Weeks pass, months pass, or maybe it is only seconds, coming and going through the interstices of millennia. Nights come and go. Living things crawl through the windows and under the door, boil up from the cracks between the floorboards, invisible insects and formless rodents, and shadows that skitter from corner to corner, or hover above the bed impatiently. Birch waits. She reads the moldy books, forgetting the beginnings long before she reaches the endings; she paces back and forth across the floorboards, looking out the window at the tracks that stretch past at eye-level, watching as the train comes on from miles away and shoots on past– there isn’t a stop near here. 

The bedroom door is open, but Birch never leaves except to use the bathroom. It is across the hall, and each time she darts from one door to the other as fast as she can, not looking from side to side. She doesn’t know how long the hallway is, or what lies at either end, but it feels bright and exposed, the sallow walls bearing down on her with malicious sentience.

The bathroom door has no lock. The walls were once white, and it is always cold, the water running out in a freezing trickle, now and then spurting out orange and thick with rust. She showers once in a while, when she can feel the grease building in her hair, but she does it fast because of the cold, and because it feels like the door might open at any moment. Some things have changed. He comes at night, now, and she feels the night coming on from hours away, long before the sun begins to set, before the room begins to dim. The days are uneven, as if the light comes and goes without pattern, but dinner always comes after dark. He brings her wine, red wine in a bottle with the cork already off and a single stemmed glass, and he pours it out again as soon as she has finished a glass, sometimes before it’s even drained, and she drinks again as he asks her questions. He asks about her life, skipping around from age to age. One moment he asks her favorite book when she was eleven, the next what color the covers had been on the bed she shared with Katie. He wants to know how she feels about her mother, what kind of ice cream she likes best, and whether she has ever had an abortion. 

At first Birch lies. She invents on the spot, making up fights with her mother over lipstick and parties, and claiming she never caught a newt in the river by her house. But the questions become recursive, referring back to one another, covering the same ground in different words, and though he never appears to doubt her, she grows weary of keeping track of the stories in her head and she begins to answer honestly, staring at the floor, not looking at his face. And all the while as they talk she eats and drinks, and he refills the glass and she drinks it down again, not fast but steady till it’s all gone away, till she’s all gone away, till she can barely feel her limbs, till she’s heavy and dizzy and silent, and then she closes her eyes, and there’s nothing but the dark, nothing but the bursting colors and the patterns on the inside of her eyelids. She’s spinning out, she’s lost in space, she’s moving at a velocity of lightyears, and there’s nothing behind her but the vacuum. And in the morning when she wakes up she’s tired like a thousand years have passed, she aches like a battle’s been fought again inside her, and she cries herself awake, and back to sleep again.

Katie slept soundly.

In the morning Cobra woke her with a swift shake, and they went with Alexandra and Sophia, an army to comfort Tia. Her mother was already there, hovering close to her daughter and and weeping with a hollow grief as if Kyrah, too, had been her child. Tia herself seemed to be at a loss. She stalked across the room as if she could go somewhere, then turned around and paced back again. As they made their way into the apartment, stopped up at the door, Katie hung back, feeling like an intruder into this strange place, upon this woman she scarcely knew. But Tia took her hand without a word, and held on just a little too tightly, and Katie realized that she was the closest thing Tia had to a witness. She sat down on the couch, and Tia beside her, and Katie was quiet as the rest of them talked of Kyrah. 

As morning turned to afternoon two of Tia’s other friends came, older than the four of them, closer to Tia’s age, women in business suits and heels and chemically relaxed hair, carrying food. One had a toddler with her, and the baby stretched out her arms happily when she saw Tia. “It’s Aunt Tia,” her mother said, “Tia Tia.” 

“Tia Tia,” the girl repeated, and Tia spun her around.

Katie and the rest of them took leave, feeling as if some duty had been taken over by people more competent to handle it. They went separate ways– Alexandra had to work and so, apparently, did Cobra. 

“I have to work, too,” Sophia said when they had gone. “You can come.”

“Okay,” said Katie.

They stopped at a Starbucks and went straight back to the bathroom without buying anything.

“Come on,” Sophia said, and pulled her inside. 

Sophia was already dressed up, wearing a knee-length navy blue skirt and a button down shirt under a tailored coat. Now she checked herself in the mirror, smoothing down her flat black hair to invisible effect, retracing her lipstick, fixing the lines of her pantyhose on her skinny legs. 

“Okay, we can go,” she said finally, and they rode the train to the Upper West Side.

“You have to wait outside,” Sophia told her as they stopped in front of a high-rise, the doorman looking out at them with no apparent curiosity. “You’re not dressed right,” she explained, and Katie glanced down at her jeans and sweatshirt as Sophia disappeared inside. She was back again in a few minutes with three dogs in tow, small and fluffy and tan with matching blue collars. They walked down along the river, but Sophia wouldn’t let her take a leash. “It’s my job,” she said with gravity, and Katie didn’t press the issue. 

Instead she asked Sophia how long she’d lived in New York, and got a significantly longer answer than she’d anticipated.

Sophia told Katie that she was half-Chinese, half-Greek, and while her Greek ancestors had been here only three generations, her Chinese ancestors had come over with the first expedition to the New World in 1421. She explained that, not liking what they found, they had gone back home again, but that when her great grandmother arrived again on the shores of California as a young woman at the end of the 19th century, she had a visceral sense of homecoming, derived of racial memory. Katie listened closely, then told her the story of how her own great grandparents had fled the Russian Revolution by stowing away on ships out of Saint Petersburg. It was family legend, and probably as true as Sophia’s story.

An hour later they dropped the dogs off again, and Katie waited on the sidewalk, feeling as if the doorman was watching her, even though she never caught his eyes even glancing her direction. 

Back on the J train, Katie glanced at the digital clock at the top of the car. 4:32 PM. “What’s the word today?” she asked, and Sophia smiled and motioned her close to whisper in her ear, even though there were only two people in the car with them.

“Delorian,” she said, and Katie laughed.

“That’s a great word.”

“Yeah, it’s a good word. I’ll write it down when we get home.” Sophia glanced nervously around the train and her eyes lit briefly on the man sitting beside Katie. She leaned in again to whisper, “Can you see what he’s writing?”

Katie sat back and looked quickly. He was scribbling on a newspaper, in the margins and between the lines, circling words in the text and underlining passages. He was middle aged and white, dressed in a pressed buttoned shirt and khaki pants with shiny brown shoes and wire-rimmed glasses. He didn’t seem to notice her at all, so she looked again, and this time caught a single line: “douse with kerosene, ignite, then dance.” 

Katie relayed it, barely breathing out the words directly into Sophia’s ear. Sophia froze.

“We have to leave,” she said aloud, and stood up, grabbing Katie’s arm and trying to pull her along. 

“We’re on a moving train,” Katie said.

But at their movement, the man noticed them and he stood, lurching as the train caught a corner and grabbing at the handrails. He was glaring, and he seemed to be staring straight through Katie to Sophia.

“Are you reading my thoughts again?” He said harshly, and Katie felt Sophia’s hands tighten on her arm.

“We’re not trying to read your thoughts,” Katie said as calmly as she could, and he seemed to see her for the first time. 

“You don’t even know what she is, do you?” He said. “She’s a prophet, she’s a saint she’s the divine Sophia but she’ll rip your heart out and marinate it in a garlic sauce. So DON’T say I didn’t warn you!” He took a step toward them, waving the newspaper, and Katie stood her ground as Sophia shrank back. The train juddered to a stop, and before they could break for the door he stalked off onto the platform and vanished down the stairs. Sophia was still clinging to her. The train started up again, they sat down, and Sophia buried her nose in Katie’s shoulder like a little child. 

“I hate crazy people,” she muttered into the cloth, and Katie suppressed a smile.

“Do you know him?” she asked,  and felt Sophia shake her head. 

“They just recognize me. It’s like gaydar. Psychodar.”

“You’re not psycho,” Katie said, and realized as she did that she meant it. 

“I know. But normal people don’t get coded messages, though.” Katie opened her mouth to speak, but Sophia sat up and waved the words away before they came . “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just I try really hard. I never leave the house without pantyhose. I don’t know how they can always tell.” 

“Pantyhose is the new barometer for sanity?” Katie said lightly, and Sophia laughed. 

“Unless you roll it down around your ankles.” 

The train stopped again and Katie looked up just as the doors were closing to see that it was their stop. She ran for the door and jammed an arm into the narrowing space, and Sophia helped her force it apart until it opened on its own. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, for your safety please do not hold the doors open while the train is in the station…” 

And they were out, the train was pulling away as they hurried down the steps.

The days went by, and Katie made no more progress. She came and went each day,  half-heartedly looking for work and finding nothing.  Mark and Sarah had real jobs, it seemed, and they came and went and ate and slept with the regularity of people who actually had to get up in the morning.

Sophia left the house only rarely to walk the dogs or buy some few groceries, and whenever she did she put on skirts and pumps, with lipstick and mascara and her pantyhose pulled up straight. Sometimes Sophia let her come to work with her, and always made her wait outside, and never let her touch a leash.

“You can pet them,” she said on the third such outing, and she let Katie rub their heads and have her face licked for a few minutes before saying, “okay, that’s enough,” and pulling the animals along the path again. At home Sophia’s door was almost always closed, but sometimes she motioned Katie inside, and they’d talk about Shakespeare. Sophia had considered and discarded every theory that the Bard’s work might have been written by someone else. 

“I kind of wish it was Queen Elizabeth,” she whispered once, then flushed, and rearranged her papers on the floor.

Cobra mostly came home late, and sometimes not at all (and Sophia whispered to her that Cobra had lots of girlfriends, but didn’t like Alexandra to see them), and at home, read book after book after book. Novels with strange bright covers and incomprehensible titles that stuck in Katie’s mind for days as she tried to puzzle out their meaning You Don’t Love Me Yet Now Wait For Last Year As She Climbed Across The Table Special Topics in Calamity Physics Burning Chrome– They all ran together in her mind as she forgot where one sentence fragment turned into another, and as Cobra lay on the mattress reading, Katie borrowed and scrounged paint and brushes and began to cover the facing wall in darkness, and in stars. Galaxies, constellations, sprays of light. Inaccurate, but she didn’t care, this wasn’t the universe as it was, but the universe as it might have been. A spinoff world, an alternate potentiality. 

As she made it,  she began to suspect that it might be true about the multitude of universes, present moments splitting off into an infinite number of moments, all happening at once, except that if it really happened, there’s no such thing as “at once”. She mentioned this to Cobra, who looked up from a novel with a robot on the cover, and nodded enthusiastically. 

“Would you have sex with yourself?” Cobra asked, and Katie thought about it for a second.

“I don’t think I’m really my type. You?”

“Oh, yeah!” Cobra answered a little too quickly.

“What are you talking about?”

Sophia was there in the doorway, only peering in with her eyes.

“The multiplicity of worlds,” Cobra said, and Sophia’s eyes widened.

“I hate to think about that,” she said, but came in anyway and settled herself on Katie’s bed.

“Would you do you?” Cobra said, and she tilted her head to the side, considering.

“There would be no risk of cross-contamination,” she said finally, which Katie took to be a yes, and then all at once Sophia spilled out the reason she hated to think about it.

She had considered the theory of multiple worlds from the age of six, when she first stared up at the stars in the sky, and comprehended the distance between them. Infinity had been taught her by an older cousin, a whispered secret from one sleeping bag to another as they stared up at the night summer sky. She extrapolated from the word infinity the theory of splitting moments. But as she thought about it she became convinced that in every other moment, every other present, the she that was she and not yet she, had died. Alone not only in the universe but in all the universes, all possible worlds lacking even the fragmented possible selves. No possibility of a kindred spirit.

Sophia stopped talking abruptly, staring at Katie’s wall and the unfinished mural.

“That’s extremely inaccurate,” she said.

Katie smiled, wanting to hug her but knowing Sophia would never allow it. “I know,” she said. “It’s a possible world.”

Sophia nodded. “Did you give the constellations names?”

“I didn’t think of that.”

I’ll do it,” Sophia said, and came to the wall, running her hands over the picture without touching the surface, and whispering quick words under her breath. “It’s not finished,” she said aloud. “Tell me when it’s done and I’ll give you the names.”

“Okay,” said Katie, “Thanks, Sophia.”

Sophia smiled at her, and fled the room.

There is paper in the room, and pens, and though he never mentions it she knows he hopes she’ll use it to write a story of her life, a second set of answers to all the questions he likes to ask, put it all into a form he can deconstruct. There’s a whole ream of paper, stacked up tight like it was still wrapped in its package, and a box of ballpoint pens, blue ink, still sealed. He wants her to write him a story of his sins. And when one morning she discovered a needle in a hidden corner of the room, fallen into a crack in the floorboards, she begins to do so. 

He sees it at once, of course, and he doesn’t say anything, only laughs and kisses her forehead. But in the morning when she wakes up, there is a second box of pens, and a package of shiny, fine-point needles. She takes them, and continues.

She starts slowly, on the tops of her feet where the needle digs down to the bone, bleeds and raises red welts that heal into smooth white and blue. Her veins still show through under the words, a poorly scraped palimpsest, and the combination makes it hard to read.

On her feet she makes a latticework of words that matter, but have no relation to one another. The skin there is close to the bone, and it bleeds and hurts until she makes her way to her ankles, where she plans to make a map of the Connecticut arctic circle up the whole of one leg, and lay out the anatomy of an opiate high down the other. Across one side of her torso, upside-down, she lays out the mathematical formulae for the life, death and resurrection of a North American tree frog in an elementary school backyard. She knows there are errors, but it doesn’t seem to matter. 

He sees the wounds and the healing tattoos each day as he comes in, but he does not ask, and does not try to look at them, at least not while she is awake.

Time does not pass, even though the seasons change from day to day. This morning she sees that the few trees have lost their leaves, and she can’t remember, if yesterday was summer or fall, if she missed a whole season or just didn’t notice it’s passing. She thinks he still comes every day, but she can’t really be sure, sometimes she thinks she sleeps through weeks at a time, she sleeps as long as she can, till she’s sick with sleep, her nerves on edge and her brain fogged over, and at last she has no choice but to wake up and move about, and then she reads the moldy books, does push-ups off the bed like prisoners do in movies, and when she can stand it no more she takes the needle and the ink, and keeps on with the tedious work.

Last night he asked about her name. She had hoped to hide it from him– he called her Amanda when he first came for her, she had answered to it, but he knew so much already, it would be mad to think he would not know her other name. And so when he asked, she told him. 

She changed it when she ran away, when she was fourteen and Annika was dead. She saw birch trees out the window of the car as the drove home from the grocery store one afternoon. They were strung out along the highway in a small clutch, stripped bare for winter even though the snow was gone and it was not yet spring. She gazed out at the pale limbs and the bark peeling back to show the insides and the dark spaces between the trees where anything might be hiding. That night she left the house for the last time and walked with her brother’s backpack to that same place in the ersatz forest by the side of the road and touched the bark, smooth and thin like scraped vellum. Minutes passed and she felt silly standing there with the mud seeping into her leaky canvas shoes, and she made her way to the side of the road.

And when a trucker pulled her rig over onto the shoulder and told her she was too young to be traveling alone, she climbed up into the cab, and said her name was Birch.

More days went by, and Katie thought of Birch. Up until the night she met the Jester, she had been thinking of it as a quest, thinking only of following the clues, of getting her back, of seeing her again. But now when she closed the door to the room she shared with Cobra, or when she went for hours-long walks back and forth across Brooklyn, she thought and thought of Birch. She told herself the story as she told it to Sophia, to Cobra, to Tia: I met a girl and she met me. I loved her, and she loved me. And we were happy. We were meant to be, and we were happy. Birch was happy. 

But Birch wasn’t happy, or she was bizarrely happy, she was quiet, she was silly, she closed her eyes and played music all day long, she loved me. But Birch wasn’t always there. Birch closed her eyes and played music all day long, and sometimes didn’t stop to eat or talk or go outside. And Birch had started having nightmares. She didn’t cry out or thrash against invisible enemies, or any of the other things people did when they had nightmares, but for nights in a row she woke Katie up, all in a panic. 

“What? What’s wrong?” Katie whispered through the weight of sleep, scarcely able to make her body move. 

“Nothing,” Birch said, “It’s nothing, it’s just a dream. Come here.” And Katie moved to her, took Birch, gathered her up in her arms and pulled her close, like a talisman, like her sleeping body might be a shield to the things in Birch’s head. 

In the morning she asked, “what did you dream about?” But Birch never remembered what the dream had been, or even that she had awakened. Or at least, that was what she said to Katie. 

Katie told Sophia about the nightmares, one night as midnight turned to morning, sitting crosslegged on the floor among the handwritten pages of her book. Sophia listened earnestly, her knees drawn up under her chin. 

“My word today was somnambulist,” she said, and pointed to a set of symbols just above her head, the paint red and still tacky. 

“She never walked in her sleep,” Katie said, and Sophia shrugged.

“Maybe she walked somewhere you couldn’t see.” 

“Maybe,” Katie said.

“I used to have nightmares,” Sophia said. “Until I was twelve I dreamt there was a man who came into my room with a knife.”

“What happened when you were twelve?” Katie asked, slightly horrified.

“I bought a lot of deadbolts for my bedroom door,” Sophia said cheerfully. She gestured to the array braced along the door.

“Oh,” Katie said awkwardly. “I guess that works. I just wish I knew what was going on in her head.”

Sophia nodded. “There’s more things in Heaven and Earth,” she began.

“Please don’t quote Hamlet,” Katie said, and Sophia frowned, hurt. “Sorry,” Katie said hastily, “I’m just tired.”

Sophia nodded. “I understand. I don’t sleep much so I forget other people need to.”

Katie nodded. “Yeah. Good night, then.”

“Good night!”

Katie closed Sophia’s door behind her and heard the bolts slide into place one after another, seven in all. She stood outside the door until Sophia was done, as if she might be guarding the door. In her own room, Cobra had fallen asleep with the light on, one hand still holding a book dropped halfway onto the floor. Katie switched the light off, and Cobra sat up suddenly.

