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boarding school, at fourteen, my father treasured me as much as anyone can humanly treasure a person who has come to resemble his dead first wife.
    “And now he’s lost his foot,” my father said of his colleague.
    “Insane,” I said.
    “Which could be good for him,” my father said. “A disruption to the given system.”
    I indulged a mental eye roll. “A disruption to the given system” was a well-worn phrase of my father’s, his way of cauterizing anyconversation or situation that risked devolving into an emotionally messy bleed-out.
    “At any rate, keep a lookout for that candida article. You should have received it last week.”
    “It could be a while,” I said. “My mailman’s an alcoholic.”
    This initiated a different sort of silence from my father, a disapproving silence. My internist had forbidden any type of psychic activity, and had gone so far as to prescribe an anti-seizure medication that cut all psychic radio signals, making it impossible to disobey his orders even if I’d wanted to.
    “He stinks of gin and has a clown nose,” I said. “Even you would know he was a drunk.”
    Alwyn, I noticed, was resting her head miserably on the pastry display case. I thought, the weight of the world . I thought, the girl with two lonely, decontaminated brains . Then I remembered: she was hurt.
    “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ll see you at the restaurant.”
    “Good,” he said.
    “Good,” I said.
    “Very good,” he said. “Good-bye.”
    Good-bye , I started to say.
    Instead I said: “I can’t wait to see you.”
    “We’ll talk then,” he said.
    “Then we’ll talk,” I said.
    I snapped our connection to a close, but an aftershock remained. From within my phone’s fake metal shell I sensed the weakening pulse of the many words we never found we much needed, once confronted with each other’s actual faces, to say.

    The Regnor was located on the kind of generic Manhattan block that vanishes the moment you leave it. We passed a dry cleanerand a florist and a butcher with signs that read DRY CLEANER and FLORIST and BUTCHER. I paused to stare at the unpetrified roasts in the butcher’s window, their wet surfaces appearing, in the mute December daylight, shellacked.
    Once inside the Regnor’s lobby, Alwyn dropped onto a velvet deco couch, its nap balded to the backing fabric in certain popular butt- and head-resting places. Overhead, the lobby was degloomed by a stained-glass skylight that might have portrayed an image of twining ivy, though the ivy might have been snakes. I positioned myself on an armchair so that I couldn’t see my reflection in the giant mirror on the opposite wall. My face—meds-bloated and, due to the recent onset of Bell’s palsy, afflicted by a droopy right eyelid—remained a surprise I could not avoid inspecting.
    Alwyn set her coffees on the table, unbuttoned the HELLO LYDIA coat, and lay back, her head notching into one of the upholstery’s denuded spaces.
    “My skull’s killing me,” she said.
    I reached into my bag’s inner pocket and withdrew a handful of plastic pharmacy bottles.
    I shook three painkillers into my palm.
    “Pick one,” I said.
    Alwyn chose a pink Darvocet and washed it down with a swig of cappuccino. I followed with six different pills. These I swallowed dry. Caffeine was contraindicated for thirteen of my twenty-three medications; plus I was a practiced pill taker now, my esophagus an inflatable airplane slide. Nor did I mind that these medications caused my psychic abilities to disappear. Shorting out a streetlamp by walking beneath it seemed as impossible to me now as extinguishing, by walking beneath it, the sun.
    “So this is where the textile conference is being held?” I said.
    “What textile conference?” Alwyn said.
    “Aren’t you here for a textile conference?” I said.
    “No,” she said. “A film conference.”
    “Ah,” I said, wondering where I had come up with the idea of the textile conference. This was