“Once,” went the story he told me that first night, “In a big city, there lived a family of immigrants. Maybe it was Paris, maybe it was the US, but they were immigrants, they had come to work, and they did embroidery. So. All that’s just to set the scene. The daughter didn’t speak the family’s native language, but she understood it a little. Her mother died, and the father was very sad. And altthough she was still very young, she decided she couldn’t stand to live with her father anymore. They were in a tight financial situation – the father worked all night, but he couldn’t do as much embroidery as when the wife had been alive. And the daughter was very sad, but she decided to move out, with another girl, who had her own reasons for leaving home, and they got an apartment not too far away. She still helped her father with some embroidery, and he paid her about half of what it was worth, so she was helping him a little, and her roommate worked nights in a bar, so she often, 4 or 5 nights a week, took embroidery with her to work on at the bar while her roommate was working.

“So one night they’d stayed late at the bar drinking together, and the girl – what was her name?”

“Cordelia,” I said.

“Cordelia said, I’m just going to pass by my father’s and give him this embroidery so it’ll be ready in the morning, I’ll meet you back at the apartment in a little while. So her roommate went home, but Cordelia didn’t show up, and she was going to wait for her, but she had classes in the morning, and since she couldn’t stay up all night waiting, though she’d never been to Cordelia’s old house, she knew where it was, and she went there ...

“It was in an impasse – the Impasse Clairveau – between two big buildings, and it was dark inside the impasse, and inside, there was just one house, a sort of facade built up against the building that formed the impasse, and it was dark inside the house, but by instinct she turned the knob and the door opened. The lights were all off, but there was a cigarette glowing in an ashtray, and she saw the embroidered shirts sitting on a table, so she shouted, “I want to speak to Cordelia,” and nobody answered, but just then the door closed behind her in the wind, and she stood there imagining for a moment that it was the sound of her own voice had closed it. There was another door to the bedroom further in the room, and so she went to the door, and just as she put her hand on it, something opened the door and ran right out, through the room and into the impasse and disappeared.
She wasn’t sure if it was an animal or a man. It was short, and didn’t walk like a man, and for a minute she just stood there shaking, and then she looked into the room and there was nothing there. She was afraid to go back into the impasse, but finally she did, and when she got onto the street she felt better, and decided maybe it was just a dog that had been shut in the room that she’d let out, and maybe it would be stupid to go to the police. So she decided to go home and if Cordelia wasn’t home by morning she’d go to the police.
Cordelia was getting out of the shower when she got home, with a towel wrapped around her head and waist. Which was weird, because she had this air of being a woman suddenly instead of just a girl, and when shee talked about her father now it was the way a woman talks about her old father and not the way a girl talks about her father: Oh, I stayed later than usual because Dad is sad about Mom being gone, and we talked for a while, about an hour and a half, and I just got back fifteen minutes ago.

So her roommate thought there was really something different about her, the way she put her hair in a towel like she was a grown-up woman now, doing some kind of hair treatment, and the way she was so self-assured – she was different somehow.

So the roommate was sly, and she wanted to find out if the thing she’d seen was a dog, so she said, “Maybe your father would feel better if he had a dog. Does he have a dog?”

And Cordelia said he didn’t have a dog, nor any other kind of pet.

Well maybe he’s sad because he lives in a dark impasse, and there’s no light.

No, it’s true the impasse is dark, but thtat’s not why he’s sad.

Or because he doesn’t have a pretty house, and he would be happy if he lived in a pretty house. The impasse is so dirty.

No, it’s not because of that, either. He likes his house just fine. It’s just like all the other houses in the impasse.

And the roommate thought that was strange, because she’d only seen one house in the Impasse Clairveau. But the next day they got up and went to school together.

So the next night she was at the bar working, and she had this strange sensation that something between her and Cordelia had changed. Like, before her co-workers were just strange people she worked with, and Cordelia was her friend, and now it seemed like the opposite, like the people at the bar were her friends and Cordelia was somehow her enemy.

So Cordelia was there, and when she finished her shirts, she said, oh, I’m so tired tonight, would you mind taking these shirts to my father’s for me tonight.

And she’d never asked before, it was strange. But the roommate couldn’t say no, it was on her way home, so she said, yes, she would, but maybe not right away, maybe in an hour, she might stay at the bar a little longer. She wanted to know if the lights would be on, and Cordelia said yes, her father was an insomniac and worked all night, and the lights would be on even if she came at 7 in the morning. So Cordelia left, and the roommate did a few little things, washed some glasses and served a few customers, and finally she asked a guy if he wouldn’t come with her to deliver some shirts to an impasse not far from the bar. But when she told him where it was, he said, the Impasse Clairveau? No way. That place is dangerous. So finally he agreed to take her there in his car and to wait outside for her. And so they had a drink together first, and he told her about the impasse, that it was a place with only one entrance and no other way in or out, that even the police were afraid to go into it, that it was really hardly an impasse at all, just a space between two buildings, and that when criminals needed a place to hide, they always went there. And she asked if maybe there were wild animals living there, but the guy didn’t think so, just criminals. So they decided maybe she would just stand outside and call to the father.