“Shit.” 

Katie smiled into the darkness. “You fell asleep.”

“Shit. I meant to stay up.”

“Why?”

“I never finish this book,” Cobra said, turning the light back on. Katie picked up the book. Perdido Street Station. 

“I think if you can’t get through a book it’s not usually worth finishing.” 

Cobra laughed. “I love this book. I just don’t want it to be over.” 

Katie smiled. “Oh.”

Cobra shrugged. “I really love books.” Katie handed it back, and Cobra set it on the bed next to the pillow. “I haven’t seen you the past couple days. How’s the search going?”

Katie shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“Did you find anything?” 

“I don’t know,” Katie said, and without warning found herself in tears. 

Cobra watched her awkwardly, then gestured at the mattress. “You can sit down.”

Katie sat. “Sorry. It’s just kind of– overwhelming or something.”  

“You know me and Alexandra, we ran away from home when we were sixteen. We lived in Atlanta for a while, in a shelter there. It was a rough place, you know? But we made it, traveled a while. And then we came to New York, eighteen years old, we knew what was what. We were living places, a couple of squats we’d stay at. 

“Anyway, it was like our third week here, it was winter and it was freezing cold. I was walking back to the place we were staying at by myself, and I was looking up at all these apartment buildings along the street, with their lights all on, I was staring in at their ceilings– ’cause that was all I could see– and thinking about what it must be like to live there. It all looked so warm, like they were places that had a bed and maybe a table to eat dinner at, and a stove you could make tea on, a place you could have a cat. And there was this one, the window didn’t have any curtains and I could kind of see into the kitchen, pots and pans and stuff, I walked past it and looked back again, and there was a woman. She was hanging from the ceiling.”

“What did you do?” Katie said quietly.

Cobra wasn’t looking at her, staring at the seascape by the bed as if the scene was playing out again between the anemones and the coral, behind the wrecked ship. “Nothing. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there for a while and stared up at her, I knew she was dead. She was wearing blue jeans and a white tee shirt, and her feet were bare. And then I just turned and kept walking until I got home to Alexandra.”

There was a silence, and then Katie said, “oh.”

“Yeah, and I just thought right then that New York was the most fucked up place I’d ever been. So it’s not just you.” Cobra grinned. “So what did the moon man tell you?” 

Katie pulled the collar of her sweatshirt down a little– the bruise on her neck had faded, but it was still visible.

“What the fuck, who did that?” 

“It’s fine,” Katie said. “I’m fine. He told me to talk to Sharon at the Cat’s Meow. I don’t know what that means. It sounds like a club or something. I looked it up at the library, but if it’s a business it’s not online.”

“Hang on a sec.” Cobra knocked on the wall and went out the door, returning a minute later with Alexandra trailing sleepily behind. 

“I’m asleep,” she said. She was wearing pajamas, a white tank top and blue flannel pants with penguins all over them. Katie smiled.

“I like your pants,” she said quietly, and Alexandra glanced down at herself. 

“In memorium,” was all she said. 

“Katie wants to know about the Cat’s Meow,” Cobra said. 

“It can wait, though” Katie interjected.

“She wasn’t really asleep,” Cobra said, and Alexandra scowled briefly.

“I might have been,” she said.

“Meow,” Cobra said again. Alexandra sat down on the mattress, pulling Cobra down with her to be used as a pillow. Katie watched Cobra put an arm around her waist and brighten suddenly at the little contact. Katie sat down too, leaning back against the painted wall.

“What about it?” Alexandra said. “I worked there, Tia worked there, Kyrah– everybody works there at some point. Cool place. Kinda freaky, though, and there’s not enough money.”

“It’s a strip club?” Katie asked.

Alexandra smiled. “Kind of. Yeah. It’s sort of a mystical experience.”

“The Man in– Someone told me I should go there and talk to Sharon. He said she might know about Birch.”

“Sharon.” 

“You know who that is?”

Alexandra was nodding. “Yeah, I know Sharon. Everybody knows Sharon. If you want to talk to her you better bring a present.”

“A present?” 

“Yeah, something–” she cast her eyes around the room quickly. “Something like that,” she said, pointing to the string of red glass beads lying on the floor beside Katie’s backpack. “Maybe a little nicer. Something pretty. It’s really just a gesture. Respect.” 

“Okay,” Katie said, “I’ll find something.”

Alexandra hesitated like she was going to say something, then opened her mouth to say something else. “I should go with you. Not tomorrow, Wednesday, though. We could go Wednesday.”

“Okay,” Katie said again. 

Alexandra yawned. “Find a present,” she said, and stood. “Night.” And then she was gone and the door shut behind her.

“See?” Cobra said, “Alexandra knows everybody.”

“Thanks,” Katie said. Cobra reached up and ruffled her hair like a child or a pet.

“No problem.” Katie switched the light off, and before the afterburn had faded from her eyes Cobra spoke, as if the question had been waiting for dark.

“Can I ask you something?” 

“Sure,” Katie said. 

“How come you’re so sure she’s alive?”

It was black in the room, Katie blinked but her eyes still weren’t adjusting. “She’s dead and it didn’t kill me, so she must still be alive, you know?”

Cobra didn’t answer. There was music, faint, coming through the wall from Alexandra’s room. It was a woman’s voice, and

Katie thought she knew the song, but she couldn’t make out the words or the tune. 

“Amanda Palmer,” Cobra said softly. “Fuck.” The sound went on, and Katie leaned her ear against the wall, letting the piano and the words she couldn’t quite hear fill up her head.

After a minute short, sharp gasps began to come from the other side of the wall, the bedsprings creaking just a little as Alexandra writhed and stifled moans beneath her own touch. Katie suddenly felt Cobra’s presence beside her, not touching but warm and electric against her skin; Cobra’s breath was shallow, she could hear it, feel it on the air. Alexandra made a sudden high pitched sound, and Katie felt herself tighten, felt it go through Cobra too. The music got a little louder, like it was in the room with them, but Alexandra was still there underneath it. 

“Hey Cobra?” Katie said, and the words half stuck in her throat.

“Hmm?”

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

Cobra laughed at that, full and low, and then Cobra’s breath was on her neck, lips brushing against her earlobe. “Katie,” Cobra said, “That is the least interesting thing you could have asked me.” Alexandra sighed behind them, and Katie swallowed. 

“I should probably get to sleep,” she whispered, and she felt Cobra nod.

“Me too.” She meant to get up, but instead she reached for Cobra’s hand and gripped it tight. Cobra squeezed back, and

they sat there in the dark side by side for what seemed like hours until at last Alexandra switched the music off.

In the silence the spell was broken, and Cobra let go her hand. Katie started to get up, but Cobra said quickly,

“You can sleep here if you want.” 

“Okay.” 

They laid down together on Cobra’s bed, and fell asleep all tangled in each other’s arms. In the morning when Katie woke, Cobra was gone, and didn’t come back until the next night, when Katie was already asleep along her own wall.

Wednesday night, Alexandra called her and said she was running late.

“I’ll meet you there,” she said, and told Katie how to get there. Katie wrote the address down, vaguely relieved she wouldn’t have to ride the subway with Alexandra, alone with her among all those people. She’d bought a hematite pendant on the street for four dollars; it was an odd shape, but it was pretty, with a rune of some sort blackened onto the surface, and Katie hoped it would be nice enough, and vaguely wondered whether she was heading off to meet a dragon, with a gift to feed the hoard.

She got to the place just as rain started to fall, and she waited in a cafe down the street for a while, but twenty minutes after she’d finished her tea the barista started giving her inquisitive looks from behind his counter, and she packed up her bag and went down the street. She checked her phone again, but there was nothing from Alexandra, so she went on alone.

“Do you work here?” Katie stopped. The bouncer was there, staring down at her with his arms folded. He wasn’t very big, but she still took a step back. 

“I just want to go in,” she said.

“Can’t go in by yourself,” he said.

“I’m twenty-three, here.” She started going through her pockets looking for her ID. 

“No, we don’t let girls in alone.” Katie stared up at him. It had started to rain harder, rolling down off the awning and splashing up onto her sneakers. She edged inward, closer to the door.

“So I need to come with a guy?” He nodded. “Any guy?” she said. He nodded again. Katie grabbed the arm of a middle-aged white man walking up to the door at a quick pace. “I’m with him,” she said, and followed him inside before either of them could object. Once inside, she dropped his arm.

“Have fun,” she said, and darted away through the crowd. It was full, there were men standing three deep around the bar, throwing dollar bills up at the dancers on the raised stage behind the bar. Some of the bills made it across, others fell down to the floor behind the bartenders. The men at the front climbed up on their chairs and stretched forward across the bars to let the girls take money directly from their hands. 

The place was dark and lit with red, and it smelled of incense and and a little bit of weed, and the crush of bodies night after night. The music was semi-familiar, songs she’d heard in passing but never listened to on her own. She could barely

see the dancers over the heads of the men, and she inched backward in the crowd until they came into her line of vision. 

She had never been to a strip club before, and was vaguely surprised by how much it resembled what she would have imagined; there were five girls up onstage, moving their hips to the beat and showing body parts one at a time, their skimpy clothing falling to the floor piece after piece. Someone  put a hand on her shoulder and she shied away, turning around fast. The man she’d come in with was standing there, looking at her with narrowed eyes. 

“You work here?” he asked, and Katie shook her head.

“I’m looking for someone,” she said, and he nodded. 

“I know everybody, I’ve been coming here thirty years. Who do you want?”

“Sharon?” He was standing too close to her, and Katie steeled herself, trying not to step backward.

“I know Sharon. Everybody knows Sharon. She won’t be out before midnight, come have a drink with me.”

Katie glanced around nervously, spotting the clock above a door leading to the back. It was only eleven o’clock. “I don’t work here,” she repeated, and he shrugged. 

“So I won’t ask for a lap dance,” he said, and shouldered his way to the bar, holding out a hand. She didn’t take it, but she followed him through the crowd up to the bar, where two seats had miraculously cleared.

The bartender, a blonde woman in her thirties, handed over two glasses; one was stemmed and filled with white wine, and that one she set in front of Katie. The man lifted his martini glass expectantly, and Katie held hers up for him to clink. 

“I’m Bob,” he said.

“Natalie,” Katie said after a moment’s hesitation.

“This place is hallowed ground,” he said, and she nodded. “People come in here, they don’t know.”

“Oh,” Katie said awkwardly. She looked back up at the stage uncomfortably, feeling it must be rude to look away, or maybe it was rude for her to be there at all. She glanced from one woman to the next, then smiled suddenly. Lilith was there, up on stage at the end, near the stairs and only half in the light.  She was wearing fishnet stockings and a fishnet dress, dancing shoeless to an awkward beat. She saw Katie and waved quickly, and Katie raised a hand in acknowledgment. No one but Katie seemed to see her, and here and there she reached down furtively and stuffed a handful of bills into her tights. 

“Hallowed ground,” Bob said again, and drained the martini. “I’ve been coming here thirty years. Used to be a hell of a place, used to be beautiful girls, girls like that one, all over the place.” He gestured toward the stage, but Katie couldn’t tell which woman he was referring to. “It’ll come back up, though,” he said. “Up and down, ugly girls now, but the pretty ones ‘ll be back.” 

“I think they’re pretty,” Katie said, seized by a brief solidarity.

He looked down at her and laughed. “Course you do. How would you know? You know this place got hit eight years ago, half destroyed by debris. My twin brother and I were in the first one, the first tower. I was on the third floor and he was all the way up at the top, and I made it out and he didn’t. Hey, Natasha!” He called out to the bartender and held up his glass, then leaned down to whisper confidentially to Katie, “Her name’s not really Natasha, I just call her that.” 

“Oh,” Katie said, and they both fell silent again until not-really-Natasha came back with a second martini. Bob left it sitting on the bar. 

“This place was closed for over a month, while they fixed it up, and then the day it opened back up again it was full to busting. All the girls, all the men who used to come here, all the people who wouldn’t be coming back, this place, it was full to busting with ghosts, and people who might as well have died, and all the rescue workers, men who’d been going in and out, day and night, cleaning out the bodies, watching each other die.

“There was this girl, Jinx. She was a bartender, and she was the most beautiful girl I ever saw in this place, in any place, and everyone was always asking her to get up onstage and she never ever would. And this night, all the firemen started asking, they were chanting her name, and she kept saying no, she didn’t do that.

“And I said, Jinx, you know who these men are. You’re going to get up there, and you’re going to dance.” He picked up the martini and drank it down all at once. “And she got up there. And my God did she dance. Never saw anything like it.

My God did she dance.” His eyes were tearing, and Katie looked away, down at the floor. “People don’t know,” Bob said again. He walked away without another word.

Katie stayed where she was and sipped the wine nervously. 

A hand clapped her shoulder suddenly, and Katie dropped the glass; it landed on the bar and didn’t break, but rolled away, spinning out all the liquid.

“Shit,” Katie said, grabbing for napkins, and turning to see Alexandra behind her. 

“You could have waited down the street,” Alexandra said, and Katie shrugged. 

“It’s okay,” she said, and Alexandra grinned at her, and flagged down the bartender, who smiled when she saw her. 

“Oh, no, nothing for this one,” she said.

“Hey, Sally,” said Alexandra. 

“Hey, hon. You back to work?” 

Alexandra shook her head, and Sally poured scotch over ice and gave Katie another glass of wine, and hurried off to take another order. 

“Come on.” Alexandra led her back through the crowd to one of the couches against the wall, and they sat down. After a moment a pairing came over next to them, a blonde girl stripped off her top and began to grind on top of a suited man beneath. 

“This place has been here forever,” Alexandra said. “I think since like the 1880s.”

“Wow,” Katie said, trying to keep her eyes off the couple next to them. “Has it always been the same kind of place?”

Alexandra shrugged and knocked back the rest of her drink. “I think so. I guess back in the day the girls just showed their knees or something.” 

Katie laughed. 

“Damn, that’d be great,” Alexandra said. “Can you imagine getting paid just to show your ankles? I’d be a fucking millionaire.”

“But you couldn’t vote.”

“Oh, yeah. Shit, nothing ever works out perfect, does it?”

T

hey sat there for a while, and Katie tried not to look at the naked girl beside them. Her stiletto heel kept grazing Alexandra’s leg in time to the music, but Alexandra either didn’t notice or didn’t mind.

“Somebody said Sharon won’t be out till midnight,” Katie said, and Alexandra nodded, half-listening.

“Yeah, probably.”

The music changed and the girl next to them climbed swiftly off her client and waited as he dug around in his pocket to pay her. She took the money and tucked it away into the purse she pulled out of the cushions as he hurried off. 

“Hey, Skye,” Alexandra said, and she turned. 

“Hey! I haven’t seen you in months!” She leaned down to hug Alexandra. “Can you tie me up?” She turned her back and repositioned her bikini top, and Alexandra caught up the strings and tied them tight, then let one hand trail down to Skye’s waist and linger there for a second, until she turned back around. 

“Thanks,” she said. 

“Sure,” said Alexandra. 

“See you later?” Skye said, and Alexandra shrugged. 

“Probably.” Skye slipped back into the crowd, and a moment later Katie caught sight of her on the arm of a new man, leading him toward the back of the club. 

“I used to be in love with her,” Alexandra said conversationally. 

“Really?”

Alexandra thought about it for a second. “I liked her a lot,” she amended, and Katie smiled. 

Suddenly the music stopped. The stage cleared immediately, the women dancing grabbed their clothes and purses and their cash and hurried down without stopping to dress, heading naked for the dressing room, leaving dollar bills scattered on the stage. Katie looked for Lilith among them, but she had vanished. From the other side, where Katie hadn’t even realized there was an entrance, a woman came out. 

She was dressed like a belly dancer in gauzy skirts and a bikini top, all in black with small, irregular metallic discs hanging from the fabric, some of them shining under the light, and others dull and blackened with age. She was fat, and pale under the lights, her hair was an unnatural red, but somehow it didn’t look dyed, looked like it sprang that way from her head. And she was dancing, and dancing and dancing. She was Salome, she was Pavlova, she was calling down the rain. It was nothing Katie had ever seen before, but it was stunning, riveting. There was music behind her, it was mostly bass, so deep and loud that it seemed to bypass her ears and pound itself straight into her body. 

There were shadows onstage with her, moving in an uncanny rhythm, they danced behind her in the shape of strange things coming, they were following her movements but they weren’t cast by her figure, weren’t cast by anything Katie could see, shadows growing out of shadows and playing over the mirror, reflecting back on the faces in the crowd.  And then something happened, a shift, a movement, and there was only Sharon on the stage, and Katie on the floor, and the music gone. The crowd was silent, vanished, they were alone in the empty bar and it smelled like cinnamon. Sharon was still moving, still in the dance, but the shadows behind her were frozen, smacked on the wall in an abstract tableau.

Do you have something for me? The words were there in her head, though they had not been spoken aloud. Katie reached

into her pocket and pulled out the necklace, held it up above her head like an offering. Sharon peered down at it, and held out her hand. Glancing around at the empty place, Katie scrambled up on the bar, kneeling up like a supplicant and holding out the necklace. Sharon took it, snorted and tossed it back. Do you even know what this means? She threw the words into Katie’s head, and Katie reeled back, catching herself on her hands and just barely stopping herself from falling off the bar. Signs of life, and you try to pass them off to me. Come here. Stand.

Katie stood, and in an instant Sharon reached out and grabbed at her head, and Katie yelped as hairs were torn from her head. She watched as Sharon twisted them into a ring, and opened a locket around her neck, stuffing them inside with what looked like several similar rings.

“Ow,” Katie said, but Sharon was dancing again, and this time Katie realized that the silence wasn’t fully silence– there was nothing to be heard, but she could still feel the beat through the bar under her feet, through the air, like the inside of a heartbeat. Suddenly struck with vertigo, Katie climbed down from the bar and steadied herself on the floor again.

“What happened to Birch?” She said, and her voice was thin and small in the space, which now seemed impossibly vast. Sharon looked down on her from the stage. 

