The man is irked. She is not listening raptly enough to him. Padgett’s last real boyfriend had that problem with her too. “Maureen. How can you not know this? I thought this is all required for any SF citizen. The baby is Kitsune. Maureen read a lot of those Japanese comic books, you know what I mean? She was Japanese, I mean the sort of Japanese where you grow up in Vancouver. You really don’t know this? Beautiful baby, Kitsune. Citizen of the world. Somebody said the Vic has actual Maori in him, if he does, it shows in her. Ten bucks says she’ll be on the cover of some ad campaign, some noble effort, in his name. God I sound terrible, but this is where we are. I saw the radio thing on those hikers who got kidnapped in Bolivia, and you know what they said was their mistake? Not having a good enough map. Eighteen months imprisoned. A good enough map.”

Padgett feels like the barefoot girl in the train station with her lost, eaten toenail. She holds up a finger. The guy stops in the middle of his trip to Baja. “You got bathroom to go to? I’m monopolizing, aren’t I?”

“Monotonizing,” she corrects, and waterbeds her feet across the room to pull, can’t make it work, push the door with a silhouette wearing an upside-down triangle for a dress. She looks back at the big man, still yakking, and goes in. The light’s pink, bad. Someone else’s turd is in the bowl like a manatee. No privacy, no space for her. She pees on top of it and splashes water on her face, a droplet on her ear in her reflection, hanging like jewelry. She looks harder into the mirror.

How’ve you been, Bottle?

There are no paper towels, due to carbon and the environment, blares the sign over the blower. She holds her face under too. So loud and so hot, and in the rush she realizes it has been a test, a pranky test. This, the yakking man, is the Vic she’s been talking to. Of course it is, of course he was. This is the movie star in the airport bar being told he looks familiar, Zeus in a peasant cloak playing trickster, I’m Gatsby, thought you knew, old sport. She’s been played, conned out. She smiles at it, and when the fan offs automatically, the speakeasy music has switched—someone screwed up the playlist, it makes her snort—over to a man, talking in even, lively tones about the mind-body problem.