What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

we are calling to offer you a fabulous life

Last night, Joyce was mugged. She was locking up Darnel’s shop in the East Village when a man drifted out of an alley and ripped her purse from her shoulder. She never got a clear view of his face, just a glimpse of his profile and then a long look at his squat figure charging down the sidewalk, her little black purse dangling from his wrist. She had felt the impulse to scream, but only a low hiccup passed through her lips. Her apartment keys were tucked inside her coat pocket and she’d slapped her hip just to make sure, feeling the metal shapes through the fabric. It wasn’t an expensive purse, but she’d carried it every day for the last two years and couldn’t help but feel that she’d suffered a loss.

She told all of this to Darnel at The Mask Market the next afternoon, sitting on a stool behind the cash register. He stood across from her, the glass display case between them. His hair was slicked back; he had a few days of stubble on his cheeks and chin. The store carried tribal art and textiles, specializing in Indonesian masks. Joyce had been working there for five months. She was only two weeks into the job when Darnel started taking her to lunch and grazing her back or waist when he slipped by to reach the register or lift a mask off the wall. At first, they just locked the shop door and went into the back and lay down amongst the wood figures and uneven towers of cardboard boxes. Then they began sneaking off to her apartment, which Joyce liked best — the feeling of having someone in her bed, walking naked through her kitchen and pouring a glass of water, as though he might have lived there. He would tell her about Bali, where he went twice a year for merchandise. He had even talked about bringing her along on his next buying trip, about watching late night topeng dances and snorkeling and swimming naked in the sea.

“That doesn’t really qualify as a mugging,” Darnel said after Joyce finished her story.

“All right.” She shifted on the stool, crossing and uncrossing her skinny legs. “What would you call it?”

“A purse snatching.” He looked at her and shrugged. “A mugging involves a weapon of some sort. A knife or a gun.”

“I had to cancel my credit card and order a replacement,” she said. “And he gave me a hard push before he started running.” That wasn’t true, but sometimes she couldn’t resist a chance to make Darnel feel guilty.

“You’re lucky.” He walked around the display case and put his arm over her shoulder. “Lucky you weren’t shot or beaten or worse.”

“I guess,” she said, even though she didn’t feel lucky at all. She had wanted to call Darnel the moment she got home and ask him to come over, but knew it was far too late to phone without arousing his wife’s suspicion. Instead she turned her noise machine to Evening Monsoon and slept with the lights on and got up in the middle of the night to make sure the door was locked.

“I wish I’d been there, Joyce.” He gave her a squeeze. “I really do.”

“Will you come by before closing?”

“How about later tonight? I’ll call your apartment.” He tapped the large face of his wristwatch. “Andrea has a Lamaze class at three.”

Darnel’s wife was six months pregnant. She had come by the shop last month, saying she’d been in the neighborhood and wanted to check on the merchandise. It was the first time Joyce had seen her. She had a round face and squinty eyes, her stomach protruding underneath a pink cotton blouse. After she walked through the store and spent a minute rustling around in the back, Joyce noticed how unbalanced she looked, on the brink of toppling over, and offered her the stool to sit on, but she only shook her head, said the masks were dirty, and then left. That same afternoon, Joyce sat on a box of ceramic bowls in the back and wrote Darnel a letter, telling him they couldn’t possibly continue under these circumstances. What am I doing here? she wrote. I can’t understand what I’m doing with my life. She even sealed and stamped the letter, but was never able to drop it into the mailbox. It was still in her apartment, in the top drawer of her dresser, underneath a pile of winter socks.

“I won’t be too late,” he said, releasing her shoulders. “Maybe we could even get dinner.”