She made a deal, Sharon said. She reached up to her breasts and yanked something from the fabric, coins that jingled together in her hand, and she flung them down at Katie. They struck her in the face and hit the floor, and she scrambled to pick them up, a penny and a nickel. 

“Please,” Katie said, “please tell me something that’s real. She made a deal, does that mean she went willingly? Did she kill herself? What are these?” She held up the coins in a fist.

Keep those, she said. Pay the piper. 

“Please,” Katie said, “no more riddles,” and Sharon threw back her head and laughed so loud it shook the walls, and plaster rained down from the ceiling. 

When in all of this has there been a riddle? She cried out, and a ceiling beam began to shake on its girders. When have you been told a lie?

And then the shadows were moving again, the music was audible, the ceiling was still and solid, and Alexandra was coming toward her, fighting through the crowd and then grasping her arm. 

“Hey, come on.” Alexandra was pulling her to the side, through all the people, and Katie ducked her head and followed.

“She’s good, right?” Alexandra shouted into her ear. She was pulling Katie to the side of the stage as Sharon stepped off, waving to catch the older woman’s attention. 

“Sharon!” 

Sharon’s eyes lit on them and the crowd parted around her as she came down to Alexandra and swept her up almost off her feet in a hug, then let her go just as quickly. Katie stifled a grin as Alexandra teetered back into balance.

“Sharon,” Alexandra said, “This is my friend Katie, she needs to ask you something.” Sharon glanced at Katie swiftly like she hadn’t seen her before, like she couldn’t be bothered. 

“No, she doesn’t,” she said, and held up a hand as Alexandra began to protest. “Katie has what she needs,” Sharon said, and Katie nodded when Alexandra looked the question at her. She opened her palm to show them the two coins, and the woman nodded.

“Come have a drink with me in the back, she said to Alexandra, “Unless you’ve come to beg for your job back.” 

Alexandra shook her head. “Not yet,” she said, and Sharon shrugged. 

“You were never a very good dancer anyway,” she said. She led them to the back. where there was an emergency exit. Sharon opened it and gestured them through, not to the outside but on a flight of stairs. 

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Katie whispered to Alexandra as they descended. “Like if there’s a fire?”

“Probably,” Alexandra said, and behind them Katie heard Sharon listening. 

The stairs went on and on, endless, until Katie thought they must be beneath the sewers, beneath the subway. She could feel the air getting thick and hostile, like when the train passed underwater, though it might have been all in her head. 

At last the staircase ended, spilled out into tunnels pointing this way and that with only dim lights hanging caged from the walls at odd intervals, as if it were a mine. Alexandra stopped, and Sharon brushed past her. 

“Forgot the way already?” She said, and laughed at that, and then took off down the pathway straight ahead. They followed, Katie was expecting a further trek, but in a few seconds they turned and were inside a dressing room that seemed to be covered entirely in purple plush. The lights were soft, and the long dressing table mirrors reflected back glowing, unfocused images. Katie squinted at them from a few feet back, trying to make out her own face, but she could not; the mirrors seemed to be coated in some non-reflective surface.

Alexandra threw herself down on a plushy couch, and Sharon settled herself in a high-backed chair that might have come from a Busby Berkeley set. After a moment Katie sat down beside Alexandra, who popped back up again as Sharon said her name.

“Alexandra, there’s Scotch in the cupboard.” 

Alexandra opened a cupboard concealed behind a painting like a safe. When she closed it again Katie craned her neck a little to see the picture, of a woman on a dance-hall stage who looked suspiciously like Sharon, in 19th century dress.

“That looks sort of like Toulouse-Lautrec,” Katie said. “I don’t recognize the painting, though.” 

“Good old Henri,” Sharon said, “Too-Loose-Lautrec. He painted that just for me. Of course, that was back in Paris. He did it so I’d write off his bar tab.”

Silent for a moment, Katie finally said, “Did you?”

Sharon smiled wide and swiveled away to the mirror and began to wipe away her make-up with pads and cold cream, referring to the glass, though Katie still couldn’t see any kind of reflection. 

“I never write off a tab,” Sharon said, “But I don’t think I’m likely to collect now. Died with nothing in his pockets but a hankie and half a prayer.”

“Katie wanted to ask you a question,” Alexandra said again. Sharon didn’t stop wiping her face. 

“I’ve told Katie all she’s going to get out of me tonight,” Sharon said. “Tell me how you are.”

Alexandra drained her drink all at once and stood up.

“We should go, then,” she said, and Sharon shrugged expansively.

“If you must.”

They ascended the stairs in silence and came out into an empty bar. The bartenders were still counting money and cleaning glasses, and Katie felt like an intruder into the stillness. Alexandra pulled her across the hallway and through a closed door. It was a dressing room, tiny and cramped with three half-naked women struggling into their street clothes in the narrow space. Skye was there, still dressed in her bikini as she rooted through her bag for something.

“Hey, Skye,” Alexandra said. Skye turned briefly and smiled at them, then yanked off her blonde hair. She folded up the wig and shoved it into her bag, and ran a comb through her own hair, short and pale blue and standing up in all directions.

“Give me five minutes,” she said, and Alexandra nodded and sat down on the bench. Katie stayed awkwardly by the door, half averting her eyes as Skye stripped naked and dressed again in cargo pants and a heavy sweater. 

The other two women put on their coats and left, and a few minutes later Skye was ready too. Alexandra held out a hand, and Skye grinned and took it, and Katie followed them through the bad and out into the street.

“I need a drink,” Skye declared, and Alexandra laughed and slung an arm around her waist.

“Unless you’ve changed drastically, you’ve been drinking all night,” she said.

“True,” Skye said, “But it doesn’t count at work.”

“Right,” Alexandra said. They walked on and on, taking turns through the streets and alleys. The area felt strange, everything around them seemed to be shut. Alexandra saw her looking. “Everything closes with the stock exchange around here,” she explained. 

Finally they came out into lights and open businesses, and taxis filling the streets, and they stopped at a brightly-lit 24-hour diner. Alexandra and Skye squeezed into the booth side of the table together, and Katie took a chair across from them. In spite of Skye’s declared need for a drink, they all ordered coffee and poured in soy milk and brown sugar. Katie tuned out as the two of them talked about people they didn’t know, and places she’d never been. The place was almost empty– there was a couple sitting on the same side of a booth near the door, barely trying to hide their touches beneath the table. As she watched, the man slid his hand from the woman’s knee up under her short purple skirt. Katie suppressed a smile and looked away, not really wanting to see what happened next. At the table in the far back corner, dark except for a single dim light, a tall black girl with a shaven head was bent over a notebook, scribbling furiously. 

Someone said her name. 

“Huh?”

“What did you think of the place?” Alexandra repeated. 

Katie shrugged. “It was okay,” she said.

“It’s all gone to shit since the stock market crashed,” Skye said.

“Me too,” Alexandra said. “Minimum wage sex work– it’s the new McDonalds!” 

“No free happy meals, though,” Skye said. She laughed, and Katie smiled uncomfortably. 

“It seemed pretty busy,” she offered.

“Yeah,” Skye said, “Sharon has a special kind of magic, the place never really runs dry, but it’s still not like it used to be.” They drank coffee in silence like liquor, and stared down at the cups. Alexandra glanced around the cafe, and grinned when she saw the girl in the corner. 

“Lo!” She called, and Lo looked up.

“Hey, Alexandra,” she waved a little from her seat, and Alexandra tried to motion her over, but Lo shook her head.

“I’m almost done, I want to finish.”

“Ooh, when’s it out?” Skye said, and Lo set down the pencil for a minute.

“Depends on when I can afford to print more,” she said.

“We can pay in advance,” Alexandra said. She pulled two dollars out of her pocket and Syke did the same, but Lo didn’t move to take them.

“I can give you copies,” she said.

“And business practices like those are why you can’t afford to print the next one!” Alexandra said, and slapped the money down on the table. Lo rolled her eyes, but left it there.

“Right,” she said, “okay, then.”

“Always get the money up front,” Alexandra said, and laughed.

Skye turned to Katie and said, “This is Dolores Knapp. She writes the best comic book in Brooklyn.”

“Oh. Hi, I’m Katie,” she said, and made a small wave.

“Lo.”

“What’s it about?” she asked, and Lo looked at her for a moment before answering, like she was making a decision. 

“It’s called Lez-Bionic,” she said finally. “Sort of… Hot Headed Paisan meets the Terminator. Meets a lot of other stuff.”

Katie laughed suddenly, then clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry– I just, it sounds wonderful. Can I buy one too?”

Lo shook her head. “Read the back issues first and see if you like it,” she said

“I have them all,” Skye said, “you can read mine.” She was almost bouncing in her seat, but Lo was unphased by her apparent celebrity.

“Thanks,” Katie said.

“Have a drink with us?” Alexandra asked again.

“I really want to finish this,” Lo said. “And Soledad’s almost off shift.”

“Next time,” Skye said.

“Sure.” Lo smiled briefly and went back to her work.

Skye leaned in and pointed semi-discreetly at a waitress on the other side of the diner, a beautiful, femme woman reading a book as she kept an eye on the few customers. “Soledad is like the ultimate performance artist, spoken word and dance, she’s amazing. They’re like the top lesbian power couple in Brooklyn.”

“In a dumpster diving kind of way,” Alexandra murmured.

“Yeah!” 

“Okay, snap out of it, Skye,” Alexandra said aloud, and Skye turned to Katie again.

“How do you like New York?”

“Um, not bad so far. I’m having a hard time finding a job, though. I’ll be able to pay the rent, though,” she added quickly.

“I don’t care, you’re Cobra’s problem!” Alexandra said, and suddenly winced. “Um, sorry. I didn’t mean that. People tell me my sense of humor is–”

“Rude?” Said Skye. “Uncalled for?”

“Mean?” Lo said from the next table.

“Insulting?” 

“Bewildering yet bitchy?” Lo said.

“Fine!” Alexandra said. “All I meant was, it’s between you and Cobra and I trust you both. Sorry, Katie. Hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable.”

Katie shook her head. “No. Maybe a little.” Skye and Lo laughed, and Alexandra took it without expression. 

“Right. You all ready?” She stood up and strode out of the diner. Katie followed her, feeling like the situation had suddenly spun out of her control and Alexandra was mad at her for something she couldn’t alter. Skye stayed behind to say goodbye to Lo, and try to sneak a look at her pages.

“Did you see anything?” Alexandra said when she rejoined them, and Skye shook her head.

“She was ready for me,” she said. They lit cigarettes without offering one to Katie, and she trailed along to the train.

Skye came home with them. The whole way back she and Alexandra leaned into each other, not quite kissing but not quite not kissing, and as soon as they were in the front door they were on top of each other, half undressed before the door to Alexandra’s room slammed shut behind them.

Katie closed her own bedroom door behind her. Cobra was on the bed staring up at the ceiling, an unopened book in hand.

“Hi,” Katie said.

Cobra nodded at the wall. “Who’s she got in there?”

“Skye,” Katie said, “we met her at the club.”

“I remember Skye. They’re gonna be in there all night.” There was an illustrative crash as something hit the wall between the rooms, and Cobra sat up. “Well, I’m not gonna stick around for the whole symphony. Let’s go somewhere.”

“I just got home,” Katie said.

“Okay,” Cobra said, and started to leave. A burst of laughter came clearly through the wall, and Katie changed her mind. 

“I’ll go,” she said, and together they hurried out the door. 

“I want to go over the bridge, is that cool?” Cobra said, and they turned West, toward the water. It took a while to get there, and they walked in silence. A stiff breeze hit them before Katie could see the river, and she shoved her hands in to the pockets of her sweatshirt, bitten by the sudden change in temperature. It was a strange wind, the kind that blew out matches and then flicked them back on again with some alchemical electricity, and she lifted her nose into it as if there were something there to sniff out. Almost as soon as they were on the walkway, the air turned vaguely nautical, and she felt somehow lighter, like she was being half swept up by the currents. The walls of the walkway rose up twenty feet into the air, and suddenly Katie grabbed the bars and scrambled up the structure until she could see clear over to the water. In a second Cobra was up next to her.

“Nice view, huh.”

“Yeah,” Katie said. They stared out over the river for a while, then finally Katie lowered herself to the ground. Cobra jumped from close to the top and landed with a thud, and they kept walking. 

“So what happened, anyway?” Cobra said, “besides Alexandra picking up pink-haired strippers, that is.”

“Blue, actually,” Katie said, and Cobra nodded.

“Mixing it up, good for her.” 

“It was weird,” Katie said. “But cool. I talked to Sharon.”

“Do you want to talk about her?”

“Sharon?”

“No, your girlfriend. I mean, you don’t have to. Just if you want to.” 

Katie thought a little. “Mostly cliches right now. Wondering how well I really knew her and stuff.” She told Cobra about the nightmares, holding back what Sophia had said about the locks on her own door. “I think there was a lot I didn’t know about her.” Cobra didn’t say anything, so she tried to explain. Birch didn’t talk about herself, or when she did it was in factual, emotionless terms. She evaded direct questions, and claimed she couldn’t remember how she liked elementary school, or whether she had aunts and uncles. And all the time, Birch lied.

She lied easily, about unimportant things. She told a bartender that her name was Caroline, told their boss she had grown up in Ohio instead of Connecticut. A man stopped her on the street to tell her she had pretty eyes, and she told him she wore colored contact lenses. Katie was taken aback the first time it happened, back in Ithaca when she introduced her new girlfriend to her French-major roommate, and Birch said she only spoke English, even though she’d read to Katie from Baudelaire all night a day before, and told her what the poems meant.

Katie listened with a sudden, sick sense of distance, confronted by something alien, something she suspected she would never come to understand. But slowly it had become a shared world– she alone knew the real answers to all the questions, there was a bubble of the universe where Birch knew everything of her, and she knew everything of Birch. A few times, when she was out alone, she tried it. A woman on the bus introduced herself, and Katie said her name was Norah. Another time she told a boy at a party that she worked at a 7-11, the overnight shift. But each time the unnecessary lies left an unpleasant taste in her mouth, and she shied away to other subjects, and ducked her head if she thought she recognized these people on the street. And quickly she gave up the lying game.

But Birch needed secrets, she gathered them up in little bits, constructing the fragments of a thousand aliases that she would never use. And every once in a while, Katie found herself wondering, who is this person, and what is she lying about to me?

Katie stopped talking. Cobra was listening, watching her talk with a little too much intensity, and she felt suddenly like she had given too much away, shared too much of something that should have belonged only to her and Birch.  

But something was shaking the bridge.

They weren’t quite halfway across, to the point where the walkway split in two, and the whole structure was bouncing heavily with an overwhelming noise.

Katie looked down nervously.

“It’s just the train,” Cobra said, but it wasn’t the train, it wasn’t coming from far away, it was coming from directly beneath them, and the rumbling sounded like a deep, deep voice. Katie looked around. There was no one else on the bridge that she could see, no bikes coming up behind them and no one walking up the other way, just the metal railways and a block of concrete shaped like a small building, though it didn’t seem to Katie to have any entrances. They were alone, the air was still but the bridge was swaying like a ship caught up in a storm. Katie grabbed Cobra’s arm and they clung together against the ballast, holding to the metal. Then suddenly it all fell still, and great shape rose up before them, blocking the path.

“Who goes there?” it bellowed, and brought its face forward into the light.

It was a creature made of stone, hominoid, or at least bipedal with unclear features, like it had been eroding for centuries. It stood heads above them, and it seemed to be stooping below its full height, and Katie saw as she stared up at it that it was made not stone but concrete, and covered in graffiti letters, bright, worn bubble letters incomprehensible to anyone but their original authors, covered over time and again by new artists. It looked like it really might have sprung out from the square hut, and Katie glanced past it to see a huge, indistinct chunk missing from the structure.

“What the fuck?” Cobra said.

“Who disturbs this bridge?” the creature snarled, and they shrank back together, until Katie recovered her breath and stepped forward.

“I’m Katie and this is Cobra, who are you?”

“I am the Guardian of this path. Why do you seek to cross?”

“Why not?” Katie said, and the Guardian frowned.

“That’s not a very good answer.”

“So can we cross?” Cobra had stepped up beside her again, staring up at the thing, and it shifted back and forth on its massive feet, considering.

“I don’t think so. I don’t like the look of you.”

“Wait a second, what’s that supposed to mean?” Katie demanded, and the Guardian opened its mouth once, baring wide, flat teeth, and paused a second.

“Nothing. I just don’t like you.”

“Well, why not?” Katie said, glancing at Cobra, who was standing with crossed arms and planted feet, unflinching.

“Well, you come here like you own the place, trying to cross without even asking.”

“It’s a public bridge,” Cobra said, “if anything, you’re squatting. We could call 311.”

“Shut up,” the Guardian said at last. “If you want to cross you have to answer three questions, that’s how it works. If you are truthful, you may pass.”

“And if not?” Katie said, and this time the Guardian smiled widely.

“Then I get to eat you up, and crack your bones for soup.”

“Fair enough,” Katie said, and Cobra nudged her.

“No, it’s not!”

“Shh, it’s how these things work,” Katie whispered, and they squared up to face the questions. The Guardian unbent to its full height, and its head rose up against the clean dark sky.

“What are your true names?”

“Katherine Ann Jackson,” Katie said, and with a panicked flinch wondered if she had some other, secret name she didn’t know about. But the Guardian merely frowned and nodded, and turned its attention to Cobra. 

“Cobra Sage Blackthorn,” Cobra said, and glanced sideways at Katie. “My mom was a hippie, okay?” But the Guardian was on to the next question.

“Are you male or female?”

“Female,” Katie said, and waited. Cobra considered for a long moment before meeting the Guardian’s eyes.

“No,” Cobra said, and Katie thought she heard the Guardian chuckle.

“Do you prefer cats or dogs?”

“Cats,” Cobra answered immediately, and glanced at Katie with a look of relief. She smiled back.

And inexplicably, she lied.

“Cats,” she echoed, the word out of her mouth before she realized what it was. Cobra stood calm next to her, not aware of what had just happened, and the Guardian was staring down at them with a look of puzzlement, and, she thought, mild interest.

