With wet hair, I walk to the all-night drugstore, buying ACE bandages and a breast pump, ziplock bags, and a forty-ounce bottle of Mexican beer. They only have a hand pump in stock, awkward and time-consuming. Back in my room, the heavy outmoded television throws splayed shadows on the bare wall. I pump with the sound off on a Spanish soap opera, trying to distract myself from the ache of the suction. The actors make exaggerated movements and faces, confessing things to one another while I labor on one breast and then the other, filling the reservoir twice and then emptying the milk into the baggies I label 9/21/93.

I know I should flush it all, but I can’t make myself do it. Instead, I hold the bags for a long minute, registering their meaning before tucking them into the freezer of the small convenience unit and closing the door, and thinking only briefly about the housekeeper who will find them, or some road-strung trucker looking for ice and feeling repulsed. The milk tells a whole sordid story, though I can’t imagine any stranger correctly guessing at the plot. I’m having a hard time understanding it myself, and I’m the main character; I’m writing it.

—

Just before dawn I wake feverish and take too many Advil, feeling my throat catch and burn around the capsules. A breaking-news banner is running across the bottom of the TV. Forty-seven confirmed dead in Big Bayou, Alabama. Deadliest crash in Amtrak history. Sometime in the middle of the night, a towboat on the Mobile River has gotten off course in heavy fog and driven a barge into the Big Bayou Canot Bridge, displacing the track by three feet. Eight minutes later, running right on schedule, the Amtrak Sunset Limited traveling from Los Angeles to Miami has slammed into the kink at seventy miles per hour, shearing off the first three cars, collapsing the bridge, and rupturing the fuel tank. Amtrak is citing negligence of the tugboat driver. Several crew members are missing, and recovery efforts are still underway. President Clinton is supposed to visit the site later today.

I click off the set, wishing that the rubbery red button on the remote could work to shut off everything, inside and out. Chaos and despair and senseless death. Trains hurtling toward kinks and gaps, everyone aboard sleeping and clueless. Tugboat captains on the wrong river at exactly the wrong moment.

Eight minutes, I want to scream. But who would hear me?

(two)

Once I worked a missing persons case, a boy we later found in pieces under his grandmother’s porch in Noe Valley, the grandmother on a creaking, peeling porch swing directly over his body when we pulled up. For months after, I couldn’t get her face out of my mind, the powdery folds of skin around her mouth, frosted pink lipstick painted just beyond her upper lip. The serenity in her watery blue eyes.