“Just looking for a friend,” I said.

  As soon as she had passed through the kitchen’s swinging doors, I snagged a candle from the closest table. I turned to go. Then I stopped.

  I had only seen Richard once, when he’d picked up Elien after Ray’s suicide. But I recognized him at the corner table in the back, and although I didn’t recognize the guy he was with, I knew the type: a tight t-shirt, tight jeans, the hint of a jockstrap’s blue waistband when he leaned forward, laughing at something Richard had said, touching Richard’s arm. Richard’s other hand was between the guy’s legs. Hard to misunderstand that kind of signal; the way Richard was working that guy, he’d have nothing but pulp down there by morning.

  Then I remembered what I was doing, and I cupped a hand around the candle and carried it out to the lobby. I made my way behind one of the seating areas, set the candle flame to the hem of one of the gossamer curtains. When it caught, I blew out the candle, tossed it in a trash can, and walked away.

  Then little tongues of fire. Little puffs of smoke.

  And nobody noticed.

  The flames were licking their way up the curtain, and the lobby was still empty except for me on one side and Elien on the other and a guy behind the reception desk. From a distance, it looked like his name tag said Enrique.

  Still nothing.

  I decided to help things along, and I shouted, “Fire!”

  Enrique got hopping. He grabbed a walkie, shouted something into it, and then he came sprinting around the lobby with a red fire extinguisher in his hands. Elien slipped behind the reception desk.

  “Fire,” I said again, and this time I pointed helpfully. The flames had climbed almost all the way up the curtain now.

  “Holy shit,” Enrique was shouting over and over again. He aimed the extinguisher’s nozzle, pulled the lever, and powder sprayed out. The extinguisher suffocated the flames quickly, and Enrique stepped around and around like he was doing the box step. He kept looking at me and looking at the smoldering remains of the curtain. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Elien still behind the reception desk.

  Enrique looked like he might be losing focus, so I pointed at a smoking wisp of fabric and said, “Fire.”

  “Holy shit,” Enrique said and blasted it again.

  When I risked a glance, Elien was leaning against the wall near the elevator, watching us like we were putting on a show.

  Which, I guess, we kind of were.

  I didn’t want to step on Enrique’s lines, so I let him get out a few more “Holy shits.”

  Then he looked at me and said, “Did you see that?”

  I nodded and said, “That was some shit.”

  And that got Enrique going again with his holy shit mantra.

  Running footsteps announced hotel security: a paunchy little guy with a hairpiece and a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man whose name was probably Crookshanks or Jeeves or something like that. I told Enrique I was freaked the fuck out and made my way to the elevator.

  “Usually,” Elien said, pressing the up button, “I like a little more variety in my dialogue.”

  I shrugged.

  “That’s my only note, though. Otherwise, it was perfection.”

  When the elevator dinged and the polished bronze doors opened, we stepped inside. The doors shut, and Elien jabbed the button marked 15.

  “I’m going to tell you one good thing about you for every floor,” Elien said. “That’s step one in my plan to make you not hate me forever. One, you’re tough and brave. You faced down the hashok in the woods without even blinking.”

  “Stop.”

  “Two, you’re sweet—”

  “Please stop.”

  “I’m going to have to talk really fast to catch up if you keep interrupting me.”

  “Elien, I saw Richard. He was in the restaurant. He was with a guy.”

  Leaning against the elevator’s rail, Elien wiped his hands on his pants and said, “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry, but I thought you should know. They were obviously, um, more than friends.”

  Instrumental music played over hidden speakers. Chopin, maybe. Not whale songs. I would have killed for a beluga right then.

  “Well,” Elien said, and then he stopped. He tried again. “Well, it’s an open relationship.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, I was going to fuck you the other night, but you weren’t interested.”

  “I remember.”

  “And it’s open, you know, both ways.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s fine,” Elien said. He was staring so hard at the elevator doors that I thought they might melt. “It’s totally fine.”

  I put my hands in my pockets.

  “I guess some guys would be embarrassed,” Elien said, laughing now, the backs of his hands against his cheeks where a blush burned.

  Now, I pulled my hands out of my pockets and gave him a hug. He pushed back at first, hands on my chest, shoving. Then he made a noise that was kind of a sigh and kind of a grunt and collapsed against me. Tightening my hold, I held him there, his face hot and wet through my shirt.

  “It’s ok,” I said.

  “It’s not ok,” he mumbled into my chest. “Why am I so fucked up? Why is everything in my life so fucked up?”

  “Let’s check on Zahra,” I said. “And then let’s get you home.”

  “I can’t go back there,” he said, sniffling into my sleeve. “I’m never going back there.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I stroked that massive blowout of windswept hair until we hit the fifteenth floor.

  “All right,” Elien said, pushing away from me and wiping his face. “Here we go. Time to find out if my shrink is really also a monster.”

  “That sounds like the beginning of a Yelp review,” I said.

  With a soft laugh, Elien stepped out of the elevator, and I followed.

  1517 was at the end of the hall. Elien knocked once, waited, and knocked again.

  When he looked at me, I shrugged.

  He knocked once more.

  No one answered.