Katie grabbed Cobra’s arm. “Run,” she said. 

“What?” 

“RUN!”

They ran. Back down the walkway to Brooklyn as the structure swayed and bounced beneath them; the ground beneath their feet began to loosen and crack, Katie felt herself tripping and scrambling as if she might be already falling through to the water below but she ran on, not looking back to see if the Guardian was following behind. They reached the end and kept running until they were onto solid ground and across two streets. Then Katie stopped and turned around. 

The bridge was solid, unmoving. She could vaguely see the shape of the little building near the top, undamaged as if nothing had happened.

“What the fuck just happened?” Cobra came up beside her, squinting to see the unchanged structure. 

“I lied,” Katie said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just sort of came out. I’m sorry.” She looked up anxiously, but Cobra was stoic.

“It’s okay, I didn’t really want to cross. I don’t know how we would have gotten back over if we did.”

“Oh yeah,” Katie said. “So, uh, what do you want to do now?”

Cobra shrugged. “Head home, I guess, or at least back that way. I think there’s a show in Bed Stuy that’s still going on.”

“I think I’m gonna take the train,” Katie said.

“Cool.” Cobra paused a moment. “Um, does stuff like that happen to you a lot?”

Katie nodded. “Lately it does. Since I started looking for Birch.”

“Huh,” Cobra said. “Let me know if I can help. I mean, I thought we were gonna die, but that was kind of interesting.”

They parted ways, and when she was sure she was out of sight, Katie fell back against a wall and crouched down on the ground, her heart still pounding. She wasn’t scared– they were well off the bridge, and she hadn’t really been fully convinced the troll would actually have eaten them; it had the teeth of an herbivore, and it hadn’t really chased them when they ran. But there had been no witnesses to the strange encounters with the dead, no one watching when the Jester tried to choke her, or when Sharon had spoken to her inside her head. She might still be crazy, but Cobra had seen the troll, Cobra had answered its questions, and Cobra had joined her as they ran for their lives. It was real.

After a while she nodded to herself, got to her feet, and jogged to the train.

It was already on the platform when she got there. She hopped over the turnstile, and caught the train just as the doors were sliding shut, with the station agent yelling at her from his booth. She pried her way in and collapsed on an empty seat, and closed her eyes to everything around her until at length she heard the announcer’s voice.

“This is the last stop on this train. Everyone please leave the train. Thank you for riding MTA’s New York City Transit.” She sat up. Wrong way, she’d got on going the wrong way and now she had to ride all the way back. She went out onto the platform. It was the 8th Avenue station, with tiny round brass statues that wielded hammers and saws bigger than they were, pushed giant subway tokens along the floor, and tried to sneak under the turnstile. It was her favorite station, and the first time she’d been there she spent almost an hour walking around and taking pictures of them.

“Ladies and Gentlemen. The next Brooklyn-bound L train will depart in approximately thirty-five minutes…” 

The place was almost empty; a homeless woman asleep on the only bench, a couple of boys kissing under the stairs, a young man with a guitar playing a Beatles medley with the lyrics slightly wrong. She sat down on the ground and leaned against a pillar, and was beginning to drift off to the strains of “Paperback Writer” when a sudden, shrill scream reached her ears. She glanced around quickly, but the few people in sight were unruffled– no one seemed even to have heard.

“Help! Somebody, HELP!!!” 

Down.

Katie looked to the sound and saw one of the small brass statues struggling on the floor by the sewer opening, caught in the jaws of a large brass alligator.

“Miss! Miss! HELP!” The statue cried out again, and Katie rushed forward, jumped over the bars, grabbed its arms and pulled. The alligator yanked back, and she let go of the small person, hauled back and stomped on the alligator’s head. It dropped its prey with a strange metallic yelp, and slunk back underground, the manhole cover slamming loudly behind it.

“Are you okay?” Katie cried, rushing to help the little creature up.

It nodded. “I’m okay.” Its face was smooth and blank like the figures had been when Katie first saw them inanimate, but when it spoke features molded themselves out of the pliant metal, rising and falling with uncanny expressions that were, nonetheless, absurdly cute. It held out a tiny hand and Katie shook it. 

“Cedric,” it said-he said– “Welder.” 

“Katie,” she said, “um, Painter,” and he made a little bow.

As he straightened, she saw that his midsection had been pierced and dented out of shape by the alligator’s teeth, though he didn’t seem to be in pain. He saw her looking, and smiled.

“Don’t worry, Katie-Painter, Rosie-Striker can put me back in shape.”

“Oh,” Katie said, “if you’re sure.”

Cedric-Welder nodded, and gestured out around them. Katie looked up for the first time and saw that a multitude of the small brass creatures had crowded around them, watching with an air of concern. A number were hanging off the stairway railing, their feet dangling in the air, and still more were clambering up from the tracks carrying tools. 

“It’s okay!” Cedric-Welder called out. “This is Katie-Painter!’ 

Katie waved at them with the familiar, awkward feeling of being gigantic and ungainly, though here and now it seemed rather more justified. Two tiny women wearing heavy workers’ aprons and carrying a large hammer between them came forward. 

“Hello, Katie-Painter,” one said, “I am Rosie-Striker.”

“Susan-Striker,” said her partner in striking.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Katie said. 

“We owe you thanks, you saved one of our own,” Rosie-Striker said, “You are always welcome among the Wee Yeomen of 8th Avenue.”

“Wee Yeomen?” Katie-Painter repeated with a smile, and Rosie-Striker nodded gravely. 

“Yes. I hope someday we may be able to repay the favor.”

There was a shaking and a screeching from the tunnel– the train had arrived. 

“Goodbye,” Katie said, and they replied in a chorus of tiny brass voices, and when she looked back through the window as the train door closed behind her, they were back in their original places, frozen in time.

Birch gazes out the window, staring at the stars between the spaces in the railroad. He is late, and with every moment that passes, she hopes a little more that this time, this night, he might be gone.

The night he came for her, she had been ready. She was sitting in bed, reading, drinking tea and waiting for Katie to come home, and from outside the window, music drifted up. It was the tinkling sound of an ice cream truck, tinny bells cranking out a melody that was almost familiar. She went to the window and looked down, saw the truck parked there in front of her house, and went down as if compelled. 

The truck window was too high for her to see in, and she raised her face up and stood on tiptoe as he came, his face shadowed by a dark baseball cap.

“What would you like?” He said, and she knew his voice at once, it hit her like a  physical pain deep down inside her chest, but it couldn’t be him, he’d been dead for years, and so she opened her mouth and whispered:

“Vanilla, please. With rainbow sprinkles.” She heard a machine creak to life, and in a moment he held it out to her, bright with color. 

She lifted it to her lips, and before she could swallow the street fell away around them– he was still there, but the truck was gone, the pavement had turned to loose dirt, and between them was a deep, open hole in the ground. She fell backward, dropping the ice cream cone in the dirt and spitting until her mouth ran dry.

“Too late,” he said, “it’s too late.”

“I didn’t eat it,” she cried out, and his laugh was warm and bright.

“You ate enough,” he said, “sin eater, you ate enough.” And then his voice dropped below a whisper, so low it might just have been the wind and the rumble of cars on the highway, but he said to her “you knew,” and she nodded. 

He held out a hand and she took it, and stepped over the open grave.

Footsteps on the stairs. He is here. Birch feels her eyes well up, and she slaps her face as hard as she can; her stomach is hot and empty, and her limbs are shaking. He is in the hallway; Birch hears the door to the bathroom open and close, the water running in fits and starts. Suddenly, unthinking, she takes up the book beside her and hurls it at the window as hard as she can, beating at the glass till it shatters. She knocks out the shards of glass, knowing he is almost here, would be here in a second. She grasps the windowsill and climbs out, somehow finding footholds in the bricks, adrenaline filling her up, taking her over, guiding her down. Too many feet above the ground she loses her grip and tumbles down to the sidewalk, scraped and bruised and bleeding, but intact.

Not looking back, Birch scrambled to her feet, and took off running into the night.

She is in a room alone, and he is there, but not there. She is waiting for it to begin, but no one has told her what is coming. There is a window, but it looks out on nothing, looks out on another brick wall and an alley below too narrow for a dumpster, too narrow for a cat. The walls are faintly yellow, and so is the light from the bulb above, but she feels like she is cast in black and white, like she’s in an old movie, like there might be static sputtering across her face, if she went to look in the mirror that hung on the back of the door. She has scarcely left the room in three months, and still it has not begun. The room is familiar, it was familiar when she got here, but it is not her room. There is a white metal bed with pink and yellow sheets, a desk, on the bookshelf is a set of plastic horses. There are books there, too, but they are mouldering, they are rotting. They smell even from a distance, and when you try to touch them they fall apart, fall into pieces on the floor. The horses are shiny, painted. They are realistic, models, not toys and they are running and grazing, and rearing back in twisted shock.

Every day there is a plate of food, and a bottle of water. 

There is a single light bulb above, the light is faintly yellow, and so are the walls. There is a door, but it opens onto nothing. And there is another door, but that door is never opened.

There is night, and there is day, and she is alone in a room, and he is there, but not there.

Katie stood by the side of the road with “New York” written in Magic Marker on a piece of cardboard, feeling a little stupid. She’d never hitchhiked before, and more than she worried about being picked up by an axe murderer, she was afraid she looked ridiculous, and that no one would pick her up. But eventually, someone did. It was a fat white man who told her stories about his daughters, aged two and four and living with their mother in Santa Fe. Katie liked him, and she drew two little girls on a pony for him as they drove South. He was going to Vegas for a reunion with his college roommates– he said they did it every five years, and every five years it felt more absurd, the four of them gambling and drinking and chatting up cocktail waitresses when they’d probably all rather be watching old Bruce Lee movies and talking about their kids. But it was a tradition, and they did it every five years. Katie nodded to the rhythm of the story, not sure what to say.

He told her about Tony, who’d become an investment banker in New York and Tokyo, and John and Ollie, who’d started up a construction company in Nebraska, and Sara and Emily, who were his daughters and liked ponies and the color blue, and Katie listened and thought to herself, this is what it’s like to live a life.

He let her out on the far side of town, along the highway. He asked her if she’d be all right, and Katie laughed like she was tough, and said, “I’m a big girl.” 

She watched as he disappeared into the shiny array of buildings, then turned away and started walking. 

After an hour, Tia picked her up. She was driving fast in a blue Astro van with the windows painted dark, too dark to see inside. She pulled to a stop a few dozen feet from where Katie was standing, and Katie waited a moment, not sure if she wanted to approach. But a woman leaned out the window.

“It’s just me,” she said, and got out of the car. “Here, look.” She went around to the back and yanked the doors open. Katie couldn’t tell if she were tiny or if she just looked that way next to the van, but she was small and black, with long dreadlocks, jeans and a black t-shirt. Katie peered through the doors and saw there was no one inside, just a couple of suitcases and several pairs of tall, spike-heeled boots flung around from the motion of the road.

“Okay?” the woman said, and Katie nodded.

“Okay,” she said. She climbed into the passenger’s seat, and the woman accelerated all at once, shooting out onto the road in the dusty wake of an eighteen-wheel semi.

“I’m Tia,” she said when they’d slowed to pace with the rest of the traffic. 

“Katie.”

Tia nodded, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel one at a time, back and forth in a wave from one hand to the other. Her nails were short and painted dark red, the kind of of color that made you think of blood but didn’t really look like it, and Katie found the rhythmic motion hypnotic. Tia probably wasn’t much shorter than Katie herself, but she was very thin, her tattooed arms stripped down to the muscle. She looked tough, like she wouldn’t let you fuck with her, tough like Katie had always wished she could be.

“Where are you going?” Tia asked, and Katie gave her half a shrug.

“New York,” she said.

“What part?”

Katie looked down at the bag on her lap, at Lady’s case propped up between her knees. “I don’t know,” she said, “I’m looking for someone. 

Tia glanced at her sideways. “Uh huh,” she said, and Katie couldn’t tell if it were disapproval, disbelief, or just a sound. 

“Where are you going?” she asked, and Tia glanced into the rearview mirror and cast her eyes quickly around the car as if to make sure they were alone.

“Home,” she said quickly. “I live in Brooklyn, in Bed Stuy. Do you know where that is?” 

“No,” Katie said. “Do you have roommates?” It felt abrupt, but she thought vaguely that this was the kind of question you asked someone who lived in New York City. Tia’s face hardened suddenly, and without her seeming to have moved the van swerved underneath them, and Katie grabbed the dashboard to stay upright. But Tia had already recovered control, and she slowed and eased off onto the shoulder again. 

“Can you drive this?” she said bluntly when they’d come to a stop, and Katie nodded, even though she hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car in what seemed like, what must have been years. “Thanks,” Tia said, and opened her door. They switched quickly, and when Katie had figured out the gearshift they pulled back out onto the highway. The feeling of driving was foreign to her after so long, and the van was so big it felt like driving a dinosaur, controlling some great beast through an agreement of mutual benefit, which might be broken at any moment. Minutes passed in silence and the vehicle did not rebel, and gradually Katie began to relax. There was little traffic, and she slowly let her hands loosen on the wheel and forced her spine to straighten. Tia was gazing through the windshield in a trance, and Katie was beginning to wonder if she ought to stop and see what was wrong when the other woman snapped back.

“Do you mind if I put on music?” She asked, and when Katie said she didn’t, she turned on country songs, blasting the speakers out so loud that Katie’s head began to throb. They drove like that for a while, Tia staring vacantly forward again, until suddenly she began to weep, violent, shuddering sobs that shook her body, shook the seat beneath her, seemed to rock the van around them with their weight. Alarmed, Katie slowed down, ready to pull them off the road yet again, but Tia made an urgent gesture.

“Keep going,” she said, “Please, keep going, I’m okay.”

“Okay,” Katie said. “Can you turn the music down?”

Tia switched it off, and the vanished sound was a vacuum around them, filled only a little by the hum of the road and Tia’s shuddering breath.

“You can tell me if you want,” Katie heard herself say, and there was a vast silence from beside her. Miles passed, and Tia might have vanished altogether– Katie couldn’t hear her breath, couldn’t sense her presence. She didn’t look, didn’t try to break the illusion, and the longer she went without seeing her the more she wondered whether Tia there was still herself, or if she’d become another person, become the dead girl through some putrid alchemy and sat there now watching with those eyes that never rotted. 

But at last Tia began to speak, her voice was warm and living, and Katie could look again, see her there and be reassured. But Tia’s living voice was thin and halting, and she talked in a steady stream but somehow without inflection, as if the whole thing had not yet become a story within her mind.

Tia was a dominatrix. (Tia looked like a dominatrix, Katie thought). She and her girlfriend Kyrah had come to Vegas in January, planning to stay three months, until they had enough money to open the cafe they had been planning for years. It was going to be in the neighborhood; they would sell organic cookies and fair trade coffee cheap enough for everyone to buy; have space for community activism in the afternoons and music in the evenings; a radical library and their old ginger cat named Ballou could get fat and sleep in the window. The ceiling was going to be painted dark blue and purple, with the winter sky painted up above. Kyrah was a stripper, and they figured they could make the money in a few months just dancing, if they worked hard. 

And at first it had gone well, the money piled up in the steel tool boxes they kept in the closet under their suitcases, not singles but twenties and fifties and hundreds, handfuls of bills every night they worked. They had resolved not to touch it, not even to count it until the day they left– right now they were living off their savings, subletting their apartment to friends of friends. But they had begun to fight– nothing big, just the stress of being away from home, shut up together in that ugly, rent-by-the-week room with its beige carpet and beige walls, and outside the bright, jolting lights that were an assault on all the senses, this town that felt like a toy-box, like something plopped down in the middle of the desert and left there, just a brightly colored shell to be filled up with dust and eaten by the sand and the hot desert sun. 

And so they had begun to fight, they’d lost their connection, lost the magic that had always been enough, at least enough to assure them that the sun would rise and set and rise again, that tomorrow would come and they would be together.

And then, a week ago, Kyrah vanished.

When Katie heard it her heart began to pound, she felt her fingers convulsing on the steering wheel and she gripped it tighter, staring ahead at the road as if she could force all the other thoughts from her head. But Tia was still speaking, and she brought her mind back to Kyrah.

At first, Tia hadn’t worried. She hadn’t worked that night, she’d been sick, violent spasms shaking her body as it tried to make her vomit up the contents of her empty stomach. She spent the night in a thick delirium, half awake and half asleep, television shows filtering into her dreams, dream figures washing out into her conscious mind. She didn’t come back into herself until nearly noon, when when she woke and found that Kyrah  wasn’t there. Her first thought was that she had come and gone, napped on the couch so as not to wake her or catch the germs, gone out for food or coffee, or just to wander the streets and look at tourists. But evening came, it was time to go to work, and Kyrah had not returned. Tia worked her shift, looking anxiously around the club for her, even though the lights were dim and the crowd was moving fast, and she could have missed her lover from ten feet away. The night came and went, and then the day was over too, and Kyrah had not come back, and Tia began to ask people, “have you seen this girl? Have you seen my girl?” She asked the woman who sat at the desk of their bed-sit, if Kyrah had come and gone, and the woman shrugged– she hadn’t seen her, but who knew, she might have come. A lot of people did. 

Tia asked the other girls at the club, the bouncers, the men she’d seen two days in a row. Somewhere past midnight a customer put his hand on her leg. She didn’t know him, and she turned around with a big fake smile until he said:

“You’re looking for Kayla? 

Tia nodded, that was Kyrah’s other name, her stage name. They joked that they had stripper names already, so they should call themselves Evelyn and Willamina, Gertrude and Temperance. But you couldn’t do that, people didn’t want to be confused, so they were Kayla and Tanya, throwaway names that had no meaning to them, no connection to their lives. The man was looking up at her expectantly, and she found her voice.

“Yes. Yes, I’m looking for Kayla.”

She sat down with him and he leaned in close to her, so close she could feel his skin next to hers, an electric presence there, but it was devoid of sex, divorced from lust. 

