She imagined an invisible city in the air, its roads like glass. (This isn't necessarily a coincidence, nor an obvious parallel text. She might have heard the same story you did from the same woman.)

Javier thought women communicated differently, on another frequency known only to them, like the band of nerves along the flanks of fish which serve as a second sight: sonar, radar, reflex and intuition all in one. (In his own mind he could see a salmon, as clear as anything, its sides vaguely rainbowed, plump, silvery. It wasn't often he could summon any vision.) There were bands below the pictures on a television screen which, he had read, could themselves convey information. It was, he imagined, how they carried text with the television channels in Europe. You could sometimes touch a woman along her spine in a way that her whole self trembled. Tevet and Aurelie used to communicate without words. Sometimes he could feel the energy of their communication passing through the room like the currents of a transparent stream.

Sunlight painted the sleeping girl's hair and the mountains beyond as well.

Aurelie's new lover, Lisa, said he imagined too much about women. She had told him this (Tevet's mother, his ex-wife, Aurelie, not Lisa) on the phone. Her new lover was a California girl, all blond and tan with bright blue eyes. She had been Tevet's swimming coach, a salmon, it was a strange thing. Once he had read the journal of Vasco de Gama, a Portuguese sailor. It was filled with tales of sea creatures who were half-women and who could glide in the band of salt spume above the waves.