Grains of cognac-brown vomit were splattered in the toilet bowl. In a fit of forensic paranoia, I scrubbed them off, as if the police would sample the puke and match it to the wine in the bottle at Lane’s apartment, or in his stomach. I had to be smart, I had to think of these things.

In the shower, massaging shampoo into my scalp, I struggled to replay the night. I seemed to peer through a keyhole at the moment of the fall. You barely touched him, I thought. I looked at my hands. Lane is a big man, he’d once crushed you with his weight, remember? These hands couldn’t move him like that. He’d leaned out, gravity pulled him down, I could see it.

When I left the bathroom, naked and dripping, I thought of the dossier. But it wasn’t on the kitchen counter, it wasn’t on the coffee table. I looked at my window—I knew the ghost had come. But the window was locked. In the bedroom, I saw the folder on the floor.

I made coffee and nibbled at a blueberry muffin. I had diarrhea. My entire body longed to escape into bed, buried under covers, but I had to go in to the Bystander, recapture the Whitney Chase of yesterday.

The dossier was a problem. I couldn’t bring it with me and couldn’t leave it here. Ideally, I’d watch it burn, but I couldn’t start a fire. Sitting on the floor, I began ripping the folder’s contents to shreds, page by page. I stuffed the paper bits into a plastic bag and mixed them up. I went back to the toilet for a while.

Then I walked all the way to the office with the plastic bag open in my purse, and at every other garbage can grabbed a random handful and threw it in. Last night’s storm was evaporating in white molecules and there were a lot of NYPD on the streets, or at least I noticed them more. Cops with assault rifles posed on the corners, observing everything.

I pictured the paper scraps that had snowed over Manhattan when the Towers fell, and told myself that the city would absorb mine too.

7.

It was past lunch by the time I arrived in Chelsea. For a few minutes I lingered by the elevator downstairs, letting the AC freeze my sweat. It’s hard to draw a true self-portrait, to consciously embody how you appear to others when you’re not paying attention, and I worried about seeming like a caricature, not in fact myself.

We’d closed the summer double issue and a lot of people were on holiday, but I still should’ve noticed the silence. I was so concerned with putting one foot in front of the other, I just walked straight to my desk, oblivious to the chill.