She walked through the parking lot of a Kansas Fried Chicken and across a deserted basketball court named after a local projects kid turned pro, the sodium lights casting her shadow thin and twisted to the Powell Houses behind the backboard. She marched across the diamond of a Little League field resting atop a fifty-year-old chromium dump, her face sullen yet tremulous, her light eyes fixed on the ground in front of her.

The fashion wave rippling through Darktown that summer was fat strips of metallic reflector tape slapped on jeans, sneakers, and shirts. As she approached the dingy yellow sizzle of JFK Boulevard—all storefront churches, smoke shops, and abandoned businesses—the agitated boredom of the dope crews brought the street corners alive with restless zips of light.

A patrol car slowed to profile her as she passed under a crude mural of a fetus with a crucifix sprouting from its navel. She raised her eyes, opened her mouth, and took a step in the car’s direction. “Give a saliva test to this one here,” the driver murmured to his partner. But then she seemed to change her mind, quickly giving the cruiser her back and evaporating into a side street.

In a few more minutes she was striding across another ball field, this one also atop an old chromium dump, and then she was facing the Dempsy Medical Center, vast, Gothic, and half shut down, the emergency room entrance shedding the only eye-level light before the city hit the river. She finally came to a halt just outside the cone-shaped perimeter cast before the entrance like a spotlight on a bare stage.

She hesitated on the edge of the pale, one foot in, one out, her face taking on a sparkle of panic as she eyed the full-up benches of the waiting room through the gummy glass of the automatic doors. For a moment she froze but then seemed to get a grip, decisively rolling off to her left, turning the corner of the building, and descending to a more shadowed entrance at the bottom of a ramp. Walking through a partially raised roll-down gate, she stepped inside an empty, garishly lit room, the silence and stillness such that the buzzing of a fluorescent desk lamp could be heard twenty feet away.

At first, as if disoriented by a sense of trespass, she appeared not to notice the overweight young black man on the gurney directly across the room from her. But once she caught sight of him, she seemed unable to look away. He was barefoot but otherwise fully dressed—dead, the fatty tissue billowing out from the box-cutter slash under his chin like a greasy yellow beard. She stared at the pale-skinned soles of his feet as if hypnotized by this hidden whiteness, stood there staring until a stainless-steel freezer door opened directly across from her. A yellow-eyed middle-aged man in a hooded parka came into the room, instantly rearing back from her presence.

“You a relative?” he asked, removing his coat. His eyes rose to something directly over her head.

She looked up to see a digital readout blinking “115,” then down to see that she was standing on a gurney-sized weighing platform set into the floor. When she looked back at the morgue attendant his eyes were on her hands.

“You in the wrong wing.”

Standing by the nurses’ station that fronted the medical center’s ER, the security guard, a goateed, nose-ringed kid tricked out in a uniform like a full-bird colonel, eavesdropped on an overnatty detective. He was on the phone to report a shots-fired situation—one dead Rottweiler, the shooter getting his face resewn in one of the trauma rooms. “A good shooting. Just thought you needed to know.” Twenty feet down the corridor a sad-faced Pakistani leaned patiently against the wall, a bloody bath towel swirled tightly around his head, his ear in an ice-filled Ziploc bag.

There was an abrupt rapping against the glass doors of the ambulance bay, and the guard turned to see the woman outside, trying to push her way in. His mouth in a twist, he brusquely signaled her to walk around to the main entrance, then resumed watching the free show in the hallways, zeroing in on a mush-mouthed drunk reclining, fully dressed, on a slant-parked gurney. The guy lay casually on his side, propped up on an elbow like a Roman senator, his head resting on the palm of his hand. Earlier in the evening, the story went, he had bitten down on a shot glass and added a three-inch extension to one side of his smile.

“I’m a alcoholic,” the drunk said, having caught the guard’s eye. “I got me a big problem with that. Not a little problem, a big problem. A goddamn Shop Rite-sized problem. I ain’t gonna lie about it.”

The guard snorted and turned his attention to a bored correction officer on escort duty. He was doing half-assed push-ups against the wall while waiting for his charge to get the rest of his thumbnail removed.

A nurse’s aide, a round, bespectacled, almost elderly black woman with a bemused set to her mouth, slapped a blood-pressure cuff on the drunk.

“I need me something for the pain. I told you that, right?”

“Right.”

“I got to get some Percocets or something ’cause I can not stand pain and I got to get to work at 6:00 A.M. in the morning.”

“Yeah? What do you do?” The nurse smirked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Well, I hope you don’t drive no school bus.”

“Mommy, I got me a forty-thousand-dollar car, cash paid. I’m telling you, you don t want to know.”

“You don’t want to know,” the nurse said, mocking him. “I cannot stand pain,” she added mincingly “You want to know about pain, you have yourself a baby, then come talk to me about pain.”

“Hey, I had six—”

“No, you.”

“Well, I was in the vicinity.”

The security guard, laughing now, hands behind his back, took a spacey 360-degree spin on one heel, then came alert with irritation as that lady outside the ambulance entrance renewed her rapping on the door. He began to wave her around again but saw the blood smearing the glass and what looked like a palm full of jewels pressed against the pane.

The ambulance bay doors were opened by remote to let a uniformed cop out, and suddenly the woman was in the house.

Eyes unfocused, teeth chattering, she floated down the hall, ignoring the irritated shout “Miss! Miss! Excuse me,” a reproachful singsong from the nurses station.

She wandered down the hallway, past the examination rooms—surgery, trauma, medical, X ray—then, as if remembering something, abruptly wheeled around, inadvertently stepping into the startled embrace of the goateed security guard.

“You got to go out to triage just like everybody else,” the kid lectured awkwardly, wincing at the sight of her upturned palms, the things growing there.