Martin wipes his hands and goes out, the towel going limp in the weather. The well-dressed woman is in a screaming heap in a scummy planter on the sidewalk, a broken square growing soil and a wan tree and spat-out gum and trash, and she does not fit in it. Her slender feet, her stylish ruined shoes, kick at the rain and the ground, and there’s a newspaper over her head, melted down to a shroud of shelter. In the rain it’s a bad day to be a newspaper, as if they haven’t suffered enough already. At Martin’s footsteps she shakes and shudders and the screams, now, are savage and ravaging.

“Take it easy,” Martin says. He throws the towel down and displays both empty hands, but the woman’s hunched over, face covered, so you can’t tell who she is.

“I saw it,” or something, is what she is screaming.

“Easy.”

But it doesn’t look easy. The tree branches let go of some measure of water, right on the newspaper, and the woman startles with a raw, yowling sound. The newspaper gives up and Martin watches her grab at the pieces with little batty hands. You can go mad anywhere, he thinks. Earth is your bonkers canvas, but it’s here that you’re doing it, wet desperate lady. “I saw,” she says, and curls over a bit. The scraps of newspaper, torn and soaked, parade down her top. Her buttons are big and clattery as she moves, still sprawled in the planter.

“Take my hand.”

Her head rolls to face him, and then back again. Martin gets only a glimpse of her crazy-wretched eyes. “I saw it,” she says. “Something ran at me. It charged me. It did this at my arm.” She rolls up her sleeve but her skin just looks rained on. No, maybe there’s a scratch. He reaches out a hand and she screams again, draws back like a damsel in an old movie.

“Hey,” the barman says. She is moving with all limbs puppety, a large wet purse adding more complication, her head down so her hair looks like a smeary face. Her pose makes Martin think of the thirsty, ragged men in cartoon deserts, rasping water, water. He steps toward her again and from under her hair she, yikes, bares her teeth.

“OK, enough,” Martin says. “Get it together. Snap out of whatever this is.”

She wails, a softer sound but no less spooking.

“I mean it,” Martin says. If he doesn’t pick up the towel now he will forget, so he does. His necktie is distastefully wet and tired. “Times like this, that shit is catching. Come in and we’ll call somebody you need, warm up.”

She has crawled, backward, out of the muddy planter, and now crouches slowly into standing, like the chart of evolution.

“Come on.”