Lillith conked out right away. I lay there in the scratchy, overbleached sheets as the brown darkness filled up with her bitter breath. From beyond the wedge of light at the door came the sound of low conversation and occasional laughter. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I got up and opened the door all the way.

“I have to use the bathroom.”

The handsome MH turned from the doorway of the nurses’ station where he’d been leaning and escorted me. When I came out he was standing with his arms folded over his chest, staring discreetly into space.

“I can’t sleep.”

I was afraid I was going to be scolded, the recalcitrant patient, but he simply gestured for me to sit down at a table. Then he sat too, as graceful as a cat. “What do you think the problem is?” A nighttime voice, soft, with subtle undertones.

“I never sleep well the first night in a strange bed.”

“And why is that?” If the day MH’s style had been supremely matter-of-fact, this one’s was seductive.

“I don’t know why. It’s disorienting, I guess.”

“Not used to a roommate?”

“I’ve been sharing rooms all my life.”

“The dark, maybe?” He was treating me like a child.

“The dark is kind, why should I be afraid of it?”

“Ah.” He smiled. “So what’s on your mind then?”

“I miss my sister.” I had no idea why I’d said that. I hadn’t been thinking it at all.

“Where is she?”

“Usually she lives in New York City, but now she’s out of the country on business.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I didn’t bother to correct myself.

“Aren’t there phones where she is?”

I shrugged, something Valeric hated.

“Well, one thing’s for certain. Someone’s broken your heart.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’ve got an extraordinarily sad face. Like an ancient Kyoto beauty. Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t up to flirting, if that’s what he was doing.

“Look,” he said, “I think you’d better try to get some rest now.”

This time, maybe because I could feel the meds kicking in, I knew I was going to be able to sleep. It was a relief to crawl back between those stiff hospital sheets, back into that haze that had no part in time. I’d have given anything to be able to stay there forever, drifting, not dead, not alive.

In the dark I leaned down to the foot of the bed where I had placed my bag and groped around in the side compartment until I found what Swivel Chair Lady had missed, jammed down to where the seam was fraying. A slender cylinder wrapped in a scrap of velvet. It had the heft of an expensive fountain pen although it was slightly longer. It smelled of the bag, medicinal and musty. In the dark I fingered the folds of cloth aside, to feel the cool jade.

My Nai-nai’s hairpin. Over a hundred years old, all the way from Shanghai, given to me for my ninth birthday. You would have thought the phoenix head would have been worn down by now, I’d handled it so much, but I could still trace the bulging eyes, the curve of the beak, as well as the wicked sharp point it slimmed into at the other end. My grandmother had once stabbed someone with it, one of her suitors who had gotten too frisky. I could picture his amazement as she jerked it out of her hair, which loosened in a gleaming, liquid black fall over her shoulders—for a split second he probably thought he’d gotten lucky—and then the mortal pain as she jabbed it in between his ribs.

I rerolled the pin in the velvet, wedged it back into its niche in the bag, and rebuttoned the compartment.

“Nai-nai,” I whispered. “Keep me safe.”

But even as I said it I knew: nothing in this world is safe.

2

Like most people I have many names. My father gave me “Delicate Virtue” in Chinese, but for the tough American world my parents decided that “Sarah Collisson Wang” had a ring to it. Herbert Collisson was the chairman of the Asian department at the Army Languages School in Monterey, where my parents were teaching then. But Sally is what I’m known as, Sally Wang-Acheson for the six years of my marriage, and since then I’m back to Sally Wang, those two flat a’s knocking against each other when Americans pronounce it, so graceless and so far off from what Daddy intended.

“What does it matter what Daddy intended?” I can hear my sister, Marty, saying. “He never gave a flying fuck about who we really were.”

You should understand this: I am not the kind of person anyone ever expected to go crazy. That’s more my sister’s department. The only extreme thing I’d ever done in my life was to drop out of college to get married. I thought I’d never have to make a big decision again, except maybe whether or not to have children.

It’s in my nature to hoard, and this turned out to be a godsend. My ex-husband, Carey, and I kept separate bank accounts, so when we got divorced the division of finances was simple. After I quit my job—telling my boss I wanted to freelance so I’d have more time to paint—I had enough savings to survive on for several months.

My new apartment in the East Village had a northeastern exposure and no coverings on the windows, so that I could sit in the baby rocking chair nights with the lights off and stare straight uptown to the silver spire of the Chrysler Building. Carey had kept most of the furniture, since it was originally from his family. My clothes were hung on exposed racks like a department store and I slept on a mattress on the floor. I had one mug, one glass, one plate, one set of cutlery, a single pair of chopsticks. Spare, the way I like things.

I actually did try working at home for a while, but it was just as excruciating as the office. Mornings I’d switch on the TV and just lie there, not getting to my drafting board until early afternoon, sometimes not at all. They fascinated me, those talk-show guests, bad skin slicked over with pancake makeup, as they related their dramas in quavering tones. I’d have to remind myself they were getting paid to do this.

I decided that what I needed to do was make my life extremely simple. Every Friday afternoon I went grocery shopping, always with the same list: a whole chicken, brown rice, and frozen vegetables. I’d stew up the chicken and live on it for a week. That was an old Wang tradition—even my sister, who can’t boil an egg, has been known to call my mother long-distance for the recipe. One day at D’Agostino’s a stock guy came up to me. “Hey, lady, are you all right?” I guess I’d been loitering in an aisle or something. Looking into his face, I realized he thought there was something wrong with me, maybe that I was mentally retarded.

I was cracking up and I knew it and I couldn’t stop it.

It got worse. I couldn’t tell anyone what I was seeing then. For one thing, my father was everywhere, a shock of white hair in the periphery of my vision, and then I’d turn and it would be a stranger, even a woman, or worse, nothing at all. Footsteps up the stairs at night, although I lived on the top floor and there shouldn’t have been any.

I took the bus to Chinatown and wandered around scrutinizing every single little old man on the stoops, hoping this would break the spell. They mostly spoke Cantonese. Daddy’s language had been a pure, educated Mandarin. Walking those teeming sidewalks, I felt totally alien although the tourists thought I was part of the scenery. When they stopped me to ask directions and I told them I didn’t know, they were always amazed and put off by the fact that I spoke perfect English.

I found the old bao zi shop where my parents would take Marty and me. Chinese McDonald’s, Ma called it. I sat on a cracked green stool at the Formica counter and ordered a pork—cha shao—with an orange soda, like I used to. But when the steamed bun came I couldn’t eat it. I drank my soda from the can through a bendable straw and watched old peasant women come in and order dozens of buns stacked in boxes tied with string. The women scolded the bakery man if he didn’t have exactly what they wanted. He just smiled and was cheerfully rude back to them.