“I saw her leave,” he said. “She was here, she was dancing and I swear I fell in love with her in two minutes, I was paying her, but then a group of boys came in, college boys or something and they kept throwing money at her. I was trying to keep up, but I couldn’t, I didn’t have enough, and they were buying her drinks, tipping her twenties up onstage, taking turns with her in the back room, and I could hear them trying to talk her into going home with them. She was shaking her head in the beginning, but they kept asking and asking and asking, I heard them say five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand dollars and I knew that was it. What kind of girl turns down twenty thousand dollars. I got her alone for a second, just a second on her way back from the bathroom, I grabbed her arm and I said, please, don’t leave with those men, I’d seen the whole thing from the beginning, I said, Kayla, if you leave here with these men you won’t come back, I’ve seen this. Please don’t do it. 

“She laughed at me and shook her head. I said there must be something I can do to stop you. She leaned in close and whispered “You got twenty-five thousand?” And she laughed again, that beautiful laugh, and she told me that she was in love with someone, and if she went with those boys tonight, the two of them could leave this town tomorrow. She said she’d come home with the money and put it in the toolbox and then the two of them could throw all their shit in the back of their van and just drive all the way into the sunset, all the way back to New York, till they got back home, back to their life.” He paused for a minute, staring up at the stage without seeing it.

“She lit all up when she talked about it, it was like all the lights in that little hallway just shifted position to focus on her. She really wanted that thing, whatever it was.” He sighed. “I just thought, what a lucky guy that must be.”

Tia’s eyes were wet now, she knew the ending of the story. But he kept talking, and she listened.

Kayla left, he said. He watched her go with them, watched one of them carry her out over her shoulder, still wearing her bikini and boots at 4AM as the bar was closing. In a last, frantic attempt to stop her he grabbed a bouncer and said Don’t You See What’s Happening? And the bouncer looked down at him, down on him and said Sir, We’re Closing. What the girls do on their own time is up to them. Besides, she looks like she’s having fun.

And the door closed on Kayla and the gang of boys, and he’d rushed out into the coming dawn only to see the car pulling out, racing away down the strip, out to the open road. They were gone.

Tia was still, Tia was silent, Tia was screaming somewhere, somewhere deep down so strong and so hard that it brought her whole body to the breaking point, like she might shatter if a single fragment more rose up to fill her.

She knew better. Kyrah knew better, they both knew better. They had rules back home, and one of the rules was don’t ever leave the club with them, don’t even go out to the sidewalk for a cigarette, don’t go past that door with one of them. And another one was don’t believe it when they promise you that much money. If they promised you five hundred dollars, a thousand dollars they probably meant it, but if they promised you five thousand, ten thousand, more– it wasn’t real. It was just a lie, just a trap. But this city was different, it made you think different, and maybe Kyrah had believed them, because here it was just barely possible, because it would have meant they could take the money and be gone forever, back to life and love and the cafe with the ginger cat.

“You’re a friend of hers,” the customer said kindly, and put a hand on her shoulder like a brother, and the thing inside Tia broke, and she began to sob. She got up from the table without speaking to this man who thought he had tried so hard, but who had done nothing, nothing at all to save Kyrah.

She stumbled out of the club, climbed into the back of the van in the parking lot and locked the doors, and bit her arms and howled. She didn’t have to imagine what had happened, she knew it. She’d known from the moment she woke up, and Kyrah not there. 

She stayed in the back of the van for hours, slept there in fits and starts on the hard rubber mats laid down for the dog they used to have. Sometime in the morning a cop knocked on her window and told her to move. She nodded blearily and climbed in the front, kicked the thing into gear. 

“You should be more careful,” the cop said, “some girl got herself killed around here two nights ago.”

What girl.

“She didn’t have any ID, we’re still looking.” He looked at her with new suspicion. “You know something?”

She’s Kyrah.

Somehow she had communicated it, somehow he had taken her away to see the body, and somehow it had been her, it had been Kyrah. They wouldn’t tell her much, but she could see it, and when she asked they didn’t say no. They’d raped her, one after another, she’d gone with them willingly but they’d held her down and beat her up because they could, because they cheered each other on, and they’d fucked her and and fucked her as she screamed, they’d choked her and beat her and fucked her, and somewhere, sometime she had died, and probably none of them had noticed right away. And they’d left her dead in the parking lot of a 7-11 down near the club, not even bothered to put her costume back on her body, just thrown it down on her lifeless form, torn and shredded and stained with blood and other things. And Tia drove carefully back to their room, nodding politely when they told her not to leave the area. She’d gotten their things, hers and Kyrah’s, and thrown it all in the van, and driven out of Vegas like a bat out of Hell, Tia said. And Kyrah lying dead in the morgue, in a metal drawer in that cold dead room, when Kyrah had always hated the cold, had wrapped herself in sweaters and polar fleece and big thick socks, and barely made it through the New York City winters even though she’d lived there her whole life.

Tia stopped talking.

Katie kept driving. There was nothing to say. She wondered briefly, vaguely whether she were driving a wanted vehicle. 

“They must be able to find the people who did it,” she said at last, and Tia gave a wheeze that might have been a laugh.

“No,” she said. “She was a stripper. She went home with them willingly, that makes her a whore. No one gives a shit, Katie, we’re throwaway people.”

They drove on in silence, on and on as the night fell down around them.

They stopped at a diner late in the night when Katie started to feel her eyes drooping and her reflexes slowing. She hadn’t eaten all day not since early morning, and now she took in french fries dipped in mayonnaise and a grilled cheese sandwich that oozed out orange from between the slices of crisp, oily bread. She drank down icy water and felt it as a shock through her body, reviving her from some fog she hadn’t been aware of.

Tia ordered the same thing she did, but ate little of it, and Katie felt herself hang heavy with empathy. They ordered coffee, and Katie went to the bathroom even though she was half afraid to leave Tia alone. The dead girl was waiting for her in the hallway.

“Oh, what do you want?” she asked irritably, but the dead girl said nothing. She put a hand out toward Katie’s face, and Katie grabbed her wrist before she could touch her lips.

“That’s seriously unhygienic,” she snapped, and the girl looked abashed, and yanked her hand free. She walked away, back toward the kitchen, and disappeared through the swinging doors. Katie went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She peed and then froze as she was buttoning up her jeans. Someone was huddled under the sink, crying.

It was a woman. She was white, her hair was a tangled, streaky blonde and she very tall, her legs drawn up painfully close to her face just so she could fit. She was hunched forward, and her hair hung down to cover her face. 

“Kyrah?” Katie said, and the woman didn’t move. She said the name again and was met only with the sound of more crying. Katie needed to wash her hands. She came up by the side of the sink and turned the faucet on, leaned over for the soap and rinsed her hand, trying to ignore the woman crying at her feet. Katie held her hands under the blow-dryer, then knelt down to where Kyrah must see her face.  She was covered in bruises, misshapen with things that had broken beneath the skin. 

“I’m sorry,” Katie said helplessly, and Kyrah’s fresh brown eyes lit upon her own.

“Sorry doesn’t. Sorry isn’t.” She spoke loudly, too loudly in the small room, and Katie glanced at the door, afraid they would be heard.

“I don’t know what to do,” Katie said, and Kyrah shook her head.

“I wish Tia were here,” she said softly, and Katie put a hand on hers. 

“So does Tia,” she said. 

Kyrah nodded. Her hand was cold and strong, and it grasped Katie’s tightly for a long moment.

“Goodbye, Katie,” she said at last, letting her go.

“Goodbye,” Katie said, and she left, closing the door on Kyrah as she rocked back and forth underneath the sink. She paused in the hallway for a moment before going back out into the light– she felt like a crazy person and she hoped no one could see it in her eyes.  She smoothed down her hair and went back out to Tia. There was coffee on the table and she picked it up and gulped it down quickly, even though it was scalding hot.

“My girlfriend died last month,” she said. “Her name was Birch.” Tia nodded, and they drank the coffee down together. Afterward they pulled the van around to the back of the rest stop parking lot and turned off the engine; Tia had blankets and pillows in the back, she and Kyrah had slept here on the drive out. Tia had a bag of weed and a bottle of whiskey and they sat facing each other on the floor, passing the bottle and the joint back and forth in silence. The side windows were painted over black, and the only light came in from the front of the van, streetlights through the windshield and the glow of the neon signs.

Tia had stopped crying. The tip of the joint glowed in the dark and Katie watched the ember rise and ebb as she breathed it in. Katie’s eyes were growing heavy, and she laid down on the blankets, already near sleep. She felt Tia lay down next to her, taking in the rest of the whiskey and breathing in smoke until there was only empty, charred paper.

“I still don’t believe it’s real,” she said, and Katie thought, I’m sorry. But her lips were slow and tired, and she didn’t say it right away, and then the silence had become manifest, and there was no space for words. For an instant she felt the press of the dead girl’s fingers in her mouth, weighting down her tongue, and then it was gone, leaving a cold  liquid trace that dripped slowly down her throat. Tia was breathing shallowly beside her, Katie could see her face without turning her head, her wide open eyes, the shadows on her skin adornments to her grief. There was nothing to say. Katie closed her eyes, and slept without dreams.

Katie woke to the van rattling and beneath her, bouncing her against the hard rubber.

“Ow.”

Tia glanced back from the front seat, and the van slowed down.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to wake you up.” 

“It’s okay.” Katie sat up and steadied herself against the seat. “Where are we?”

“Almost halfway. Do you need to stop?” 

Katie made her way into the passenger seat and peered out the window. Highway, more highway, but more trees, too. “I’m okay for now,” she said.

“Okay,” Tia said.

the day wore on slowly. They took turns driving, listened to talk radio until the jarring voices of the right-wing hosts gave them both headaches, stopped for fixes of caffeine and sugar at gas stations. In the late afternoon Tia asked,

“So who is it you’re looking for in New York?”

Katie hesitated, and Tia glanced at her nervously. “Sorry,” she said, “I know it’s none of my business.”

“It’s fine,” Katie said quickly. “I’m looking for Birch.”

“You said she died.”

“Yeah. It’s complicated.” 

Tia nodded. “Okay.”

Katie told her the story in starts and stops, leaving out the dead girls, leaving out Kyrah in the bathroom. “I know I sound like a crazy person,” she said at last. “But I have to go.”

Tia was silent for a minute. “It probably wasn’t her,” she said at last. “She recognized her from a painting. And that white-blonde hair thing is pretty unusual, it’s easy for people to see one feature and get mixed up.”

“I know,” Katie said. “I know it’s not much to go on. But the name-”

“Amanda is a common name, Katie.”

“I know. I know I won’t find her. But I have to try.”

“Yeah, I know. If somebody said-” She stopped. “I get it. I get it,” she repeated.

The drive took another day and a half. Katie had never been through most of the states they passed through, and another day, another time she would have wanted to stop and see the world’s largest pancake. But they were just over an hour from the edge of the city when, gazing out the window, she saw the place from the dream. It couldn’t be, not really, and one place looked like a thousand others, but the trees stood still and dead in the water, the space between them filled up with weighted dark, the kind of dark that hid things, and the moon shone down on the white tree bark with a ghostly light. She wanted to stop, wanted to run down the hill and see if there was anyone down there, anyone waiting in the water, but she couldn’t ask. Instead she memorized the road signs nearby, and hoped she’d be able to find it again.

It was the middle of the night when they reached New York City and even then there was traffic backed up all the way out the Holland Tunnel. It took them nearly an hour to get to Brooklyn. Tia found a space on the street in front of a three-story apartment building, and Katie helped her carry the suitcases up the stairs to the top floor, balancing her backpack and the violin on one arm. In the hallway, Tia stopped dead.

“There’s someone in my apartment,” she said softly, and Katie’s heart skipped a beat. She was right. The door was just a little bit ajar, and there was light beyond it. “Stay here,” Tia said, and she set down her bags and shoved the door open with her arm braced out in front of her, standing off to the side, out of range. The door banged against the wall, and somebody inside screamed.

“Kyrah?” The voice shouted, and Tia relaxed instantly.

“It’s Tia,” she called. She picked up the bags and motioned Katie to follow her inside. The door opened into the kitchen. There was someone leaning against the counter, holding a cat in one arm and a bag of cat food in the other hand. 

“Jesus, Tia, you scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry. I forgot you might be here. This is Katie. Katie, Cobra.”

“Hey.”

“Hi,” Katie said. Cobra was tall and thin, and maybe Native American, with straight black hair hanging down to the shoulders in a messy cut that looked like it had been done at home with a razorblade, which it probably had. Cobra was wearing jeans and a thick wool sweater, and Katie couldn’t tell if Cobra were a boy or a girl, or even if she ought to be able to tell. 

But now Cobra was setting down the cat and filling its bowl with food, and looking expectantly at the door behind them.

“Where’s Kyrah?”

Tia hesitated, and Katie felt herself shrink back, out of the picture, not wanting to intrude on their privacy.

“Kyrah’s dead,” Tia whispered at last, and the scene became surreal. She cried, and Cobra came forward and held her as she wept, and Katie stood by the door and tried not to watch. The cat came over after a little while and rubbed up against her leg, and she picked it up gratefully, glad for something to do with her hands. It was orange with bright green eyes, and it rubbed its face up against hers so hard it was almost an act of aggression. 

“Hi,” Katie whispered, and it began to purr loudly as she stroked its back, feeling suddenly relieved at this brief contact with a living creature. Tia and Cobra had gone into the next room, they were sitting on the couch, and Katie stayed where she was, petting the cat, whose need for attention seemed endless. She looked around the kitchen, at the pictures stuck up on the refrigerator with silly magnets, the light green paint on the walls, the mat in front of the sink with a picture of a cat that looked just a little bit like the one in her arms. Long minutes passed, until at last Cobra came back into the kitchen.

“I’ll come back and check on her in the morning, but right now I think she wants to be alone. Do you have anywhere to stay?”

Katie shook her head mutely and let the cat be lifted from her arms and set down on the floor. “Bye bye, Ballou,” Cobra said, and then to Katie: “You can come crash with me for a couple of days. My roommates won’t care, there’s already five of us.”

“Thanks,” Katie said, and they slipped out of the apartment quietly, turning the lights off behind them. Cobra locked the door, and they left.

Cobra walked fast, and Katie hurried to keep up, the violin slapping against her back. After a few minutes Cobra seemed to notice and offered to take something, but Katie shook her head.

“I’m fine,” she said. They came up on the stairs to the elevated train and clattered up to the station. Cobra glanced around them.

“Do you have a Metro card?” 

“No.”

“Right. Follow me.” There was an agent in the box, but she was reading a magazine and didn’t look up as they passed. Cobra let a couple go in ahead of them, then inched up into the turnstile and pulled the bar back and forth, climbing through. “Come on, hurry up.” 

Katie mimicked the motions and got through, catching her foot and almost falling as she did. Cobra caught her by the arm and pulled her along.

“Come on, walk fast.” When they were around the corner Cobra said, “thanks for going along. I never pay for the Metro. It’s a matter of principle.”

Katie laughed. “Principle?”

“Yup. Also, I’m usually broke.” 

It was cold out, and Katie was shivering in her sweatshirt before the train came, but when it did it was heated, and she sat down on the bench directly underneath the vent. Cobra stayed standing, holding onto the bar overhead as if about to swing from it. “So Tia picked you up on the highway?”

“Yeah.” 

“Huh. It was probably good she had someone in the car with her.”

“Yeah,” Katie said, waiting for the next question, too tired to make up answers that weren’t the truth.”

Cobra asked it: “So what are you doing in New York?” 

“Looking for my dead girlfriend,” Katie said. Cobra nodded.

“Okay. This is our stop.” 

It was another ten minutes in the cold before they got to Cobra’s apartment, and  Katie gazed up at the sky when she could, looking for the stars. It was cloudy and there was too much light to make them out, but the moon was low and full and piercing white. There were bodegas, bars and restaurants all along the streets, boarded up lots that looked like they might hide grass and rusted tools. Finally they came to a building like all the other buildings and climbed the stairs to Cobra’s apartment. There were lights on and the apartment was warm and smelled like bread. 

“Hellooo!” Cobra called out, and there was a vague chorus of helloes from several directions. Someone was in the kitchen and Cobra pointed at Katie and said, “This is Katie. Katie, Sarah and Mark.” Sarah and Mark waved. They were both white, with brown dreadlocks, and they looked like they were probably wearing each other’s clothes, loose pants of indeterminate color and dark, plaid shirts. A loaf of bread sat steaming in its pan on the counter, and they were stirring something in a pot on the stove.

“Hi, Katie,” Sarah said.

“Hey.” 

“Come on,” Cobra said, heading to a pair of doors at the end of the hallway. “You can put your stuff in here, it’s my room. Do you have a sleeping bag?”

“Yeah,” Katie said. As she followed Cobra into the bedroom, the other door opened a crack, and Katie caught the shadow of a human face before it slammed shut again. 

Cobra’s room was mostly empty. There was a wide mattress on the floor in a corner, and a low table with a books, candles and papers scattered across it. The room had only one window, small and high up in the wall, it was screened off and hanging open in spite of the cold. Katie turned, and stopped. The wall above the bed was painted from floor to ceiling in shades of blue. Katie took a step back to look, and it came into focus; it was an ocean scene, or something like it, as if the side of the room had been cut away and set down undersea. There were corals and anemones, schools of fish and small, multi-legged animals scuttling across the ocean floor; far in the distance was the cloudy outline of a sunken ship, and high above against the ceiling hung the belly of a whale. The wall was stuccoed, and the figures were slightly warped with the strange texture, so that staring at it all too long made Katie dizzy.

“That’s really beautiful,” she said at last.

“I like fish,” was all Cobra said.

“I paint, too,” Katie said, and Cobra glanced at her with a flicker of interest, and motioned her back out into the hallway.

“Cool. Hey, come here. Sophia!”

The door they’d passed stayed shut, but Katie heard footsteps coming up to stand there.

“Sophia, open the door, I want you to meet somebody,” Cobra said.

