“I don’t think that.” Of course I do think that, but now that she’s said it out loud and I see the look on her face, I feel bad.

“We could’ve been friends. I really needed a friend here,” she says, turning to toss the cigarette. I can see the clips mounting her synthetic yaki ponytail. Though I have in the past taken such poor care of my hair I’ve had to shave my head to preempt inevitable baldness, I want to take her face into my hands and point her in the direction of a good wig store. I would prefer to be upset with her, but my hand is bleeding profusely, and this is precisely her charm, the reason the professional whites talk openly to her about their fiscal conservatism—her lovely brown doll face, her full mouth and kind, carefully empty eyes.

I don’t know if there is any good way to admit my own desire without seeming deranged, because this hypothetical in which we were friends was never purely hypothetical to me. The blossoming and immediate kibosh of our friendship had in fact taken me months of half-written emails to get over. Because it is impossible to see another black woman on her way up, impossible to see that meticulous, polyglottal origami and not, as a black woman yourself, fall a little bit in love. But we had nothing at all in common.

“Please. I was a liability to you,” I say, holding the smoke in the back of my throat.

“Well. Yes.” She lights another cigarette, smiles. “But not like you think.”

“You’re going to tell me again what I think?”

“You think because you slack and express no impulse control that you’re like, black power. Sticking it to the white man or whatever. But you’re just exactly what they expect. Like, I understand wanting to resist their demands. But they can be mediocre. We can’t.”

“Mediocre?”

“I can’t be associated with it. Like, there is actually a brief window where they don’t know to what extent you’re black, and you have to get in there. You have to get in the room. And if I have to, I will shuck and jive until the room I’m in is at the top.”

* * *

It is only once I am underground that the arteries in my hand truly begin to weep. It is one of those early August days where the oxygen in the air is uncoupled, dense with Drakkar Noir, old pollen, and reheated Spam. It is one of those days where the M is full of Italian tourists energized from a full day at Banana Republic, and three stops in, my sweat is their sweat, the pores on Federico’s neck emptying into my mouth. There is blood everywhere, and I can at least count on my city not to notice, though a baby by the door is pointing at me, so I turn away and try to look involved with my phone. Then, in the brief window of service between Manhattan and Brooklyn, Eric sends me a photo of a friar fleeing a baboon. He writes, at this archival conference in toronto and saw this illuminated text. pages are swollen, binding is beyond reinforcement. this thing is nearing the end of its life. you can practically smell the rot.

* * *

Having already been in the process of filing him away, burying him with the other men who evaporate after pulverizing my cervix, I am relieved, and yes, I am ashamed. I want to say that I am not that kind of girl. Portable, contorting herself over an inaccessible, possibly disinterested man, but what if I am? There are worse things—factory farming and Christian rock and the three-dimensional animation of Mr. Clean. Because maybe I don’t want to be cool. Maybe I want to be all-purpose. Maybe I can’t pretend to be aloof to men who are aloof to me. So I text him two hundred words’ worth of things I know about baboons and I play Rebecca’s voicemail again with this exchange still fresh.

* * *

When I arrive home I can’t extend my fingers, and the floor moves when I open the door. By that I mean we have roaches and they scatter as I search for some peroxide and gauze. But of course we don’t have these things. We don’t even have a smoke detector. For instance, we have a big general pill bottle where we keep some old ibuprofen, Xanax, and Alka-Seltzer, we have some coconut oil we use for bacon and our hair, and for cutlery, three butter knives, one of which keeps showing up in the shower. Neither I nor my roommate is very prepared, which is why we get along and then have huge fights in the case of there being an actual emergency, usually re: the mice.

* * *

So I rinse my hand after washing it with a little Irish Spring, and I look for some toilet paper, but we are out. I look for a T-shirt to wrap my hand in, but I have no clean clothes and have been putting off doing laundry by wearing my bathing suit as underwear. So I find some raw canvas in the back of my closet, wrap it around my hand, and take my paintings out with the trash.

* * *

I stop at the corner grocery, spend $5.65 on a package of good, soft toilet paper and $3.89 on a large, store-brand carrot cake. I consider buying a box of Band-Aids, but even the generic brand costs more than I want to spend. I strip down to my bikini and stop by the laundromat, where I spend $3.25 on a standard wash and dry and make a few calls about my student loans. I portion out my last paychecks on the back of my hand with a Sharpie while the rinse cycle goes, and something about how this arithmetic sprawls down my arm makes me feel like I can make it work. When I return home, a mouse has started on my carrot cake, so I make some instant oatmeal and retreat to my room, where I listen to my roommate and her feminist boyfriend having very sweet communicative sex.

* * *

I work on my résumé, slip in a vague communications role peddling paraben-free dog shampoo, and, to show I have character, I stick to the facts regarding my month at Murray’s, where I mongered an array of soft cheese. I throw in some blatant lies and make sure any inconsistencies are small enough to explain away once I have a foot in the door and am armed with enough recon on my interviewer to either have talking points on the company culture or a five-point plan to suck dry any available reservoirs of white guilt. I interview well despite my nerves, and while I wish I could take credit for that, my ability to maintain human form and make a good impression is all about my skin. The expectations of me in these settings are frequently so low, it would be impossible not to surpass them. I send a few applications out, wrap my hand in some fresh toilet paper, and for a few hours I manage to sleep.

* * *

I have a dream about the bones in my skull liquefying, and when I wake up and see my laundry basket, something about the inevitability of dirty clothes, of the sebum and discharge, of a finite number of quarters, fills me with panic. And this is not so bad. Some nights I lie awake and the sky presents an entire anatomy that makes me feel hopeless and sometimes like a spider is crawling across my face, but tonight feels different. Tonight I am suspended in a lurid hypnagogic loop in which the ground is always rushing upward, the Japanese demon squatting on my chest lengthening to its full height, peeling back its long buttocks to reveal a fully functioning eye.

* * *

I think of my parents, not because I miss them, but because sometimes you see a black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know that they have seen some shit. You know that they are masters of the double consciousness, of the discreet management of fury under the tight surveillance and casual violence of the outside world. You know that they said thank you as they bled, and that despite the roaches and the instant oatmeal and the bruise on your face, you are still luckier than they have ever been, such that losing a bottom-tier job in publishing is not only ridiculous but offensive.

* * *

In the morning, no jobs have contacted me, but there is a text from Eric accompanied by a photo of a fully erect seraphim. He writes, take a look at that grass. the color is called verdigris and they used to make it by boiling copper in vinegar, and I don’t respond because I can’t bring myself to do anything but get up to go to the bathroom, and even that is something I have to convince myself to do, because I have not once wet myself in adulthood and I think perhaps I’m due. A couple of days after that, I put some water in a glass and drink it, and Eric sends me a picture of a chimera with a star-shaped tongue. He writes, in the tradition of grotteschi. the art of the grotesque. But how cool is this. in the beginning grotteschi just meant ornate, and I send out a few more job applications and take a shower. I start to shave my legs, but on the second leg the lights turn off and I stand there in the dark with the razor, feeling like the universe is suggesting something. Eric texts me more photos of gargoyles and vagina dentata and no jobs call back even when I revise my résumé daily and spend $28.09 at Marshalls on a pantsuit.

* * *