The ones who came to Doven had presents that didn't settle. The sensation his clients described: a day that had happened but hadn't finished happening, a moment that was both now and recent-past simultaneously, like a door that stood open but neither opened further nor closed. Doven had been working with this for nine years. He had a vocabulary for it. He used it precisely.
Veln was thirty-four and had been in this state for two years. Not continuously, she had periods of normal closing, periods where she could feel the present moving into memory the way it was supposed to, the clean resolution of one moment into the next. But in the other periods, time accumulated strangely. Things remained present that should have receded. She could not explain to people who had not experienced it why this was so difficult to live with. It did not look like anything from the outside.
She asked him, in their fourth session, whether he had ever experienced it himself. The closing, she meant, the normal kind, the kind she had sometimes and wanted to have always. She said she had been watching his face during their sessions. She was not sure what she was looking for but she had been looking.
"What do you see when you look?" Doven asked.
"I'm not sure, " she said. "Something careful."
After she left he sat in his office in the late afternoon. He waited. The chair, the window, the quality of the light coming through at this angle. He waited for it. He was not sure what it meant that he was waiting, or what it meant that he was noting the waiting as something he did. Nothing closed. He remained in the afternoon the way the afternoon remained in him. He sat in that for a while and then turned on a lamp.