Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecedntly revealed, as though we wree used to seeing women in veils.

"Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly."

We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fanthom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that thye understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

They receeded from us, from the other girls, from their father, and we caught sight of them standing in the courtyard, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut, looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched.

He began to weep, looking out from the garage, as music filled the street like air. "It was the kind of music they play when you die," he said.

It occured to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, "Don't waste your time on life."

Later, when other acquaintances chose to end their lives-- sometimes even borrowing a book the day before-- we always pictured them as taking off cumbersome boots to enter the highly associative mustiness of a family cottage on a dune overlooking the sea. Every one of them had read the signs of misery Old Mrs. Karafilis had written, in Greek, in the clouds. On different paths, with different-colored eyes or jerkings of the head, they had deciphered the secret to cowardice or barvery, whichever it was. And the Lisbon girls were always there before them. They had killed themselves over our dying forest, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decision better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up at precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and they hadn't heard us caling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with out thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.