Joyce slumped on the stool. The shop smelled of incense and mothballs. Last night, after the culprit was out of sight, she’d leaned against the store window, the glass cool against her face, and felt the glare of the masks. When Joyce began working at the shop, the masks had terrified her, all those bulging wooden eyes and flung open mouths, the painted faces that, during the evening shifts, radiated an eerie light. Most were shaded red, green, blue, and gold, the eyes silver or black, some decorated with feathers or tufts of human hair, the most expensive ones studded with semiprecious stones: lapis, charoite, gaspeite, jasper. The death masks resembled human faces, the eyes and lips exaggerated into menacing caricatures, while the others were designed to look like animals, painted whiskers and long white tusks. After the mugging, Joyce focused on one mask in particular: the death mask that hung right above the register. It was the largest piece in the shop, painted acid greens and blues, with huge red eyes and white teeth. She’d stared at the mask through the window for a long time, as though it could offer her some kind of rescue.

“Can we go to the café down the street?” Joyce asked.

Darnel kissed the top of her head. “Whatever you like.”

She walked him outside and watched him move down the sidewalk, his lumbering steps. It was spring. The trees were tipped with green and white. The brick façade of the building across the street was covered in blue and gray graffiti and the colors looked almost cheerful in the sunlight. Every so often, someone would get stuck behind Darnel’s broad frame and lurch left and right, looking for a way to pass. It had always seemed strange to her, the way people hurried even when they had no particular destination in mind.

Joyce went back inside and dusted the masks, standing on the stool to reach the ones that hung closer to the ceiling, as she did every afternoon, despite what Darnel’s wife had said. During the rest of her shift, she only had three customers. First, an older woman wearing a caftan and white braces on her wrists. She didn’t say anything to Joyce when she came into the store, just stood in the center of the room for a little while and gazed at the walls of masks, her mouth tight with confusion, as though this wasn’t where she had meant to end up. An hour later, a couple lingered in front of a death mask that cost several hundred dollars. They both wore shorts and sandals and carried mesh tote bags. The spoke in a foreign language; the man kept touching the space between the woman’s shoulders. Joyce watched them from behind the register. They were young, early twenties, and looked happy. She both envied and pitied them.

The woman pointed at the display case, which held a selection of semiprecious stones. Garnet, red jasper, moonstone, tourmaline. She asked Joyce which types were supposed to bring luck in love. Joyce opened the case and took out an opal. The stone was shaped like a small egg. In the woman’s slender hands, it gleamed blue.

“This one is good for love,” Joyce said. “But I have something even better.” She handed the woman a piece of unakite. It was a rough stone, speckled with green and pink. Unakite, she told the woman, was supposed to help with finding direction. If you ground the stone and then looked into the powder, you would know what you needed to do. Joyce had considered grinding the stone for herself; once, after finding a mortar and pestle in the back, she placed some unakite in the bowl, but she couldn’t bring herself to crush it, afraid it would reveal she’d taken too many wrong turns to get back on track, or, worse, that it wouldn’t tell her anything at all. She hoped this woman would be braver.

“Here,” she said, returning the opal to the case and closing the woman’s hand around the other stone. “This is the one you really want.”

After Joyce’s shift, she took the subway to The Fish Emporium on 8^th Street. Earlier in the day, she had used the store computer to look up photos of fish found in Bali — angelfishes and clownfishes and blacktip groupers — and decided it was time she got herself a pet. Bali. Whenever she walked down the street or hung onto the handles that dangled from the tops of subway cars, she repeated the word to herself like a song. Bali, Bali, Bali. The first time Darnel mentioned going to Bali, the idea hooked itself into her immediately. She bought a map, which she sometimes unrolled on her bed, so she could study the shape of the island; if work was slow, she used the computer to find pictures of Bali, mist-covered mountain ranges and azure waters and temples with roofs shaped like giant jenga puzzles. When she saw something about Bali, an ad for a resort or a travel article, she tore out the pages. She had never traveled outside the United States, not even on her honeymoon with her ex-husband (they had gone to a bed-and-breakfast in Maine). She thought this was symptomatic of something, though she wasn’t sure what.

Joyce had moved to Manhattan from upstate New York after her marriage broke up six months ago. She was married for five years. When she first met her husband, he was living with another woman. She was almost a decade older than Joyce, a retired ballerina who taught dance at a private girls’ school. Her husband had lived with the ballerina for eight years, longer than Joyce and he ended up being married, and after they had divorced, Joyce realized she’d never gotten over the feeling that their marriage had been poisoned by the betrayal on which their life together was founded.

