At about four in the morning, long after the club had closed, I realized that my body was trying to keep me out of it. Like hell if I was going to let that happen. I would not go quietly into the good night. I dropped down from the ceiling and my body tried to push me away. When I shoved myself back into my flesh, my body jolted with the shock.

Mercedes looked up from her desk. "About time. How you doing?"

My mouth tasted like a wino's armpit. I remembered the evening, but did not have the energy to sort out the facts now. "Not terrific, but I'm still alive."

Mercedes plunked a pile of letters and file folders into her outbox and stood up. "You said something about taking drugs."

Had Oswaldo drugged me? He'd picked up the drink from the waiter's cart and handed it directly to me; I'd focused on the cute little pink parasol the entire time. I couldn't even tell if I was on drugs. When I shook my head, something other than the usual idiotic thoughts rattled inside. "Maybe I've got the flu."Putting her hands on her broad hips, Mercedes said, "What do you want to do? Do you want to come to my house?" I adored Mercedes's house, especially because she could afford to pay for heat and always had lots of good food and music and strong, sweet coffee in tiny cups. However, I had a mortal fear of being sick in someone's house.

My mother Regina had frequently said that nothing is more disgusting than a sick child. Not wanting to give her one more reason to resent my existence, I had made it a point to never ever get ill. "I think I'll go home," I told Mercedes. "Can you give me a lift?"

My recovery was brief. As soon as I got inside my dismal flat and closed the door behind me, I was taken by the chills. I was shivering so violently that I could barely manage to brush my teeth and almost blinded myself when I removed my contact lenses. My blankets weren't enough to keep me warm, so I took all the clothes out of my closet, piled them on the bed, and crawled beneath the heap.

Chapter Three

wherein our heroine loses her fashion sense

I fell into some sort of delirium. While that sounds muy romantico if you go for repressed Victorian heroines, my condition was not so marvelous. Instead of wearing a lace-trimmed white cotton nightgown, I struggled to creep into flannel pajamas that my father, Jerry D, gave me as a college graduation present. The large red and black penguin print detracted considerably from the drama of my condition.

When I was alert enough, I'd make a cup of tea or a bowl of ramen, but I couldn't take more than a few sips. The food and drink tasted revolting, and I had an almost painful craving for meat that I was too weak to satisfy.

Time meant nothing to me. I shifted in and out of consciousness, seeking sleep to release me from my aching bones and alternating fever and chills. Sometimes I imagined Sebastian as I had last seen him, condescending and cruel, and other times I remembered him as he had been, as beautiful and radiant as an angel, smiling at me from a distance, holding out his arms. That vision would dissipate and Oswaldo with his brushed-back chestnut hair and clear gray eyes would appear, irresistible and insatiable, his lean limbs wrapping around me, his full mouth grinning in mischief, draining me of all my energy and filling me with pleasure.

When the phone rang, I didn't answer it. A few times I got up and listened to my messages. Clients wanted to schedule appointments, and the nursery harangued me to come in right away to substitute for a sick employee. Nancy called and wanted the gossip about Kathleen's party. I pulled myself together enough to call her back and say that I was sick and would share the grisly details later. She offered to bring over lobster bisque, but I pleaded with her to stay away so I wouldn't infect her.

Maybe I'd caught the illness from Oswaldo. I remembered how he'd pushed me away from his cut lip. In my agitated state, I yearned desperately for the taste of his mouth and skin and blood again. Once, I imagined I felt his itchy wool suit against my skin, and I awoke drenched in sweat on the floor. I had gruesome dreams, too, vile visions of carnage and sex that shocked me.

The scrabbling in the walls began to sound like Morse code. I thought they might be messages about Sebastian. If I listened hard enough, I could learn the pattern and understand his secrets.

Once I hallucinated that my abuelita, my grandmother, had come back to me. I could smell canela, the cinnamon tea she loved, and feel her small brown hands stroke my hair as she recited the silly consolation for a child's injury: " 'Sana, sana, Previous colita de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanara manana." I could hear her voice murmuring prayers in Spanish and the soothing click- click of her rosary beads. I would have endured much more suffering to have those few moments with her again.

One day I awoke and was able to sit up. I toddled slowly to the bathroom, pausing whenever dizziness overcame me.