  “Do we go?” I asked.

  Shaking his head, he pulled out a keycard and dipped it into the lock. The light flashed green. Behind us, the elevator dinged again.

  “Now or never,” I said.

  Elien pushed into the room, and the smell of death met us. Every light was blazing. First was the bathroom on our right, with mirrored doors and a collection of toiletries and cosmetics spread out on the counter. Then the bedroom. Zahra lay with her head at the foot of the bed; like David Bass, she had been gutted in three broad slashes.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said behind us, and I glanced over my shoulder to see the two guys from security standing in the doorway. I realized now that Enrique had pointed me out, and they had followed me up here because the fire was, in hindsight, pretty fucking suspicious. “Just what do you—holy shit. Holy shit. Get on the ground right now. Bill, call the cops. Call somebody!”

  “Elien,” I said.

  “Zahra isn’t the hashok,” he whispered to himself. “How can it not be her?”

  III

  At night, when a person is passing along a trail or going through the woods, and meets the Hashok Okwa Hui'ga he must immediately turn away and not look at it, otherwise he will certainly become lost and not arrive at his destination that night, but instead, travel in a circle.

  - “Myths of the Louisiana Choctaw,” David I. Bushnell, Jr.

  ELIEN (1)

  The worst part wasn’t the hours I spent in the interview room, answering the same questions over and over again, explaining that I hadn’t killed Zahra. The worst part wasn’t the array of misdemeanor charges and having to wait until Richard could bail me out. The worst part wasn’t even facing Richard again, smelling the cheap cologne that was still on him from the other guy. The worst part was Dag’s face right before they separated us, and knowing that I’d screwed up his life again, maybe worse than ever.

  Richard drove us home from the New Orleans police station; it was late morning by then, and both of us were exhausted. Richard’s mouth was a grim line. Sunlight flashing off the lake illuminated the bags under his eyes. His carefully combed hair was mussed, and I could see how very thin it had gotten on top. He looked old. I watched him. I watched the fields of corn flick past us. Pheasants pecked among the chaff. I could still smell the hotel room, Zahra’s body torn open. Like the smell in Ray’s apartment. Like the smell in David’s trailer.

  When we pulled into the garage, Richard touched the remote, and the door clattered down behind us. We sat there for a while, and Richard scratched the thick hair on the back of his arms.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess that open relationship wasn’t just for my benefit.”

  “I really don’t think that’s what we should be worried about right now.”

  “I should have known,” I said. “I should have fucking known. I told you I didn’t want an open relationship. I told you I didn’t need one. And you insisted. You said it would be better for me. You said it was important that I feel free. And I never fucking took advantage of it, which was such a fucking mistake, because you were lying to me, picking up street trash, fucking whoever you wanted.”

  “Your behavior recently has been worse than erratic, Elien. I’m worried about you. Frankly, the way you acted last night makes me think that you haven’t been making any progress at all with Zahra, and—”

  “Well, she’s dead, Richard. Somebody butchered her in that hotel room. So it’s not like I can ask for a refund because she didn’t fix me.”

  “This would be a good time for you to practice your breathing—”

  “You lied to me. You both lied to me. A conference? Jesus, that is the oldest one in the book, and I still fell for it.”

  “All right,” Richard said. “I suppose we should talk about that. Yes. I lied. That was not good behavior. But you’ve been frightening me lately. I needed space. We both agreed that an open relationship—”

  “No.” I started to laugh. “You are so full of shit. Don’t do that. You know I didn’t want that.”

  “You certainly didn’t seem to mind when you were humping that deputy on my fucking couch.”

  The garage wall swam in my vision; I blinked to clear my eyes.

  “All right,” I said and got out of the car.

  Against one wall, Richard had a pegboard with tools and sporting equipment. Leaning up against it was a baseball bat. High end, of course, because everything Richard bought was high end. Not aluminum. Not wood. Reinforced carbon fiber polymer. I swung it once, and it whistled through the air. I felt like I could smash my way through a tank.

  “Elien, put that down.”

  I swung it again. I liked the resistance as it cut through the air. “God, I just can’t believe how stupid I am.”

  “Put it down.” Richard was standing behind the car door, watching me. “If I think you’re going to start hurting yourself again, I will call the police.”

  “Richard, sweetheart, get a clue: I never fucking stopped hurting myself. I just figured out better ways to do it.”

  Then I headed into the house. I used the bat to knock down some of the paintings, and then I went to work on the cabinets. Richard followed me, not speaking, his arms folded across his chest. After I’d shattered the glass fronts to the cabinets, I reached into one and grabbed one of the wineglasses on the shelf inside. A chunk of glass sliced open the side of my arm, but I didn’t feel it. I got a bottle of red. I got the corkscrew.

  “You’re bleeding,” Richard said. He had his doctor’s bag on the table, and he was rummaging through it. “Will you please stop for a moment so I can bandage that cut?”

  My hands were shaking, and it took me a couple of tries to get the corkscrew seated. By the time I had, Richard was coming up behind me.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “I’d like to look at your arm.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  Then I felt the prick of the needle.

  “What the fuck—” I began.

