When it was time to leave the roof—we were heading to the guesthouse that day, the one among the reeds and toads with the royal who bellowed at the boy bringing me my yogurt on a silver tray because he had peeled the foil lid neatly back—I went first to keep Kathy from tumbling and then she sat to descend the stairs, working them one by one, first feet, then butt, then feet, and Emma coming last, with the canes. I got to the bottom, ducked my head, and stepped into the empty ballroom that was no longer empty to face rows and rows of chairs filled with Chinese men in suits, affluent-looking but not like businessmen; more like a religious cult. Everywhere men in rows, each holding some kind of prayer book, and the podium was now banked by flowers and occupied by a man who had come to a halt in his sermon as a woman—me—appeared next to him.

Then came Kathy laboriously crawling, and the men in the chairs could see just her feet, which she was picking up manually, by her thighs, and setting down, then moving to sit on the next step, then manually putting the feet one step lower, et cetera.

And so she materialized in the room, legs first and then her face, concentrating on the task of not falling, and when she looked up she saw that we had descended like Spider-Man into the theater of whatever this was. I saw her pulsate with shame for a moment on the last step, her dead legs asprawl, her face radiating something both false and beautiful, like the big plastic flower on the wall of the Marigold Hotel, and then she grinned. Big and real. In her handmade Indian hat that made her look eccentric and hip, in her gauze shirt and yoga pants, letting Emma and me haul her to her feet and fasten the canes to her forearms. She smiled so radiantly and so wickedly, and we walked, click-click, click-click, down the flower-banked aisle, click-click, past the pious-looking nervous men who stared not at us but at their books, their laps, the vault of the castle-something ceiling, and past their leader, the man at the podium who waited until we had gone through the doorway to the elevator alcove before he resumed his sermon.

It always seemed like we were trying to hold on to her, grasping smoke, watching her disappear, but in that flower-festooned moment, Kathy emerged corporeal, the stone wall giving birth to her, feetfirst.