She wins the jackpot on one of those Bingo scratchers: $100,000. Money makes time shiver, makes the Holocaust evaporate off the top of her brain like skim milk. She looks out at the world: maybe things are just fine. LA after the rain is a jasmine-scented oil slick: roadkill, offal, gasoline, Tagetes erecta—Mexican marigold, called cowboy’s cologne for its sweet smell. Cahuenga from Tongva, “place on the hill,” she enunciates over the phone to her psychiatrist, obscurely located thousands of miles away in a Midtown basement. “Kah-weyn-guh, 1747 North Cahuenga.”

What special conceit was her blood? She takes the money to the dentist. She’s seersuckered with small ulcers from vaping, each barely larger than a pore. The hygienist eyes her wisdom tooth, singular, baby small, because humans are still evolving. He wants to test his skill. “I’m no surgeon,” he tells her, aspirating blood from her receding gums. “But I could rip that right out with my hand.” He pedals the chair upright and offers her rinsing alcohol. She schedules multiple follow-ups and some preventive care, then checks her bank account on her phone.

Her new understanding of the world is still stalking her at the microdermabrasion clinic. She’s laser resurfaced by a Filipino teenager whose dream is to travel. She’s never left the Valley excepting a single trip to the Philippines to visit relatives, age two. “London, Paris, New York,” she says from somewhere beyond the laser gun. “I’ve heard those are the best ones.”

She drives to Vallarta Supermarket to buy aloe for her skin. She enjoys the copper taste of blood clots. Raw cod cools on a melting sheet of ice. A pennant string of chile pod bags flags violently in the air conditioning. At night it rains again and brings back the heavy intermingled scent of flowers and garbage. In the morning, she hikes Condor Trail to Rattlesnake Trail. 90 degrees before 10 AM. Wild mustard and sweetgrass, two turkey vultures circling overhead.

They were, in a neutral, cards-on-the-table kind of way, experimenting on patients at the mental hospital. The doctor wanted to give them all a shot of naltrexone—an opiate antagonist that deprives the addict patient of pleasure and disrupts the neurochemical reward system for bad behavior. “I’m jealous you get to leave before me,” whispered her roommate Xiaoyu. “Oh, Xiaoyu, you have no idea,” she said, going to the bathroom to wring period blood out of her sheets. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her name was Marceline. Her eyes were like exit wounds. Later, a man came to the community room and played guitar while they took turns shaking bells and maracas. She left out the back to whisper-hiss at her boyfriend on the communal payphone.

“I just want you to be responsible with the money,” her mom calls her and says. It was one of those conversations that was actually about something else, or they just wanted attention from each other for some reason.“It’s my money,” she buys something diamond. She buys white shoes. She buys Tranquility Body Oil in a hand-blown glass vessel from a women’s collective in Oaxaca.

She drives to the beach to get brunch with a friend. The surface tension of the ocean roils the pier where they eat. Trees wilt in leftover breeze. Back at her place, she develops blisters and burns along the backs of her thighs from failing to reapply sunscreen. Sun-drunk and helpless to avert the course of tragedy, she takes a hot bath and naps for several hours. When she wakes up, she stands by the window watching children circle the block in toy cars that reproduce their Platonic ideals in excruciating detail: a model BMW Gran Coupe about a foot in diameter blazes by. A few weeks later, the burns peel off under her pants at work, and large cross-sections of her dry skin carpet her cubicle.

Money means the blunt injuries of childhood are behind her. She cut her face open at the kitchen sink. She’d been washing dishes on a small plastic chair that had gone out from under her, the plate shattered on the rim of the sink and a single shard went cleanly through her nose. They refused her anesthesia because she was too young. Instead, a nurse soaked a folded pad of paper napkins in soap and water and placed it over her eyes to distract her. “They’re sunglasses,” she cooed. “You’re wearing a pair of sunglasses.” She was offended by the consolation.

While getting an abortion, she looks outside the counselor’s window at an assortment of colorful flags and tarps strung up on the opposite building: Adoption Is Still An Option. Are You Sure This Is What YOU Want? “Is anyone making you do this?” The counselor repeats a lesser god version of her enemy’s mantra. She signs a paper testifying to her free will and goes to lie down in the operating room with her doula, a shy woman playing with her sleeves in the corner. A team of doctors takes turns introspectively pressing on her veins while trying to insert the IV. The fentanyl makes her noodly and she lies backwards to gaze at the ceiling. The light above her bed is papered over with a plastic veneer of blooming jacaranda flowers. “Who did that?” She asks. The doula shrugs. “People like to look at it while they’re high.”

The viscera of her body—from the Latin viscus, “deep down,” from Proto-Indo-European root, *weys- (to turn)—invented, maybe, to separate the productive inner body from the deli meats, the fibrous tissue, muscle, and skin—the husk—is left untouched while clot strings of blood are sucked through an enormous speculum. Under the skin, the heart is profoundly sensible. She feels exhausted by references to the fickle heart. The heart is unfairly maligned and drowned in a well of its own blood. Arrhythmia is—from the “Identify Your Flaws” chapter of Understanding ADHD in Women—inconsistency. She drinks a small cup of water in the waiting room and looks it up: *weys- to *Wéysdh-ti, “to influence.” She was under the influence or she was being a bad influence or she was under something bad. 

She started buying old things, archival things, enjoyed the fatuous thrill of accumulation. She started collecting books and illuminated manuscripts, gold leaf pages of psalms, shreds of medieval day life. She read on one that a wedding party had been devoured by a pack of a hundred wolves and was moved to tears, a hundred wolves. The whole world was an anecdote.

She had, for a time, been helplessly attracted to a homeless person who slept in a box on the roof of her apartment, a blackout alcoholic who watched TV on his phone and later moved into a one-bedroom loft that had been illegally subdivided into 7 rooms for $150 a month. They drank white rum and lean until she slipped in the bedroom one night and split her head open on the nightstand. She swooned in his arms and coquettishly offered to buy him a shirt to replace the one she ruined with her blood.

The CAT scan technician was a cheerful, paternal man, the type of person she sensed vastly displaced from her own plane of existence. He offered her an Armenian newspaper circulated by the local community while she waited and made small talk. “Well, would you look at that,” he says. “No concussion, nothing wrong at all.” Marceline asks if he would show her the pictures and he does: four polarized blueprints of her own mind. “You have a perfect brain,” he says. “I know,” she agrees.