  But then I wasn’t saying anything because I wasn’t inside myself anymore: I was floating just outside, watching myself fall, watching Richard catch me and get me onto the couch. He pulled the ottoman up next to me and bandaged my arm. I just kept drifting; I was a kite barely tethered to my body.

  “I’m going to give you something to help you sleep,” Richard said.

  Special K, I wanted to say. Keeps the doctor away.

  And then he gave me another shot, and I slept.

  When I woke, it was late afternoon; the sun brushed the St. Augustine grass like velvet, and the magnolia leaves were glossy mirrors. A resurrection fern was opening on a sugar maple. I was a fern. I could be resurrected. I was pretty sure, with all that fern talk, I was tripping pretty hard.

  My first attempt at getting up didn’t go so well. On my second try, I managed to stay upright. I crawled upstairs. The door to Richard’s study was closed, and a strip of light showed underneath it. I didn’t trust my feet, so I kept crawling, my arm aching from the cut, until I got to our bedroom. I found a Herschel backpack and stuffed a few changes of clothes inside. I grabbed the essentials from my bathroom. Then, bracing myself on the wall, I shuffled back to the stairs.

  The study door was open, now. The room was dark; it smelled funky, like body odor.

  When I got downstairs, Richard was standing in the kitchen. The wine and the wineglass and the corkscrew were on the counter. He was eating yogurt.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  I shook my head. We’d left David’s laptop on the breakfast table last night, so I grabbed it and shoved it in the backpack. Then I took slow steps toward the front door.

  “Elien?”

  “We’re done.”

  “Elien, come back here.”

  “Goodbye, Richard.”

  “I know you’re upset about earlier today, but you were out of control. You were hurting yourself.”

  At the front door, I rubbed my eyes; everything seemed doubled. “You can have my stuff,” I said. “Or you can give it away. Or you can burn it, for all I fucking care.”

  “Get back here right now. You aren’t well.”

  I opened the front door.

  “Elien, stop it right now. This is childish.”

  I had to lean on the jamb to get myself out onto the porch.

  “I’ll have you locked up for your own protection,” Richard was saying. He had such a lovely voice. He ought to have been on the radio. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  I slammed the door.

  In one of the rocking chairs, I waited for my Uber. Richard paced on the other side of the windows, watching me. He didn’t come outside. He didn’t try to talk to me. He didn’t have a hypo with more Special K. I thought maybe he knew that I’d kill him if he ever came near me again.

  My Uber driver’s name was Britton, and he was balding with a graying ponytail. When he dropped me in front of Dag’s house, he said, “Kid, take it from me, you gotta lay off the hard stuff every once in a while.”

  I limped up the steps and knocked on the front door.

  When Dag answered, he was wearing running shorts and a tank top; the tank had a cartoon narwhal and, in rainbow letters, THE GAY UNICORNS OF THE SEA.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Or that’s what I tried to say. Mostly, I just sobbed.

  Dag’s expression shifted from anger to irritation to something I couldn’t recognize. Then he pulled me into a hug and helped me inside.

  DAG (2)

  It took a long time to get Elien to stop crying. Part of the problem was that he didn’t even seem to realize he was crying. He kept trying to apologize, and I kept trying to get him to use a tissue, and my dad kept trying to hear the golf announcer.

  “Pat him on the back,” my dad said during a commercial for some sort of joint-pain medicine. “That’s what we used to do when you cried.”

  Patting Elien on the back didn’t help.

  During the next break, when they were explaining the magic of the new-and-improved Clapper, Dad said, “Maybe try some warm milk.”

  “The fact that all of your parenting expertise comes from when I was two years old explains why I’m an emotionally stunted adult,” I said.

  But I went to get the milk.

  When I came back, Dad said, “You’re not an emotionally stunted adult. You’re my big handsome boy. You’re my champ.”

  Elien didn’t want the milk.

  “He doesn’t want the milk,” I told Dad.

  “Let him think about it. Sometimes they have to decide they want it on their own.”

  “No more advice, please,” I said.

  Dad didn’t particularly like that, and he started punching the buttons on the remote. By the time the volume was at sixty-five, I was shouting so Elien could hear me. Finally, with a dirty look at my dad, I took Elien’s elbow and towed him into the kitchen. Behind me, the volume dropped substantially.

  “Elien,” my mom said, “what’s wrong?”

  He was still crying.

  “You know what,” my mom said, tapping her lips. “I bet he’d feel better if we did something with his hair.”

  “He’s not a doll,” I said.

  “I know he’s not a doll. But I always feel so much better after I do a little self-care. I have the hair-cutting kit in the closet. We’ll just do a little trim, and then we’ll do his nails, and if he wants, maybe we’ll even do a makeover.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Elien? See? He nodded.”

  “How did I survive being a child? How did I make it to adulthood?”

  “I’ll get the kit.”

  “I like his hair the way it is.”

  “Well, yes, but it’s a bit long, don’t you think?”

  I was standing behind Elien, and I pulled his head against my chest, trying to cover as much of his hair as possible. “No haircuts.”

  “Fine,” Mom said with a sniff. “You could try singing him a song.”