I asked the bargirl for a maraschino cherry so I could chew the stem. How did people tie these with their tongues? It seemed like a testimony to something about the human body, something the mind could not control. Seek and destroy. You could damage any part of the brain you wanted, and some people would still be able to tie those stems into knots. I wouldn’t, but others would.

“I’m only trying to help her,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s enough.”

“Sweet girl.” He smiled. “It’s enough.”

He put his arm around my back, and I felt his hand moving underneath my skirt, grabbing my ass. I slapped his arm. “I’m saying something true about my life.”

“And?”

“And you don’t even give a fuck.”

He squeezed me harder and laughed. “Of course I don’t.”

I beckoned him closer with one bent finger, made like I was going to tell him a secret. Then I leaned into his ear and spat.

“You little bitch!” he said. “What was that?”

I looked from side to side—for another person’s face, for the door. Whiskey blurred the lights. I didn’t leave any money. I barely stumbled as I left.

One day my friend Alice invited me to a launch party for a film. Not a movie, she said, but a film. Alice was attractive enough to have a good time anywhere. She was half German, half Japanese—“Axis-bred,” she said—and gorgeous, her smooth skin eerie like a doll’s. The certain knowledge of her own allure lay beneath her beauty, its seed as well as its product. She knew how to abuse substances in a serious way without becoming unseemly.

She told me it was going to be absurd, this party, full of people from Los Angeles. “I’m from Los Angeles,” I said.

She paused to consider this. “You are,” she said. “But not like they are.”

She wanted to go early, elevenish. It still meant I would have to skip my trip to Grandma Lucy’s. I called Juana and asked if she would mind bringing some soup that night. Could she stay while Lucy ate it? She could. Sometimes Grandma Lucy spilled on herself without realizing. A streak of tipped-over oatmeal had once left a red flush across her thigh, grains stuck as if they’d been pasted on her skin.

The party was in a dirty Bushwick warehouse. The film, which almost no one had seen, was about schoolyard bullies. The gimmick was the bullies had superpowers, but the good kids had even better ones. There was comic violence but not upsetting violence, for reasons that had to do with ratings. There were possible political implications. A woman at the party was speaking loudly, maybe drunk, maybe sober, about valences. It was an allegory for the war on terror, she said, official torture policy and so on. “So what’s the takeaway?” she said. “All’s fair as long as only the bad guys get hurt?”