I’m tired of trying to describe things that aren’t describable, so just trust me: when I swung back onto the Taconic and pressed the pedal, a wormhole opened up and my car entered it. Ninety winding miles in ninety minutes, everything black and sparkling with silence, no headlights but mine, no thoughts whatsoever except a constant telegraphing to the animals: Stay back.

At the West Side Highway, my phone rang.

You’re where? M. said.

A dark beery bar in rural Illinois, some guy throwing picks at a dartboard, some other guy with his forehead on the jukebox, puzzling it out, some other guy bumping the lewd-lady pinball machine with his hip, and young me on a bar stool, balancing a saltshaker on a single grain, wondering if anyone would ever care where I was or what I was doing.

I’m wherever here is.

Once you get the shaker balanced on its beveled corner, you have to blow the salt off the bar so that it can look even more wrong, against physics. When I turned down Fourteenth Street, stretched out before me was a long, impossibly empty corridor of green lights, the nameless Illinois guy pulled back the pinball shooter and sent my silver car gliding through the intersections, one after another after another, until it came to rest in a parking space exactly in front of the building.

She was in her living room, sitting up in the hospital bed, the apartment darkened, candles flickering, a few friends that I didn’t know moving about in the dark, her ex sitting glumly in a straight-backed chair, Emma standing in the bright kitchen with Daisy, the home-health aide. Behind them was the fridge with the morphine kit sealed in a plastic bag labeled with a skull and crossbones, drawn in Sharpie by me because it seemed like so many people were coming in and out that a mistake could be made. Kathy had seen me do it.

“You’ve drawn a skull or two in your day,” she’d noted.

In art class, every other still-life setup had a skull in it somewhere, just for atmosphere. The chalky ivory color of it, the faint temple dents, the tall, expressive teeth, the nose-hole vacancies. Still-life minus the life.

She was surprised to see me there when I was supposed to be upstate but took it in without asking.

“I decided to come over,” I whispered.