“Drop it, then,” I said. I don’t know why I was so angry, but I was furious. I felt that these detectives were questioning me in the wrong way, and I badly wanted them to behave differently. I wanted someone to say how sorry they were that this had happened to me, to ask me how I was doing, to make sure I knew what was real and what wasn’t, to listen to my thoughts and feelings and fears without rushing me or telling me I was wrong. You weren’t supposed to threaten a victim that unless he talked, he’d owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. They were threatening me, even in the way they stood there. Wasn’t I the victim? Weren’t you supposed to at least be nice to the victim?

I thought about Bunny that day at the wonderful house on Oak Street. “I don’t want to be good anymore,” she had said. “I think it’s a rigged game.”

“How about this, we’ll go downstairs, we’ll get a coffee, we’ll come back up. Would that work for you?” Detective Carmine said, and Detective Brown rolled his eyes as hard as any teen girl ever has.

“Maybe we should come back some other time and we can bring a social worker,” Detective Brown said softly to Carmine. “ ’Cause we still need to get out to Santa Monica to talk to that witness. I’m just saying, there’s gonna be traffic.”

“We’ll be right back,” Detective Carmine said. “We’re just going to get a coffee, you can think about that night, and when your head is clear we’ll be back and maybe you can give us some idea of what happened. Because this isn’t right. You don’t need to worry about punishment, you don’t need to worry about hate crimes, or what their lawyer is going to say or do or how they will be sentenced. All you have to do is tell us what you remember, okay? Nothing about that could be wrong. Okay?”

I nodded, and they left, and I waited and waited for them to come back but they never did.

* * *

—

I was moved to a regular room later that day, and they also removed my catheter. “Some blood in your urine is par for the course at this point,” the nurse said. “Just let us know if you see big chunks.”

After that, I peed with my eyes closed, terrified of seeing anything even remotely like that.

When they made me get up and walk for the first time, I understood how bad it was. My abdomen was so full of fluid that I felt like I was wearing a fat suit. My feet and ankles were swollen to the size of pug dogs, and when I stood, it felt like my ankle skin was going to snap and water would just gush out of me. I had thought I was dying so many times during my hallucinations, but nothing was as horrifying as understanding that now I would be living, and that it would hurt this badly. It wasn’t even really the pain, it was the shame of it, the humiliation of the flesh, the sense that my body was disgusting.

Other than that, I liked my new room, which I shared with a darling old chap named Scottie. Scottie was there for pneumonia, but he was getting better now, and he let me put on The Golden Girls and laughed at some of the jokes. We both got excited when they brought pudding. I have always loved, and felt a deep affinity for, the elderly. People always go on about babies, but if I were to give birth to something, I would want it to be an eighty-year-old woman who loved to play bridge.

I began to be afraid of being released. As much as I had been unwilling, or even weirdly unable, to report Jason, I could not imagine continuing to live in the same house as him. I even felt like I remembered a conversation with Aunt Deedee in which she said I would have to move out, but I could not tell if that had been a dream or not. I wasn’t sure when anyone had said they would visit me again either, but I knew it had been at least forty-eight hours since I had seen my mother or Aunt Deedee. Everything before that was in a kind of timeless miasma. I wasn’t even sure when Bunny was coming back. For the first time, I wondered where my cell phone was, but there was no one to ask.

Ann Marie did not come to my new room, and I began to accept that Bunny was right, and that she was dead. For some reason the physicality of death, the mortification of the flesh, was very real to me, and whenever I would think of her I would viscerally imagine her corpse, and I often could not make these fantasies end and would find myself hyperventilating and nauseated. Ann Marie was dead, and Bunny had killed her. That was a fact.

But Ann Marie’s corpse also felt like some kind of puzzle I was trying to solve. What did the inside of a person have to do with the outside? And were we all the same inside? Were our interior psychic organs all identical in the same way we each possessed a stomach and a heart and a spleen? Psychology seemed to be predicated on this assumption, that the psychology of one person would be comparable to the psychology of another. But what if it wasn’t? What if there were no organs of the mind at all? And what if, in our rush to think of the inside of a person as a corollary to the body, we misnamed ourselves? And what if in that misnaming, we turned ourselves into something unspoken and unspeakable?

All the things you couldn’t say! It seemed to me there were so many. And how were you supposed to get anything sorted if you couldn’t talk about it? Wasn’t language our best hope and our last stop before murder?

Bunny came sometime that night. I didn’t know the time, but it was definitely dark outside my window and Scottie was asleep and snoring sweetly.

“You look so much better!” Bunny cooed as she sat down, scooting the chair up closer to my bed.

“Oh, thank you, darling,” I said. “Being beaten almost to death does wonders for the skin.” I fanned my face so she could examine my pores.

“Oh, oh, oh, you are back! You are fucking back!” she cried, a little too loudly.

“Don’t wake Scottie,” I said, “he’s had a very long day. First, a Golden Girls marathon, and then a Designing Women marathon. We are exhausted, honey.”

“Has the hospital made you gayer?” Bunny asked.

“Perhaps! Perhaps! Maybe I’m just less inhibited because of the vvvvunderful drrrrugssss.”

“Whatever it is, I like it.”

“They say I could be released as soon as Thursday,” I said.

“That’s great.”

“But I can’t go home. Where the fuck am I gonna go?”

“Why can’t you go home?”

“Ugh, because Jason.”

“The farting?”

“No. He’s much more hostile these days.”

“He is?”

And suddenly I was crying. I covered my eyes with my hands, trying to wipe away the tears, but I could tell I was not going to recover and this was going to become a serious crying jag. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

“Oh, Mikey,” Bunny said, and climbed up into my bed. I had to scoot over painfully to make room for her, but her body was so big and warm and safe.