You’re the girl from the floods, right? I saw them carrying you out of the restaurant. You were soaking wet, collapsed. I asked around. I have my sources. I found out all about how you were dying with a fever and so you started a flood to keep yourself alive.

Before we left that debauched house, Justine touched my forehead.

The best kind of nurse, she said, is a nurse with a malady.

I’d spent so much time in Nicholas’s apartment; I forgot the thrill of being alone on the dark and empty streets. Something rose up in my heart; I felt myself soaring, as if I was suddenly winged. And Justine, even when she was walking, she seemed to be leaping. I just wanted to go wherever she went. I thought of that expression: If Justine jumped off a cliff, would you? And I thought, Yes, I would, yes.

Sirens and threats, the cops looking for her, Dirk Wallace wanting to bust up my face, none of that seemed real. The black streets and the black sky were tilting and swerving and the whole world seemed drunk and I liked it that way.

We wandered over gardens and lawns. We crept through hedges and ran by living rooms and we had no accidents and we didn’t bother anyone.

She said she knew a guy with a thousand records. His house was always a party; he always let her DJ. Under the streets of Chinatown, she confessed, secret tunnels led to an opium den where a lady in a kimono passes around her pipe of poppies.

But we didn’t end up at an opium den.

We ended up at the Lake for Forsaken Orphans.

We sat on a bench. The moon lit up the black wet circle. Lilies, I think they were lilies, some small white blossoms, floating flowers in murky, green leaves. There was a waterfall, and it was louder than my mother’s water; it was loud and rushing, falling over the black rock, falling so fast the water was white.

In the mist, the lake and flowers seemed soft and blurred, and it reminded me of looking at something when you’re crying, the way it wavers and hazes and almost fades away.

What is this place?, I asked Justine. Is it British?

It’s Japanese, she said, in her way, so certain and sure.

She learned forward, elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her palm. I like to come here, she said, ’cause this is where I lost my dad.

She told me her story then. Not that it’s your business, but just so you know, because it’s not in that stupid police report.

She was a year old, bundled in blankets; her father was a poet. He brought her to the lake because he wanted to write a poem. He set her down for just one second. Just one second, he set me down and went off to his car to get a new pen. That’s when she got stolen. Sara, she said, I was abducted by criminals. This sick, evil, lascivious couple.