We met in the metal garden and smoked on top of the slide. It was usually dark, and in the dark her words emerged as a lit cortège, cutting the horizon.

“When I grow up,” she said, “I want to be a disease.”

Language, as she deployed it, was neither a line cast nor a bullet fired. It was a catholic mechanism: the sharp twist of a pilot biscuit into the waifish body of a christ. A word, placed on her tongue, became flesh. One night it was almost morning, I could almost see her, every sentence a necklace she was pulling out of her mouth, tangled in smoke.

“I want to be filthy with beauty,” she said, “loaded on stink and swagger. I want to be heart on bicep, balls in throat, with my best friend’s eyes in my pocket, and a flaming comet of hunger clutched in my fist like a pet rock.”

She had a large, stretchy mouth and spoke like an X-ray, stripping every word to bone. “I want to be a jet-fueled mass of chrome and steel, circling the planet with an infinite supply of packaged almonds, missing no one, my strong, clean body rippling in the heat that rises from the landing strip, my little feet, wheels that never fail to find it.”

“I want doll skin,” she said, “sticker eyes. I want to be a black flash of lashes against a desiccated white lie, stamped with a smooch. I want bendable limbs, high-heeled feet, and a plastic snatch.

“I want to cut teeth. To break bones in the street and use the pieces to draw pictures with my blood on the sides of buildings. I want to be the city melting behind the glass, and I want to be the glass, inlaid with wire mesh so when it breaks it hangs together still. And I want to be the breaks.

“But I know what I am,” she said then. “I’m like you: the sweet spot, the rough patch, the missing rib.

“I’m the coyness, the wheedle, faked passion, icicle tears, small betrayals, the accommodating orifices, the warm welcome and the long way back. I’m the pout, the prettiness, and dreams of the real thing. I am hard knocks and lost loves. I’m just like a real person—in a movie. I’m how much it hurts and how much that’s part of it.”

She finished her cigarette. I leaned in to taste her mouth. It tasted bloody and torn apart. When I smeared her against the slide, she was a true thing bursting open in silver pieces against the pale fresh silent playground.

Later, I lit up and she stayed lying down. Each time I pulled on the cigarette, the cherry burned a short film of her face moving against itself, the way rain wriggles down glass. There was something horrific in it. I let my smoke rise, and then I fastened my belt and walked away.

It was spring when I saw Julia again. She lived above me, crying in the bath and moving furniture at night in high heels, but I only ever ran into her in the playground across the street from our mansion block. I was happy to see her. I liked her golden eyes and big waves of hair, her candlelit skin. There was something deluxe and unfathomable about her form. It seemed in continuous, almost imperceptible motion, like a body of water. She said she’d been to visit her father, she didn’t say where. As she sparked up I noticed a raised pink button of scar tissue, the size of a pencil eraser, on the back of each hand. I wondered if she’d been away long enough for these to be new, and if not, why I hadn’t noticed them before. It had rained and the world was black glitter. I listened to the suck and pop of her lips on the filter, the sizzle of burning paper, and her delicate, agonized sighs.

She invited me to supper. “To celebrate,” she said.

“Is it your birthday?”

“My anniversary.”

“Ah,” I said, flashing on the way she’d arched her back and gripped the sides of the slide. “Happy anniversary.”

“Thank you.” She blew a smoke ring and poked it.

I was surprised. Julia exuded such an air of freedom and solitude that I’d assumed she was single, and possibly an orphan. We left the playground and crossed the road, splashing through the puddles.

I could smell hot, scented oils. The apartment was dark and glossy, all leather and blood-colored wood, and she didn’t try to make it brighter. When I looked around, I felt as if I’d died and someone else had moved into my apartment. There was no one waiting, and nothing on the dining table except a salmon-pink plasticky paper cloth, its sticky sheen reminiscent of scar tissue. I began to suspect that the person with whom she shared this anniversary was out of town, perhaps even out of her life, and I was to be their surrogate. I wondered how far I’d be expected to deputize the role. She poured me a glass of watery wine to drink while she made Bloody Marys. She mixed in Angostura bitters and celery salt, and scrambled a panful of eggs.

“I’m tomorrow’s girl today,” she said, dishing all the eggs onto a plate and sliding it across the table.

The eggs were runny and transparent in places, yet I couldn’t be sure whether the black bits were pepper or charcoal.

“Aren’t you going to have any?” I said.

