When Erica took a leave of absence to complete her research she knew almost immediately that she would fail. She devised lists of people to telephone, penciled in a schedule of interviews and columns with questions. Her handwriting seemed small and bruised. She called no one.

She remembers now, in the long mornings when Flora and Bob are gone, that she always detested fragments. Or more accurately, the need to order them, to invent a spine, a progression, a curve that resolves.

She is, at her core, too nervous, restless and cynical. There is something within her that can only say no. It’s odd that she had thought she had subdued this, found her own rainforest, slashed and burned it to the last acre of cold ash. She wonders if she should be grateful. Perhaps somewhere on a balcony, in a permanently ochre-tinted city she isn’t certain of, there is more air for someone, a woman standing mute and confused in a scented dusk, a woman searching for something.

It was late morning. Day was elbowing clouds above glazed roofs of orange tiles, and she felt startled and amazed. Seen from the right angle, the city was a sequence of seashells, glistening abalone, mother-of-pearl. She became aware of the fact that she wasn’t worried about abandoning her project or the implications this might have on her tenure profile. She had always sensed a rainy day coming. It would be an afternoon in winter when some massive typhoon would speak her name. There would be a new fluid language, a kind of cursive rendered in acid. Then it would invade her lungs, she would be singed, and it would be the time of the drowning.

It occurred to her that the suddenness with which her behavior altered had a predestined quality. It was as if all her life she had been secretly engaged in a dress rehearsal for precisely this abandonment and divestiture. This knowledge felt perpetual and alluring, like sin or revelation. It was inescapable, a kind of return. It had always been there. This was the cove where she was meant to anchor.

This must be what she was thinking about at traffic lights, why she didn’t play her car radio and was never bored, why the static in the air seemed a kind of hieroglyphic she tried to decipher. This must be why she would walk out of theaters and not remember the title of the play, the setting or even the genre. Had it been a musical, a love story or a comedy? She would walk across a parking lot, shaking her head.

Perhaps she had been tuned into another station entirely. There was something on the margin that attracted her, something in the extreme edge of the register where you couldn’t be certain of dates or motives or outcome. She could never understand, really, why the motion picture was more interesting than sitting in the lobby with the carpet that looked like a stained glass in reverse, deco blood petals, panels of crimson and lime that marked not translucency but rather the end of the line. Here couples glared at each other above the too yellow popcorn and all things were random, vaguely metallic and swollen. She thought of hooks that were swallowed. And why was this less significant than the other images, the ones you sat in the dark rooms for, sat as if a subliminal force were fattening you for a harvest or a kill.

Erica realized that time would pass and her grant would expire. The questions she had planned to examine seemed distant and trivial. She wondered if it were possible to be defined by refusal. Certainly the most brilliant of her subjects would listen to her questions, run a slow hand across a soft mouth and remain silent. She was looking out the kitchen window when she realized this. There were five pigeons on a strip of grass and the red bands around their necks were exactly the same shade of corrupted pink as the red no-stopping lines painted on the curb in front of their house. Had she finally discovered something?

She began to sleep past eight o’clock. She called a taxi cab for her daughter the night before, gave Flora ten dollars, told her to wait outside and keep the change. She reminded Flora not to mention this to Bob. She squeezed Flora’s shoulder with her fingers when she said this.

When Erica woke up late, she made a second pot of coffee, put brandy in it, ate an extra piece of toast, layered it with jam. She turned on the stereo. The concept of rock and roll in the morning by sunlight was stunning.

Her husband came home for lunch. She hadn’t expected him. She was looking out the kitchen window. There was a tarnish in the air, a sort of glaze. Perhaps part of a complicated cleaning solution with invisible ammonia, it was designed to bring out the shine. But the sky was overcast.

“You seem troubled,” Bob said. He put his briefcase on the table. Its proportion seemed monumental. “Is it the research?”