The door opened a crack and Katie saw a sliver of a face, dark hair hanging down over the eye. “Who are you?” Sophia said.

Katie cleared her throat. “I’m Katie,” she said.

Sophia nodded gravely. “You can come in,” she said, and opened the door. 

“Cobra!” A new voice was calling from the kitchen.

“Alexandra’s home. I’ll be right back,” Cobra said, and hurried out of Sophia’s room. Sophia closed the door. 

“What are you doing here?” She sat down on the floor. “You can sit down,” she said. The floor was covered with papers, and Katie piled some on top of each other to clear a space to sit. 

“I hitched a ride with Cobra’s friend Tia,” she said.

“Oh,” Sophia said, “I like Tia.” 

Sophia’s wall was painted too, covered in signs and symbols that looked vaguely like some ancient alphabet, though there were English words thrown in, too. “What’s that?” Katie asked, and Sophia told her.

Sophia said she had things echoing in her head, words like songs getting stuck in the creases of her brain. Sophia said the new words arrived every day at 3:00 PM, and were gone by seven, and she wrote them on the wall in permanent marker. She pointed at a series of symbols. “Yesterday, it was Lefferts Boulevard,” she said. “Today it was Manuel Uribe.” 

“Who’s Manuel Uribe?”

Sophia leaned close to Katie and whispered in her ear. “He’s the fattest man in the world,” she said. “I never met him.”

“Oh,” Katie said awkwardly. She glanced around the room. There were books piled everywhere, the three-foot shelf against the far wall was stuffed full and the floor was stacked high with more. She scanned the titles. Most of them were multiple editions of Shakespeare plays, jammed in with no apparent sense of order. The rest seemed to be books about Shakespeare,  biographies, literary criticism, and a science fiction volume that appeared to depict the bard wrestling a giant octopus.

“Lots of Shakespeare,” Katie said, and Sophia flushed and nodded.

“I’m kind of an enthusiast,” she said. “I’m working on a definitive biography.”  She scrambled for a stack of loose paper, covered in scribbles, and brought it back without showing Katie what was written there. “I’m a direct descendent of the Earl of Southampton,” she said. “Henry Wriothesley; he was Shakespeare’s patron and lover near the beginning of his career. So naturally I’ve taken an interest.”

“Naturally.”

Cobra peered into the room. “Hey, Katie, I’m making something to eat, want to help?” 

“Sure.” Katie stood, and smiled down at Sophia. “Thanks for showing me your book.”

“Anytime,” Sophia said. “Can you close the door on the way out?”

Katie followed Cobra out into the kitchen.

“She’s nice,” she said.

Cobra grinned. “Yeah, the Shakespeare thing is cute, right?”

“Is she really descended from the Earl of Southampton?”

“Beats me. Here, crack these.”

Katie took the carton of eggs and the bowl and started cracking eggs into it as Cobra chopped onions and green peppers.

“So what next?”

“Next?” Katie said.

“Yeah, with your girlfriend. That’s enough eggs.”

“Oh, right.” Katie put the carton back in the refrigerator and looked for something to do. Eventually she sat down at the kitchen table and watched Cobra pour everything into a cast-iron skillet. Something black hurtled down from the top of the refrigerator, barely missing her head, and Katie screamed. The black thing screamed back, and hissed. Cobra was doubled up laughing, and so was someone behind them. 

“Hi, cat,” Katie said at last, and the woman in the doorway leaned down and picked it up. “This is Bilitis,” she said, and Katie reached out to pet it, then snatched her hand away as it tried to claw her.

“She’ll get used to you,” the woman said. “Hi, I’m Alexandra.”

“Oh. Katie, this is Alexandra.” Cobra said her name like it meant something bigger, and Katie felt suddenly like she was intruding on something private. But Alexandra was indifferent.

She had dark hair that fell past her shoulders in tight curls; her skin was pale and her features were large and angular. She wasn’t really beautiful, but Katie couldn’t take her eyes off her. She was dressed all in black, dark jeans and leather boots up to her knees, and the fabric of her tee shirt stretched so tightly across her breasts that Katie could see the outline of her nipples. Katie felt suddenly awkward in her presence, like she was too big, like she was in the way. Alexandra wasn’t smiling. Katie glanced again at Cobra, and it was so plain Katie almost wanted to laugh; Cobra was in love with her, and Alexandra didn’t give a damn.

“Do you want something to eat?” Cobra said at last, “I’m making an omelet for me and Katie.”

“No,” Alexandra said, “I’m good. Do we have any Scotch left?” She set Ballou down on the floor, and the cat shot out of the room and disappeared under the couch. 

Cobra didn’t answer, but grabbed a bottle out of the cupboard and poured some into a coffee mug for her. Alexandra took it without a word and drank it down.

“Fuck,” she said. “I’m tired. I beat a guy so hard he bled.”

Katie felt her eyes widen.

“Long as he’s paying,” Cobra said casually, and Alexandra laughed.

“No shit. Thanks for the drink, darlin’, I’m going to bed.” She kissed Cobra on the cheek and left, banging shut the door to her own room. Cobra went back to the stove, and, after a moment, said, “The plates are in the cupboard above the sink.”

Katie got them plates and silverware, Cobra served out the omelet, and they ate. 

Katie hadn’t been paying attention, but as she bit into the egg she realized she couldn’t remember when she last ate. She felt her stomach contract around the first bite of food as if it were fighting over a taste. “Thanks,” she said, “this is really good. And for letting me stay,” she added.

“Everybody gets stuck sometimes,” Cobra answered. Katie finished the eggs fast and hungry, trying to slow herself down to be polite, and failing. When it was gone her stomach still rumbled for more, but she didn’t want to ask for anything more, and instead she took her plate to the sink and washed it.

“You don’t have to do that,” Cobra said, but handed her the skillet and the rest of the dishes anyway and let her scrub them clean. They went to bed right after; Katie rolled out her sleeping bag against the wall near the door, far away from the painted sea, and she fell asleep to the sound of Cobra breathing, and Sophia scribbling with her markers on the other side of the wall above her head.

In the morning Katie woke up late, and found everyone but Sophia gone. Cobra’s bed was empty, the blankets tangled up on the bed. When she opened the door, Sophia peered out at her.

“You can take my key,” she said, “I’m not going out today.” 

“Oh,” Katie said. “Are you sure?”

Sophia nodded. “I’m very sure today,” she said. “I have to discredit Francis Bacon.”

“Cool,” Katie said. “Is it okay if I take a shower?”

“Just don’t use Alexandra’s shampoo,” Sophia said, “It’s mango. You can use mine. I don’t really have dandruff, though.” 

“Thanks.”

Katie showered quickly. From Sophia’s comment she assumed that hers was the dandruff shampoo, and she used it. She had a towel buried in the bottom of her bag, and was suddenly extremely glad she had packed it. Afterward she sat in the living room and flipped her phone open and shut. Courtney said she had seen the girl at a party. After a few minutes hesitation Katie called Jack. He was half-asleep, it was still early back at home, and she spoke quickly, hoping he wouldn’t awaken enough to ask her questions.

“Courtney’s number?” He said when she asked for it. 

“I wanted to talk to her fiance,” Katie said.

“Right, the artist.” After a moment Jack recited her number and Katie scribbled it down.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Sure. Katie, how are you? Are you at your parents’ house?”

“I have to go,” she said, and disconnected before he could ask her anything else. 

It took Courtney a minute to remember who she was, but when she did she was friendly, and didn’t seem to mind Katie calling her out of nowhere.

“What’s up?” she said.

Katie realized too late that she hadn’t thought of a good reason for what she was about to ask.

“Do you remember where you met that girl who looked like my picture? Birch’s cousin?”

“Um…” There were voices in the background, it sounded like a foreign language, though Katie kept catching single English words. Courtney came back. “It was this crazy party, someplace in Brooklyn– this big loft.” She named streets, and Katie wrote them down though they meant nothing to her.

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

“Can’t you just call her mom?”

“Maybe.” Katie said. “I don’t know, I don’t want to bother them right now. And they don’t like me very much.”

“Oh,” Courtney said. “Listen, Katie, I don’t really know you, but if there’s anything I can–”

“You just did,” Katie said abruptly. “Thanks.” They hung up.

Katie took her backpack and left, checking again for Sophia’s key before letting the door swing shut behind her. She retraced their steps from the night before to the train station, walking too far up a few streets before she finally made it. The map in the subway station had red graffiti on the plastic cover, but she peered through the words she couldn’t make out to the streets underneath. After a while she found the streets Courtney had given her and guessed which train to take. The station wasn’t crowded at this hour of the day, and the station agent was looking at her, so she bought a ticket, thinking as she did, that Cobra would probably have jumped the turnstile anyway.

Katie stared down through the rails to the street below– she had a sudden urge to leap down onto them, and took a step away. The platform began to rattle with the coming train and as she watched it she took a step forward, letting the wind rock her as it passed, like it was passing through her. She got on, and rode, and rode.

After what felt like hours, and might have been, she got off the second train and wandered until she found the intersection. The neighborhood was different from Cobra’s- there were more warehouses, and buildings with windows but no doors, or doors and no windows. With no signs, no houses, few people moving back and forth, Katie began to feel like she was walking through a desert. There was graffiti on all the outside walls, but it was mostly gang signs and words she couldn’t read. There was a warehouse on the corner that didn’t look any different from the other buildings around it except for an anarchist symbol spray painted three feet high. She glanced around, but there seemed to be nobody coming or going, and she quickly slipped through the bent gate.

The door was locked. She couldn’t even see any way to open it from the outside, no bar or lock, just a sheet of black metal that presumably led inside. But there was a broken window at the first floor, only four feet above the ground or so. Katie looked around her, but there seemed to be no one in sight. Pulling the sleeves of her sweatshirt down to protect her hands, she hoisted herself up to the window and scrambled through. The leg of her jeans caught on a sliver of protrudent glass and she heard it rip as she landed on the floor inside, but it did not touch her skin. The floor beneath her feet was solid, it was concrete; the place was dark except for the light coming through the windows, but there were few of those, and they were all painted over with translucent color, making a dim stained glass. She glanced around, not sure what she was looking for, knowing there was really nothing there to find. 

The floor was sort of clean. It looked grimy but was free of trash; in one corner were a couple of candles melted down to the ground and a box of matches, and a shapeless canvas bag that might have held anything. Someone was staying here. Katie froze for a moment, listening for the sound of movement, but nothing was stirring in the room, and she began to wander again.

The ceiling was hung with objects; origami animals, dolls, balsa wood airplanes painted in neon colors that glowed slightly in the near darkness, and colored plastic shapes that must have been children’s toys. The walls, she could see now that her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, were covered in murals– abstractions and cartoons, words, it was too much to take in all at once. One entire wall was painted to look like a newspaper, with headlines a foot high and columns and columns of detailed text. 

Someone cleared a throat behind her, and she jumped. 

“I don’t know you.”

It was a child. Or rather, two children, though only one had spoken. They were both girls, both about ten years old, and they were dressed exactly alike in blue jeans and pink sneakers, with matching, slightly dirty, blue and white striped sweaters. Their hair was split into two braids and tied with pink rubber bands, and they were both glaring at her. One was white, with hair somewhere between blonde and brown, and the other was Chinese, and had a single silver ring through one of her earlobes, their only apparent difference. They were glaring at her with identical expressions. 

“Um. Sorry,” Katie said. “Do you– do you two live here?” 

“Sometimes,” said the white girl.

“But you’re just kids.”

“Even kids gotta live somewhere,” the Chinese girl said reasonably.

“Well, does anybody live with you?” Katie said.

“Sometimes,” they said together. “What do you care?”

“We can take care of ourselves,” said the white girl. “Get out.” Something flashed in her hand and Katie saw for the first time that they were both holding knives. 

“… Okay,” Katie said slowly, “I’ll get out. Can I ask you something, though?”

“Five dollars,” they said.

“One.”

“Three.”

“Fine.” The Chinese girl held out her hand while the white girl held the knife up a little more prominently. Katie dug three dollars out of her pocket, along with the photo of Birch. “Have you seen this girl?” They took the photo and examined it with studious care.

“Someone saw her here at a party,” Katie said as they passed it back and forth. 

“Sometimes there are parties here.” One girl said. They whispered to each other for  a moment, then said together: “We might have seen her.”

“Please just tell me,” Katie said.

“Go ask a rolling doughnut,” said one.

“Go ask the man in the moon,” said the other.

“Fine, never mind.” Katie pulled the photo out of their hands.

“Hey!”

“It’s my photo,” Katie said. 

“I was serious,” the Chinese girl said. “Go ask the man in the moon.”

“And how do I find him?” Katie asked. They exchanged a glance. 

“He’ll find you,” they said together.

“Now leave,” the white girl said again.

Katie nodded. “I’m going,” she said, and the two little girls watched silently as she climbed back out the window. One leaned out after her.

“You could have gone out the door,” she said.

“I’ll remember that for next time,” Katie said wryly. But the girls had vanished back into their painted room. She looked around. The party had been her only lead, and with it found and gone she was suddenly struck by how absurd the whole thing was, a medieval quest taken all out of context. Ever since leaving home she’d been running on some arcane spiritual adrenaline, holding fast to the few fragments she held and ignoring the clarity of how impossible a task she was living out. She was still holding the photo of Birch in her hand, and now she put it back into her pocket without looking again at the face. A flash on the pavement caught her eye and she bent down and snatched up a bracelet of red plastic beads strung onto elastic. It was bright and gaudy and not to her taste at all, but she slipped it onto her wrist and hurried away. 

She followed her steps back the way she’d come and stopped when she passed a cafe sandwiched in between what looked like two competing tire stores. The shop had three tiny tables crammed in beside the window, and Katie bought a cup of tea and sat down. She pulled out the photo of Birch, and after a minute got out her sketchpad and started to copy it. She made draft after draft, copying the same image over and over across the pages until her tea was freezing cold and the light outside began to fade. 

“She’s pretty,” a voice said from across the table, and Katie looked up at the dead girl sitting there. “Can I have some of your tea?” she said.

“I guess,” Katie said. “It’s cold, though.”

The dead girl shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.” She drank down what was left of Katie’s tea. She was wearing clothing again this time, the same hoodie and jeans she’d had on when Katie saw her with Jack. Katie didn’t look down to see if she was wearing shoes. 

“Would you like anything, miss?” The barista called out, and the dead girl shook her head without turning around. “No thanks,” she said.

“So, other people can see you?” Katie asked, and the dead girl swirled the dregs of the tea around in her cup. 

“Sometimes,” she said. “It depends. I don’t know.” 

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“Lilith.”

“That’s pretty,” Katie said. “Do you know who the man in the moon is?”

Silence.

Katie met Lilith’s eyes, suddenly wide and frightened. 

“No,” Lilith said firmly.

“You’re the crappiest liar I’ve ever seen,” Katie said.

“I know,” Lilith said. “When you’re dead you sort of forget how. Don’t look for the man in the moon.”

“The girls in the house, they said he would find me. They said I should ask him about Birch. I thought they were telling me to fuck off.”

“That’s probably how they meant it. People say that.”

“People don’t say that.” 

“Oh. Will you buy me a muffin?”

“You know I don’t have a lot of money left, right?”

“Please?”

“Fine.” Katie went back to the counter and bought Lilith a blueberry muffin. “There,” she said, and Lilith took a big bite out of the top. Katie watched her chew and swallow and wished she hadn’t– the parts of her jaw and throat moved too close to the surface of her skin, and things shifted there that didn’t look natural. It was grotesquely fascinating, and Katie couldn’t stop watching.

“How do I find him?” Katie said at last, and Lilith avoided her gaze, staring out the window. A small child passing starred back at her for a moment, then began to wail, pointing and shrieking until its mother picked it up and carried it away. 

“The kids were right, he’ll probably find you,” Lilith stood abruptly. “I have to go now.”

“Wait, why?” Katie asked, suddenly wanting to hold on to the only familiar face she had. But Lilith was bouncing nervously on her heels, looking around the cafe as if she expected something to leap out from the shadows behind the espresso machine. 

“It’s getting really dark,” Lilith said.

 Katie laughed. “You’re afraid of the dark?” she said, and Lilith glared at her.

“The dark’s a lot scarier when you know what’s in it,” was all she said, and with that she flounced out the door with the rest of the muffin in her sweatshirt pocket. Katie stayed a while longer staring out the window into the evening, until the barista started to sweep the floor around her. She went back outside, and headed home. 

She was only a block from the train when she heard music coming from directly above her. Katie looked up. There was a man sitting perched on the stone wall, his legs crossed jauntily. His features were Asian, and his skin was frosty with a pale silvery sheen that gleamed softly in the moonlight. He was dressed in a jester’s costume, sewn together in shades of silver cloth, dark and light– bells dangled from the tips of his pointed toes, from his collar, his sleeves and the points of his jester’s hat. He had in his arms a stringed instrument that he strummed softly–and slightly discordantly– as he sang.

“Would you believe, they put a man in the moon, man in the moon…” He broke off and stared at her sharply. “Katie, isn’t it?” 

Katie met his gaze. “Maybe,” she said. “Anyway, it’s man ON the moon. ‘Would you believe they put a man ON the moon.”

The jester’s lips curled up into an odd smile. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said. He gestured at the case in her arms. “Tell me, Katie, are you a musical girl?” Katie shook her head.

“It’s not mine,” she said. 

He raised an eyebrow. “It was given to you,” he said..

“I’m holding it for someone,” she said, gripping Lady tighter. 

“Gifts freely given can’t be returned,” he said, and began to strum the instrument once more, a tinkling song that sounded like little bells. “You can try and give them back,” he went on, matching the rhythm of his words to the music as he played, “but they’ll always belong to you. Unless you pass them along,” he added, “but that was given to you.”

“It wasn’t hers to give,” Katie said. 

He shrugged. “Maybe not. Andy did you hear about this one…. They put a man on the moon…”

Hey!” 

He stopped playing. 

“I have to ask you a question.”

“You get three, you know,” he said mildly, “it’s traditional.”

“I only need one,” Katie said.

