“This is something you need.” She touched his leg and her own hands were small and knobby, like strange windfall fruits. “This is something you need and it will not cost you much.”

The fever seemed to sweep in from someplace outside of him, another bad feeling on the overly fragrant air. It blew through him, burned fast and then was gone, like a flare of marsh gas, and it emptied him out. He was shivering in the aftermath. Trembling as Samantha trembled, shuddering down through her medication into sleep. The woman reached out and placed her hand over his, so that together they both held the severed hand where a sliver of dried skin still stuck to the base of the thumb. Bones not long removed from their flesh.

“Please,” she was saying, “it will not cost you much and is something you need. You are sick.”

“I am sick,” Ethan said.

“You are sick and this is a remedy for those who are broken.”

He pulled away and left her holding the skeletal hand. Way up in the hills and in the forest across the street, birds whose cries he did not know began to announce what would have to pass for a new day. She said it again—”It is a remedy for those who are broken”—and it felt like the wrong way to start a journey, a curse or a bad omen, a reckoning, rigid and fair and as inalterable as the past.

On the last morning in New York before it happened, Ethan stood at the window and watched the sun breaking in slantwise shards off passing traffic. Down in the street, fifteen floors below, the noodle vendor assembled his cart. Behind Ethan, across the apartment, in the bathroom, the shower turned off, and he knew from when Samantha used to leave the door open that now she was pulling back the curtain, reaching for her towel, covering her face with it and not putting on the fan, never letting the fogged mirror uncloud before her. He thought to himself: if I crossed the apartment, if I opened the door.

Outside a car horn erupted.

Sometimes when he woke in the night he did not know her, her face ruptured out of dream, withered and shrunken, a face carved from tree bark, and later he will say to himself, this is how it happened. He will look for causes and impulses, but will find only a sequence, an unfurling of events.

A pair of pigeons flushed from the sill.

He turned from the window and went to the kitchenette. He cut up bananas and poured coffee.

To the closed door, he said: “It’s going to snow. Don’t forget your boots.”