She shook her head, no. It was nearly noon. It was the hour the working men sat on lawns smoking cigarettes and eating lunches that looked too meager to sustain them. They leaned close to one another, planning burglaries and trading lies about women.

“You aren’t yourself,” Bob decided. He paused and studied her face. “I don’t have to go to Seattle. Christ. I don’t even have a paper to deliver.”

Erica said, “Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly fine.”

Later, she stood in the backyard where the bushes were trimmed and resembled elongated skulls. She had forgotten he was going to a conference. Now that she knew he would be gone this night and the next, she wondered if his absence mattered. Was it fundamental, was it definitive, would there be change? She leaned against the side of the house. These were the stark fragments that bruised, made you fall, made you hoarse. It was best to create methods of walking with your eyes shut.

Bob noticed that she was different, but his conclusion was wrong. He could observe but not interpret. She was merely in transition. She was returning to a version of a former self. And Erica wondered how she would devise a process of clarification, how she would solve this small confusion of who she was.

Whenever she encountered enormities. Erica could only think of walking beside water, a bay or a rocky stretch of coast, or finding her daughter, holding Flora and breathing in the scent of her black hair, which was the spiced essence of night rivers. They were the only two manifestations in the landscape that were indisputable, like a certain sequence of spires, of bridges or plazas. This was how she could know where she was. Geography would form a rudimentary net, the first in a series of coordinates. Later, she could build a landing strip.

Erica walks into the early afternoon, uncertain of where she is going. There is only a sense of fluid depth and the realization that she is again thinking about her sister, Ellen. Her sister has two best friends, and both of them are dying. These two other women, barely nodding acquaintances, have somehow achieved a massive presence in Erica’s life. Often her sister will telephone with frantic updates on the brutal unravelings of the other women. It is curious how Lillian and Babette seem more vivid to her than her actual friends.

Erica is given the details of their deterioration, and she absorbs these fragments without effort. They arrange themselves, as if she has an innate capacity for this ordering. She understands these proportions, their facets, how they must be viewed and composed. She envisions Babette, the French skier, frail now, ninety-three pounds. Babette, who never married or had children, who chose instead an intimacy with mountains, a life of suitcases and hotels facing ridges of white, is now confined to a wheelchair.

Erica has memorized the saga of Lillian, shunned by her oncologist, left without a referral for three months, and finally sent to an experimental chemotherapy program. The doctor tells her they expect the treatment to fail.

In the long mornings of waxy stray sunlight across camellias, she finds herself waiting for Ellen to telephone, to recite the most recent conversations, to impart the medical data and the second and third opinions. How Lillian, only a year before the vice president of a stockbrokerage, a woman with two hundred and seventy-five employees, called in the pre-dawn, terrified. They had removed the plug from her arm. They wanted her to get out of bed and into a wheelchair.

“They’re dismissing me, and I’m too sick to go home,” Lillian realized and wept. “I’m afraid. I keep drifting off.”

“What did you do?” Erica asks. She can see pan of the street from her living room window. The leaves on the orange trees look artificial, landscaped beyond recognition. They are not trees but someone’s concept of how trees should look.

“I tracked down the resident. He said Lillian could die any minute. She doesn’t have a month left.” Her sister sounds broken. “I told him Lillian lives alone. I said he couldn’t send her home alone, not like this.”

She pictures Lillian, whom she has only met twice, and cannot clearly remember, as a tall woman with white hair and a straw hat with yellow silk flowers. Now this Lillian is shrunken, ordered into a wheelchair and pushed to the front of a building she cannot recognize. She has no hair, she is too weak to fasten her wig, it’s become too complicated. A nurse who barely speaks English, is from the Philippines or Guatemala, deposits the wheelchair at a curb where a taxi attempts to take Lillian to an apartment she cannot provide adequate directions to.

After all, north or south of Wilshire is an immensity of possibility; everything writhes, stung by citrus and pastel.