She had been surprised by how easy it was to leave. She told him the morning after they got into an argument over a movie they’d seen. At the end of the movie, the heroine walked into the sea and drowned herself in order to escape her monotonous life in a Norwegian fishing village. Joyce found her choice noble, while her husband thought it absurd, and, over dinner at the same Italian restaurant they always frequented, they argued their cases bitterly, skimming the edges of bigger, knottier issues that they could not articulate or even really understand. They went to bed angry and, in the middle of the night, Joyce woke with an ache in her chest and wandered into the guest room to sleep. When she went downstairs the next morning, her husband was sitting at the kitchen table with his bran flakes and newspaper, slurping the milk like he always did. She sat down and told him that she no longer wanted to fall asleep and wake with his body next to hers. He looked at her, his face expressionless except for his eyes — his pupils, she could have sworn, widened like spilled ink. Then he flipped to the sports section and went back to eating his bran flakes. And that was that.

During the divorce, when her friends and family asked what had happened, Joyce said the marriage had simply run its course, as if losing a husband were no less complicated than quitting a tedious job. But in truth, the separation, the sudden rush of solitude, had left her feeling like she’d misplaced some part of herself in a foreign land. It wasn’t that she missed her husband, but that the divorce hadn’t brought the relief, the clarity, she desired. The one thing she did know is that she was glad to get out of upstate New York. She’d always disliked her job in real estate — she never got the hang of sales pitches and was usually only allowed to show rentals — and the stillness of the suburbs, the quiet routines of her neighbors, people waiting for their lives to get better or worse or end. She signed a lease for the first apartment she saw, a one bedroom in Alphabet City, and found her job in the classified section of the New York Sun. Her friends were horrified to discover that Joyce, a licensed real estate agent, was working in a tribal art store for an hourly wage, but Joyce felt she no longer belonged in the world of 401Ks and home ownership. She just needed to duck underneath the surface long enough to figure a few things out.

The inside of The Fish Emporium was cool and dark. The walls were lined with tanks that glowed a phosphorescent blue. At first, Joyce thought the store was empty. The doors chimed when she entered, but it took several minutes for a young woman, with cropped blonde hair and stacks of silver rings on her fingers, to appear.

“Sorry,” the woman said. “Business has been slow ever since New York Times Magazine ran an article that called fish passé pets for city kids.”

“I don’t think fish are passé,” Joyce said.

“Me either,” the woman said. “In fact, I love them.”

She took Joyce by the elbow and showed her the selections of butterflyfish and algae eaters and Japanese fighting fish, beautiful, velvety-scaled creatures that had to be kept in individual tanks.

“If you get two of these and put their fishbowls side by side, they’ll spend all day staring at each other,” the woman said. When they passed a tank of goldfish, Joyce was reminded of the orange anthias that swam in Bali’s reefs. She peered into the tank and watched the fat orange fish dart through the water.

“I’ll take one of those,” she said.

When the woman plunged the little green net into the water, all the fish darted away. After a few swings, she scooped up a fish with a white spot on its side and dumped into a plastic bag filled with water. Before Joyce left, she picked out a top-of-the-line brand of pellets, a glass fishbowl, and a little plastic castle to go inside.

In her apartment, Joyce placed the glass bowl in the bedroom windowsill and emptied the plastic bag into it. She watched the fish bob around in the water and circle the pink castle. She set the noise machine on her bedside table to Midnight Mist, then kneeled on the floor and stared at the fish’s black eyes and orange scales, its tail in the shape of wings. For a moment, she wished she could call her husband into the room to watch the tiny air bubbles rise from the fish’s mouth to the top of the bowl like miniature balloons. But she knew, if he were here, that he wouldn’t sit on the floor and watch the fish with her. He would think it was a silly and pointless way to pass time, and that was why she had left.

