Hanging up, Carmen experiences a surge of frustration. Did they even know what such a thing meant? She remembers a photograph she’d once seen in class. A 1950s housewife directly facing the camera. The only sign she’d had the operation were the dark bruises under both eyes. Back then a lobotomy was an outpatient procedure performed in fifteen minutes, often on depressed women. Some doctors performed dozens a day and patients would ride home in cabs after. To figure out how deep to swish around the ice pick, and when to stop, a common practice was to ask the patient to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as you did it. When she started forgetting the words, you’d gone deep enough. And sometimes the ice pick left behind barely anything, sometimes there was only a body remaining . . .

She shudders, rubbing her arms, looking around. As she was talking to the police she’d also been following the late-night weekend crowd, and so Carmen, with a nervous look around, shows her ID to a bouncer and follows a group of people into a bar. The music thrums around her, people packed in, drinks sloshing. Carmen jumps when someone puts an arm on her back to push past her. There’s a knife handle sticking out of her pocket, her body is still wet underneath her clothes, and in one hand she still holds Kierk’s notebook. She finds a backroom without as much noise and dials him. Again and again the phone buzzes to no answer at all.

Carmen lies awake in the hotel. At first she keeps jerking up at the slightest noise, very aware of the structure of the door, or the open glass of the hotel window, and at these times she clutches the Hello Kitty notebook to her like some kind of metaphysical shield. On the nightstand rests the kitchen knife. The door has stacked in front of it all the other furniture in the room except the bed and nightstand. Unable to sleep even in the sanitary hum of the hotel, she’s instead been trying to quiet her fear by reading the journal. It is the only thing that can occupy her busy mind, and, wide awake, she reads deep into the night, finally arriving at the last entry written in Kierk’s quick and spindly scrawl.