One time she fell asleep eating chowder. Later, I found kernels of corn stuccoed all over her couch. Juana took me on a tour of their cleaning products. She showed me how to use carpet cleaner on the diarrhea stains and explained the difference between brands: This one you can use on the couch, this one not.

“Too harsh?” I asked.

She pinched her nose. I understood. Too smelly.

Juana was very emotional about my grandmother’s condition. One afternoon I found her crying in the kitchen. “No more,” she said. “I hate it.”

I hated it, too, but I’d never cried about it. I’d often wanted to, but I wasn’t sure I was able. I patted Juana’s arm. My fingers felt wooden and inhuman.

“You’re very—how do you say?—strong,” she said. “Very strong.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t strong. I was just organized into little sections inside. The sections didn’t touch each other, necessarily. I hadn’t seen some of them for a long time.

I returned to the city after midnight and called the friends I knew would be awake: the ones who didn’t have jobs, the trust-fund artists and the downright poor, the ambiguously depressed, with diagnoses and without, the ones who lived so far into Brooklyn they essentially lived in Jersey. We talked with beer on our breath, leavening our words with wisdom. They talked about how they’d seen rats as large as dogs in their stairways, how they’d unlearned the aesthetic rules of prior centuries. I talked about how I’d faced mortality in Connecticut. We stayed awake until dawn because we wanted to feel reduced by fatigue—in just that way, sharpened into spokes—or else we were afraid of dreaming.

One night I didn’t call anyone. I wanted to find a man, any man, who could offer his face as a label for my loneliness. I already felt alone. I needed this stranger, wherever he was, whoever he was, as proof. I found him at an Irish bar in midtown, a bald man sitting by himself near the bathroom. I liked his voice when he offered me a whiskey. I told him I wanted it neat.

When he repeated my request to the bargirl, he was forceful and assured, as if he understood exactly why I needed it like that. He’d make sure they got it right. If I squinted, his head looked like it was glowing. It was as blurry as a lightbulb seen through tears.

We drank. We talked about the perils of age and the delusions of youth. Sometimes he tapped his skull like a good-luck charm: Knock on wood. He asked me why I was staring at his head. I said, “I like how it gleams.”

I drank a little more. He drank a little more. He said he was a doctor who specialized in brain lesions. “Seek and destroy,” he said fondly, tapping the wood of his scalp once more. I wondered if he’d even gone to med school.