Something was wrong with my vision. When I put in my contact lenses, everything was blurred worse than without them. My old glasses were just as bad. I saw better without either, although there were disturbing flashes when objects would suddenly come into almost three-dimensional focus only to fade into fuzziness again.

I carefully stripped to take a shower and observed with uncharacteristic detachment that all my charming, decorative fat had vanished. My bones stood out sharply on my hips and my wrists. I leaned against the shower wall until the hot water ran out and then I stood under the cold water. I didn't feel clean. I didn't feel right.

I glanced at the clock. It was 3:00 a.m. I pulled on sweatpants and a sweatshirt over my pajamas and slid my feet into worn suede loafers. A man's tweed overcoat completed my ensemble. I found a few dollars in change in the coat pocket.

As I left the house, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My wet hair clung to my skull and my eyes were dark hollows over jutting cheekbones. My full lips looked as oversized as Mick Jagger's and my skin was as sallow as bacon fat. I pretended that I was fashionably punk.

There was a twenty-four-hour supermarket only a few blocks away. I walked slowly, counting each step, seeing my breath in the chilly air. My need for protein, for red meat, was so strong that it propelled me into the harsh glare of the store's fluorescent lights.

At the meat section, I selected a pound of ground beef swimming in bright red liquid. Eager to get home, I rushed to the one open checkout. The clerk had seen worse than me, so she just raised her brows a bit as my trembling hands counted out the coins for my purchase.

Honestly, I had planned to fry up a burger when I got home, but I was agonizingly hungry and so weak after days without food that I thought I would pass out. I made it to the corner before I took out the package and tore a corner of the plastic wrapping.

I lifted the Styrofoam tray to my mouth and sipped the blood. Then I sipped again. In seconds, I was sucking at the raw meat, trying to extract every drop of liquid and telling myself it was no different than eating steak tartare.

When I heard the footsteps behind me, I tried to hide the packet of meat, embarrassed to be caught. I turned to see a rough- looking young white guy approaching. The glint of a knife in his hand sent a jolt of fear through me. But before I could do anything, the predatory expression on the man's face suddenly dropped away. I used the only weapon I had, the package of chewed hamburger. I threw it and the man hollered in terror and bolted away.

I must have looked worse than I thought. Sure, men had run from me before, but it was usually after we'd dated for a while.

As I trudged home, I forgot the attacker and fretted that my unsanitary eating habits would probably result in a raging E. coli or Mad Cow infection. I shuddered to think of all the rude comments my mother Regina would make at my funeral if I died of the latter.

My body must have needed the protein, though, because I felt much stronger. I entered my flat and surveyed the horror. It smelled like the men's locker room of hell. I opened windows and gave the room a few spritzes of O de Lancome. My sheets were rank, and I yanked them off and put them in a laundry bag. My next duty was washing up the mugs of moldy tea and bowls of congealed ramen that I'd been unable to eat.

Now I had to call the local health clinic. After determining that this was not a life-threatening emergency and being quizzed by someone at a call center, I finally got through to an advice nurse. I told her I was sick, that I'd had an unsafe exchange of bodily fluids, and that I thought I'd exposed myself to E. coli or Mad Cow.

"What's your temperature?" she asked.I put my palm to my forehead. "Hot."

"Have you had any vomiting or diarrhea?"

"That's disgusting, no."

"How do your lymph nodes feel?" she asked.

I didn't exactly know what lymph nodes were, but I thought they were somewhere around my throat. I searched around and noticed the swelling on both sides of my upper neck. "Tender and swollen."

She told me that I could come in that night but that I'd have to wait in the emergency room. That could be hours, what with gunshot victims and heart attacks getting priority. I promised to come in if I felt any worse and made an appointment for the next morning. She recommended that I contact the man with whom I'd swapped body fluids.

I was torn about Oswaldo. I was jonesing to see him, but not when I looked like this. I needed to talk to him to make sure that I had only contracted an ordinary flu and to find out if he felt as madly attracted to me as I did toward him.