Who could draw the line? Lillian knows there are indications. Poinsettias in a cluster might be December. There are lilies at Easter. That comes in April. Of course vegetation is a kind of compass that rises from the ground. There is always a chorus of pigments. This is why we believe in resurrection. And Lillian couldn’t get out of a taxi, walk across a lobby, wait for an elevator, open the many locks of the heavy front door she had insisted on. And there’s no food there, there hasn’t been food in weeks. She just eats through a plug. She can’t remember how to turn on appliances or to whom she gave her cat.

Erica wonders if these are parables. Is this what happens to women who dare to live alone, even the good ones, like Lillian, a churchgoer who doesn’t sin, ever. Her sister is adamant. Lillian is from the South, for god’s sake, she wears gloves and gives money to an organization to protect stray animals.

The air smells scrubbed, polished and detoxed. It is a winter that has been taught a lesson. And Erica doesn’t want Flora to be left like this, in some remote time, when she can’t be there to protect her, to make sure about release forms, wheelchairs, plugs, the administration of morphine, a bed with a view of the tops of palms.

Suddenly Erica remembers when she decided to murder her daughter. They were living in Northern California. It was the winter it never stopped raining, the coldest and wettest on record. She was going to graduate school, and they didn’t know anyone in the county. Erica was still smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. She had bronchitis again. It was her fourth bout of bronchitis that year, and she refused to take a chest X ray. The doctor in the student clinic said she was killing herself, pointed his long white arm at the door, placed her chart on the counter next to her purse, turned back, walked away.

Erica was convinced she had lung cancer. She could sense the blue particles like a glacial stream, trickling and widening. The rain made them grow. They were sensitive to water. Inside her veins she could feel a fluid she imagined was the color of chilled larkspur. She was certain she wouldn’t survive this California winter.

It was before she married Bob. She lay awake listening to the rain and imagined her daughter Flora without her, a four- year-old orphan, a ward of the state. A child to be adopted by foster parents who would sexually abuse her, fail to provide piano lessons and poetry. A child to be raised in apartments where she was the entertainment for the brothers and uncles and the television set was always on.

There was only one possible solution. She would take Flora into her bed, curve into her body, hold her beneath the quilt. They would both take sleeping pills and the winter would he over. But she didn’t kill Flora that night, didn’t kill herself, and now it is Los Angeles in early February.

Everything feels and tastes like spring. The afternoon dissolves into impressions, phantom images; we give them anchors, we give them language, she thinks. We practice acts of anthropomorphism; we weld the rules of grammar, but they are still creatures, pulsing.

She needs to see Flora. She is nine blocks from her school. It is afternoon and at 2:30 the fourth graders have gym on North Field. Erica can sit behind a clump of oleander and watch her daughter play volleyball near the fence. The day has become simple, transparent. She can either walk along the ocean or watch Flora move through lacquered sunlight. These are the only two indisputable activities in this world.

She walks past an orange tree, then a tree with lemons that look distended and one with tangerines that are a sharp red. They sting the mouth. You bite into them and burn or bleed. You serve such fruit at weddings or wakes. Yesterday she watched Bob pack. He was going to a meeting in Washington. He said she seemed different. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine,” she had replied.

She remembers saying this to her mother. She had employed exactly the same cadence, the precise rise and fall of her voice. This is a lie she has long ago engraved within herself. This is the way she imagines grown-ups speak. And her mother said, “Don’t make me laugh.”

“I’m getting myself together,” she had told her mother. It might have been at the end of graduate school, during her first divorce. It might have been the winter she almost murdered her daughter.

“It’s going to take you a lifetime,” her mother said. Her mother was drinking vodka. She surveyed her coolly, evaluated her Like a suit she didn’t consider worth buying. Then she smiled.

Of course, her mother and father are dead now. They are dead but not quite gone. There is an entire substratum of people like this, people she doesn’t quite know, and yet they somehow linger. There is the matter of her sister with the two best friends who are dying. There are her daughter’s mystery friends that surface and are erased, names she has never heard before suddenly brandished as best friends.

