Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Family Life

Synopsis

From the beloved, New York Times-bestselling author of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress comes a hilarious, timely, and big-hearted new novel about rebuilding life in the face of disaster.

Forty-five-year-old Donna Koczynski is an ex-punk rocker, a recovering alcoholic, and the mother of two teenagers whose suburban existence detonates when she comes home early from a sales conference in Las Vegas to the surprise of a lifetime. As her world implodes, she sets off on an epic road trip to reclaim everything she believes she's sacrificed since her wild youth: Great friendship, passionate love, and her art. But as she careens across the U.S. from Detroit to New York to Memphis to Nashville, nothing turns out as she imagines. Ultimately, she finds herself resurrected on the other side of the globe, on a remote island embroiled in a crisis far bigger than her own.

Irresistibly funny, whip-smart, and surprisingly moving, Donna Has Left the Building spins an unforgettable tale about what it means to be brave — and to truly love — in a tumultuous world.

Release date: June 23, 2020

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

Chapter 1

The morning of my forty-fifth birthday, I woke up to a cop knocking on my windshield. My Subaru was parked in the dunes by a low concrete building scribbled with graffiti. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but after driving all night—fifteen, sixteen hours maybe—crying, downing Adderall and Ativan, talking aloud to myself, punching the rim of my steering wheel—shouting along to the Ramones at one point—Hey-ho! Let’s go!—blah, blah—you get the idea—I’d passed out in the passenger’s seat, reclined all the way back like a dentist’s chair. A brand-new guitar—a cheap Rogue Dreadnought—sat propped in my lap like a shotgun. I had only a dim recollection of buying it.

“Morning, Sunshine,” the cop said drily. His nametag read GONZALES. When I lowered my window, he looked surprised: Clearly, he hadn’t expected to see a middle-aged woman with pearl earrings in an ANTHRAX hoodie. “Everything okay in there?”

Without waiting for an answer, he took a perfunctory glance around the interior of my car. I felt a sudden kick of panic.

I’d fled in a frenzy—jamming items willy-nilly into my purse—forgetting my coat—my scarf—even my shoes. At first, I’d torn along the access roads without any particular destination in mind—driving recklessly around the grim, nickel-gray industrial parks and balding woodlands of southern Michigan—ruminating, weeping—having just left my husband, Joey (with his sexual malfeasance and his misuse of cosmetic dentistry)—and our son, Austin—whose emoji I saw more than his face now—it was like he communicated only through hieroglyphics—and our neurotic, drooling dog, Mr. Noodles, a Labradoodle with “issues” who wouldn’t stop yelping at 3 a.m.—costing us upward of $2,500 in pet psychiatry so far (a doggie shrink: really?)—and our overmortgaged house with its perennially unfinished “finished” basement—the kitchen circa 1982—our contractor, a reservist, apparently in Iraq or Kabul somewhere—so we couldn’t exactly sue—wires were sprouting from the drywall like the unwanted hairs on my chin.

With the heat cranked up, my Subaru had grown increasingly yeasty over the miles, encrusted with crumbs from granola bars and gummy bran muffins purchased at gas stations. The foot wells had clogged with cellophane wrappers and coffee cups like a landfill. In the backseat lay the curvaceous coffin of my new guitar case, along with a jumble of boxes from a discount shoe outlet, and an ominous, glinting pair of industrial scissors, and some hacked-up pleather, and a bottle of Listerine Zero, and about a hundred balled-up Kleenex littered about like so many paper roses from all of my crying. There was also, I realized, a large cache of other people’s prescription medication stashed in the glove compartment.

It occurred to me then that there might be a missing persons report out on me, or even—possibly—an arrest warrant.

But Gonzales stepped back from the window. “Ma’am, there’s no parking here,” he said wearily. “You gotta move.” He motioned to a sign I’d missed when I’d arrived in the dark: PARKS DEPARTMENT ONLY. Beyond it, to my right, I became aware for the first time of the New York City skyline rising across the water like a distant fortress, the great pistons of it glittering in the morning sun. Before me stretched the vast, heaving Atlantic, tumbling and scraping…tumbling and scraping…its surf sounding like applause. As the patrol car pulled away, I glanced down at my long-dead phone—then out at the unfamiliar, mesmerizing ocean—and realized that nobody on earth knew where I was. I had literally driven to the edge of America. I was wholly untethered. I could be anyone, do anything, or completely disappear. I had nowhere left to go.

  

My name is Donna Koczynski, and I’m an alcoholic. A lush. A drunk. A founding member of the Margarita Mafia, as a bunch of us on the PTA at my daughter’s middle school in Troy, Michigan, once christened ourselves. Now, I’m a dried-out alkie. That’s not how you’re supposed to say it, of course. The more correct term these days is “in recovery.” “In recovery” sounds so much more benign and generic and suburban. But a lot of the reason I drank was to get away from being benign and generic and suburban in the first place.