Later that evening, it started to rain. Joyce showered and changed into a sleeveless silk dress with yellow flowers printed on the front. She cleaned her apartment and set the noise machine to Rainforest Chatter. By eight o’clock, the goldfish had figured out how to swim through the circular hole in the center of the castle and Joyce had given up on Darnel coming in time for dinner. She ate leftover takeout, sitting on the bed and looking into the fishbowl. She was looking forward to showing him the goldfish and telling him she’d picked this one because it reminded her of the anthias that lived in the waters of Bali, which, if they ever went snorkeling like he said they would, they’d see huge schools of near the reefs.

At ten, Joyce was about to exchange her dress for running shorts and a T-shirt when Darnel called and said he would be there soon.

“It’s late,” Joyce said when he finally arrived, his hair damp from the rain. “What did you tell your wife?”

“That there was a problem at the shop.” Darnel smiled and pinched her wrist. “Which isn’t a total lie.”

“Ha,” Joyce said. “Ha, ha, ha.”

He wasted no time unzipping her dress. He stroked her back, pressing her body into his. His hands were wide and hot and she felt consumed by them. She kissed him, leaning against a wall. He unzipped his pants and lifted the hem of her dress.

When it was over, they lay on her bed for a while. The sound of dripping water came from the noise machine. She turned away from Darnel, but could still feel the warm, damp line of his body against her. Would she want to fall asleep and wake with him every day and night? She was considering this question when Darnel noticed the goldfish.

“What’s its name?” he asked.

“Bali.” She hoped he’d say something about an upcoming trip, but he only sighed and told her that he wouldn’t be able to stay much longer.

Joyce watched the goldfish lap the castle, running her fingers over the spines of the books sitting on her bedside table, underneath the nose machine. They were on the history of Indonesian tribal art. Darnel had lent them to her, so she could learn about the merchandise and answer questions for customers. One book described how the masks were carved: flat chisels and gouges created the first ridges and curves, then double-edged knives refined the features and hollowed out the inside of the mask. The death masks protected the deceased during their passage into the underworld. Many death mask eyes were reinforced with a layer of human bone on the inside; the blocked eyes were supposed to prevent harmful spirits from entering the body. And much of the power lay in the stones: jasper could end droughts; lapis kept away troubling dreams; opal attracted love. The mask makers had to follow the strict conventions issued by the tribes, precise patterns of coloring and carving, or else risk being cast out of the tribe and, some believed, angering the spirit power of the mask. Joyce’s reading made her feel uneasy about people buying the masks and hanging them in their homes without knowing the capabilities of their new acquisitions.

“Do you ever worry about the people you sell masks to?” Joyce asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What if a mask brought them bad luck?”

“Then they’d have to buy another one that brought them better luck.”

She could tell he was getting restless from the way he was shifting around on the bed.

“I should leave,” Darnel said, sitting up. “Andrea has a morning appointment.”

“Tell me one thing about Bali before you go,” she said. He leaned over her and brushed hair from the side of her face. She felt his breath against her ear. He told her about Mount Agung, Bali’s highest summit. The Balinese believed gods lived on the mountaintop. If you climbed to the peak of the mountain, you were supposed to be able to see into your own soul, and because of this most people who reached the top never returned.

In the middle of the night, Joyce was woken by a ringing phone. It took her some time to realize the sound was coming from her own apartment. She kicked away the covers and lurched into the kitchen, her mind sticky with sleep, and answered.

“Am I speaking to the primary resident?” It was a woman, the voice high-pitched and strange.

“Yes.”

“Are there any other residents?”

“No.”

“Not even a cat or a dog?”

“No.”

“A goldfish?”

“Actually, yes.” Joyce rested a hand on the counter. The rain was still falling outside. It pained her to think of how long it had been since she’d had a phone conversation with someone besides Darnel. “As of today, there is a goldfish.”

“Still,” the caller said. “You must be lonely.”

She looked around the kitchen, which was barely large enough to hold a mini-refrigerator and a microwave. The sink had been clogged for a week, but she hadn’t taken any steps to repair it, ordering most of her meals from the Chinese restaurant below her apartment and eating out of the cardboard containers.

“Hello, sole resident,” the woman said. “Are you still with me?”

