Jonas shrugged. He was a lifelong shrugger. It was the genuflection of the devout fuckup. “Let’s go to the street,” he said. “Midnight will blow your mind.”

Outside they stood by the murky canal that ran down the street like a median strip. All along the block people set off their rockets, nearly dutifully, and gossiped and smoked. She felt the peculiar calm of not understanding the ambient language, a state she loved: it was like having part of your brain induced into a coma.

“Just wait,” said Jonas.

What were they waiting for? Oh yes: midnight. Mistress Mickle checked her heart the way she might reach into her handbag for a wallet she was continually certain had been pickpocketed but never was. How was her heart? There, but working? She took her pulse at her neck: steady, fine, though her torso felt percolated. She’d read an article online about women’s heart attacks, how they presented differently from men’s, how nearly anything (it seemed to Mistress Mickle) might be evidence. Was that pain in her chest, or in her back? In her chest or her breast? What bodily border must a pain cross to enter another bodily meridian? Insomnia could be a symptom, the article said: well, she had that now. She had all the symptoms, though fly-by-night versions. Intimations of symptoms. Not pains, but twinges. Not racing but trotting. She was dying, she was making it up, she wouldn’t go to a doctor. She had no natural fear of death, and was vain about this: it was what separated her from the rest of dumb humanity. But she was phobic about embarrassment. That’s what the death certificate would cite under cause: embarrassment, congenital and chronic.

In the middle of the street, a small boy knelt beside a man with 1970s Elvis sideburns. Not father and son, she didn’t think. There was a formality: the man seemed to be the boy’s firework godfather, come from far off to teach him how to light a wick. The boy must have been eight. The man must have been a ghost. Together they held a smoldering twist of paper to the fuse and stepped away. Mistress Mickle felt the rocket’s rising shrill at the back of her throat, absorbed its pop in her tonsils. It tore itself into three red branches, then faded.

“Fucking awesome,” Jonas called to the kid.

“Extraordinary,” she said, in a four-syllabled, English way. Then, “Yeah, awesome.” Already the man and boy were righting the bottle for a new rocket.

“Sixty-five million euro, according to the papers,” said Jonas. “That’s what the Dutch spent on fireworks this year. Hey, did I tell you? I’m going to apprentice to a hatter.”

“You’re too old to be an apprentice,” she said. Then: “A hatter?”

“Felt hats,” he said. “They’re the next thing. They’re coming back.”

“Come and went, haven’t they?”