Five bundles of kale for a customer in an eighth-floor walkup in Flatiron. A vial of rosewater for a customer in Greenwich Village whose labradoodle humps me down the stairs. Band-Aids and cigarillos for a customer who runs out of the Strand with a stiletto clutched in each hand. Chipotle every which way and always with no beans. Three black wigs made of virgin Malaysian hair for a half-human, half-turquoise customer on Bowery, soggy Chelsea mailwomen with their tired, roving eyes, white drug dealers in Sperrys waving to the NYPD, delivery people properly affiliated with pizza parlors and flower shops all hooked into the peripheral intuition that keeps us all from falling into the city’s bounty of open holes. Though now I walk over a subway grate and am excited by the possibility of its giving way, because despite the city’s breakneck, multilingual carousel, despite the businessmen marching into my path and the elliptical assault of glass and steel and scary wooden trains in Upper East Side toy stores, I don’t feel like I’m moving even while I’m on my feet, up and down and in and out and pressing a dollar slice directly into my large intestine, my parking jobs incrementally more careless as the orders come one, two, six, as I exit a sad Central Park studio at 12:53 a.m. and find my bike not gone per se but divorced from both its wheels. So I take my basket and my bell and hold them in my lap on the F, the L, and the posthumous fart that is the B60 bus, asleep before I fall into bed and then rise to my landlord-cum-yogi sucking an appetite-suppressant lollipop in my doorway, asking me to pay up or get out, and also namaste, before I take a cold shower and pay for one of those gargantuan Citi Bikes, which tend not to be made for girls under five foot two and so tend not to be conducive to punctual deliveries or preventing you from careening into someone’s gazpacho or sprawling into a four-way intersection, ready to surrender the part of yourself that M train mariachi hasn’t already killed.

* * *

I wake up to a group of surly Elmhurst Slavs putting my stuff out on the curb and find myself, at 7:00 a.m., embroiled in an argument over my toaster oven, which necessitates that I take a Lyft to a storage facility in Bedford Park. The city is coming up pink on my map, all tapped out despite a torrential downpour that has cleared the streets. A lone woman darts from the subway with a plastic bag over her head, an umbrella salesman looks over his table and sucks his teeth, and a river cuts down Great Jones, but otherwise it is one of those rare nights where everyone is inside with all the right condiments and drugs, and I am obsolete. I go a little lower to try to get some work. I stand in front of a few popular pickup spots and wait. I go inside for some water, and because the waitstaff know me, they give me some gnocchi alla vodka on the house. They treat me like a customer. I get a folded cloth napkin, and they come around with the parmesan. It is sort of a joke, because I still have my helmet on and my map open. But then I look at the food, and I look around the empty restaurant, and I lose my appetite. I apologize and take the Citi Bike a little ways uptown to get some air, but it doesn’t help. I feel like I’m wearing a lead apron, like each of my limbs, one by one, is falling asleep. On my map, I note two bridges within biking distance. Then the first order of the day comes in. It is a standard supermarket run, though when I get to the store and scroll down the list (cotton balls, crunchy peanut butter, lobster bisque from the hot bar) I see there is a request that I go to a second location, an army navy on Forty-Fifth, and purchase a small Stryker bone saw.

* * *

In the grocery store, there are only three other people, and one of them is a cashier. I pass a woman in the seafood section, and she smiles at me, but beneath her smile I see her wondering where everyone is. I feel our silliness, my reliance on the city’s density, which I have spent so much time hating but proves to be the last barrier between me and some inconceivable boss-level of concentrated loneliness. As I ladle the bisque into a cup, I try to focus solely on the soup and not on my teeth, my skin, and the gradual breakdown of my body into dust. At the army navy store, the salesman doesn’t ask any questions, and I don’t regret the purchase until I’m halfway to my destination, which turns out to be a hospital. But a quarter mile out, a car speeds through a stop sign and I stop short and spill all the bisque. At this point in my career, I can deliver almost any bad news about soup, but when I get to the entrance, I notice that some of the lobster has gotten into my shoes, just as Rebecca comes jogging out of the hospital in scrubs and rubber boots. For a moment I think maybe I can wring out my socks before she reaches me, but it is too late. If she is shocked, I see no sign of it on her face. She takes off her gloves and looks through the bags. She inspects the saw and sighs. She asks me to come inside. So I go with her through the waiting room, every bodily fluid already detectable in the air despite the pineapple air freshener at the reception desk, where a man with a prosthetic arm begs for Percocet and a colossal goldfish hangs suspended in its own waste. We step into the elevator and Rebecca puts her hand up when I try to broach the subject of the soup.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says as we head into the cafeteria, where she pulls out a chair and asks me to sit down. She settles down across from me, brings out the peanut butter. She takes a spoon out of her coat and cleans it on her lapel. “Why didn’t you call? I left you a voicemail,” she says, opening the peanut butter, hooking her finger into the oil collecting at the top.

“I’ve been busy,” I answer, but as I say this I think about her message, about the huskiness underneath the words, the suspicion I have that she may have been smiling. The voice she has now is different. It sounds like a voice anyone might have. “In the app it said Becky Abramov.”

“Maiden name.” She sucks her finger, frowns into the jar. “This is dangerous work for a woman. How can you know who’ll be on the other side of the door?”

“This city isn’t really dangerous anymore.” As I say this, I relish the feeling of a vintage lie. A thing I would say to my father when he was alive and trying to make an effort to call. “I lost my job,” I say, thinking it will feel cathartic and realizing immediately that I am wrong.

“I’m sorry about that.” She pushes the peanut butter over to me, extends her spoon.

“What’s the saw for?” I turn the spoon around to look at my reflection, and even though I know how the image will refract, it still takes me aback.

“I work here at the VA, as a medical examiner. The guy I have today has the hardest skull I’ve ever seen. My husband didn’t tell you what I do?”

“We don’t talk about you,” I say, wondering if it will hurt her. I resent her presumption that we would talk about her at all until I see her disappointment.

“We talk about you,” she says, and I get the feeling that I’m meant to ask what about, so I don’t. But I want to know. I want to know what he’s said, and when she smiles I know she can see it on my face.

“And you like that? Hearing about what we do?”

“It’s not that I like it. But I like to be informed. Control for variables. I know that’s not your thing.”

“How would you know?”

“Because you don’t care who’s on the other side of the door.” She pauses and looks at me, her eyes distant, studious. “Let me show you something,” she says, screwing the top back on the jar and striding to the elevator, which is papered in flyers that say things like: Need Help? Did the war come back home with you?

* * *