“Do you work here?” the officer asked her.

“Not anymore.”

“Are you authorized to be here?”

“I’m just here to pick up my stuff,” she said, looking around her for support. There was none.

“Lock them up,” the receptionist yelled. “She’s trespassing. And he tried to choke me.”

The cops moved toward them. Then Boogie Boo came out.

“Y’all have gots to fire me,” she said to the others before addressing the police. “It’s all been blown out of proportion,” she said to the policemen. “If they just take the boxes and go everything will be okay. It’s all a misunderstanding. And there’s no need to have your hands on your guns. This is a place of business, not the streets. Sylvia, I apologize to you from the bottom of my heart for all these punk-ass negroes who work here.”

Sylvia hugged her.

“It’s okay, girl,” Boogie Boo said. “After this I might as well just come with you.”

The police escorted Sylvia and Diego out of the building with the boxes. The van, however, was gone. A homeless man said the same cops had given it a ticket and called to have it towed.

It was Diego who began to laugh at first. Sylvia held back—but she broke down completely when it began to rain. The situation was so absurd.

“You cried like a little girl,” she said, punching Diego’s arm. “You almost shit in your pants, didn’t you?”

“And you actually did,” he said.

“Can you imagine … after all that … the damn truck got towed?”

“And now it’s raining!” he added.

“What next?” she asked, gasping for air in the downpour. “We’re gonna get hit by lightning?”

“Don’t push it.”

They leaned against the boxes and laughed until they were tired, amusing the skittering passersby, who stole glances from beneath their umbrellas and shook their heads at the two maniacs getting soaked to the skin and loving it.

“Is there anything here that you really need?” Diego asked her.

She thought for a second. “No,” she said.

“Good. Let’s get coffee.”

They left the boxes in the hand truck and went downtown to an Irish dive near Times Square and settled into a musty booth and ordered two scotch and waters from a waitress whose eyes told them she’d seen patrons at their worst. The scotch warmed Sylvia’s belly, and the dim light put her in a sober mood.

“I was just thinking of how many things have happened to me in the last couple of days,” she said, checking off events in her head.

“Hmmm-hm.” She wanted to talk, he realized. And he wanted to listen.

“I feel like such an idiot, Diego. Blind … phony. I should’ve left Umbra a long time ago, because I wasn’t happy. But I guess a lot of times when people aren’t genuinely happy, they try to destroy their beliefs. It’s hard to face your soul every day and not like what you see. It’s easier to face something so destroyed that you can say it is not really you … it makes it easier to remain in denial. Do you understand what I’m saying, Diego? You go from standing for something to standing for nothing in particular; you make everything relative, when you damn well know in your heart what is wrong and what is right.”