She takes him with her, or vice versa, spiraling up through the staircase as the lights go on beneath them. The rest of the night and the early morning are a slow strobe, items on a shuffled list Padgett can’t quite read or make sense of. They arrive at a house that is gray and glass on the outside and polished wood everywhere in the interior. The car is stupidly fancy, a midlife crisis too early. The baby—Kitsune, she remembers—gets strapped in and then so does Padgett, the seat belt impressive as a cosmonaut’s, thick, with a buckle right over her breastbone. She can’t get in, then she can’t get out. She appears to be leaving a party with a famous man, or has left the party already, the moon mooning across the view of big bright storage blocks on carrier ships at rest in the Bay. It’s a high-up neighborhood where it’s no big deal, with lawyers, to snatch up three houses from immigrant families and make one boxy glass home for yourself.

The baby is handed over to someone who may or may not have called her Miss. Padgett stands on a porch, is what it is, and tries to find the Golden Gate Bridge, her bearings, on this balcony. The Vic is talking about water and says the word restoration. She sits on a bench in the kitchen that looks too new to be restored, but he means the water, the oxygen in the water, fizzy and iceless, that cools down her throat and, she sees this with her hands on the sheets of the bed, lifts the flush away from her skin.

The music has shifted, of course. How could it not shift perfectly in the home of the king of the system? He is standing over her, extremely naked, his hand on his own genitals like he’s afraid she’s going to kick him. Her sweater is draped over a barstool at the kitchen counter that she tricks him into admitting was the priciest kind. She has seen them, lined up in a store south of Market: the ones so cheap they were already malfunctional, the OK ones, the built-to-last ones such as Martin and Stanford have purchased, the upper-middle-class ones for new condos, and then the barstools so pricey it fills her with shame for the species. If she opens her eyes, which she keeps not doing, she can see all the way up his downy legs, not a flattering view but an arousing one, vulnerable and full of hair. You don’t have to do anything, when you go home with a man, if you let a man take you home. Except, Padgett thinks, basically you do. So she takes her clothes off, and his face just lights up, something she sees in him for weeks, and this, she thinks—this must be the plan, too.