We’ve all heard addiction stories before. Some Bambi-eyed hopeful takes a snort or a swallow, then another—until we watch with smug fascination as her life spirals downward like a jet-fighter shot down over the Pacific (“corkscrewing” would actually be an excellent verb in my case, come to think of it). There’s her spectacular plummet, but then—of course—after the splat—redemption. Slowly, phoenix-like, she gets herself clean, piecing herself back together like a gorgeous mosaic.

Yeah, well.

My life fell apart after I got sober.

No one expects their personal implosion to be ridiculous. Certainly, I never did. Growing up in Detroit, I’d witnessed lives falling apart due to big, serious events: Wars. Plant closures. Illnesses. Yet my own epic unraveling seemed to be precipitated by a single trip to Las Vegas and a bacon-wrapped fig.

The Las Vegas part itself actually isn’t as significant as you might think. An annual marketing conference: bleh. But I had been sent there—all expenses paid—because I’d been nominated for an award. For twelve years, I’d been one of the top “culinary ambassadors” for a company called the Privileged Kitchen. Maybe you’ve heard of it: “foie gras quality kitchenware at chopped liver prices.” (Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist.) Instead of a physical store, Privileged Kitchen reps open pop-up cafés in shopping malls or come directly to your home—and prepare an entire gourmet meal for you and your friends using only PK products—which, of course, we pitch the hell out of to you as we cook.

So, in other words, yes: I was a salesperson. Me, Donna Koczynski, “culinary ambassador to your personal world of flavor.” I can see you rolling your eyes now, shifting in your seat. It’s okay. I get it. No one gets hot and bothered by some chirpy kitchen shill. No little kid grows up saying, “Gee, one day, I’d like to do cooking demos in strip malls and subdivisions.” But in my own defense, working for the Privileged Kitchen enabled me to set my own hours—be home for my kids after school—keep our mortgage afloat—which, given how the financial crisis hit Michigan, was no small feat, I can tell you. And I liked the PK gig well enough. It allowed me, in my own small way, to perform again.

The honor I was nominated for in Vegas was the company’s prestigious “Platinum Spatula Award.” The Platinum Spatula had begun in the early 1990s as a joke, really—a giggle among sales reps: a surplus plastic spatula wrapped in tinfoil and awarded to someone based on some inane, made-up category. Best Recovery from a Kitchen Disaster. Greatest Resemblance to David Letterman in a Hairnet. That sort of thing. But over time, it had morphed into an actual trophy—an oversized pewter-colored spatula with the recipient’s name engraved on the handle—accompanied by a check for $1,000. Colleen Lundstedt, the Privileged Kitchen’s CEO and founder, awarded it to the rep with the highest revenue each year.

The annual conference always took place in Las Vegas—though, really, it just as easily could’ve been held in Disneyland, Branson, or Des Moines. We Privileged Kitchen sales reps were a stupefyingly wholesome bunch. (I suppose we had to be if we were regularly going to get invited into strangers’ homes.) Most of us were women with kids, juggling all the parts. Three of my colleagues were actual Sunday school teachers. My colleague Victor and I were the only two who even swore on a regular basis. With the Privileged Kitchen crowd, there was no adultery in Vegas. There was no white powder chopped up on mirrors removed from the bathroom wall, or college funds gambled away at the craps tables at 3 a.m. My cohorts’ idea of fun was karaoke (“Copacabana” and “Shake It Off,” my God) and playing tipsy games of “Celebrity” in the lounge. With us, what happened in Vegas was never anything that needed to stay there.

Still, you’d think Las Vegas would be a dangerous place for someone like me—and you’re right. Except that I’d developed little strategies. I brought jumbo bags of sugarless gummy bears from Costco and carried Austin’s Traveler Guitar with me. I’d gotten it for him for Christmas after he’d complained that my old Stratocaster was too “bulky” to practice on. “Why should I have to, like, stand and hold a guitar, when I can just compose on my iPad?” he’d said. His shrug of indifference was like a blade in my gut.

The Traveler Guitar was lightweight, just a truncated neck and frets, essentially. It was nearly as portable as a laptop, and I’d held out that misguidedly optimistic, idiotic parental hope that Austin would be thrilled by its novelty, that this new-generation hybrid would magically inspire him to want to keep practicing. (And let’s face it, make him love me more!) Obviously, though, I’d missed the memo: Almost by definition, no sixteen-year-old boy wants to play the same musical instrument as his mother.