It was almost five in the morning, which seemed like a reasonable time to catch Oswaldo in his hotel room. I phoned the Croft, and as the phone rang, I imagined his warm laugh and the knowing, greedy way his hands had moved over my body. The front desk clerk said they had no Dr. Oswaldo Krakatoa staying there and couldn't disclose if one had ever been there. "We at the Croft respect the privacy of our guests," said the snooty clerk.

I assured the clerk that Dr. Krakatoa was totally desperate to find me and that he would appreciate the clerk's disclosing his whereabouts. The clerk was intransigent and rudely hung up the phone when I suggested that he was a servile minion of hell. I would find Oswaldo later when I looked and felt better.

Now I forced myself to sort through the pile of old mail I'd been neglecting on my desk. A lefty flyer informed me that a group called Corporate Americans for the Conservation of America, or CACA, which purported to be an ecofriendly alliance was actually the front for a shady multinational consortium. The flyer urged readers to write to their representatives to support an.

international workers' rights bill that CACA was trying to quash.

I would have done this immediately if not for the incessant scrabbling in the walls. Virginia Woolf wrote that women artists need a room of their own; she should have specified a ratless room of their own. Also, I couldn't invite fabulous men over for a romantic evening if there were rats running around the place.

I located the nexus of noise, a few feet to the right of my bathroom door. I got as far as using a screwdriver to carve a hole in the drywall before exhaustion overwhelmed me and I collapsed on the unmade bed fully dressed.

Chapter Four

raticide (not the punk band)

I didn't wake until sunset the next day. I had missed my doctor's appointment. I did a cursory physical check before I attempted to sit up. I didn't feel sore or cold, but I was weak and hungry again. My vision had improved, I guess, if I defined "improved" as seeing everything clearly but with a heightened sense of dimension.

I checked my answering machine. I was shocked to hear Sebastian's voice, tense and edgy, leaving me a message. I listened to Previous it again and again: "Milagro, this is Sebastian. Call me right away." He left a local number.

Going into my closet, I pushed through the bright clothes to a box hidden in the back. I dropped onto the floor and rummaged through the evidence of our friendship: theater ticket stubs, museum programs, restaurant matches, and other sad little mementos. The voice on the answering machine was not the boy who had sent me these witty postcards. I deleted his message.

On the way to the bathroom, I was horrified by the sight of four dead rats lined neatly in front of the hole I had made in the wall.

A memory stirred, the image of myself squatting by the hole in the wall and waiting, screwdriver in hand. I tried to repress it, but could not. I had been filled with rage. I could not and would not tolerate vermin reducing my modest circumstances to utter squalor. A girl had to have some standards, and if that meant stabbing rats to maintain those standards, then pass me the screwdriver.

A pity that I wasn't still consumed by the kind of anger that gets you through really icky situations. I tried not to look as I used newspapers to shove the small corpses into plastic bags. I drenched the floor with disinfectant, scoured like an obsessive housewife, then threw the sponges and the screwdriver into another plastic bag. I washed my hands in scalding water, scrubbing hard to get off any contagion. Only when I had deposited the bags outside in the bin did my hunger reappear.

I called the health clinic again and was told I would have to wait fifteen minutes to talk to the advice nurse. My stomach rumbled loudly so I hung up. Tomorrow I could try to get a walk-in appointment.

After an extended search, I discovered a few dollars in the pocket of a vintage velvet shawl. My newfound wealth gave me a surge of energy, and after my shower, I did all those girly grooming things I'd been neglecting for days, like brushing my hair.

I pulled on my tightest black pants, which now bagged in the seat, and a stretchy white shirt. Tragically, my tatas lacked their usual bodaciousness, especially since my bra was too loose around them. While changing into a nubby sweater that would hide the wrinkles in my bra fabric, the phone rang.

"Hola," I said.

"Milagro, it's Mercedes."

"Hey, chica, I was just going to grab a meal and visit you at the club. Bailaremos y cantaremos and all that."

"What is going on with you?" she said in a very unamused voice.

"What do you mean? I've been sick."

"I know that. Something else is going on. Some people have been asking for you lately."

I ignored her ominous tone in the excitement I felt that Oswaldo was trying to find me. "A fabulous man, quirky dresser, hair the color of a sienna Crayola crayon, silver eyes, lithe as a cat..." I began.

