“I don’t think you did that. But neither can I accept the idea that a trapdoor opened between reality and the twilight zone and these things fell out.”

Yes, that was the problem. For Paula the idea that the Lucite cube and the other things which had appeared in my apartment had some supernatural origin was automatically off-limits, no matter how much the facts might seem to support the idea. What I needed to do was to decide if I needed to argue the point more than I needed to make a friend.

I decided I did not.

“All right,” I said. I caught the waiter’s eye and made a check-writing gesture in the air. “I can accept your inability to accept.”

“Can you?” she asked, looking at me closely.

“Yes.” And I thought it was true. “If, that is, we could have a cup of coffee from time to time. Or just say hi in the lobby.”

“Absolutely.” But she sounded absent, not really in the conversation. She was looking at the Lucite cube with the steel penny inside it. Then she looked up at me. I could almost see a lightbulb appearing over her head, like in a cartoon. She reached out and grasped the cube with one hand. I could never convey the depth of the dread I felt when she did that, but what could I say? We were New Yorkers in a clean, well-lighted place. For her part, she’d already laid down the ground rules, and they pretty firmly excluded the supernatural. The supernatural was out of bounds. Anything hit there was a do-over.

And there was a light in Paula’s eyes. One that suggested Ms. Yow, Git Down was in the house, and I know from personal experience that’s a hard voice to resist.

“Give it to me,” she proposed, smiling into my eyes. When she did that I could see-for the first time, really-that she was sexy as well as pretty.

“Why?” As if I didn’t know.

“Call it my fee for listening to your story.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good-”

“It is, though,” she said. She was warming to her own inspiration, and when people do that, they rarely take no for an answer. “It’s a great idea. I’ll make sure this piece of memorabilia at least doesn’t come back to you, wagging its tail behind it. We’ve got a safe in the apartment.” She made a charming little pantomime gesture of shutting a safe door, twirling the combination, and then throwing the key back over her shoulder.

“All right,” I said. “It’s my gift to you.” And I felt something that might have been mean-spirited gladness. Call it the voice of Mr. Yow, You’ll Find Out. Apparently just getting it off my chest wasn’t enough, after all. She hadn’t believed me, and at least part of me did want to be believed and resented Paula for not getting what it wanted. That part knew that letting her take the Lucite cube was an absolutely terrible idea, but was glad to see her tuck it away in her purse, just the same.

“There,” she said briskly. “Mama say bye-bye, make all gone. Maybe when it doesn’t come back in a week-or two, I guess it all depends on how stubborn your subconscious wants to be-you can start giving the rest of the things away.” And her saying that was her real gift to me that day, although I didn’t know it then.

“Maybe so,” I said, and smiled. Big smile for the new friend. Big smile for pretty Mama. All the time thinking, You’ll find out.

Yow.

She did.

Three nights later, while I was watching Chuck Scarborough explain the city’s latest transit woes on the six o’clock news, my doorbell rang. Since no one had been announced, I assumed it was a package, maybe even Rafe with something from FedEx. I opened the door and there stood Paula Robeson.

This was not the woman with whom I’d had lunch. Call this version of Paula Ms. Yow, Ain’t That Chemotherapy Nasty. She was wearing a little lipstick but nothing else in the way of makeup, and her complexion was a sickly shade of yellow-white. There were dark brownish purple arcs under her eyes. She might have given her hair a token swipe with the brush before coming down from the fifth floor, but it hadn’t done much good. It looked like straw and stuck out on either side of her head in a way that would have been comic-strip funny under other circumstances. She was holding the Lucite cube up in front of her breasts, allowing me to note that the well-kept nails on that hand were gone. She’d chewed them away, right down to the quick. And my first thought, God help me, was yep, she found out.

She held it out to me. “Take it back,” she said.

I did so without a word.

“His name was Roland Abelson,” she said. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“He had red hair.”

“Yes.”

“Not married but paying child support to a woman in Rahway.”

I hadn’t known that-didn’t believe anyone at Light and Bell had known that-but I nodded again, and not just to keep her rolling. I was sure she was right. “What was her name, Paula?” Not knowing why I was asking, not yet, just knowing I had to know.

“Tonya Gregson.” It was as if she was in a trance. There was something in her eyes, though, something so terrible I could hardly stand to look at it. Nevertheless, I stored the name away. Tonya Gregson, Rahway. And then, like some guy doing stockroom inventory: One Lucite cube with penny inside.

“He tried to crawl under his desk, did you know that? No, I can see you didn’t. His hair was on fire and he was crying. Because in that instant he understood he was never going to own a catamaran or even mow his lawn again.” She reached out and put a hand on my cheek, a gesture so intimate it would have been shocking even if her hand had not been so cold. “At the end, he would have given every cent he had, and every stock option he held, just to be able to mow his lawn again. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“The place was full of screams, he could smell jet fuel, and he understood it was his dying hour. Do you understand that? Do you understand the enormity of that?”

I nodded. I couldn’t speak. You could have put a gun to my head and I still wouldn’t have been able to speak.

“The politicians talk about memorials and courage and wars to end terrorism, but burning hair is apolitical.” She bared her teeth in an unspeakable grin. A moment later it was gone. “He was trying to crawl under his desk with his hair on fire. There was a plastic thing under his desk, a what-do-you-call it-”

“Mat-”

“Yes, a mat, a plastic mat, and his hands were on that and he could feel the ridges in the plastic and smell his own burning hair. Do you understand that?”

I nodded. I started to cry. It was Roland Abelson we were talking about, this guy I used to work with. He was in Liability and I didn’t know him very well. To say hi to is all; how was I supposed to know he had a kid in Rahway? And if I hadn’t played hooky that day, my hair probably would have burned, too. I’d never really understood that before.

“I don’t want to see you again,” she said. She flashed her gruesome grin once more, but now she was crying, too. “I don’t care about your problems. I don’t care about any of the shit you found. We’re quits. From now on you leave me alone.” She started to turn away, then turned back. She said: “They did it in the name of God, but there is no God. If there was a God, Mr. Staley, He would have struck all eighteen of them dead in their boarding lounges with their boarding passes in their hands, but no God did. They called for passengers to get on and those fucks just got on.”

I watched her walk back to the elevator. Her back was very stiff. Her hair stuck out on either side of her head, making her look like a girl in a Sunday funnies cartoon. She didn’t want to see me anymore, and I didn’t blame her. I closed the door and looked at the steel Abe Lincoln in the Lucite cube. I looked at him for quite a long time. I thought about how the hair of his beard would have smelled if U.S. Grant had stuck one of his everlasting cigars in it. That unpleasant frying aroma. On TV, someone was saying that there was a mattress blowout going on at Sleepy’s. After that, Len Berman came on and talked about the Jets.