“If you’ll tell me what you want.” As a teenager, she had played phone games with neighborhood girls on Saturday nights. They would open the phone book, close their eyes, and point to a name. Joyce knew this call was probably just a prank, just kids looking to make fun of a woman alone in the city, but maybe, she allowed herself to believe for a moment, it was something else entirely.

“The rain is melting the city,” the woman said. “Are you melted yet?”

“Not yet,” Joyce replied. “Maybe I’m a penguin.”

“You’re no penguin. Not a polar bear either.”

“How do you know?” She walked to the window and pulled back the curtains. The street was quiet. It was dawning on her that a strange call in the middle of the night should be making her nervous. “You’re just a stranger on the phone.”

“I’m a specialist.”

“In what?”

“All things.”

“So why are you calling me?”

“To offer you something.”

“And what’s that?” Her voice sharpened. “What could you offer me?” There was a burst of laughter in the background, followed by a low thump. Perhaps, she thought, it was one of the teenagers who waited tables downstairs, playing some kind of joke.

“We are calling,” the woman said, “to offer you a fabulous life.”

Joyce heard a click, the buzz of the dial tone. She looked out the window again before unplugging the phone. She put the noise machine on Roaring River, then turned on all the lights in her apartment and sat on the floor. She didn’t understand what had just happened, why she had kept talking, what the woman had meant by all the things she said. She felt dazed. She watched the goldfish swim from one side of the bowl to the other.

“I don’t understand this world,” Joyce said to her fish.

The next afternoon, Darnel came to the shop and told Joyce they needed to talk. She was on a stepladder, straightening one of the masks. She had never gone back to sleep after the phone call and felt exhausted.

“About what?” she asked, not looking at him.

“Let’s get some lunch,” Darnel said.

Joyce got off the ladder and turned to Darnel. He held a large white envelope in his arms. The top three buttons of his dark blue silk shirt were undone, which Joyce thought looked a little ridiculous. She could hardly believe this was the same man who’d whispered in her ear the night before.

“What’s in the envelope?” she asked.

“I’ll show you when we’re sitting down,” he said.

He did not kiss her on the lips, did not hug her and dig his fingers into the muscle of her back or suggest they swing by her apartment after lunch. She locked up the store and then they walked to a café down the street. It was humid outside, the clouds rimmed with black.

At the café, they sat outside. She stared at the envelope, the unlikeliest of possibilities flooding her mind: it contained travel brochures, two tickets to Bali, he was about to propose their escape.

After the waitress took their order, Darnel placed the envelope on the table. Joyce tugged one of her pearl earrings and watched the sidewalk. The pearls were tiny and fake and pinched her skin if she wore them for too long. A man passed the café, shouting into his cell phone. A woman walked by seconds later, a hardcover book pressed against her chest, as though she was holding a child.

“Are you ready to show me what’s in the envelope?” she asked.

“Are you ready to see it?”

She shrugged. The waitress reappeared with their order. Joyce added cream to her coffee and took a sip. One of her favorite moments of the day was watching the splash of cream dissolve into her coffee, the little white swirl, a small luxury.

He pulled out a large photograph and handed it to Joyce. The background was dark, with a fan of paleness in the center and a figure trapped inside the light.

“The first picture,” he said. “A boy.”

“Great,” she said. “That’s all the world needs.”

The shape of the baby resembled a giant olive, the features and limbs fuzzy. Thoughts of Bali evaporated like mist being burned away by a rising sun. She wanted to tear the picture in half, to dump her coffee over that tunnel of light. But she could not stop staring into the waves of black and gray and the lump in the center. Finally, Darnel took the sonogram from her and returned it to the envelope. They were both quiet for a while. She finished her coffee. He drank his beer and ate his cheeseburger.

“I’ll give you as long as you need to find another job,” he said.

“I’ll only need a few days,” she said. “To find something else.” She was already dreading facing the Bali pages she’d pinned to her refrigerator, evidence of her stupidity, of her inevitable humiliation. She asked Darnel if he wanted his books back. He did not.

“I’d appreciate a quick exit,” he said. “But I understand your position.”

“You couldn’t possibly.”

“I’ll get lunch.”

