Padma and I stayed up, talking and drinking tea, until the early hours of the morning. When I finally went to bed, it was in what Padma called Claudia’s room. The walls were painted bright red, and every piece of furniture had some sort of human or animal characteristic. The dark wood of the headboard was carved with grotesque, leering faces, the night-table had feet with taloned claws, and the dresser had what looked like a curious fox face on each drawer. There were all of Claudia’s favorite books—Mann’s Death in Venice, Lewis’s The Monk, Goethe’s Young Werther, Hamsun’s Hunger, Byron’s poetry, and a complete collection of Poe—braced by a pair of watchful gargoyles. Opposite the bed were two framed pen-and-ink drawings, one of writhing humans transforming into snakes, the other of a woman sinking into a pool of black water as hands grasped her from below. I knew without being told that they were my sister’s creations; there was one in my Barcelona apartment of a woman melting under the force of a radiant sun. When I’d hung her work in the apartment on Rivington, she’d torn it down. My sister had destroyed most of her own drawings in various fits of temper over the years; the only pieces that survived were the ones she’d given away.

I’d never seen a space that Claudia had decorated before. My sister had spent her adult life shuffling from shelters to squats, taking refuge with friends and lovers, or with me. Now everything in the room reminded me of her, as if the force of her personality had been channeled into inanimate objects. In the closet was a black silk wraith of a robe adorned with red dragons. I scanned the silver hairbrush for a strand of her hair, but it was spotless. In the bedside table drawer was a serpentine ashtray and an open package of cigarettes from Nat Sherman. I lit one up, winced at the stale taste, but smoked it anyway.