Magdalen Powers Station She is screaming at him. At top volume, her mother tongue sounds just like you're afraid it might: implacable, militant.      "Verpiß dich!" She bangs the door shut. "Verdammte Scheiße!" Her hands grasp air, as though she is trying to construct some sort of order. "You cannot leave. How can you even think of it?"      "Heike, we've been though this before," Theo says, sounding tired, but with a forced air of interest, engagement—as if they had not, in fact, been through it before. "We're going nowhere. And I can't stay here forever."      "You could if we were married." She says this softly. It is not the first time she has had this thought, or the first time she has voiced it.      "What good would that do? It's not something either of us would want for its own sake, and you know that."      "But we— It could be better. We just need more time. Theo," she says— pronouncing no h, using long a for e—his head spinning for an instant at the sound of it in her mouth, "there is no one else I want. No one else in the world...It will be better with us, I promise."      His bags are near the door. She is between them and the threshold. It is Heike's apartment: inherited, filled with the effects of the dead she doesn't know how to cast off. She steps toward Theo where he stands, in the center of the room, his arms down, palms forward. "Bitte," she says, taking his hands. "Don't go."      His face twists as he holds her, breathes in the fresh green smell of her hair, its buoyant blondness belying her encroaching middle age. Like fields he ran through as a child not because they held secrets, hollows, treasure, but simply because they offered the fastest route home. She sighs, squelching the smile that rises at the pressure of his hands on the small of her back. Later, he steps back into the suit he had worn that day on a job interview at a language school for international businesspeople.      "You're going out," she says (surprise, hurt, the urge still to seduce). He is not looking at her. He is putting on his socks. He is tying his shoes.      "I need to walk," he says. "I need a drink."      "Let me come with you," she says, attempting girlish guile.      He raises his eyes (dark glower under heavy brows, cheekbones from some lost Cherokee forebear, strong suggestion of a Franco-Jewish nose). "I'm giving you what you want. You give me this."      She sinks. He stands, pulls on a dark overcoat—a gift from her for interviews, teaching, for the Alpine winter—and steps out into the damp cold night. He hurries across town, through nearly empty streets to the station. It is 10:00. Only the Christmas Market is still populated, and only the heartiest souls are there, standing, talking at the checkered tables, draining their mugs of hot spiced wine.      He reaches the Hauptbanhof at 10:14, just as a train is pulling in. He stands at the station end of the platform as if he had been there an hour.      Isabel steps off the train, settling her pack on the cement. It is two hours until her connection to Prague, where she will walk 10 dark blocks to an old hotel on Wenceslas Square, to a small room with a view of red rooftops, reserved under his name. Less than 10 meters separates them.      "You have no bags."      He shakes his head.      She takes a breath, catches it, forces it out. "I should just get back on this train," she says, motioning sharply toward the car she's just left, bound in minutes for some other destination. Trembling, just for a second.      Now he walks—slow strides in dully gleaming shoes—deliberately, not taking his eyes from hers. If you were to imagine that she felt like a bird with a snake in a diagram—a dotted line connecting their eyes—you would not be so far from the truth.      He stands close in front of her, saying, "Let me take your bag."      She gestures at it like the lover of a dog-owner: as if to say, Well, there it is: Look at what your dog has done. Then, like the dog itself, she smells something not quite right.      He carries her pack to the lockers near the platform. Deposits it. Puts in some coins. "Do you need anything?" No. He shuts the door, hands her the little key. They walk out into Stuttgart's squares and lines.      In silence, they cross a plaza to an orchestra-sized platform, with stairs going up all four sides. Each large corner makes up a bench. They sit, looking out at the city: low, black, geometric—all slick windows and stainless beams.      For the first time since they have seen each other, they touch: she is leaning forward, her palms flat against the cold stone; he puts his hand on hers.      Before she can think of how to respond to this, she is kissing him. A long, breathless silence. She sits back. He looks at her eyes. "So much pain," he says. He reaches to touch her hair, but she sneaks in under his outstretched arm, like a boxer.      They are sitting close together, her arms around him, under his coat.      