And so, the Traveler Guitar that I’d ordered specially for him sat propped in his room behind his hockey equipment until I’d finally decided to liberate it for my trip to Las Vegas. The afternoon I arrived, I sat on the edge of my hotel bed, tuning it, strumming through a few light riffs as they came to me. Random stuff, stuff I hadn’t played in decades: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” “In Between Days.” Inexplicably, the theme from The Munsters. It was odd what I recalled, what I seemed to channel, the muscle memory in my now-uncalloused, stinging fingers. But it felt surprisingly good; it kept me occupied.

When I ran out of songs, I went into the bathroom and undressed. I told myself that I was just going to bathe, yet inevitably, I scootched down in the tub so that my pelvis was directly beneath the faucet and spread my legs. As the water tongued against me, I imagined Zack, my boyfriend from when I was sixteen, and then the cute, bed-headed guy who’d assisted me at the Hertz counter earlier that day at the airport. Okay, I’m not proud of this. But what can I say? Joey and I, we’d been married twenty-three years already. And since hitting forty, my hormones? Well. Nobody tells you that perimenopause is like puberty in reverse. Just a snow globe of emotions all over again, and some days, I was in so much sexual heat, I was sure it was boiling off me in a vapor. Other times I was just, well, sweaty.

The Platinum Spatula was awarded on the second day of the convention during the final plenary session—a time chosen, I suspected, to allay that hypoglycemic funk of late afternoon, when everyone started yawning and stretching and secretly checking their phones. Two other sales reps had been nominated alongside me: Amelia McCorkle, a high-strung dog breeder from Boston; and Brittany Chang, a twenty-seven-year-old fireplug of a girl from Corpus Christi who’d once broken her ankle auditioning for The Next Food Network Star.

Colleen Lundstedt called us all up onto the stage. We had to stand there like beauty contestants as she chimed from the podium: “Don’t they all look great, folks? Big round of applause, please, for the top culinary ambassadors of 2015!” With great fanfare, she introduced each one of us (finally pronouncing my last name right. Koczynski—Koh-zhin-skee—it’s not that hard, people). Then, she held up the “secret envelope”—which was just plain silly, really, because everyone knew that Colleen herself selected the winner. “A drumroll, please!”

The only time I’d ever been awarded something was for my sobriety—the one-year token, then two, and most recently, five. Joey and the kids had attended each ceremony and hooted and applauded. The first year, we’d had a sheet cake afterward at home, studded with candles and buttercream roses. The kids had made cards: Austin’s a crayoned picture of me holding a big glass with an arrow pointing to it saying “Diet Coke” and Congrats, Mom on 1 year sober!!! Thank you for not getting drunk!!! I am so proud of you!!! (Good God, that alone nearly killed me.) The next year, we’d gone to dinner at a Mexican restaurant the kids loved, with an insipid mariachi band and virgin strawberry margaritas all around. Yet in the end, we were always celebrating, in effect, something I’d stopped doing, not anything I, myself, had ever managed to achieve or create.

Colleen paused dramatically, her head thrown back, her spray-tanned wrist pressed against her forehead. Playing along, Brittany Chang clasped her hands together and jumped up and down campily and squealed “ohohoh!” There was a smattering of laughs from the other reps—though I didn’t think Brittany was fooling anybody. It seemed obvious to me that she really wanted to win.

So did I, frankly. A thousand bucks—with one kid in college already, and us finally dug out of bankruptcy? Plus, I deserved it. I’d been with the Privileged Kitchen longer than either Amelia or Brittany. I’d worked harder than either of them, too. I know that selling kitchenware sounds like a joke, but do you know how stressful it is to prepare an entire three-course meal (tuna crudo with avocado mousse; ginger-glazed duck breast; pineapple panna cotta) while shouting like a carnival barker inside a shopping mall—trying to capture people’s attention as they meander aimlessly from Yankee Candle to the Sunglass Hut, their eyes glued to their phone screens? It’s not easy to cook in front of thirty skeptical invitees, either, in some stranger’s kitchen—pets, toddlers, hostesses clattering underfoot—their ringtones playing snippets of “Born to Run” and “La Cucaracha”—all while you’re chopping and sautéing and smiling and keeping up the friendly patter as the oven overheats and olive oil spits up from the skillet, freckling your wrists with tiny first-degree burns.

As a PK rep, I’d gone to places on weekends that no one else ever bothered with. My hometown, the ruins of Detroit—whole neighborhoods sitting burned out and discarded like shell casings in weedy fields. I’d driven with my wares past miles of ghost gardens, collapsed factories, abandoned skyscrapers, meeting on Saturday mornings with young artists and hipsters striving to revive the city with little farm-to-table restaurants in the trashed storefronts of Corktown. Joey hated when I went downtown—he insisted on accompanying me whenever possible—it was still one of the carjacking capitals of the US—but sometimes, I braved it alone myself.