“You know Alexa?” Flora begins. Erica says no. “Alexa, my best friend,” Flora continues, highlighting each of her words, obviously annoyed.

This name is not familiar. She feels defensive and afraid. “I know Robin and Claudia,” she reminds her daughter. “I know the twins. But not Alexa.”

She is combing Flora’s hair. It is night. She winds strands into tiny black braids. In the morning, when the braids are undone. Flora will be adorned with vast complexities of curl. Now Flora’s head looks like a nest of snakes. We give birth to mythology over and over. Erica realizes, almost trembling with terror. We are the dried riverbeds where they hatch, where they drag their cold bodies across sand. It is from our bellies that they come.

“You’re lying,” Flora says. “All you do is talk on the phone. You don’t even drive me to school anymore.” Then she slams her bedroom door.

Now it is important that she find Flora and tell her she wasn’t lying. There are protocols for the keeping of names. These syllables are sacred. When the winds have taken everything, even the buildings and the stones and the bark, these names will remain. These are the perpetually open graves. She is going to explain this to her daughter. She will defend herself against this suggestion of desecration.

Last night, her sister called with more information about Babette. She can no longer sit. She has to sleep strapped to a board, upright, held by buckles. Her bones are turning to a kind of tin. Her sister cannot pronounce the name of the new disease. She can only say that Babette is rusting. She has nightmares filled with liquids, rain: waterfalls, a recurrent beach where she watches the approach of a tidal wave. Ellen has just visited her. She says Babette’s skin smells like dust. She creaks when she breathes.

Erica knows both women were misdiagnosed, twice. Somewhere there are four mistakes; someone must be counting. Last night she asked her sister, “Do you ever talk to Lillian about death? About dying?” Erica was lying on her bed. She wanted to know. Bob had not yet gone to Seattle. Erica had shut her bedroom door.

Her sister thought for a moment. “No.”

“What do you talk about?” Erica asks.

“Ordinary things,” her sister told her. “Who’s playing good tennis. Who got a face lift. Whose kid is in jail. The weather, the economy, you know.”

Erica does know. When her father was dying, when he was decaying in front of them, inches from their faces and almost in slow motion, it was the one thing no one ever spoke about. Father had the cancer stench. It was a kind of rancid yellow that made her think of tortured fruit and strange rotting cargoes abandoned at sea and something terrible done in rooms with unshaded lightbulbs, abortions, perhaps, or children being photographed naked. Her father’s skin became translucent. He was a region of rivers. You could peer inside and see his infinity of blue sins.

Erica wants to ask her sister if she remembers this, but she doesn’t. They never speak about their parents or the way they died or what their lives might have meant. Their parents simply disappeared, like a species that vanished overnight. It’s as if they never were.

Erica realizes there is an entire ghost substratum inhabiting her. She’s become aware of how much time she spends thinking about people she doesn’t know and will never know, doesn’t even want to meet once. Not just Lillian and Babette, these secondary tragedies she’s internalized, not just Flora’s profusion of suddenly found and lost best friends, but how she thinks about movie stars and European royalty and the state of their marriages.

She doesn’t do this consciously, she would never permit herself to do this consciously. But when she takes her emotional pulse, when she looks directly inside, what she’s been thinking about during a three-way traffic light, during a wait in a line at the bank, is Elizabeth Taylor and her new husband, the former carpenter and drug dealer. What do they do together? Do they attend AA meetings? Do they work the twelve-step recovery program? Do they promptly admit mistakes and answer crisis hotlines? She thinks they secretly drink and take drugs. Liz shows him what she has learned about pain pills and champagne. And he initiates her into the sordid avenues of hard-faceted white, the great internal winter, cocaine.

Now, during her leave of absence, when she can take her emotional pulse repeatedly, with concentrated deliberation, she realizes she has been colonized by the insubstantial — something leaking, broken and generic out of a self-destructing culture. A kind of collective virus.

