"Didn't expect you to bring a whole library," my landlady said. She lead me through a spartan parlor-I had an impression of yellowed lace and sepia shadows-and down a narrow hallway to the bedroom that would be mine. I set my box of books down on the floor. Dust rose in a soft exhalation, as if I were being welcomed by a restless spirit.

"Maybe I could store some of my books in the barn." She shook her mule-gray head. "The barn is full of rusted machinery. You'd get tetanus just looking at that mess."

But when I glanced out the window, I saw light spearing through the cracks in the barn's wall boards, suggesting that there was open space inside.

"Has this always been a guest room?" I asked. The room's former occupant had left no imprint; all sensual memory had been stripped from the room. The paint on the windowsills had flaked away, and the wallpaper seemed to have been torn off the walls by hand, leaving only a few shreds of yellow fluttering against the plaster.

It's only twenty-five dollars a wee\, I reminded myself. For twenty-five dollars I could tolerate bleak decor.

"My girl used to stay here. My boy stayed in the one opposite." With a jerk of her head the woman indicated the closed door across the hall.

The words "girl" and "boy" threw me. Was my landlady referring to farm help, or to a daughter and son? I tried to imagine her spare, hard body carrying children. I felt like I had some kind of responsibility, as a would-be sociologist, to ask about her life, her family, but her severe words invited no curiosity.

"No visitors after dark," she said. "And no drinking." Then she left me.

I had the dream on the very first night, the one that would wake me almost every night I spent in that house. The dream was always a step ahead of my consciousness, jumping out of my grasp whenever I tried to remember it. But I know it recurred, because I always woke up in the same state: paralyzed, bound. Feeling absolutely alone, yet strangely safe because of my enforced stillness. Once the fog of sleep cleared, I wondered what was holding me here in this room, which offered no sensory comfort, no release from its emptiness. I wondered why I didn't just leave.