When I finally look up Alpha is there, curling his index finger as an illustration of my limp-dickedness. I clench my hand—thumb outside my fist, thank you very much—and unleash it on him. I miss but it doesn’t matter because I am already on top of him and berserking. I am saved from a probable lawsuit by Tracey, who peels me off the mime and throws me in a cab.

A Bra Tells the Truth

A Bra Tells the Truth

When I get back to my apartment I realize that in a certain light—in fact, in every wavelength and every frequency of the entire visual spectrum—I am even more of a chump than I thought.

As I scour the apartment for the Nix antidote—I inadvisably took twenty milligrams in the cab, and I have no sensation in my toes or fingers and my tongue is dead weight inside my mouth—I discover the bra that Charlie left behind on the night of the argument. It’s wadded up between the wall and the mattress, forlorn, like a treasure-hunt prize that someone planted but forgot. At first it inspires nostalgia: this is the first bra I ever removed from Charlie’s body.61 As with all seductive undergarments, this bra tells lies. The lies are stronger than the truth—they are the lies that you want to hear, have been waiting your whole life to hear—but you can never make them out, not quite. It doesn’t want you to. It wants you simply to be curious forever.

Tonight, though, this bra finally tells me a truth. A painful one.

The bra looks just as lovely as ever, a miracle of delicate sheer fabric and clever engineering. I press the gossamer material to my face and breathe it in, detecting the usual fruit-and-powder fragrance of Charlie’s breasts and the powerful headnotes of the new perfume she was wearing that night. I also detect, faintly but definitely, other notes—cardamom, cloves, cumin, coriander, fenugreek, peppercorn—and, as they register in my olfactory bulb, I experience a vague but powerful jolt of something imploding nearby, a sickening depth-charge feeling.

Those are all ingredients of garam masala.

Garam masala is used in curry.

The dots connect: the Sikh guy eats curry. Curry gets on his hands. Hands transfer curry to bra.

I want to vomit. I want to shoot someone. Instead I throw back a cool thirty milligrams of Nix and wait for the hurt.

It comes fast.