There’s the immense Colorado sky, there’s the grass, there’s the clothes on the line, fruit hanging ripe in the trees, the smell of wet cut grass. The land ripping out flat to the Mississippi with the sun leering on top in every direction. And you’re standing above it, a million miles from bumper-to-bumper commuter-nightmare New York. You’re not there anymore, though, you’re here, at the foot of the Rockies, cow-town college town on the American prairie. Great American steer farm. Steroid-fat cows. Transistor radios in barns, cows chewing all night long.

There were five of us in the room during the procedure: the doctor, her assistant, the hand-holder, me, and, of course, Lynn. She was the star. This was her show. Then it would finally be over. The hand-holder was a therapist, trained in female personal crisis. She was never more than a foot from Lynn throughout that long day.

The staff was ready to go. A stainless-steel machine is used by the doctor to vacuum it out, and the doctor needed Lynn’s O.K. to begin. The whole thing was supposed to take five minutes.

Lynn got weepy from nerves, and we all waited while she collected herself. Everyone was anxious to get on with it. I bet Lynn was, too. I held her hand and kissed it; she wasn’t even looking at me, she stared up at some poster on the ceiling. The sound, the way she cried, choking some, the way you do when you’re sobbing lying on your back, so the spit runs down your throat, swallowing, laughing underneath the crying for how absurd the scene was—even Lynn could see it—lying there with her legs propped up in the air, all these fucking people around her holding her hands and her knees and her privates, watching her like she was—ha-ha!—about to give birth (sorry). Boo-hoo. But in my mind I keep coming back to that sound, not loud, not shrill, that crying, it was almost a noise an animal would make. How much trouble Lynn was having even crying right then, without strangling on her own spit. Is there a way to describe how much I wanted to get the fuck out of there? I wanted to shout, God of New York, turn off that sound, get me out of this room before I’m seared and split open, before I develop breasts myself. The other half of my brain, though, recorded her voice for all time.

“You’re O.K.,” Lynn said to nobody, to herself. “You’re O.K.” She’d planned to get through it without tears.

Then it was quiet and she told the doctor to go ahead, and the doctor nodded to her assistant. The assistant turned on the machine, and the machine made a sound like any vacuum.