“I don’t eat eggs.” She retreated to the kitchen and returned with a jar filled with rollmops suspended in cloudy liquid, and a box of saltines. A woman in a black chādor emerged from the master bedroom, pushing a metal walking frame. Only her long white hands and almost mouthless face were visible. Her eyes shone like olives. She looked like Julia might look if she became an owl.

“My mother,” Julia said, unscrewing the jar. “She doesn’t speak.”

I said hello. The mother nodded demurely and wobbled toward the couch. She wore squeaky red pumps that ticked against the floorboards as she scraped the walker along. I realized this was the sound I’d been hearing at night. I decided it was her, sobbing in the tub. She switched on a true crime show and cranked up the volume.

“You mean she doesn’t speak English?” I shouted over the blare.

“She’s taken a vow of silence,” Julia said, plopping a rollmop on my plate. “She had a vision when she was pregnant with me. My father says she was just dehydrated, but I believe it was something.”

“You’ve never heard her speak?”

“She prays out loud.”

I was starting to get a poppers headache from the scent of the oils. The TV blasted a detailed blood-spatter analysis and the pickled herring was gelatinous and hairy. I prodded the eggs with my fork. I looked at the wide, smooth bones of Julia’s face, her lips that always looked bitten, unable to grasp how such a beautiful woman could be responsible for this revolting food. I glanced at her mother, who was sitting there like a monolith. I wondered whether the cloak was a cultural or a personal accoutrement. I couldn’t place Julia’s ethnicity. She could seem Brazilian, Jewish, Jamaican, or Irish, as her mood shifted. She had been rather quiet since we entered the apartment.

“What do you do?” I asked her.

“I’m a laser technician.”

I pictured beams of blue and violet light shooting from her fingertips. “What does that mean exactly?”

“I remove tattoos, mostly. Sometimes freckles, hair, and port-wine stains.”

This didn’t sound like it would pay well, and I wondered how she could afford to live in our building. I forced myself to take a bite of the eggs. They were lukewarm and slimy, and I tasted the grit of eggshell. I put down my fork, trying not to gag. Julia took my plate to the kitchen and reappeared with a paring knife and a bowl of figs. Finally, something she couldn’t destroy. I sliced one open and broke it apart. I’d never noticed before how fig flesh resembles putrid, maggoty meat. I dropped it on the table and pulled out my cigarettes.

“We have to go outside,” Julia whispered. “She doesn’t know I smoke.”

I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I could hear a slapping sound behind the door. When I pushed it open, I saw a huge black fish splashing in the bath. Something about its rubberiness, on top of everything else, made me want to be sick.

I flipped up the lid of the toilet, but I didn’t want the fish to watch me throwing up, so I went into the hall and leaned my head against the wall. My stomach turned every time I heard the fish flop. I noticed that the door to the smaller bedroom was ajar. I could hear Julia banging around in the kitchen, so I nudged the door and went in.

There was a desk, a chair, crammed bookshelves, and books stacked knee-deep on the floor. A ballet barre ran along the bottom of the window and the desk was piled with sentences handwritten on strips of paper. Some were arranged on the desk like refrigerator poetry. I noted the absence of a bed. I knew the apartment had only two bedrooms, but I resisted the notion that she slept next door with her mother. It just seemed too bizarre. I pictured her asleep on top of the books with snowy drifts of cut-out words forming a pillow and duvet.

In the playground Julia held out her fists like she was sporting LOVE HATE tattoos. The smoke laced her fingers and I looked at her keloid scars.

“This was seven years ago,” she said, as if she was showing me a photograph. “I was working as a pole dancer.”

“No shit. What was your stage name?”

“Proust.”

I laughed. “Any special reason?”

“I wanted to hear the announcer say it in his schmoozy voice when he introduced my act. Anyway. There was a patron who didn’t come in very often, maybe once a month.” She took a drag like a last breath. “Always alone. He was tall and slender, with half-European, half-Asiatic features that were so chiseled it seemed almost grotesque. Bright amphetamine skin and pointy black shoes. Instead of tucking fivers into my g-string, he’d slip me a long white envelope containing a cashier’s check. But first, he always reached up as if to shake my hand.

“When I offered my hand, he slid his palm past mine and circled my wrist with his fingers. I felt a lift, like a drug rush, and he let go. No one was allowed to touch us, but since I appeared to initiate the contact, and because it looked so out of place, I suppose, the bouncers never stopped him. This went on for months. The mixture of need, anticipation, and gratitude established a bond. Sometimes when I was leaving the club or my building, I had the feeling I was being watched. One night the envelope was fatter and I thought he’d given me cash, but inside was a contract.”

“A job contract?”

