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“What’s goin’ on out there?” demanded a voice. I wheeled around to look at the door. I could not see the person who stood behind it.

“Help!” I said. “Where’s Mr. Morgan? She won’t wake up! She won’t wake up! HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP!”

“The guy with the parrots?” said the dark sliver of space behind the door. It was a deep, throaty, dry, cracked voice, a sleepy voice, a woman’s voice?

“Yes!”

“He died.” The voice cleared its throat. “He passed away a few months ago.”

What could I do? Gwen, the world was reeling and crashing all around me! My panic had now spiked into an apoplectic crescendo. Griph Morgan? He was DEAD. What if Lydia WAS GOING TO DIE TOO?

Grace under fire? Ha. Far from it. I am not a little ashamed to admit that I was flailing my arms in the air and rattling around in the hallway like a Ping-Pong ball.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” I said.

The door down the hallway thumped shut, and my heart fell into my bowels. Then it sailed back up into my throat as I realized that the person behind mysterious door number three had only closed it in order to unhook the chain, and now the door was swinging open to its full width to reveal the possessor of the voice that had spoken, who was a heavyset middle-aged black woman. She was wearing glasses and a bathrobe. She looked and acted like I had just woken her up.

“What the heck are you screaming your head off about?” she said.

“Come on,” I said, and grabbed her hand. “Lydia isn’t waking up.”

“You live downstairs?”

“Yes! Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease HELP!”

The woman yawned. I dragged her by the hand. She left her door open, and descended the stairs with me in a pair of faded purple slippers. I brought the woman into our apartment. She entered cautiously, knocking with her knuckles on the open front door. I realized from the disgusted look on her face what a squalid and disreputable mess the house must have seemed to her. In the old days Lydia would never have let it get like this. It is true we had been living mostly out of our suitcases since we moved back several months (was that what they were, not weeks?) before. It is also true that Lydia had not been cooking like she used to, so we had been ordering in lots of pizza (which I liked) and Chinese food (which I also liked), and much of the refuse from these deliverable cuisines—i.e., boxes of various shapes, sizes, and degrees of residual soiledness—was piled up on top of the table and the countertops—on top of most surfaces, actually, including the moving boxes. I’ll own that at a certain point our apartment had developed a bit of a fly problem. It is also possible that our clothes and the sheets on our bed were unclean, as Lydia had not done laundry since moving back to Chicago. I have also neglected to mention that Lydia had some way of acquiring those lumpy pungent-smelling cigarettes she used to indulge in with Tal, and that she had been smoking them so habitually lately that the entire apartment had taken on their odor.

When I led this unknown woman from upstairs into our bedroom, Lydia was awake. Lydia was awake again and standing up in our bedroom, in approximately the same spot of the floor on which she had fallen, right next to her side of our bed. She was still wearing the nightgown in which she slept.

“Hello?” said Lydia. Lydia held her head with one hand in a way that suggested that her skull had cracked open and she was trying to hold it in place so that her brains wouldn’t dribble out. The sunlight coming through the bedroom window caught in the fibers of her hair, which was damp and bedraggled and falling in her face, and made them glow like the filaments of lightbulbs, like a disheveled scramble of tungsten wire. Her face was scrunched in pain, her eyebrows inwardly compressing the flesh above the bridge of her nose into two vertical folds. The bedsheets were in a state of rumpled disorder, and the air in the