So he took her, and once she got to the entrance it looked different at first. She realized there wasn’t really a gate or anything, just the trash bins on either side, but once she was a little way from the car, she felt better, it looked different again, scary, but not so scary. Anyway, she was standing there calling, when she saw a little form in an overcoat coming over, and she screamed. It walked like a dog, or maybe like a man, she couldn’t tell. It was out in the street, and as it walked toward the car the guy drove off in fright. So she threw the shirts into the impasse and went back to the bar.

So there the guy was there, with tears in his eyes, talking about this horrible monster that came for him while he was in his car, and he couldn’t describe it, but said he could tell when it looked at him that it was something bad, with bad intentions, something that would hurt him.

So the girl went upstairs to the boss’s office. He worked, not in the bar, but up in his office, and she knew he had a gun. So she went and said, I want to borrow your gun. I think there’s a guy from the bar who’s been following me or something. So he said, well, I have a gun which I never loan to anyone, but you can have this one, it’s smaller, but still impressive, and it’s full of blanks, which won’t kill anyone, but they’ll make a lot of noise and they could still injure someone.

So the girl went home, and went to bed, though she felt nervous, and she kept the gun on her.

So the next day Cordelia said, did you take the shirts to my father, and she said yes, well, he wasn’t there, so I left them in the impasse.

And Cordelia said, well that’s strange. You couldn’t even take them inside? I saw him today and he told me he found them in the street.

And the girl said, well, you know everyone says the impasse is dangerous, and I got scared. You know what people say about the impasse, don’t you?

And Cordelia said, yes, but that it was all exaggerations,
So Cordelia said, I just ask you to do this one little thing, and you can’t even do it. It’s very strange.

So they were at the bar that night, and the guy was there, and when he saw the roommate he though she’d tried to trap him by making him go there with her, and he started talking bad stuff about the impasse, and Cordelia got in a fight with him and hit him, and he didn’t hit her because she was a girl, but he called her names. And the roommate had to separate them.

And after a while they were living not like friends anymore. And when they talked about it, Cordelia said, so what did you see that night, the first night, and the girl told her, and Cordelia said, I knew you went there that first night, and I wanted to send you back again because it serves you right, and I won’t tell you what you saw. That’s my affair. And Cordelia moved back with her father, and paid half the rent until her roommate could find another place. I don’t want to see you anymore, Cordelia said. I won’t come to the bar anymore, and the girl said, well, I don’t really want to see you anymore, either, so ok. And one day some months later she called her, but she still hadn’t found another place yet, but she said, it’s taking a long time, why don’t you just pay a quarter of the rent, and I’ll look harder.
So she set about looking with new vigour, and found a small place on the 7th floor just above the impasse Clairveau. By this time she hadn’t seen Cordelia in a long time, and she didn’t hate her anymore, and she reasoned to herself: all I did was one night go to her old place to see if she was ok, and she was mad later about the fact that I left the shirts in the impasse, but in the end her father got them anyway.

The back window of her apartment gave onto the impasse, and eventually she started watching the impasse all the time, and spent all her time doing that, but she never saw anything, no one, neither Cordelia nor her father, nor anyone else. And she spent all her time leaned against the window, drinking coffee and watching. But it was a long way down.
Until one day she saw something, a little brown thing, in the impasse, and she was sure she saw it move, but then it was still again, and the next day it was gone.

So she decided to lower a tape recorder onto the roof of Cordelia’s house, which was just below her window. The roof was very thin. And she left it there, and pulled it up later, and she heard the voice of Cordelia speaking in a strange language, and then the voice of her father, and then a growl, loud, and then dead silence. Or maybe something like the sound of a chair falling over.

And she did it five times, and it was always the same thing.

So finally she decided to see exactly what time this happened, and it happened at midnight, every night.

So she lowered a rope out her window and climbed down to see if maybe there was a hole in the roof she could look through, but she fell, and she was wearing a harness, so she screamed, because she was suspended just above the father’s door. And the father came out, he looked a lot like Cordelia, and said, what are you doing on my roof, and he was very severe, and she explained that she was the old roommate of Cordelia, and she’d come to see her, and could he cut her down, and he said, why didn’t you just come in through the entrance, but he cut her down and told her to come inside and explain herself, and there was Cordelia, and Cordelia said that ever since her mother died, in fact, the best way her father had found to cover his grief was to dress up as her mother at night, so half the time he was himself, and half the time he was her mother. And her mother was small, so he hunched over, and pulled his beard back over his face with some cream, and he walked funny.

And so, in fact Cordelia was a lesbian, and so was her friend, so they loved each other.