The stairwell doors were numbered, as if the residents wouldn’t be able to keep track when they came home. The “4” was an elongated green man in a loincloth, one arm held out and bent. By the time I climbed that far, I was glad to see him. The hall behind him was painted with frescoes of vacant Roman courtyards. Sher’s door was the middle of a fountain; I knocked on a painted nymph’s tummy.

Sherrea had her face on, and layers and layers of black and purple clothing. The astral colors of sorcerers, she’d told me once. Her black hair was wet and had been combed flat to her head, but that wouldn’t last long. There was a cigarette between her white-painted lips, smoked nearly down to the filter.

Her big dark eyes got bigger when she saw me, and it made her look almost as young as she was. “Sparrow. Blessed goddamn Virgin,” she said around the cigarette. “Get in here and lie down.”

“I’ve been lying down,” I said, thinking of the river flats.

“Not in any way that was good for you. You’ve got some kinda shit in you, chica. What is it?”

Either she really is psychic, or I wasn’t looking my usual sleek self. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there when it happened. I’ve probably got some sunstroke as well.”

“Oya. Well, you’re not gonna sit in my living room like that.”

She drew me a bath. She was prepared to drop me in it herself, but I declined firmly. She insisted that I leave my clothes outside the bathroom door, so she could wash them (an unexpectedly practical gesture from Sherrea). I did, and locked the door.

Her bathroom was the place in the apartment that looked most like hers. Dark — probably where she put her makeup on. Paisley shawls, ferns shaped like visitors from outer space, incense, brass bowls. Mismatched glass jars (from jelly and peanut butter and salsa, elevated beyond their stations) full of dried leaves and flowers and powders, with a combined scent that called to mind medicines and hot metal. The mirror was like a pool half seen through vegetation; it was swagged with velvet draperies dimly printed with flowers that all looked carnivorous.

I was in the bath for a long time. I might have even fallen asleep; I know that when Sherrea pounded on the door and shouted, “Did you kill yourself in my goddamn bathroom?” I sat up with a jerk, my heart slamming in my chest like a moth against a window. Water lapped over the side and splatted on the floor. It wasn’t warm water anymore, I noticed.

When I stood up out of the tub, my reflection appeared in the velvet-hung mirror like a doppelganger in a forest clearing. There was just enough light for me to see the discolored lump on the side of my cheek. The rest of my face was an interesting ghoulish hue. Bloodless. I decided that Sher was jealous; she always tried to look like a vampire in training. No wonder the woman on the tri-wheeler, she of the sixty or so names, had thought she’d run me down. I looked as if she had, and then backed over me, too. I found a comb among the glassware and worked it through my hair, but I couldn’t find anything to tie it up with.