“How noble of you.” Joyce tried to think of the Evening Surf setting on her noise machine, the lulling sound of water hitting sand. Then she told Darnel something she’d never said to anyone before, that the thing she missed most about being married was the actual word “marriage,” being able to say she was “in a marriage” or “working on her marriage.” It gave her the feeling of being a part of something that mattered, something vital and alive.

“But I wasn’t a part of something that mattered,” she said. “And neither are you.”

“I was worried you might cry,” he said. “But I think the way you’re acting now is even worse.”

“And how is that? How am I acting?”

“Like you’re going to stab me with your fork the moment I turn around.”

“I wish I had it in me.” She stood and dropped her napkin onto the table.

“Are you going back to the shop?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll come by later to see how you’re doing,” he said.

She began to walk away, then stopped and looked back. Darnel was hunched in his chair, staring down at his empty plate. What I really want, she thought, is to not want to want him to chase after me. She left the café and started down the sidewalk. The sky was the same dull gray. She passed the red and yellow awning of a meat market, a restaurant with paper pineapples and bananas hanging from the ceiling, walls of graffiti.

When Joyce entered the shop, she immediately felt the glare of the masks, weighty and sharp, as though they knew what had happened, or had seen it all happen before. She stood in the center of the store, surrounded by swirls of color, the glint of stones, hollow eyes and wild grins. She found the mask that hung behind the display case, the one that had leapt into her mind after her purse was taken and the man disappeared into the shadowed street; the stark white teeth and red eyes, the forehead studded with onyx and amazonite.

She went behind the case and stood on a stool. She was surprised by the weight of the mask when she lifted it from the wall; it stretched from her neck to her hips. She placed it on the glass surface of the case and studied the expression, the subtle blending of colors, the points where the paint thickened slightly. She raised the mask to her face and felt the smoothness of the wood.

Darnel hadn’t come by the shop and she didn’t expect he would. He was probably back with his wife, a hand resting on her puffy stomach. She took twenty dollars from the register, for the cab she would call to carry her and the mask away from the shop. The theft made her giddy. She went into the front and stretched out on the carpet. She felt consoled by all the faces, an audience for her life. She lay straight as a corpse and watched the ceiling fan spin in lazy circles, the low hum muffled by the noise on the street.

In the taxi, Joyce asked the driver to drop her at Tompkins Square Park. She wasn’t quite ready to return home. The mask was balanced across her lap, the red eyes staring up at her, perfectly circular and the size of plums. The cab docked on the curb and Joyce handed the driver the twenty and told him to keep the change. The humidity made the loose strands of hair around her face curl; the air was sticky and thick against her skin.

She followed the wide concrete path, passing stands of elms, the branches curved and heavy with foliage, and oriental planes, the pointed leaves brushing the ground. The mask was difficult to carry and she kept having to reposition her hands to keep a good grip, but she didn’t mind. She liked having it close to her. The park was nearly empty: a young woman sitting on a bench and reading a paperback, a man sleeping on the ground, a sheet of cardboard covering his arms and torso.

Joyce stopped walking when she reached a fountain carved from pale stone, a memorial for the Slocum disaster, a boating accident in the East River that killed nearly a thousand people in the early nineteen hundreds. The fountain smelled of sulfur. She watched water pour from the parted mouth of a lion, the stone eyes and mane shaped in a way that reminded her of the wood figures in the shop. She held the mask in front of her stomach and wrapped her arms around it.

She was standing by the fountain when she heard the boy’s voice behind her. He said to turn around and she did.

The hood of his sweatshirt was pulled over his head and his face was angled towards the ground, but she was able to see a clump of stringy blonde hair and a pimple on his cheek. He flinched a little when he saw the mask. It took her a minute to comprehend what was happening, to notice his hand underneath the front of his sweatshirt, the nose of the gun pressing against the fabric. He told her to give him everything and she simply shook her head.

“I don’t have anything,” she said, looking over his shoulder. “No money.” The open circle in the park was empty, the space surrounded by trees and bushes, the branches thick and green. She listened carefully for voices or footsteps, but heard nothing. She looked at the boy. Twice in the same week. She could not believe it.