She used to think about Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. That was when she lived with painters, when she lived in lofts above Indian restaurants, and afternoons smelled of curry, the sun set in a sequence of saffrons, she thought the bungalows behind hedges of sunflowers along the Venice canals were holy, and her parents were not yet dead.

She didn’t try to imagine Sylvia Plath and her husband in bed. She didn’t envision Virginia wrapped in the arms of a woman, rain falling, and what they might have done with their mouths. She visualized instead the kitchens where they brewed tea, the patterns of painted pink rosebuds on the cups and the way the wind sounded as if it had just been eating ships. But the graphic couplings she now considers, the intricacies of bodies and proclivities, this she has saved for television stars.

It is 1:30, and she is four blocks from Flora’s school. She can sense that Lillian is going into a coma. That’s what she was afraid of when she telephoned Ellen and wept, “Don’t let them send me home. I feel like I’m drifting in and out.”

Erica closes her eyes, and there are acres of faces within her. She is even replete with the spouses of men she barely knows. How many afternoons had she imagined her lawyer’s wife. She did this for months during her first divorce, staring at the photograph on his desk. A blond woman with ice skates hung over her right shoulder. A woman wearing a green wool sweater and sunglasses. She was often tempted to ask her name. She finally decided it was Ingrid or Justine. She was good with dogs and gardens, never got migraines, enjoyed baking.

It occurs to Erica that what she wants to research is not history as it actually is or was but some more fragile peripheral version, in its own way, filled with untamed ambiguity. It would be a history of the undead, the flickering partials and the almost.

In these regions of ambivalence are the men she almost married. Erica has reconstructed pieces of their lives, a conversation, a newspaper clipping, an accidental sighting, something overheard. She might have stayed with Derek in Maui. Or the photographer in Spain. There are the lingering pulsings of her former selves, standing on balconies of apartments and villas, watering geraniums, wearing a white slip above cobble stone alleys, above a plaza or a bay.

Jason, telephoning her at the university two years ago. She was working late. He was drunk. “I’m drinking fifteen-year-old scotch and it’s been fifteen years since I fucked you. Come over.”

Erica looked out her office window, noted the low soiled mountains and considered it. It was August in Southern California, and everything seemed burned, even at night. It was the time of the avenues of scorch and the unraveling of an indelible yellow.

She could reach into the substrata of the barely known, make a date, meet in a motel in Long Beach, maybe, or Van Nuys. It would have to be an urban suburb where no landscape could intrude, where it wouldn’t be about beaches and palm trees, but California as it really was —back roads the color of mustard, smelling of onions and vinegar below hills where nothing could grow. In a valley of brush and sage and sand they could know the real nature of their hearts. It wasn’t the stuff of postcards. But they knew this already. That’s why she hung up.

We carry the undead with us, she thinks. That’s why it’s so hard to walk, why her boots hurt and the sun sears. She still packs for Jason, still takes him to Hawaii and London with her. She stands at her closet, one closet or another, hearing him say, only red or black. You’re a Toulouse-Lautrec whore. Anything else on your skin is an atrocity. And she finds herself repeatedly choosing these colors, in nightgowns and coats, tablecloths and socks.

Maybe she will tell her colleagues it is the history of the partial she wishes to explore, the terrain without specific intentions or borders. This is what she is thinking as she approaches Flora’s school, as she sits on a lawn next to a rock with a bronze plaque nailed to it. “Dedicated to Maurice J. Finelander, 1918-1964.” What did that forty-six-year-old man die from? Did he suffer, turn translucent, did he drift, could you look inside his chest and chart the avenues of his disgrace?

After she sees Flora, she will go home and wait for her sister to call. Afternoons are punctuated with desperate news about Lillian. Sometimes Erica telephones first. She has never called her sister so often, not even when their mother had a heart attack. They haven’t spoken this often since they shared a room in the summer house.

“What’s the latest with Lillian?” she will ask. Her eyes will be abnormally wide, she will take big breaths, as if there is some quality in the late afternoon wind that she needs.