"No," she said. "These guys didn't look interested in dating you. Have you done anything wrong?"

She caught me off guard. "It depends on what the definition of 'wrong' is. Morally wrong, legally wrong, ethically wrong, a sin of omission-"

"Callate la trompa," she said .brusquely. "Wrong like something a cop would be interested in. Any dead bodies, any bank robberies, any forged currency?"

"Mercedes, you know me better than that," I said, all huffed up while at the same time wondering if I'd let any criminal behavior slip my mind. "What did they look like?""It happened a few times. One was a redhead, friendly, skinny little guy. That was maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. He was asking Lenny and the bartenders if we knew who you were, where you were. No real alarms going off with that one. Way gay, but with you, I never know."

What can I say? Gay men liked me, and sometimes they really liked me. Nancy said it was because I radiated strong and confusing pheromones, like those used to bait insect traps.

"He seemed harmless, so Joe said that yeah, you came around sometimes," Mercedes said.

"Gay, redheaded, and skinny?" I knew two gay redheads and one sexually ambiguous strawberry blond, but I had a strong instinct it was that chatty little waiter again. Which made me wonder, why did he keep showing up?

"The other gavacho looked Ivy League, blond, handsome in an establishment way. Totally The Man. He tried to give Lenny money for info on you. I didn't believe him and I didn't like him."

Why was Sebastian so interested in me after all this time?

Mercedes said, "Don't tell me you're involved with drug selling, Milagro. The Man gave us some bogus story about being interested in your writing."

I was irked that my friend assumed bogusness from anyone who expressed interest in my writing. "Mercedes, if I was dealing, don't you think I'd pay my drink tab? I know who you're talking about, and, believe it or not, he's a critically acclaimed writer."

I didn't add that he was also a horse's ass. Perhaps Sebastian really did want to talk to me about my writing and I'd deleted his phone number from my machine. "Did he leave a number?"

"No, we told him we didn't recognize you because slutty Latinas all look alike."

"I wish you were here so I could slap you upside the head." I was rewarded by a brief chortle on the other end of the line.

"What did you really say?"

"I really said too many people came in the club and that you weren't anyone we recognized. That's it."

"Thanks for the warning, but you don't have to worry about them." I was profoundly disappointed that some oddly dressed nutcase calling himself Professor Pompeu Eruption hadn't asked after me. My stomach rumbled loudly. "Who's playing tonight?"

Mercedes launched into high praises for the country rock band she'd booked. I hadn't seen them before, but she swore "they're hotter than my mami's stove for Easter dinner."

"Country rock? Probably country crap," I said snippily to cover up the fact that I intended to grovel at her feet later for money.

She got suspicious when I was too nice.

"You are such an ignorant bitch."

"Yeah, well, if you insist, I'll come by."

"Whatever," she said, but she said it cheerfully.

Since I was going to My Dive later, I dolled up my outfit, adding dangly earrings, a jangle of rhinestone bracelets, and a delightful cropped fake leopard-skin jacket. Fake leopard is one of those timeless classics. I slipped my feet into funky red sandals with sexy little straps. I plastered on extra makeup to hide the circles under my eyes, and I finished my look with scarlet lipstick.I was jittery as I left my flat, and I tried to delude myself that I was just excited to go out, to be well again. Well again? My knees were practically buckling, and the hunger I felt was so intense I almost cried out as I clattered down the street to the market. I stumbled and kept myself from falling by wind-milling my arms.

The supermarket meat section glowed in a red-tinged light. First, I grabbed the family-economy package of ground beef, but then I noticed that there was much more liquid in the smaller amounts. I shuffled through the packages and calculated the totals.

Blood dripped from one package onto my hand. Without thinking, I licked it off and felt an exquisite tingling through my body.

It was because I was starving. Looking up, I saw a butcher behind a glass display window staring at me. As I sashayed away, I thought I must be looking pretty good.

The night clerk at the checkout was the woman I'd seen before. I placed my packets of ground beef on the counter along with my money. She glanced at me and her eyebrows went up a little higher this time.

I hurried out of the store even as she was picking up my money. Down the block, most of the small shops and boutiques were closed. The door to a spice shop was set far back underneath the second-floor overhang. I moved into the darkness.