Once outside, my chest pains and tightness subsided and my posture straightened, and I ran without thought or direction. I didn’t stop running until I collapsed onto the greenery of scenic Prospect Terrace on Congdon Street. I skulked past the monument to Roger Williams and stood at the waist-high fence, the boundary of a precipice. Spread out in the distance, downtown Providence glowed and slept, and it didn’t care what happened to me. It never did.

I left the fence eventually and curled up on a wooden bench under the canopy of a billowy oak tree. I woke early the next morning, slicked with dew. I still had her camera.

Oops, right?

* * *

I didn’t know what to do with what had happened at Mercy’s apartment. What would you have done?

Me? Thanks for asking.

I tried to be normal. Scratch that. I attempted to crawl out of the haunted bottomless ditch I’d fallen into and climb back onto the road to wherever it was I was headed before Mercy’s fateful return.

Yuck. Fuck fate. Fate is the rationalization for rapacity and evangelical evil, for the privileged chosen, for a hand holding a weapon.

Prospect Park was a few blocks from Victor’s (from my band Antigone, remember him?) swanky apartment, but waking him up and begging for a ride back to my car or my shitty place, especially the morning after I’d missed a rehearsal (oops) would’ve made me out to be more of a fuck-up than I already was. He was a bandmate, not a friend. Besides, I needed the walk to clear my head. (What a misleading bromide that is. “Clear my head” makes it sound like your mind is simply cluttered and only needs you to pick up your clothes off the floor, wash and put away the dishes, maybe move some boxes of stuff you don’t use but can’t bear to throw away down into the basement. The reality is more like a mental Whac-A-Mole game: with a handy mallet you smash down the thoughts that keep popping up that you don’t want popping up, and you whack and smash and whack until you’re exhausted or numb, and either way, you give up.)

When I made it back to my apartment, mind uncleared, I ignored the blinking answering machine and I ate two bowls of cereal and then slept a full twenty-four hours, missing a bartending shift at the Paragon and another band rehearsal.

Victor woke me the next day with a phone call. He asked where I’d been in that aloof, I-don’t-really-care-about-the-answer kind of tone. I told him I’d been sick, too sick to answer the phone. He said I’d missed the last two rehearsals and he left audioless space for me to apologize. I didn’t. He said I wasn’t reliable. Me, the grinder, the respected Susan Lucci of the Providence music scene, was no longer reliable because I’d missed two lousy rehearsals (okay, maybe I’d missed a few more). He said that I was no longer in the band. I said, “You’re doing this over the phone?” It was clearly meant to be a rhetorical statement-question that judged his lack of empathy. He miffed a clove-cigarette laugh and said he’d meet with me to do this, but he didn’t want to catch whatever illness it was I had. I said, “Fuck you,” and I said many other things with “fuck” in them after he hung up.