“You think?”

“Yeah.”

“Okayyy! So that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna follow my bliss.”

“Now you’ve got it!”

He held the door open for them. “You think—I ask Victor, you think he’ll cover for me?”

“Sure. He’s a friend of yours, right?”

“Yeah, I guess…”

“Well, there you go…”

Once outside, Nico and Jack mounted the steps to the broad dirt path that ran beside the canal. Jack indulged in his complicated, almost frantic, ritual of sniffing and peeing, while Nico let her mind drift, eyes on the turbid water.

On the way back, she tied Jack up outside Dean & DeLuca’s and went in to buy cheese and a baguette—and a single, perfect tomato. Returning a minute later with her little bag of groceries, she found a woman in a maroon suit talking to Jack, whose leash she’d tied to a parking meter.

“Heeza guh-boy,” the woman mewed, “waiting for Mommy. Yes he izzzz. Whatta guh-boy.” Suddenly, she straightened up, and looked sharply at Nico. “I hope you clean up after him.”

“Oh,” Nico said, taken aback. “I do. Absolutely.” Stooping, she freed Jack from the parking meter, and headed back toward her apartment. Inside, she set to work on a tomato and brie sandwich, lightly toasting slices of the baguette. Using an Appalachian bread knife that resembled a fiddler’s bow, she began to cut paper-thin slices from her perfect tomato. And as she did, and much to her surprise, she found herself crying. She could feel the tears rolling down her cheeks, hot, wet, and senseless. It was almost as if she was slicing an onion instead of a tomato, because there were lots of tears—and they came from nowhere, as irrelevant as snot because they had no emotional content. They were just… tears. She wasn’t sad. She wasn’t unhappy. She wasn’t… anything. It was the woman outside Dean & DeLuca’s who’d brought it on, the one who was so friendly to Jack, and yet… people like that made your heart sink. I hope you clean up after him! she’d said, as if there was something wrong with her, something about Nico that was unclean or contemptible. You could see it in the woman’s eyes, hear it in her suspicious tone.

When the sandwich was made, she went into the living room and sat down in front of the TV. Jack composed himself at her feet, waiting for her to eat, waiting for her to share—which she did, tearing off a part of the sandwich that was runny with cheese. She wasn’t hungry anymore. Just… gray.

Pushing the sandwich away, she lay back on the rose-velvet sofa and flicked on the remote. Jack finished his little wedge of brie and, with a regretful glance at its source, jumped up beside her, curled into a ring and went to sleep. Idly, Nico scratched behind his ear as the morning bled into afternoon, talk shows giving way to soap operas and peculiar sports. Oprah! One Life to Live. The BMX Challenge…

It was odd the way these things came and went. One minute, she was on fire, the next—she didn’t feel like doing anything. Wherever her energy had come from over the last few days, it was gone now. All she wanted to do, all she felt able to do, was lie there in front of the TV. And it really didn’t matter what was on. NASCAR. The Weather Channel. Seinfeld reruns. It was depressing.

And tiring. And not just physically. The exhaustion she felt came as much from her heart as it did from her body. I hope you clean up after him! Why were people like that? It was enough to make you weep.

The sandwich was gone.

Jack must have eaten it—which was fine, because she’d been lying there on the couch for fifteen or twenty hours, gazing at the television, half-asleep, watching anything and everything, seeing nothing. And now, after all that rest, she was even more tired than when she’d first lain down. It was all she could do to sit up, and once she had, she regretted doing it because the back of her head was pounding.

Walking into the kitchen, she stood for a minute in front of the little espresso machine, rehearsing in her mind everything she’d have to do to make herself a cup of coffee. In the end, she gave up on the idea, and wandered out onto the balcony. It was a chilly day, and overcast, as if her mood had been projected on the world around her. Every once in a while, a gust of wind rattled the wrought iron rods on the balcony and the ferns thrashed. They looked a little peaked, and it occurred to her that she should give them some water and, maybe some plant food. Or bring them inside—it was almost time. But she didn’t feel like doing that. She didn’t feel like doing chores. She felt like—

Suddenly, the alarm went off on her wrist, reminding her to take her meds, and “call home.” Crossing the room to the table that held her portable computer, she picked up the carrying case in which she kept her medication. Unzipping one of the side compartments, she found the little orange bottles she was looking for, but the one in which the lithium had been was empty. She’d forgotten to refill the prescription in… wherever the fuck she’d been when she was taking Placebo 1.

Somewhere hot. Sunny. Palm trees. California!

But why was she in California? To see someone. Find someone. But who? Why? She couldn’t remember. Which was the whole trouble with Placebo 1. It really messed with your memory. Seating herself at the table, she opened the computer, and slid the On button forward. When the machine had gone through its routine, she sent the browser to the requisite URL, and waited for the page to load. Soon, the familiar words appeared:

Unknown Host

Description: Could not resolve the host…

Removing the overlay from the carrying case, she began to affix it to the monitor—and hesitated. For a long while, she sat there in front of the computer, staring at the nearly empty screen. And then, impulsively and, somehow, defiantly, she switched the computer off, and stood up. Crossing the room to the hall closet, she grabbed her inline skates, and left the apartment with the vague idea of refilling her prescription. But when the time came, she glided past the pharmacy on M Street, and kept on going.

She didn’t know it, but a part of her was coming to a decision, answering a question that Nico herself hadn’t had the courage to ask, using a part of her mind that she would have sworn wasn’t there. In her soul or subconscious, an argument was raging, and that argument was generating all the energy she needed to move faster than traffic, sweeping past Georgetown’s chichi restaurants and slick bars, stores selling books and Japanese prints, artisanal toys and love potions.

She loved blading, the glide and grace of it, the way faces, trees and buildings slid by in a kind of montage, half glimpsed and never quite remembered. Somehow, this smooth ride took all the edges of the city away.

Approaching the Four Seasons Hotel, she swung south and descended into Rock Creek Park. There, she swept past the Kennedy Center, turned around, and went back the other way, moving like a speed skater with her right arm swinging in a rhythmic cadence. By the time she reached the old mill, just above Porter Street, the argument within her had come to an end, and the relief that it brought was palpable. Enough, she thought. It’s over.

Reversing direction, she turned for home, elated by the prospect of a warm bath. I’ll use the rosemary bath gel, she thought, imagining the spice and tang of it.

Her headache was gone.

While the bath filled, she telephoned Adrienne at home, knowing her sister would still be at work, and left a message on the machine.

“Hey ‘A’,” she said. “It’s Nikki. I hope you haven’t forgotten about dinner tonight—it’s rainbow importante…”

The two of them dined together every other Tuesday, alternating venues—unless, as sometimes happened, one of them was really busy (as Adrienne had been of late) or under the weather (as Nico sometimes was).