A while later: "It's cold," he says. "Should we get some Glühwein at the Christmas Market?"      "You know how I feel about that: It's like Champagne, don't you think?...For celebrating. There is nothing here to celebrate."       "True enough...A drink, though?"      "Of course."      He leads her again through the foggy, unfamiliar streets. She wonders where he lives, how close by it is. She came from Munich, which was not her home. But he had been there—had seen where she cooked, slept, paced. He had seen far more of her than she had of him.      They come to a small bar occupied mostly by old men. "It's one of my favorite places here," he says.      She smiles, easier this time. Theo's shoulders relax a little. He sits next to her. Suddenly shy, she leans toward him and whispers her order. When two beers and a whiskey arrive, she takes the small glass from next to the candle in front of Theo, where the bartender mistakenly put it, touches it to Theo's, and drains it. Putting the glass down, she starts to run both hands through her hair, then stops halfway through, leaning on her elbows as if the air has gone out of her. Isabel's hair is red in the candlelight, dark against the white of her hands. Without lifting her head, she says, "So. What do you have to say?"      He takes a deep breath, sighs as if he had never thought about it before—had never spent hours walking alone, hours on his knees, wondering about exactly this: about why it was so hard to trade the known for the unknown, even if the shining promise of the new was not just a rumor, a theory, but was etched in pure gold.      "It's hard for me," he says, struggling with a language that no longer seems his own. "It takes a long time for me to form any bond of affection with another person. Once it's there, it's hard to break."      "I don't understand," she says. "You keep saying you want to leave. You've been saying it for ages. Why don't you just go?"      "It's not that simple."      "It's not...that...difficult."      "I'm so sorry," Theo says. "I want to be with you."      She sniffs: derision.      He slouches.      She leans over and kisses his cheek, high up next to his ear.      He pulls her toward him and says into her hair, "We should get you to your train." Isabel is dragging her feet. "Come on," he says, not unkind.      She walks like she is on a death march, like at any moment her feet will give way underneath her and she will have to be carried, dragged—a prisoner who wants to be brave, has planned to be eloquent, but in the end can only stumble and wail.      They arrive with moments to spare. He hoists her pack out of its locker and carries it to the train. She climbs on, stands in the vestibule.      "I will be with you," he says. "I will."      "I love you," she says. For the first time out loud.      He pulls them nose to nose. "I love you, too." He kisses her.      The doors close and they do what they are supposed to do, which is place their hands on opposite sides of the same pane. The train sits in the station long enough for them to feel the warmth come through, long enough for it to become even more ridiculous—so much so, that as the train pulls out they are almost laughing. Walking back, Theo is engulfed by levity. He stops again in the raised square and rubs his arms through his coat. He looks again in the directions they looked, sees the things they saw, feels almost—now that the pressure is no longer immediate—that he could go with her after all. By the time he reaches his door, his feet are dragging almost as much as Isabel's had been, which is to say: the feeling has passed.      He steps inside, sees his bags where he left them. It feels like days ago. The lights are out, and only the curtained dimness of the moon comes in—the furniture all dark shapes, nothing defined. He hears Heike roll over in the next room—hears sheet against sheet as her body drags one across the other. He leaves his coat over the arm of a chair, slides his bags further inside the room. In the bathroom, he closes the door before turning on the light—a small courtesy, but a courtesy nonetheless.      He scrutinizes himself while he brushes his teeth—looks at the reds of his eyes like a veterinarian. Lines have insinuated themselves on the outer corners and he notices, or maybe imagines, that his jaw is going slack. A thump of fear sounds in his gut. He turns out the light.      In the bedroom, Heike is asleep like a child: diagonally, bunched up, sheet twisted in one clenched fist. Theo sits on the edge of the bed and strokes her hair. Her hand relaxes and she begins to smile. He reaches over her carefully, so as not to wake her further, picks up the other pillow and goes to sleep on the couch. Under a blue and tan afghan Heike's grandmother rewove from her daughter's outgrown sweaters, Theo sleeps the sleep of a dog: put out, twitching, half full of dread; dreaming of running, not sure if he is chasing or being chased. Quack