“Did you see my fight?” she asked me.

“Yes, I did. It was incredible.”

“Thank you. Who was O’Day training with again? Dad?”

“Dave McNair, or Mc-something?”

“I mean, I guess they really can’t train her not to be stupid, that was the thing that was most frustrating about it, how stupid she was. She just kept walking into it again and again. I don’t like that.”

“I know,” Ray said.

“Is it less of a challenge that way?” I asked.

“No, it’s like, I just, I don’t like them to feel like victims. And when they’re stupid like that. It just makes me feel like I’m slaughtering animals.” She drank the rest of her second Long Island.

“They’re not victims,” Ray said. “They’re fighters.”

“You’ve always hated fighting,” Bunny said to me.

I paused, a bite of salmon halfway to my mouth. “Yeah,” I said, wanting to go on and lie, to say something about how while I didn’t prefer to fight myself, I admired her for fighting. I couldn’t even think of a way of phrasing this. I worried I would gibber like a hostage to a gunman.

“I think,” Bunny said, suddenly laughing, “that you would prefer to never have to act at all. To just passively let things happen to you. Like, blah. Like, I’m just a crying statue of pure suffering, wah.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, flustered and wishing I had not drunk so much of my wine. I was such a lightweight that even a glass left me spinning. “Just because I don’t like to beat people up doesn’t mean I’m some passive crybaby.”

“Not a crybaby,” she said, “not a crybaby. But like…an artist that doesn’t make anything. You study yourself. You study life instead of living it. And everything you feel is like a fine wine and you sniff it and swish it around and in the end you barely fucking drink it.”

Around us the entire restaurant seemed dark and shadowy, as if we were in a massive cave with many chambers. I tried to remember that she was not right in the head, that I shouldn’t take it personally, the things she said, but they were dangerously close to the truth and I could feel the muscles in my cheeks start involuntarily twitching.

“Like, on some level, don’t you think you let those boys beat you up?” Bunny said.

“What boys?” I asked, incredulous. “Jason and Tyler and them?”

“You could have run into the Rite Aid,” she said. “You could have screamed for help. The brewery was right there, someone would have heard.”

“But I didn’t understand what was happening until it was happening. I froze.”

“You choked,” she said. “I mean, isn’t that the same thing?” Her left eye was now almost completely swollen shut. She had eaten her filet and her chicken and all of the rolls.

“You know what I think we should do,” Ray said, “go back to the hotel and order a movie and just turn in and relax.”

“Ugh,” she said. “You’re so fucking obvious, all you are trying to do is control me. That’s all you ever try to do.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” he said.

“Everyone’s a victim,” Bunny said. “Everyone is just fucking helpless.”

Ray studied his watch. He seemed very tired. “I’m not trying to control you,” Ray said finally.

“But you’re gonna freak out,” she said.

“I’m not going to freak out,” he said.

She studied him for a moment. “Good. Then let’s order another drink.”

“I don’t think another drink will—”

“Control. Freak out,” she said.

“Fine, order the drink,” he said, and she did.

“I’m sorry I’m being so mean,” she said to me.

“Oh, it’s okay,” I said, though that wasn’t true at all. I felt panicky and unclean, like I was in an early Harmony Korine movie, and yet I couldn’t fully bring myself to blame her. As I always had, I found it much easier to blame Ray, who was encouraging her to do this to herself.

“Do you think everything means something?” Bunny said. I wasn’t sure if this was a continuation of her earlier complaint, or if we were going in some new, terrible direction. I was done pretending to eat my salmon. Its skin looked sad and ruined on my plate.

“Like, it seems like you think everything means something and if you could only understand everything then it would all be okay. It’s like thinking a map will change the size of the ocean. Do you have any gum? Dad?”

He handed her a piece of gum, then realized her fingers wouldn’t work well enough to unwrap it, so he took off the foil for her. He motioned to the waitress for the check. They were both chewing gum, I could smell the spearmint over the odor of the steaks. Someone in the dark of the restaurant was laughing. I couldn’t see him but it sounded like a big man was laughing.

“Even God can’t understand everything,” she said.

“I thought that was the whole point of God. That he could understand everything.”

“Some things he chooses not to understand,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I thought she was cracked, now truly and finally cracked.

“That’s the whole point of hell, isn’t it? A place to put the people God chooses not to understand?”

“Dear lord,” Ray said, and rolled his eyes.

“Like, this one.” She pointed at her father. “You would always ask me back in the day, ooh, what was his relationship with his mother like? That was what you thought would explain it. Like, if you knew why Ray Lampert was the way he was, then—what? Then what? What does understanding someone get you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“My mother was a fucking cunt,” Ray said.

“Where’s our hotel?” Bunny asked. “Is it near here?”

“It’s downtown,” Ray said. “We’ll take a cab.”

* * *

—

We said goodbye in the hallway without any fanfare, Bunny didn’t even look at me, just shuffled into her and Ray’s room saying, “Take off my fucking shoes, oh god, I need them off right this second,” and Ray scurried after her. I took a long, hot shower in my room and called Conor and tried and failed to explain to him what had happened.