“I won’t say how much he offered me, because that would be naming my price, but it was a lot. The contract had four clauses: I wasn’t to eat or to wear underwear or socks for four hours beforehand, or to press charges afterwards, and I shouldn’t be intoxicated. The final condition was a gag order lasting seven years. It expired today.”

The pieces clicked into place. “This is the anniversary you meant?”

“It’s been in the vault all this time.”

“You mean you actually honored the agreement? Why?”

“It’s just good form,” she said, shrugging. “I always keep my promises.”

“What did he want you to do?”

“He’d listed all the things he didn’t want to do. Like he didn’t want to fuck, photograph or film me, or cook and eat me, or piss or shit on me. I didn’t have to drink his come or pass it to anyone else’s mouth.”

“Hmm.”

“It went on like that.” She lit a cigarette off the one she had going and blew smoke through her nostrils. “No enema was necessary. I wouldn’t have to change my name or get a tattoo. I’d be acting my own age. I wouldn’t have to smoke, or to masturbate. I wouldn’t be tickled or scratched or bitten.

“There would be no candle wax, coffins, speculums, or cattle prods involved. I wouldn’t have to wear a diaper, a straitjacket, or a labial clip. I’d be allowed to keep all of my hair. I wouldn’t be acting like an animal, a waiter, an ashtray, a toilet, or any piece of furniture.

“There would be no abrasion. No dolls. I wouldn’t be asphyxiated, inseminated, branded, or breastfed. I wouldn’t be fucked with feet or have to use a chamber pot, and he didn’t want to do that thing where you squeeze your legs together to form a triangular saké vessel.

“No telephones, animals, or electricity would be used. I wouldn’t be mummified in cling film or otherwise, or have to do any chores. I wouldn’t be force-fed or entered into an auction. Pages and pages of this shit.

“Even just by reading the contract, I was already playing the game. Anyway, I don’t believe in turning things down. And I was young, a little unsure of my worth. I liked the idea of being paid that much to do something that, apparently, only I could do. Most of all, I wanted to know what a person could want so much. If I didn’t do it, I’d never find out. I signed the contract, filled in my bank details, and completed the health questionnaire, which included some unusual measurements. I mailed it to his PO box. About a week later, a long white envelope without a postmark arrived, containing instructions for my pickup. As the day drew near, I began to look forward to it in a peculiar sort of way.

“I went to the meeting place at three in the afternoon. It was a street address with no floor number so I thought it would be a house, but it turned out to be a garden next to a cemetery. I arrived just as the rain cleared. The flowers looked beaded and swollen, and the marble tombstones and stone statues glistened in the sunlight.

“A white van reversed through the gates. I went over and opened one of the back doors and climbed in. There was a metal bulb stuck to the floor that followed me like an eye. The windows were sealed, and when I closed the doors it was so dark I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or shut. As we started to move, I crouched on the floor and took off my clothes, as I’d been instructed. The glinting eye watched me.

“The sound of car horns and jackhammers faded. We drove in a straight line, without stopping, for what seemed like a few hours. The road surface changed and we took some wild turns. The van stopped, and the engine cut off. The floor shuddered when the front doors slammed. I waited for someone to come and let me out. I could hear sounds in the distance, water rushing and children squealing. The noise grew and faded, distorting as if going around a bend.

“I crawled across the floor, feeling for the doors. I found the handles, but they wouldn’t turn. I started shouting and banging on the metal. When my hands were sore, I lay on my back and hammered the doors with my feet. I wondered if I was going to die there, while the camera watched. I curled into a ball on my side and cried. Next thing I knew, I caught a knock to the chin that made me bite my tongue so hard I saw sparks. I was bouncing in the back of the van and we were going very fast, off-road. We slowed down and crunched up a slope. Then we reversed and braked, but the motor kept running. I heard a clicking sound. The doors swung slowly open.

“It was night. Out in the cool, blue forest stood a statuesque woman with a shaved head, holding a rope. I climbed out and walked unsteadily toward her. She had bare feet and long toes and wore a long-sleeved chainmail leotard that glittered in the taillights. I thought she was the man’s sister. The overt beauty that had appeared almost repulsive on him was wonderful on her. She took my hands and placed them together as if in prayer, and tied my wrists together. I thought I recognized the temperature of her touch. When I tried to summon a memory of my patron, all I could picture was a suit, a cipher—I realized it would have been easy to pass in the polarized atmosphere of the strip club.

