“The name comes from the French for fire,” said Thuy. “French stew is pot au feu.” She stared down at her noodles, stirring them into knots. A voice had just begun talking in her head. Her voice. She was getting blowback from the Thuy Nguyen character in Wheenk. The virtual Thuy was telling her not to sleep on the Merz Boat at all.

“Did your mother make pho at home?” Jayjay asked.

“Oh never,” said Thuy distractedly. “It’s too much trouble. Boiling the beef bones, skimming the stock, blackening the shallots and ginger roots with a blowtorch, putting them into a cloth bag with star anise and cinnamon to steep, filtering the stock—never mind. I’m hearing a voice. And I’m worried the ant shoon will catch us before we know it.” Thuy laid some money on the table, just in case they had to leave in a rush.

Virtual Thuy kept on talking to her. Virtual Thuy wanted to show Thuy a little metastory she’d made. A scenario that might come true.

“Back to the boat now?” said Jayjay, glancing anxiously at the restaurant’s glass door.

“I don’t think so,” mumbled Thuy. “Right now I have to—” The metastory in her head had begun to play. It was well crafted. Virtual Thuy was smarter than Linda Loca’s George Washington character. Of course. Jayjay said something else, but Thuy wasn’t listening to him. She was immersed in Virtual Thuy’s metastory.

On the Merz Boat Craigor reads in bed, and Jil lies motionless and wide-eyed beside him—her image is overlaid with a vintage clip of the Bride of Dracula in her coffin.

Thuy and Jayjay settle into the crooked igloo and fall asleep. Thuy’s dreams are animated images over her head. She sees seabirds stalking a stony shore. One of them plucks her up and carries her to a nest made of a single long loop of pho noodle, intricately woven over and under itself. Thuy in the nest is a baby bird with sparse yellow pinfeathers. She claws and pecks at the noodle, repeatedly breaking and retying the knot, each time changing its connectivity. A hairless pink rat pokes his head over the edge of the nest. Thuy is too busy with her knotting frenzy to notice him. The rat wriggles into the nest and presses up against Thuy from behind, his tiny red penis twitching against her.

Cut to Thuy waking up with the sun coming through a porthole. She thinks it’s Jayjay spooned against her back. But the man’s smell is wrong. And then she hears Jayjay’s voice outside. The hut’s door flies open, showing pearly sky and the silhouettes of Jayjay and Jil. Thuy looks over her shoulder at the man whose sticky private parts nestle against her thigh. Craigor. She’s naked with Craigor on the couch in Craigor’s workshop at the back of the boat.