Someone gave me a debit card from the Red Cross with four hundred dollars on it and a free bottle of water. I took as many photos as I could of the building’s exterior and the scattered pieces of paintings, then hailed a cab. The cabbie asked how my day was. I told him that my apartment burned down. He turned off the meter and drove uptown without saying another word. When we got to 41st and Dyer I tried to give him a twenty, but he waved it away.

I don’t remember getting upstairs, but somehow I did, collapsing on the tweed sofa in Cady’s studio. She held out a bottle of bourbon, and I fell into it, waiting to feel drunk. I never did, not even when it was empty. I was exposed, pulled apart, a ragged bundle of threads sailing through the air onto a condo balcony. Yet—no matter how much I drank—I never felt anything.

The New York Times interviewed me about the explosion two days later. “Abstraction has long felt like an afterthought,” said the image caption, “but paintings like Tomato Tomato, with their feminine devotion to detail, are meticulous as a Vermeer. They make evident the time spent on their creation, but it doesn’t feel like a chore.” The reporter also described my previous work as “wry,” “spatially overwhelming,” and “viscerally incursive.” The Times critic, when asked for a quote, helpfully noted that they were impressed that a woman “could so successfully handle the XL format,” since it is “traditionally the domain of men.” The accompanying photograph—in which I climbed, at the photographer’s urging, a scaffold to reach Prudence’s two unharmed panels—made me look tough. Though it was meant to be flattering, I felt condescended to and boxed in. Overall it presented me as an imitation of hypermasculine abstractionists—lady Pollock, lady Rothko, lady de Kooning, my use of a bygone movement updated and validated by my gender and youth—instead of a person unto myself.

Though I had renter’s insurance, it turned out that they didn’t have to pay if the apartment wasn’t technically legal, which it was not. The building was zoned for commercial use only, which I violated by living there.

We weren’t allowed in for a week. During that time the firefighters went back with a chemical bath and doused the entire space to dampen any possibility of further damage, so when I did get in, it was not what I expected. In the movies a domestic fire is always an ash pile, the end of a campfire, a ragged-edged photo of your wife clutching a golden retriever peeking out from the wreckage. But apartment fires don’t actually burn that way—not if someone manages to put them out.