“She led me by the rope through the trees. I tried to read the line of her body, but I couldn’t tell if this was the same person or not. Waiting at the edge of the forest were four men with flashlights. They wore metal masks shaped like horses’ heads, and one of them held a black box with a handle. The masks were very tall, so that the men’s faces were in the horses’ necks. I didn’t know how they were able to see.

“We walked across the meadow and up a hill. The men wore toolbelts that clanked as they walked. It felt so creepy, marching across the countryside in this secret procession. When we reached the top, I saw a makeshift scaffold and, lying flat on the ground beside it, a life-sized wooden cross with cables snaking out. The men switched off their flashlights and the woman let go of the rope.

“They formed a circle around me, the men with their masks on, me with my wrists tied. There were no trees, and a three-quarters moon had come out. The woman said something that was a command without being a word, like an acrobat giving a cue, and I felt one of the men come up behind me and take something out of his belt. I wanted to turn around but I was afraid, so I shut my eyes. He started brushing my hair. He did this for quite a long time. The bristles were sharp and stiff.

“The woman untied my hands, and two men picked me up by the armpits and ankles and laid me out on the cross. There was a short bar extending between my legs and a platform for my feet. They fastened my arms to the crossbeam just above the elbow and at the wrist, with multi-stranded cable that threaded right through the wood, and fixed my knees and ankles to the standing beam. One man had a special machine that clamped and melted the cable—I could smell hot plastic and wire. Another went around trimming the ends with wirecutters.

“The way everything fit my body, and was so ultratech, made me feel almost safe. The woman knelt beside me, and the man with the tallest horse’s head came over with the metal box. He unsnapped the latches and opened it and started passing things to her: a pair of latex gloves that she put on, and some makeup sponges, which she tucked into my arm restraints, making them tighter. She flicked my veins and swabbed them with a cotton ball soaked in chilly pink liquid. The man gave her two syringes, clear and cloudy. Holding one between her teeth, she uncapped the other and emptied it into my arm. Whatever it was, it burned going in. She dropped the used syringe into the black box and stuck a small round Band-Aid over the puncture wound before injecting my other arm.

“When she removed the sponges from under the cable ties, one arm felt hot and the other felt cold, and then they both felt like air. The man took out a long thin nail and started to hammer it through my palm. I could see the blood streaking and feel the pounding of the mallet vibrating in my teeth and eye sockets, but I was numb from the neck down. They didn’t put nails in my feet. It would have caused too much damage.”

She opened her hand and pointed to the satiny disc. “See how it’s not perfectly centered? They went between the bones. This spot is symbolic anyway. You’d have been nailed through the wrists. So then the woman was kneeling beside me again. She had a tiny pot that looked like lip balm, and she twisted it open and dipped her index finger into it. Her movements had a loopy, layered quality, and I realized my eyes were strobing. When I tried to look directly at anything, my focal point kept oscillating either side of it. The stars looked like needles.

“Her outstretched finger was covered in gold paint and seemed unnaturally luminous. I had an impulse to touch it, but my hands were nailed down. The brightness seemed important, and sexual. I began to feel turned on, not in the human way, but as if I was a plant, photosynthesizing. When she daubed the paint on my forehead, my skin seemed to feather beneath her touch, like an eye opening. She put her finger in her mouth and sucked off the paint. The gesture struck me as unbearably raw. It just about doubled me over. I’ve never experienced anything like it—I felt like I was going to burst. The feeling subsided, and I felt pure and spun, like after a crying jag. I got lost in her face for a while. When she opened her mouth, I saw a galaxy inside it.

“The men threw the cables over the scaffold. They winched me up and forward, and I heard hammering. Within seconds, I began to feel the strain. If I let myself hang from my arms, my chest felt tight and I had trouble breathing. I had to push against the platform with my feet and keep my whole body engaged. You need a super-strong core. I guess that’s why she didn’t just pick some girl off the street.”

She lit two cigarettes and handed one to me. “That’s when I started to see shit.”

“What kind of things?”

“Winged embryos flying through the sky. Gods fucking each other with snakes coming out of their eyes. I saw a tribe of glass people holding weapons and tools made of skin. They had shiny transparent bones and organs nested inside their bodies, and real blood in the mesh of their veins.

“I saw hundreds of people walking through darkness and light. Young and old, through sun and snow. Some walked on their knees.

“I saw a boy with shells covering his body, swimming along the ocean floor. Sometimes a single pearl of air escaped from his lips. When he came to an underwater volcano, he hovered beside it until an octopus rose from its mouth. The boy’s legs scissored and he shot toward the octopus and bit it between the eyes.

