C lockwise, this dream: eighteenth-century marble, winding, worn stone unevenly waxy, tones of smoker’s phlegm caught in its depths, profiles of each step set with careful segments of something lifeless as plaster, patching old accidents. Like the scribed, transected, stapled sections of a beloved limb, returned from voyaging: surgery, disaster, a climb up stairs taller still than these. Westernmost, the spiral. Above the lobby, the stripes of Robert’s shirt, the Turk’s head atop the stapler, above the subtly rude equine monkey-business in the desk’s carved thicket, she climbs.