When the movement stopped, and I felt cool grass beneath me, cradling my cheeks, I looked deeply into the dirt, trying to X-ray it, wanting to find a home with the worms and bones and roots under it. I think I was moaning, gasping, still weakly trying to crawl away. But again I was stopped. Against my will I was turned over onto my back. The big sky above me was still there, clotted with smoke and ash. Beyond my feet was an inferno.

And above me was a familiar face. One I knew was coming.

“Don’t fight me, Bonnie,” Krystal said, gripping my shoulders and staring down at me. “I’m trying to help you.”

Three

I have entered a new way of life now, one that smells like canned green beans and disinfectant. I live in a hospital masquerading as something else, something homey and intimate, and it is populated with doctors masquerading as regular people, dressed in jeans and casual wear. It is a large, echoing place that’s always chilly and endlessly white. When I close my eyes, I can imagine snow.

Each morning I wake and a nurse attends to me. They help me into a sitting position, dress me, wheel me out to the dining room for breakfast. I am a compliant guest. I sit at a table with four strangers near the kitchen door, and as we all stare at our morning mush I listen to the industrial blender that sounds like a buzz saw. I find it comforting. I envision myself as the morning fruit being pureed to a smooth, easy consistency, the world passing in the same way fruit pulp passes over the blades, my brain holding loosely to everything. This is the only version of consciousness I can bear.

From the tiny stones of reality that refuse to pass smoothly, though, I’ve gathered that I’m back to the name “Bonnie.” I am no longer allowed to wear proper shoes, or watch Three’s Company, or see many visitors. And Krystal, with Morris’s help, put me in this place using my own money. I’ve been told it’s for my own good, my own safety. Here it is hard to do what you want, like hang yourself with a bedsheet, or stow away pills, or drown in a sink full of water, without a jean-clad someone politely stopping you. Outside my room is a number, 205, a cosmic joke to be macerated right along with all the other small insults of being alive.

The end of my world was all over the news, the nurses have told me, though I don’t want to hear it. They tell me how they valiantly fended off reporters who’d tried to see me at the time. I listen, their kindness exhausting. The reporters couldn’t have gotten to me, anyway; for two months after the whole mess, after I was first transported here, I was placed in a medically induced coma on account of my burns, and by the time I woke up, the news cycle had long forgotten my name.