“What about that?” He gestured towards the mask with his gun. “That’s got to be worth something.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s worth quite a lot.”

He moved closer, head still lowered. She smelled cigarettes on his breath, saw sweat on the bridge of his nose. She gripped the edges of the mask, her fingers throbbing. He pushed his hand forward, so she could see the outline of the gun even more clearly. “Last chance,” he said.

It was then Joyce started to laugh. She had meant to scream, but the noise that spilled from her mouth was piercing laughter. Her face was hot, her sides knotted and aching. She tried to think of things that were not, in any way, funny: the boy pulling the gun out from underneath his sweatshirt and pressing it against her forehead, the mask shattering on the ground, Darnel’s bloated, listless wife. But Bali kept coming into her mind. Bali! How could she have possibly believed Darnel would take her to someplace like Bali? It was all so ridiculous, and she kept going.

The boy jerked his head. His hood slipped back. For a moment, she saw his eyes: a cloudy gray-blue, confused and frightened as the possums that sometimes wandered into the roads of upstate New York. She laughed harder. Something in her chest was tightening, closing, and she began to get dizzy. When the boy raised his chin and looked into her eyes, she thought she was dead. All she could see in her mind was the mask; she imagined it settling on her face, the weight and scent of the wood. But the boy relaxed his arm, turned, and ran down the path, one hand still fixed in front of his stomach, the back of his sweatshirt flapping like a cape.

After the boy disappeared, Joyce set the mask down and waited by the fountain until she was sure he was really gone. Given all that had happened, she felt strangely unshaken. She picked up the mask and began walking. She passed a corner grocery store, boxes of tomatoes and bundles of yellow tulips on display outside, and a sex shop, the mannequins dressed in pink wigs and lingerie staring dumbly through the glass.

She went to her street and entered the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor of her building, where she requested pork dumplings and moo shu chicken. The waiters paused to stare at the mask; the customers looked up from their plates, mouths bulging with food. She felt powerful and exotic. Her order came quickly, dots of grease already expanding across the brown paper bag when they handed it to her.

One of the busboys stopped, a lanky kid with a scar on his cheek, a white tub of dishes pressed against his hip. He nodded at the mask. “Who’s your friend?”

“Isn’t he lovely,” Joyce said. She wondered if the boy had been involved with the call to her apartment. “He puts hexes on people at random.”

“That should come in handy,” he replied before slipping into the kitchen.

In her apartment, Joyce placed the mask on her bed and put the noise machine on Summer Monsoon, then sat on the floor, near the fishbowl. She opened the container of dumplings and ate them with her fingers, flipping through the classifieds in the New York Sun. She read the job listings aloud to her fish: data entry in Brooklyn, a call for a translator of Turkish in Queens, a receptionist at a nail salon in the West Village. She couldn’t go back to where she had come from, but she didn’t think she could stay where she was either. She would have to find a way forward, towards that gray line on the horizon.

She set aside the newspaper and the dumplings and looked at the mask. While waiting for the cab, she’d considered leaving the shop door unlocked or maybe even propped open, but it saddened her to think of the masks being stolen or vandalized. Darnel had been counting on her to close tonight and probably wouldn’t return to the store until morning. She wondered what he would do when he found the mask missing. Come to her apartment, call the police. Or just let it go. It had cost him some money in Bali; the price tag said eight hundred dollars, although that was probably twice what he paid. Maybe he’d be so glad she went quietly, he would be willing to accept the loss.

It was dusk. The city lights beamed; the sallow moon hung needlessly in the sky. Joyce thought she heard the faint ring of a phone and imagined her anonymous caller dialing the number of another apartment, grabbing someone else’s life by the throat and shaking it. She pressed her hands over the mask’s white teeth, as though she was keeping something from leaking out. The onyx and amazonite glistened like drops of black and turquoise paint. She considered taking it to the library tomorrow and checking out more books about death masks and their powers. She only knew they were supposed to transform the wearer in the afterlife, to make them braver and luckier and happier, to help them find their way through a new kind of world.