It was pouring. His jacket was as wet as the towels on the kitchen floor. He started back, then thought of a porch. It was close, he knew it was. It seemed the choice, nothing was open in East Boston at 2 a.m. Everyone here worked; everyone here had never been to a nightclub; everyone lived out their lives in spoons and napkins, trying, trying, trying. There were corner bars, which closed at eleven. A Schlitz neon winked at him through the downpour. Why did he have that last beer? Why? Work, he said to himself, you have to be at work, up at five; you cannot live like this. His brother’s face looked at him, wordless, mystified. He thought of the Sikh family that lived next door, the wife in embroidered chiffons, the boy in that head sock with the bun on top. They were asleep, holding on to one another.

The horn jumped him. Heather was in her BMW, dressed in black leather, eyebrows dark, lips spooked to an eggplant matte. Her hair was cascading everywhere in Niagaras of coppered blond. She rolled down her window. “Get the fuck in,” she said.

The club was dialed high when they arrived. There were lines. There were bouncers. There were cars and motorcycles on the sidewalk. Women in fur coats were slicked down by the storm, their hair and their minks shiny as seals. In an alley near the club where they parked, a woman in a pink plastic dress was spread-eagled, a man between her legs. Lighters bobbed in the rain.

Heather parked. Aziz opened a lime umbrella and held it over her like a suzerain’s slave. The rain had already drenched him through, but she was untouched. It was as if he had capsized desperately while she, queenly, had floated down a river on a canopied felucca. She handed one of the bouncers a hundred-dollar bill, and when this failed to move him she handed him another. They were in.

The crush inside was harsh. Heather pushed forward, and he straggled, hoping she would forget him. Work was only three hours away. His shame was exquisite, flowers and more flowers of it, multiplying across fields and fields, covering the world. He winced.

She pulled his hand and dragged him on. He could see she was saying something, but the music was so loud, the drinking around them so thick with glasses and voices trying to outshout the music, that all he made out was her grape lips and every so often, when the strobing shifted, her teeth.

They reached the edge of the dance floor. Heather never drank. She had only one thing on her mind, and that thing was there, right before them: Rafik and the Djara, dancing slowly, while the music scissored fast.