“What will you give me?” The curly smile was back, and he quickly played off a jig, waving his legs around in the air.

“Give you?”

“Surely you must know there’s always a price.” He gestured suddenly, and for less than a moment Katie thought she saw a long, thin metallic tongue flicker over his lips. “Give me the fiddle,” he said. Katie clutched it tighter.

“It’s not mine to give,” she said. His tongue slid out and this time the moonlight glinted off it in a ghastly shiver.

“Its mistress is dead,” he said, “her mother has given it to you. It is yours to barter, yours to give.”

“It doesn’t belong to me!” Katie snapped, and the jester shrugged, and took up the jig again at a maniacal pace.

“So what do you have?” he asked peevishly, still playing. Katie shrugged.

“I have a necklace,” she offered, holding up the string of red beads she’d found on the floor of the loft. The jester sneered.

“Glass beads for the isle of Manhattan. Let me see what’s in your bag.” He took a great leap from the wall and was suddenly standing before her, larger than he had seemed perched above her. He stood only a few inches taller than Katie, but she could see the muscles straining against the thin fabric of his tunic and tights. Up close she could see little stains here and there, and a little tear in one of the points of the hat, where white batting was beginning to leak out.

“Let me see what’s in your bag,” he said again. He took it from her, holding out the instrument for her to take. Reluctantly, Katie made the trade, gripping Lady firmly by the case’s handle and cradling the other instrument in her arms.

It was cold to the touch, and while it must have been made of wood, it felt too smooth, like ice or metal. As the Jester rooted through her backpack, she felt the warmth slowly seeping out of her, leaving cold places where her skin touched the instrument. The Jester crouched on the sidewalk, going through her few things. He pulled her shirts and underwear out and set them carefully on the sidewalk, then held up her watch.

“Time could be a good gift,” he said thoughtfully, and rattled the watch next to his ear. “This is kind of cheap, though.”

“It doesn’t work that well,” Katie said apologetically. He shrugged with great philosophy.

“I’ll take this,” he said, holding up a paperback.

“You want my book?” Katie said, shifting the instrument’s weight from one arm to the other, the cold beginning to burn. He shrugged again.

“Do androids dream of electric sheep? Worth finding out.” Before Katie could answer he had taken back the lyre, leaving her bag open on the ground with her belongings strewn across the sidewalk. She knelt down and started to pack it all up again. Something jingled as it hit the ground before her, and she picked it up. It was a knotted leather thong with three tarnished medallions hanging from it, the cord strung through square holes at their centers. Katie shoved the rest of her things into her backpack and stood up.

“Put it on,” the Jester said, and she tied it hurriedly around her neck.

“Tell me–” Katie began, and he cut her off with another jig. 

“Questions only. And all the usual fairy-tale rules apply, so choose your words very, very carefully.”

“How do I find Birch and bring her back?” Katie said it all in one breath, and found herself gasping by the end.

He frowned suspiciously. “That sounded like two.”

“Fine, it’s two,” Katie snapped. “Answer.”

The Jester shrugged and began to play the lyre again, a variation on the same jig. His fingers moved faster and faster, until they became a blur and the music fell together into undifferentiated noise. Katie felt the coins on her neck grow suddenly cold against her skin. She looked down– as he played faster and faster, two of them began to shiver as the third stayed still at the center, their shapes blurring until they were almost translucent. At last he stopped abruptly, and instantly the two coins vanished. The Jester met Katie’s gaze with eyes that were ice, that were the cold, the airless light of the moon. Katie felt her breathing slow, her blood thicken inside her veins. She shook her head hard and fast, breaking away from his stare. “Where is Birch?” she said and her voice cracked and snapped with bitter strength. 

The Jester smiled. “You can’t get there from here,” he said.

“Tell me where she is.” 

“In the snow, in the cold, in the earth.”

“That’s where they buried her body,” Katie said, and she felt the ice spreading out, starting deep in her stomach and taking root, branching through her veins. “Her family had her buried in Connecticut. Is that what you meant?”

“Is that your third question?” His eyes were on hers again, a dark and dull metallic color, fixed on Katie as though he could feel the cold that spread within her, as if he could drink from it. 

“No. Answer the second one,” she said.

“You cannot bring her back,” he said.

“That’s not the answer to the question.”

“It is the only answer.”

“How do I bring her back?” Somewhere inside Katie knew she was standing on a sidewalk, that the air that brushed her skin was mild and thick with the scent of street-cart falafel. In her peripheral vision she could see people passing by, talking, laughing, shouting, they were within the reach of her arm, but she could no more have reached out and touched them than she could reach across the world.

“Ask Orpheus,” the Jester said.

“I’m asking you,” she said.

“You would have to go to the realm of the dead, which is the kind of club that has membership requirements.”

“Fine. Third question, how do I get there and get her out?” 

In a motion too fast to follow, the Jester darted forward and grabbed the third coin still hanging around her neck. He pulled the leather tight, jerking her upward, cutting off her breath.

“There’s only one way to get there.”

Katie felt her throat spasm, her lungs straining to take in air, fighting against him even though her limbs were barely responding to her brain. There should have been a revelation, should have been bright light and faded memory, but there was nothing, nothing but dark and pain and an abyss behind her, he was holding her over it, he was going to let her go and she would tumble down and down, down forever. She felt his fingers loosen on the cord around her neck, he let her go and she was falling, falling into nothing…

… and then she hit the sidewalk and he was bending over her, he pressed his nose up against hers and it would have been funny if she wasn’t afraid he was going to kill her for real. “Talk to Sharon at the Cat’s Meow,” he said softly, and then he let her go. She fought to catch her breath again, coughing and wheezing there on the sidewalk, and when she could breathe enough again to look up, the Jester was gone, and the moon hung low above her, watching her watching it.

Somehow she made it back to Cobra’s apartment, and let herself in with Sophia’s key. Cobra and Alexandra were on the couch watching a movie on a laptop computer.

“Hi,” she said, and they chorused hellos without looking up. Katie stood there awkwardly for a moment, and then Alexandra paused the video.

“Ask her,” she said, and Cobra elbowed her. 

“Fine. How long are you staying in New York, Katie?”

“I don’t know,” Katie said with sudden nervousness, “Maybe a while. I’ll find a place in the next couple of days, I promise.”

“Actually– I’m kind of running short these days,” Cobra said. “The rent here’s four hundred for the room. We could split it, if you wanted.”

Katie hesitated, and Cobra shrugged.

“Or not, whatever. I’d let you paint on the other wall, though.”

Katie laughed. “Deal,” she said.

“Cool.”

“Told you,” Alexandra said. “Rent’s due next week and you clean the bathroom every other Tuesday. Welcome to the family.”

“Thanks.” Katie hugged her backpack to her chest, suddenly happy.

As she went into the bedroom, Sophia poked her head out the door.

“You have to get your own shampoo now.”

“I know,” Katie said. “I will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Sophia nodded. “Okay. You can stay, then.” She closed the door, and Katie sat down by her new bedroom’s only window, and watched the street below, fingering the third medallion still hanging around her neck.

Katie never saw the body. She got back to the house long past dark, long past midnight, the moon clear in the sky with that white edge so sharp it looked like it might cut you if you reached out for it too far. There was a silence she could feel even before she rattled her key in the door, jiggling it open to slip inside. 

She went straight to their room, seeing the yellow light make its thin bar under the closed door. Birch was still up, then. Katie hadn’t checked her watch, but it felt late, felt like 3AM all over again. She pushed the door open soundlessly, catching it just at that point before the hinges squeaked. The light was on beside the bed, the portable CD player was wafting out Johnny Cash from its scratchy speakers, and a book flipped open on the bed. It was a mystery novel with a dated cover, a man in shadow with his gun held up behind his ear. Birch wasn’t there.

Katie swung her backpack down on the floor, took off her shoes and got into bed with her clothes still on to wait. The tea on the bedside table wasn’t hot, but still steaming a little in the chill air, giving off a faint scent of echinacea. Katie took a sip and replaced it, turned the book over and read a few words, and waited for Birch. She scrunched down in bed, her eyes heavy. 

Slowly the tea stopped letting off steam, and Katie fell into sleep without dreams, and in the morning Jack came home and told her that Birch was dead. He said it in a whisper, said it like a lie, and the first thing she thought, all she could say was:

“I don’t believe you.” She gazed up at him, bemused, still clumsy and thick with sleep. “What do you mean?” she said, “where is she?”

“Last night we came home around midnight,” Jack said, “she was passed out in your room with the door open. We took her to the hospital, they said she died on the way.” He stopped abruptly as though he knew it sounded absurd, his hands in his pockets, letting his bleach-blonde hair fall into his eyes. “We didn’t know where you were,” he said awkwardly. “We tried to call you…” He trailed off.

Katie looked away, staring off into the corner at the rusted radiator and the overstuffed bookshelf. Birch’s sneakers were there, overturned on the floor. One of the soles had started to peel away, and the toe was all wound around with duct tape. It was fraying at the bottom with a white film along the side, but it still held. Birch’s violin, Lady, was resting in it’s open case. At last Katie found a voice, though her lips moved somehow wrong, suddenly numb.

“She’s barefoot,” Katie said in a whisper, but Jack looked blank. “I want to see her,” she said, and he nodded. They went to the hospital together in his car, a ride that blurred in her memory even as they drove. 

They didn’t let her see Birch. So they drove home again, and Katie shut her eyes against the daylight. 

When she was little, when she climbed up trees and raced through the streets and backyards with others, children whose names and faces had long since faded into one another—way back then it seemed there had always been some imaginary companion, some secret-keeper, invisible to the rest, to whom she whispered the stories of her life and thoughts. And when she now tried to see the nameless friend, the face she saw was Birch’s.

The day they met she felt a shock, a thick, weighty jolt through the bottom of her belly as if she’d been in an accident, narrowly escaped death, seen the lights of Heaven or Hell.

They met in Ithaca, in upstate NY, three months after she’d started college there. She was at a party, somewhere up on the hill at a house full of people she didn’t know, full of dim light and beer and the faint smell of weed and bodies all crammed in together too close to dance or talk or hear the music that rattled against the ceiling. Katie was surrounded, she couldn’t get to the door, couldn’t get to the stairs where it was dark and there was space to sit.

There was already someone there, she was small, and all of her an ashy blonde—hair, skin, pale eyes that must have been blue—all of her seemed to be damped down in color, one decibel below the rest of the world. As she sat, looking out at the crowded room, there seemed to be a wash of quiet just around her, suffusing the space just beyond her person.

Someone’s elbow hit Katie in the back, and she jumped away, hearing a disembodied “sorry” float back to her through the crowd.

Katie wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but a little while later, her head aching with the pounding music, she made her way to the stairs, to sit down by the wall, and found herself enveloped in the blond girl’s span of quiet. She wasn’t doing anything, just looking out at the room and playing with an empty plastic cup between her hands, but she turned and met Katie’s eyes as she sat down, and her face had a sudden familiarity.

They talked, the nothing words you said to strangers, and then the party began to thin, the place began to stink too much of beer and weed, and they went out into the clear night and walked, talking about life and art and books they’d read, and all the other things you said to someone you were trying to impress, and then they were down by the river, down in the gorge with the water flowing loud and cold beside them, their breath wafting up in steamy trails into the frigid air. Birch’s face was paler in the moonlight, sharper, and her lips and thin eyelashes flickered, blinking as she spoke. They sat down side by side on the rocks, the cold seeping up from beneath them. 

Birch told Katie she was from further upstate, that she’d run away at fourteen and hitched a ride to Telegraph Avenue all the way on the other side of the country, the other side of the world, then rode back two years later with a junkie boyfriend and his junkie friends. And when she walked back in the door of her house, her mom and dad had hugged her tight, then gone right on as if she’d never been gone.

She told Katie about her violin named Lady, she said she was a photographer, and she liked to shoot in the moonlight, and when she said that she looked down shyly like she thought she might be telling too much. And Katie told her about college, and how she was thinking about dropping out because she felt so far behind in all her classes. Just like she’d felt behind the first day she was there, when everyone else seemed to know their major, to have friends, to have lived away from home and been to Europe and gone to private school, and she was just a tall, awkward kid with frizzy reddish hair from the New Jersey suburbs.

And Birch was listening with a grave intensity, her nose scrunched up and her pale eyelashes fluttering frosted in the moonlight like Katie was telling her a profound truth, like she’d never heard it before but understood it instantly, completely. And they were somehow sitting closer without having moved an inch, and then Birch was kissing her, her small hands moving through Katie’s hair with a thin delicacy, and Katie was pulling her closer, breathing her in with a nervous awe. And when at last they were both shivering, too cold to stay outside any longer, Birch took her hand and led her back to her house, to her room that was all dark wood and blue and silver. They didn’t make love, not then, but Katie fell asleep in a warm haze, half-naked under thick blue covers, wrapped close and tight around Birch’s small body. 

And when in the morning she woke, it was to the sound of music, she opened her eyes and Birch was there, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, playing an eerie gypsy tune on an old fiddle.

That was three years ago.

Katie had always felt too loud, too big and tall and heavy, too quick to trip over her words or her own feet, but beside Birch it seemed to be all right, as though what had always felt like excess was the balance to Birch’s small, silent presence.

And a few weeks later she’d flunked a midterm exam, and gone to Birch’s house to find her pacing the floor of her bedroom with a feral tension. She grasped both Katie’s hands in hers when she walked in. “I can’t be here anymore, I can’t stand it,” she said. 

Katie hugged her close, stroked her hair. “So let’s go away,” she said. Three days later Katie dropped out of college and they went away. They caught a ride with someone Birch knew, some people going west, and they sat squished in the back with everyone’s bags piled up around them. She tried to ask Birch what had happened, why they had to leave so urgently, but she would not say.

“It’s nothing,” she said as they whispered to each other in the  backseat, under the cover of the music. She shied away when Katie tried to put an arm around her, but then Birch took Katie’s hand and gripped  it until it hurt. Birch had a friend when they got to San Francisco, an older woman who let them sleep huddled on her pull-out couch for three weeks until they found a room in a small town in southern Oregon, and part-time jobs together in a used bookstore at next to minimum wage. 

After a month or so they settled into something. In the morning they both worked, and in the afternoon they came home, and Birch read books, or immersed herself in tiny, obscure projects with spiral notebooks and charcoal drawings, or else she picked up Lady, the violin, and played her until long past nightfall. Katie had always let her painting be an afterthought, taking up pencils and brushes when inspiration struck, when she had the time, when school work was light. But now, with nothing to do but shelve books in the mornings, everywhere she looked she saw scenes, figures, corners and details sketched, scribbled, struck out in oils. She drew every day, spent all her extra money on art supplies. Her clothes became spattered with splotches of paint, she threw away pages and pages, and slowly, as she could afford the materials for it, she stacked up finished canvases in the corner of the room, refusing to let them be hung in their room, or elsewhere in the house.

And slowly, it had become a life. They fought infrequently, sharp words from Katie, and wordless staring from Birch that made Katie feel as though she might be going mad. They made up afterward with sex and reassurance, forgot the argument again within days. Katie’s parents began to call again after a long silence, and they offered to pay for college courses, if she would take them. She started to, one or two at a time at a community college, and one semester she signed up for an advanced calculus class, so that Birch could take it in her name.

For a few months, their room was filled with paper scribbled all over in blue ballpoint pen with signs and symbols and a few scattered numbers that looked to Katie more like witchcraft than like math. And Birch came back home from school in a determined quiet, with a flush in her cheeks. But when Katie tried to persuade her to take more classes under her own name, Birch just shook her head, not brushing back her pale blond hair when it fell into her eyes.

The math class ended, “Katie” got an A, the real Katie signed up for art history and intro economics, and the pages of signs and symbols got stacked at the bottom of the bookshelf, under books by Virginia Woolf and Jonathan Lethem, and The Ultimate Guide To Lesbian Sex.

Three years went by, it was a life, and now Birch was gone, and Katie couldn’t even begin to think, couldn’t begin to understand that she would never touch her face again, never sleep with that small body in her arms, wake up in the night to see that pale blond hair glistening in the moonlight against her own skin.

Katie and Jack went back to the hospital in the afternoon, and still they told her nothing. “You’re not family,” said the young, kind nurse, and when she heard the words Katie wanted to throw back her head in a wordless, senseless howl of grief. Not family, no, she wasn’t family, she was everything. Birch was everything. But Jack was there with her and he grabbed her shoulders as if to stop her. He had been there when they took her in, and when he asked the question they answered. “It was a heroin overdose,” he said, and the nurse nodded without saying it aloud.

Katie stood for a moment in stunned silence, then spoke in fragments: Birch wouldn’t, she didn’t—not that.

They shook their heads, suppressing smiles of pity, or scorn, or kindness. And what could she say? Birch never touched drugs, never spoke of them one way or another—when anyone around her did, she just wrinkled up her nose and gave Katie a smile, her “people do such silly things,” smile. If she’d ever used, even if she’d been straight-edge and vehement, Katie might have found a way to believe it. 

“She didn’t,” Katie said again, and then, “Please let me see her.” But they had not.

Birch’s family came a few days later, cold pale people who looked a little like her, but with a strange flatness about them, or maybe that was just Katie’s mind wringing them out, not wanting to see a resemblance to Birch in these people who did not like her. There was a mother, a boy and two girls, all a little younger than Birch. There was a father, too, a dark-haired man, but he stayed in the driver’s seat as though it were a getaway car, staring hunched through the window.

They greeted Katie with a friendly indifference, and spoke among themselves in hushed tones. They took away all of her things, going through the bookshelves and holding up volumes for Katie to claim or let go. She watched as they gathered up Birch’s clothing, her photos, the ratty stuffed basset hound she’d had since childhood.

And then the mother, the woman with hair just the same as Birch’s was, with a drawn face and heavy circles beneath her eyes, she was reaching for Lady.

“That’s mine,” Katie said, without thinking, too harsh. Birch’s mother went still, and looked at Katie with ice.

“This is Amanda’s violin,” she said, “we bought it for her eleven years ago.”