“I saw a tall, bearded man in a red cloak banging a drum and dancing on giant stone steps. The cloak had a hood that looked like a girl’s face with blond hair and a bloody heart attached.

“I saw four children kneeling on a bed and peeping through a window into a moonlit garden, where a man and a woman stood facing each other. While the man wore simple clothes, the woman was sheathed in a gold silk dress with a high neck, her wrists and ankles dripping jewels. She got on her hands and knees in front of him and pressed her forehead to the ground.

“I saw a desert so vast it hugged the planet’s curvature. The sky was egg-yolk yellow, and the sun and sand were white tinged with violet. Thousands of statues stood in perfect rows. There was a ripple as they tipped their faces toward the sun. They were still again, so still I wondered if I’d imagined the movement, if they’d been positioned that way to begin. At some unspoken cue, they began to move in perfect unison. It was a slow dance, a sequence of poses. The figures moved in impossible ways. No two steps were exactly alike, it was a progression or a story. There was a crackling sound and they stood still, their faces upturned. The sun’s edge blackened as if burned by flame. As the shadow slid across the sun, the figures bowed. The darker the sky grew, the deeper they bowed. The bluish corona appeared. Perfect, it quivered and was gone.

“It was dark. I was thirsty. When I sat up, I saw the metal eye and knew I was in the van. It wasn’t moving. Crawling across the floor, I could feel that my hands were bandaged. I clambered out and shut the doors. I looked around. I was on a quiet residential street. It was dawn.

“As the van pulled away, I felt like I was re entering Earth’s orbit after being away a hundred years. I couldn’t remember anything about myself. I wasn’t even sure if the clothes I was wearing belonged to me. It took me a while to recognize where I was standing, at the end of my road. I went home and took off the bandages. My wounds had been neatly sewn up. The next day, the money landed in my account.

“For months, I barely spoke to anyone. I just felt very spaced all the time. All I wanted to do was stay in my room listening to music. One morning I woke up and went outside. It was autumn and the sunlight was knives cutting through me. When people passed me on the street, I could look into their eyes and see what color the sky was at the moment of their birth. What color it would be when they died. I could move through their whole lives, even things they hadn’t done yet, as easily as walking through the rooms of a house. It wasn’t like flashing images—more like knowing where your tongue is in your mouth so you don’t bite it.

“To me, other people used to be a show that was on sometimes, like fish at the aquarium, and now I could feel everyone around the world at once, in painfully exquisite detail. When this faded after a few weeks, I was relieved. But I started to wonder if what had happened was something I needed. I went back to the club to look for her, hoping to find out what else she wanted to do.”

“Did you see her?”

“I did, eventually. Before I could approach her, she walked up to the stage, holding an envelope. I saw her do the handshake on this other girl. Then she took a step back, slipped the envelope back into her pocket, and left. The club burned down a few weeks later.”

It began to pour. We were instantly drenched, and Julia’s hair frizzed into a ball. We laughed as we slid down the slide and ran across the street. We stepped into the elevator, wet and shivering, and I pushed her up against the doors as we began to rise.

Kissing Julia was like kissing language. Her tongue was a flame, licking phoneme and diphthong. She swallowed me like a sword and her eyes were doves, her mouth a lake of fire. Her cunt a cup of tears. Her body a city: I carved a key out of soap, found the trapdoors, and learned the secret knocks. I drew a map and held it inside me, the dark, oily streets running through me like veins. I chalked hopscotch grids on pavements and wrote on walls. I watched leaves fall and animals die. The sun turned black, and when she pressed her thumbs against my windpipe, I heard galloping horses and the hard bass of gunfire. We came like dragons, heaven and earth getting closer. Her eyes blazed red and gold, and in them, kingdoms burned.

In the morning she was gone and there was ash on my pillow.

I stopped going to the playground. I started smoking in the apartment, out the kitchen window. I wasn’t sure about the choking, and I didn’t like the way everything seemed darker and brighter around her. One night as I was coming back from work, I looked up and saw her watching from her dining room window. I realized I hadn’t heard any scuffling from upstairs in a while. The lamp shone through her hair as she smiled. I waved and she disappeared. I thought she might be coming downstairs, so I hung around by the mailboxes until some other people came in. The following night I went upstairs and rang her doorbell. A little girl in a ballerina costume answered. She said she’d been living there since before Easter, but she also told me her parents were unicorns.

Last week I was in another city. Julia was there, in a black bar on a black street, holding a dark drink.

“You again,” she said and took a sip.

I offered her a cigarette. She said she’d quit.