“Mice!” he roared. “We had fucking mice in our room! And if you don’t do something about it now we’re going to blast that out over the internet and this dump is going to be in even worse trouble than it already is!”

I had the urge to sob. Everything felt hopeless. Finding Peaches. Figuring out what caused these visions. Leaving. Staying here. Reuniting with my mother. Saving the shop. It was all one big Rubik’s cube that I didn’t know how to solve. And all the while, the image of the Tower loomed in my mind. It wasn’t just Peaches who was going to face an upheaval. I felt something about my life was about to shift, to possibly break.

I sat on the concrete lip of the fountain and stared up at the false sky of the Quarter. The shapeless, smeared-looking clouds, the egg yolk–yellow sun. The tingle only lasted for half a second—a light-headedness, a strange taste in my mouth. Then a vision swallowed me up.

Movement. A woman’s hand reaching for a cord, pulling on it, a lamp crashing to the ground. A man’s work boot—reared back and kicked. The legs of a chair, the broken fingernails reaching toward them. The edges of the room going hazy, the light shrinking to a pinpoint, then nothing but darkness.

When I came out of it, I was on the ground, my head pounding—
I must have slipped from the edge of the fountain, knocked my head against the stone. A woman perched on a scooter stared down at me, her eyes huge behind her glasses. I pushed myself up, my whole body exhausted, like waking up after a nightmare. My mouth was dry, but I swore I could smell blood. I kept bringing my hand to the sore spot on my head, expecting it to be wet.

“Hun, you okay?” the woman asked. I managed a nod. I wondered if I had bit my tongue. I spit in my hand to see if I was bleeding—the woman’s face changed from concern to disgust, but I didn’t care. I forced myself to keep moving: to the bridge between the casino and the parking garage, the elevator to the ground floor, out onto the street. I knew those hands. Small, like a girl’s. Peaches. I was too late. The brokenness I had felt pulsing in this city all summer, at the center of everything that was wrong, had taken over. I had started to shake and told myself I was too cold in the air-conditioning, thought it might help to feel the sun on my face, my arms. I stood at the rails and watched a man with a metal detector make his way over the dunes, toeing at mounds of sand, searching. I gripped the rail hard, until my knuckles turned white.