody could work out how she’d got the injuries. Thankfully none of them would leave any lasting scars. The police hauled in the old man who ran the Ferris wheel for questioning, but he had no memory at all of giving her a ride just near closing time.

The next day some local policemen came to question her. She had trouble answering their questions. When they compared her face with her picture in her passport, they frowned, strange expressions on their faces like they’d swallowed something awful. Hesitantly, they asked her: “Mademoiselle, we’re sorry to have to ask, but are you really 25?”

“I am,” she replied, “just like it says in my passport.” Why did they have to ask that?

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A little while later, though, when she went to the bathroom to wash her face, she understood. Every single hair on her head was white. Pure white, like freshly driven snow. At first she thought it was somebody else in the mirror. She spun around. But she was alone in the bathroom. She looked in the mirror once more. And the reality of it all came crashing down on her in that instant. The white-haired woman staring back at her was herself. She fainted and fell to the floor.

*

And Miu vanished.

“I was still on this side, here. But another me, maybe half of me, had gone over to the other side. Taking with it my black hair, my sexual desire, my periods, my ovulation, perhaps even the will to live. And the half that was left is the person you see here. I’ve felt this way for the longest time—that in a Ferris wheel in a small Swiss town, for a reason I can’t explain, I was split in two for ever. For all I know this may have been some kind of transaction. It’s not like something was stolen away from me, because it all still exists, on the other side, lust a single mirror separates us from the other side. But I can never cross the boundary of that single pane of glass. Never.”

Miu nibbled at her fingernails.