I got sick later from that kitchen; that delicious incredible Indian food was full of microscopic critters my body hadn’t met before. This American Indian house here in the Arizona desert is full of critters too; in the yard is a small sign saying BEWARE OF SNAKES.

From the ruins up on top of that balustrade, Kathy down below in her rusted chair, and Emma with her phone, framing me under that ancient broken arch with nothing but blue sky around me—in that rare moment I got to be the higher power, looking down on mice and friends.

So the Marigold Hotel with its giant plastic flower affixed to the crumbling patio wall, me up early after the night of the trapped horse sending out his foot, like sleeping with a man who wants you to know that the bed you’re clinging to the edge of is, in fact, his. Not that he wants you to feel bad about it or anything, just that he did buy it, and he did get the people down in the city to put it on a truck, and he did flee the house when they arrived so that you could be the one to watch them assemble it after cringing over how they were going to get it upstairs. They had to hike it onto their shoulders in order to wrangle it up the stairway, along with the big broad headboard that I recently almost painted PLEASE DON’T FUCK HER IN THIS BED on but then didn’t, because I don’t like to mar wood. I watched them inch-by-inch themselves up the narrow stairs in the upstate house with its low ceilings and hand-hewn railings, the same way (back to India) that I watched Kathy in another grand castle-something hotel, the one with the ancient paintings of elephants and camels all over the stucco walls, and her refusing to be left behind when the elevator ran out of floors and we found ourselves in a big empty ballroom with a stage and chairs and a narrow opening that seemed carved into stone with shallow, slippery steps. She wanted the roof, where the sun was, and a view of Udaipur or whatever midwestern-type Indian city we were in that day. She handed us her canes and then, with Emma going first, crawled up the steps, slowly, me behind her, Kathy determined, not joking or sighing, just working. One step at a time, until suddenly we came out into bright sunlight onto a rooftop patio with potted plants, chairs draped in dyed fabric, and a lone woman pushing a broom.