Perhaps it has something to do with the enormous subterranean architecture she is discovering with its roots, shadows and branching networks. This is beneath her feet all the time. This is what children sense under the bed. This is the secret structure of the world, and children feel this hidden spine. This is why they need stuffed pandas and teddy bears. This is why she is walking to the school to find her daughter, to tell Flora she would never lie about the names of the almost known.

Suddenly, Erica recognizes a complexity that makes her decide to turn back. She wants to tell Flora that certain fragments seem like lies but they are not. It is simply the other world with its decaying possibilities casting luminous debris. It is not deliberate. There is no malice. But names get lost here. They are like seashells washed up on a wide night shore in a season of not enough moon. Inside each shell is a name, and the sea speaks it clearly, says Alexa, Flora, Lillian, But there are winds, the intrusion of partially forgotten winters that in memory are a stark and insinuating blue. And Erica realizes that she cannot tell this to Flora. This is a stretch of beach you must find for yourself and then only in a drowning season.

Erica walks home on a boulevard where the sidewalk is planted with rose bushes, bird of paradise and iris, and she is thinking about events in the subterranean world. Here are the traffic accidents we almost had, but didn’t. Here are the planes we missed that might have carried bombs on them. Do the almosts form an architecture? Is that how you navigate in the cities of the undead?

Later that week, her sister calls, desperate. Lillian has run away. She’s had a paranoid seizure, perhaps from the drugs. Or maybe the cancer has metastasized into her brain. No one knows. She just took her raincoat and wallet and disappeared from the hospital. Her neighbor saw her get out of a cab. Lillian explained that she had come back for her cat.

“What should I do?” her sister asks.

She imagines her sister holding the phone, pacing, staring out the balcony. The wind has been blowing, a Santa Ana from the desert. Everything seems a form of fleshy yellow. It is a night of skin. Lamps are insignificant. The moon is so inordinately bright she thinks the savanna must have been like this, rocked by streaks of yellow with the intensity of seduction and prophecy.

“We’ll drive the streets and find her,” Erica decides. “I’ll pick you up.”

Flora has suddenly appeared. She is always barefoot, soundless. She simply materializes. She is holding her math book open at her hip. Flora could survive in the night, with her head of uncoiling snakes. She seems to be waiting for something. Erica knows what her daughter is doing. Flora is stalking.

Bob has returned from his conference in Seattle. He is staring at her, watching her assemble car keys, wallet, jacket. He studies the objects she is sliding into her pockets as if he plans to collect evidence. He is standing in front of the living room door as if he intends to guard it.

Earlier, when she was cooking dinner. Bob had asked if she had gone to the library. He had telephoned, and she wasn’t home. She said no. She stared at the cheese she was cutting. She examined the tip of the knife. Her husband didn’t understand that she was never going back to the library. It doesn’t contain the artifacts she needs. Then he asked what she had done all day.

“I don’t remember,” she said. She was holding a knife. It felt hard in her hand. She put it down. She could feel the moon through the window. It occurred to her that there was no history, only the etiology of yellow.

Now Bob says, “Where are you going?”

There is always this moment, she realizes. The where and the why. The demand for coordinates and specifics, the number of acres, who saw the troops, which direction and how many. There is always this and the way sometimes you don’t answer.

“It’s Lillian,” she says, walking quickly toward the door. He is heavier but has trouble with his knees. She could outflank him if she had to. “She’s roaming the streets. She’s lost her mind.”

Erica considers the invisible artifacts she has recently unearthed. She thinks about mapping the subterranean stratum. What sort of tools would she need, what form of illumination?

“But you don’t even know that woman,” her husband says.

“I do know her,” Erica replies. “I’ve never known anyone so well.”

Flora is staring at her. They look into one another’s eyes, and Erica realizes communication is dimensional, like something knitted, a rope or a net. Then she is walking into the yellowed night, where the wind sounds like a rushing river; there is a lashing of branches, and the leaves are clinging to stay on.