“She gave it to me,” Katie said, her face hot. “Please. I’ll pay you for it.”

The ice-mother might be about to laugh, or about to slap her. She held up the case, dangling it from a thin hand. “This is a ten-thousand dollar violin,” she said.

“I’ll pay in installments,” Katie said instantly, even though she couldn’t, not in a year, not in ten years, not in never. The boy, who was maybe fifteen, and dark-haired, not like his sisters, he hadn’t spoken, hadn’t helped carry Birch’s things, just stood in the corner with his hands in his pockets. Now he raised his head.

“Mom, just let her have it.” She gave him a snappish look.

“You expect me to believe Amanda just gave a ten-thousand dollar violin to some roommate?”

“Mom,” he said again. He was standing next to the stack of canvases, and when she turned to him she must have seen it, the front painting was of Birch, naked on their bed.

Katie had just finished it, two, maybe three days before she died. Birch insisted she would pose nude, but only if Katie took off her clothing, too. 

“Otherwise I’ll be self-conscious,” she said, and grinned. 

Katie painted with better detail than she’d ever found before, she’d touched with her hands already every curve, every nuance, tasted her skin so many times. Halfway through the last session she’d thrown aside her brush to dry with paint still on it, distracted beyond thought, the need inside her a ravenous thing. Birch shrieked with laughter as Katie leapt onto the bed and kissed her, bit her, and they made love like it was new, like it was an ancient thing, and afterward, her skin still hot to the touch, Katie got up and finished the painting with the taste of sex and Birch still on her lips.

And now Birch’s mother was staring right at it.

Katie darted forward, noticing suddenly how small and thin they all were, feeling large and heavy and clumsy as she moved across the room and turned the painting to face the wall.

“Paul,” said the ice-mother calmly, “please get Amanda’s things.” The three children together gathered up the boxes and hurried them out the door. Paul paused as he passed Katie.

“She’s just sad,” he whispered, and his whole face quivered for a moment before he turned away and almost ran out the door into the hallway. The ice-mother set the violin case on the floor and straightened, then took a step back.

“Keep it,” she said, and she walked out of the room.

Katie locked the door behind them and picked up Lady’s case. She sat down cross-legged on the bed and hugged it to her chest until the hard seams bit into her skin, starting bruises.

More days went by, and Katie only left the half-empty room to go to work, where the quiet of the bookstore was another shelter, only jarring her back to life once in a while to help a customer.  Jack or Evan came in once or twice a day as if to make sure she was still there. Jack came in one night carrying two mugs of hot chocolate. She looked at the door and saw Evan there, hovering half out of sight.

“You can come in,” Katie said, her voice a little hoarse. She had been given the weekend off, and she realized as she said the words that it was the first she had spoken since coming home two days ago.

Evan came in and perched on the foot of the bed next to Jack. they looked so much alike that their relationship had always struck her as some strange expression of egotism, but they seemed happy. Jack led, Evan followed, and Katie had never seen them fight.

“How are you doing?” Jack said at last. Katie took a sip of the drink too fast, scalding her mouth.

“Thanks for the chocolate,” she said.

“We want to help,” Evan said quietly, and she pulled her knees up closer to her chest, forming a wall.

“She didn’t overdose,” Katie said suddenly, before she was aware the words were forming.

Jack and Evan exchanged a look. “Yeah, she did, sweetie,” Jack said in a tone meant for a child, as though he thought she might be going mad.

“She didn’t!” His tone had sparked some fury deep inside her, and now she was talking too fast to stop. “She didn’t, she didn’t! I lived with her for three years. She wouldn’t have taken that shit, not for any reason.” They were looking at each other again, trading nervous glances.

“Katie,” said Evan, “Have you thought that she might have—I mean, she was very withdrawn. She didn’t seem to be… happy.”

Not happy. Quiet, shy, withdrawn in public, but Birch was alight with happiness, with some ephemeral glow of vitality; her presence was so strong, so bright it swept Katie up until she couldn’t tell her own happiness from Birch’s. “She didn’t kill herself,” Katie said flatly, the rush of adrenaline gone as fast as it had come. They sat there a while in silence, and then Jack and Evan left, and spoke in hushed tones outside her door. 

Weeks passed. Somehow, improbably, life returned to a vague normalcy. She went to work, came home in the afternoon, sketched and painted things she saw in the street. When she thought of it, it seemed incomprehensible that there could be a world without Birch, that life could continue at all, that she could draw breath, and Birch be gone. But the times when she did not think of it grew more frequent, and slowly she became accustomed to a day when she did not come home to Birch’s presence, where she went to bed and rose alone.

Early in March Jack’s cousin came to visit. Katie heard her arrive from within her room, heard the table sounds of dinner and talk and drinks poured out after, glasses of wine from the tiny stash Evan kept in a cardboard box under their bed. A little while after midnight there was a knock on Katie’s door. She answered in pajamas, her hair bushy and flat on one side where she’d been lying down reading a book. Jack was there, the girl beside him. 

“This is my cousin Courtney,” he said. She was tall, taller than he was by a couple of inches, and she looked like Jack, but with long brown hair that probably matched his natural color. 

“Hi,” Katie said briefly.

“Come have dessert with us,” Jack said all in a hurry. Katie ran her fingers through her hair to smooth it down and shrugged. She followed them down into the kitchen. Evan had made brownies, thick with bitter chocolate and Godiva liqueur. They were still hot from the oven, and Courtney bit into one too quickly and burned her mouth. She dropped the brownie and gulped down milk, then looked up at the table with milk on her upper lip, and chocolate smeared across her chin. Katie laughed spontaneously, and the foggy weight of sleepiness receded a little.

“Katie’s an artist,” Jack said, and turned with unnatural brightness to Katie. “Courtney’s fiancé is a sculptor.”

“Oh,” said Katie awkwardly as Courtney wiped her face clean with a paper towel. “What kind of sculpture?” she asked, realizing as she spoke that she was genuinely curious. Courtney shrugged.

“Different kinds. Last year he did a series with found objects, now he’s working in metal, he’s welding street signs and fenders together.” With large gestures she described the structure, and Katie tried to follow her hands and words, envisioning the half-finished work suspended in mid-air, a twisted cityscape forged into being with scraps of steel and iron nails and a blowtorch. The vision was dystopic, magnificent, and Katie put a hand on her stomach, slightly seasick.

“Katie, show her your paintings,” Evan commanded, and Courtney nodded eagerly. 

“I’d love to see them,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it. Katie rose nervously, biting down on the things she was accustomed to saying, I’m not any good, it’s not my best, it’s ugly, it’s silly, I hate it.

They came into her room behind her, crowding all three in the doorway as she shifted a pile of clothing from the floor to the armchair, clearing a path to the finished canvases stacked against the wall. She let Courtney flip through them. The one of Birch was at the back, facing the wall where it had been since her mother left. 

“Hey,” Courtney said, craning her neck to see the picture. “Can I turn this around? I think I know her.”

“You don’t,” Katie said, her chest suddenly hot and empty. “I mean, yeah, go ahead.” 

Courtney lifted it easily and turned it around, and Katie was struck with a sickly sense of exposure as Birch’s naked flesh was laid bare in light that was at once too bright, too harsh. But Courtney’s eyes were on the painted girl’s face, and she was nodding.

“I know this girl,” she said, “I met her a couple of weeks ago, I was in New York visiting my grandparents. I ran into her a couple of times, I don’t remember her name.”

“That’s Birch,” Evan said with warning in his voice, and Courtney quickly replaced the painting at the front of the stack.

“Sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t her, obviously. Just somebody with similar features. Anyway, her name was something regular, like Ashley.”

“Amanda?” Katie said softly, and Courtney seized on it with relief.

“That was it. Amanda. Is she a sister or a cousin or something? They look a lot alike.” Katie nodded.

“Something like that,” she said softly. 

“Small world,” Courtney said naturally, as if it were a conversation. As one the three turned to leave the room. 

“More brownies to finish!” Evan declared, and they tramped out after him. Katie followed them to the door and shut it quietly as soon as the last was through it. New York. That was it. Amanda. Katie closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She longed to chase after Courtney, to go and wake her in the middle of the night and ask her, where, and why and how, where did you meet her? What did she say? How did she look? Was she all right, was my Birch all right, was she my Birch at all? But she did not.

It was that night that Katie began to dream of dead girls. 

She was on the side of the highway in the dark– it didn’t feel like night, there was enough light to see by but she couldn’t find its source, as if the air itself was dimly illuminated. There was no moon, no sign of artificial light, and the air was damp and cool. Katie had gone to bed in only an undershirt and shorts, and it was all she was wearing now. She shivered, pulling her body in close on itself. She looked around her.

The road was empty far in both directions; she couldn’t see or hear a car, and the blacktop seemed somehow thin, as if it might not take her weight. She backed away from it, climbing over the guardrail to the embankment. It was grassy and wet, slick under her bare feet, the mud moving with her weight, shifting her balance under her. The woods lay below her, the trees stretching up above her to the sky. She couldn’t see through them to another side, and the forest was flooded, water reaching up the trunks– half the trees were dead, drowned, stripped bare but still standing, strewn among their living fellows. There was no wind– everything was still around her.

And then the first girl swam up from the water. 

She was very young– she couldn’t have been eighteen–and she surfaced a few feet from where the water ended and the mud began, and walked toward Katie on unsteady legs. She opened and closed her mouth a few times as if not finding her voice, her purple lips making soundless shapes. Her skin was grey, her hair was stringy with lakewater and tangled up in algae, and she was naked, her flesh marked here and there with shallow cuts and scrapes that gaped but did not bleed. Katie felt herself draw back inside, but she did not move as the dead girl stopped only inches away. Her mouth opened and closed again, and Katie heard her voice come out, less than a rasp, less than a whisper.

“What are you doing here?” 

Katie shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“You’re alive.” The word was a hiss, and Katie heard it whistle through the holes in her rotting lungs. But her breath smelled like the forest, like the dirt and moss and  cool, shadowy air. Katie shivered again, the cold had gotten worse and she wondered if it were emanating from the dead girl, radiating out with the chill of the grave. 

“I’m looking for someone,” Katie heard herself say, and the dead girl’s eyes flashed suddenly. They were bright blue, and fresh as if she were still alive, but they stared at her without comprehension.

“You’re alive,” she mouthed again, and shook her head, her hair slapping wetly at her shoulders. 

“I’m looking for Birch,” Katie said loudly, and her voice echoed through the trees. The dead girl leaned in close to whisper. Her lips brushed Katie’s ear and her body shuddered,  anxious to get away. Katie forced herself still, forced herself to stay. 

“I don’t know that name,” the dead girl said.

“I need to find her,” Katie said, “she’s small, blond. She died.”

“You love her!” The dead girl ripped herself away, dancing backward in an instant, her voice was accusatory and loud for a moment before it faded again into a scant sound. 

“Yes.”

The girl backed away, her hands rising up to her hair and tangling until her fingers disappeared.

“This the place of drowning things,” her throat forced out the words, “there is no love here. There was a boy, he loved me once, but there is nothing like that here.”

“Do you mean this is only people who drowned?”

“Drowned and drowned, down and down. Go away.” The girl was sulking, folding her thin arms across her chest.

“Please, tell me something!” Katie heard her voice crack on the edge of desperation. “You’re the first– the only person I’ve met who might help.”

“No one helps,” the dead girl said. “Ask them, but they won’t help you.” She gestured at the water and Katie saw the figures beginning to rise up from the water– they formed beneath the surface before they broke it, dark shapes under the waves that slowly turned to human beings, walking slowly toward the shore, coming out from among the trees. The first to make it to the shore were women, young and old but they looked alive, not like this waif who wavered at the edge of decomposition. They came toward her in fluid motions, and Katie found herself rooted to the sand beneath her feet as they approached. Hands and arms stretched out for her, trailing algae, grabbing at her hands, stroking her hair, surrounding her. She did not know, at first, what was strange about them (though she knew that they were dead, dead of course they were dead, this was the place of drowning things). They were cold to touch, coming up into her arms as if from a cold, cold pond and touching her with turgid fingers.

They were dead, of course, but there was no way to speak the word– this one slipped her fingers between Katie’s lips, holding down her tongue, while that one held her about the waist so she could not move. Fingers wrapped around her ankles, tracing up and down the tendons of her feet and taking hold of her toes, hands slid down beneath the fabric of her clothes, lifting up her breasts, taking hold of her shoulders, her arms, her hips. And faces, everywhere, white and black and shades of brown, all fading to shades of grey, with those eyes too bright for life, too fresh for death, staring into her as a thousand whispers assaulted her ears, “alive alive she’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive let me touch it alive….”

“BIRCH!” Katie screamed the name out and it shook the air around them, shook the sand beneath them but still the dead girls held her tight until she screamed it again and again, screamed the name like it could save her, but all the dead girls in the world were there to steal her warmth, and the echo faded deep into the trees. Katie looked up at the sky as they slid their hands over her, gazing up into the sea of dead stars until at last– she awoke.

After that, the dead girls were in her dreams nearly every night. Not all at once, not in the drowning place, but flitting through the natural world, playing the roles of people she knew, walking past her, touching her cheek with a passing shiver. She closed her eyes and saw their faces, newly dead and long decayed, skeletal and shrunken with those fresh new eyes. She slept less and less, awakened in the middle of the night and unable to fall back asleep, the bed spreading widely out underneath her, too big, big enough to consume her without Birch there to help her fill it.

In the daylight she went to work, came home, read books and watched television, and everywhere she sensed the dead girls watching, waiting, hovering nearby. Until at last, she began to see them in the daytime.

The first one came into the bookstore, and bought a novel by Candace Bushnell. She was the same girl from the drowning place, from the trees by the highway, the one who had spoken to her, and now she was dressed in jeans and a white tank top, her bruised and withered arms with their open, bloodless wounds exposed under the florescent lights, holding up the book she wanted to buy. She set it on the counter and said nothing.

(Not real, it’s not real), Katie thought in a panic (you’re hallucinating, she’s not real, she’s not dead, it’s someone else or else it’s in your head.)

“Would you like anything else?” she brought herself to say, and the dead girl shook her head mutely, her stringy hair dropping bits of dark plant matter onto the floor. Her feet were bare and grey. Katie took the book from her and rung it up, told her the price and took the money from her hand. It was all single bills, crumpled and wet and stinking of the swamp. Katie smoothed them out and put them in the register, and when she looked up the dead girl and the book were gone, leaving a puddle on the floor where she had stood. Katie went to the back room and found the mop, and cleaned up the spot.

For the next few days, she glimpsed them on the street, saw them staring out of car windows at her as she walked, sitting in the corners of cafes, drinking nothing and watching her as she read. At night she was followed by the sound of bare feet on concrete, though there was never anyone behind her, and sometimes outside her bedroom window, figures raced by and slapped at the window with anxious, heavy fingers. When that happened, she pulled the covers over her head and closed her eyes. They never came into the house, never appeared in her bedroom, and though she strained to look each time one appeared who was small, who was blonde, she never saw Birch among them. Then one morning as she was leaving the house with Jack, the first dead girl was waiting on the sidewalk.

She was wearing an oversized sweatshirt, the hood pulled low over her face so that the sun would not show her blue, sunken face, the sleeves long enough to conceal her bony hands. Her feet were covered in socks, but she wore no shoes. 

“Who’s that?” Jack said, and Katie shook her head. No one. They turned the other way, and the dead girl grabbed her arm.

“I have to talk to you,” she said. 

Katie tried to pull her arm away, but the dead girl’s fingers were locked in tight on her flesh. “What?” she said sharply.

“Do you know her?” Jack said aloud, and Katie nodded impatiently.

“It’s fine,” she said, and let the dead girl pull her in closer and whisper harsh and quiet into her ear, her tongue flickering out of her mouth, brushing Katie’s skin and making her hair stand on end. 

“I’ve been looking for your girl,” she said. “She isn’t among us.”

Katie looked behind her quickly. Jack was there waiting, listening, ready to jump in and pull her free, pull her safe. She bent her face to the dead girl’s, whispering back as the wet, tangled hair fell upon her cheek and stayed there flat. 

“She didn’t drown,” she whispered, and the dead girl shook her head again.

“Drowned in anger, drowned in loss, drowned in drowning, not in water, but she isn’t among us. She isn’t in the place of drowning things.”

Katie’s heart was beating fast, and she realized she was gripping the dead girl as tightly as she was being held, they were locked together in a struggle or in an embrace. 

“So where is she?” she asked.

“Not among the dead.”

Katie met her eyes. “Then–” The dead girl shook her head.

“Ask the pigeons, ask the river, ask the man in the moon. I don’t know. But she is not among the dead, she is not among the drowned.”

Katie shook her head, more, she needed more but the girl had given everything, she didn’t know any more. “Is there anything I can–” She cut off as the dead girl shook her head.

“Nothing, not for me, not now. Someday.” The dead girl let go her arm and leaned in closer. In a second her fingers had slid into Katie’s open mouth, pressing down her tongue. Katie jerked back in panic, and the girl pulled away instantly. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “you’re so warm.” She put her fingers between her own lips, sucking on them, then turned and ran, her socked feet slapping on the concrete until she had disappeared around a corner.

“What the fuck was that?” Jack said, and Katie shrugged.

“Just a girl I used to know.”

“Is she strung out or something?”

“I think so,” Katie said. “Jack, I think I have to leave.”

He nodded. “I want to help you, Katie.”

She shook her head, tears forming behind her eyes again, even though she thought she had run out weeks ago. “I know, but I think I have to get out of town.” He hugged her, and she held on as if his body could shield her from something. 

“Are you going home?” he asked, and she seized on it.

“Yeah. Go stay with my mom and dad for a while,” she said, and she felt him nodding above her, she couldn’t understand how he could not be aware that she was lying. 

She didn’t sleep that night, but packed a backpack with sketchpads and pencils and a change of clothes. Everything else could be left behind. The next morning she gave Jack a check for the next month’s rent, all the money she had left, and told him she was visiting her parents for a while, back East. She left late in the morning and set about hitching a ride to New York.