“No,” she said. “Leave Janet out of it.” Then she stood in the bathtub, bare and tall and towering over me, swaying only slightly. She was covered with goose bumps, like a pointillist’s Venus. I wanted to hold her, wrap her in a towel, warm her by the fire, even though there was no fire, even though it was a hot night like all the others, and we didn’t have that kind of love. But she stepped around me and disappeared naked into the dormitory. I still had to pee, and once that had been accomplished, I came back to find that her bed was empty.

I slid my body between her sheets. Her pillow smelled like the plasticky jasmine of her shampoo. Her sheets were silky and cool. I kicked my legs back and forth to feel the smoothness against my skin. I turned my face down into the pillow, but something didn’t feel right. There was no thrill, no promise of closeness here. I didn’t know what I was doing. I crept back to my own stale bed.

Ritual cleansings are common in both Eastern and Western religions. Ablutions are often required before worship, as though our gods cannot be trusted to see us as we are, as though the soap we scrub into our outsides might filter down to clean our filthy souls, or at least shine them up a little. Baptism, mikvah, misogi, punyahavachanam, ghusl, an evening in the sweat lodge. Cleanliness/godliness. But it seems to me that the closer we get to our natural states—the muddier we get, the more savage, the more covered with semen and silt and scratches—the closer we are to whatever elemental force created us. It does not seem likely that the gods are civilized, that they take their tea with one blue pinkie finger held aloft. It does not seem likely that they were looking down at Laurel, kindly or at all, no matter how she splashed and shivered in that cold dead tub.

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