I SWEATED THROUGH a strange dream: Ramesh Uncle and I were aboard a ship making for America. I never saw my own face, or his—we were ghostly bodies with splotches of light for heads. We kept pacing the ship deck as the ocean sprayed our faces, and I kept saying, How will we know when we get there? and he said, There’s a big statue, and when we berthed at the California coastline, an enormous oxidized bronze Anita loomed, one hand high in the air, holding not a torch but, instead, a very large tiara.

I woke around two. I could not imagine lying still through the night. I tiptoed downstairs and stepped outside, barefoot, making my way to the Dayals’ front lawn. I stood a moment and considered the facade of that strange house, the mustard yellow and the lively red door, and I thought it was time for me to break something.

I lifted the watering can behind the azalea bush. The key was missing. So I edged around back and found, next to the cement path, a stone. I gripped it in both hands as I approached the basement, where Anita and her mother had been the night I left my knife in the kitchen. I had the sense that some boundary between my dream and my waking life had not yet fully shut.

The bottom square of glass on the basement door window shattered quickly, and I didn’t think about the shards protruding when I pushed my arm through and undid the lock, making use of the digital dexterity I had been developing in hopes of one day removing a girl’s bra. I dropped the rock on the earth outside. No alarm. The only sound was the house itself: the ambient noise of the airconditioning, the hum of a refrigerator.

Last I’d been in this basement, it was unfinished, with boxes piled up by the water heater. Now, though. The first thing I thought was mad scientist. Three long tables, the kind Anita’s mother might have used while catering, were covered with white plastic tablecloths. A mess of tools was laid out. A large stone basin. A blowtorch. Tongs. A juicer. (I thought of the buzzing I had heard the last time I was here.) A huge plastic jar of sugar. I looked down to see a trickle of blood dripping from my elbow to my wrist. I pressed my shirt to it.

I moved toward the fridge, which was also new. Sometime recently, the Dayals had added a small kitchen—a fridge, a kitchen island on wheels, a wire rack. When I opened it, still tending the wounded arm, I saw the thing altering Anita, like a vast shaft of light, striking her chest, growing her up.

On the top shelf were three round, yellow lemons.