I drove over to Dearborn regularly, too. There was a huge Arab-American community out there—completely untapped. They tended to lie low, especially since September 11—twice they’d had to cancel their heritage festival because of protests and threats—and a lot of folks tended to be leery of them, but I’d figured: Hey, they cook, right? And so I taught myself how to make labneh and kibbeh and pilafs—easy enough—really delicious, actually—and the women were appreciative and welcoming—they even taught me a few words in Arabic, though I think this was just for their own amusement—most of them were American-born to begin with—and even I could tell my accent was a nightmare—and they tended not to buy a lot of stuff in the end. But still. Royal Oak, Inkster, Sterling Heights, Livonia: I did them all. No potential customer within a fifty-mile radius of me went unpitched. Utensil by utensil, I moved that inventory. I was intrepid.

“And the winner is…” Colleen Lundstedt’s voice chimed like a nursery school teacher’s. In spite of myself, and my desire for total nonchalance, I felt my heart catch and my face smile as I heard her say my name—my name!—in the echo chamber of my head. “Brittany Chang. Brittany,” Colleen Lundstedt announced, “you have not only had some of the highest revenue for 2015, but also, the highest ratings on our website’s ‘customer satisfaction’ survey and the most followers on Twitter and Instagram!”

And suddenly, perky Brittany was jumping up and down, clapping and posing for photos with Colleen Lundstedt, and waving the spatula victoriously above her head. Amelia and I stood there with the good-natured smiles plastered across our faces that we salespeople are such masters at—then we, too, congratulated Brittany, shook hands with Colleen Lundstedt—it was an honor just to be nominated—blah, blah—before getting the hell off the stage. “Hey, at least we got a free vacation, right?” Amelia sighed, biting her lower lip. “Though, dammit, I’m missing my dogs.”

“Yeah, well…” I said vaguely, and my voice trailed off. And I realized, on some level, I’d been expecting this very outcome all along. It seemed inevitable, somehow. Nowadays, the world valued velocity and spectacle over anything genuine. Or maybe I was just getting old.

Afterward, there was a cocktail reception we were all obligated to go to as well. It was held in one of Vegas’s swanky new restaurants, on a mezzanine overlooking the main dining room. The gimmick of the place was a giant glass “wine pyramid” that rose up through the center of the dining room like a three-story volcano. Waitresses in acrobatic harnesses rappelled up and down inside it, plucking bottles of merlot and sauvignon blanc from racks fifty feet overhead. It was meant to be elegant, I suppose (the menu said the design “recalled the French tradition of the Louvre”), but Vegas can’t help itself, can it? It was far more Ringling Brothers than Le Cirque, so literally over the top.

Me, I ordered a cranberry and club soda—one, then another, then another—God, I would’ve loved something stronger. At AA, a fellow alkie once said, “I feel like I’ve got this voice inside me crying all the time, I need. I want. Fill me.” This was my reality exactly: I need. I want. Fill me. At the reception, I wandered around sucking on my gummy bears nonstop, accepting jokey condolences from my colleagues, posing gamely with them for group selfies, smiling until my face hurt. I had a vague sense that hors d’oeuvres were being passed—platters of mushroom tartlets, baby lamb chops, some sort of deconstructed spring roll—but my stomach was in knots from the ceremony—and anyway, all of it was just loaded with calories. And so I didn’t eat, and the party began to blur around the edges and, suddenly, the atrium below me was rotating. I excused myself to the ladies’ room, performed some human origami trying to wrestle myself out of my Spanx, gave myself a good talking-to in the bathroom mirror, then doused my face several times with cold water. By the time I emerged, I was surprised to find the last of my cohorts already downstairs by the coat-check, struggling to punch their arms through the straps of their complimentary Privileged Kitchen 2015 tote bags. The servers were clearing away the dishes, disassembling the bar.

I felt a stab of abandonment. A postparty melancholy started to seep in. Twelve years of hard work, and zilch in the end.

I stood alone on the mezzanine, unsure of what to actually do with myself now (call Joey? text the kids?)—certainly, I should be doing something—what was my life, after all, without responsibility and productivity and guilt? Turning my phone back on, I saw I’d missed several alerts. My screen read:

Ashley Kozcynski tweeted:

@BernieSanders should ban GMO’s. They’re killing the bees! Sanders 4 Prez. #FeeltheBern #noGMOs;

Charleston massacre pain scene lingers. Check your White Privilege, people!!!;

Russian airstrikes rumored to start targeting Homs!! ☹

Ashley, our daughter, was studying abroad in London for the year. She was majoring in—God help us all—something called “Social Theory and Practice”—living in a group house full of homemade hummus and recycled toilet paper. When she’d first told us about the exchange program in Britain, I’d pictured her sipping tea in some grand Victorian drawing room, being waited on by a butler—okay, I’d been binge-watching Downton Abbey—yet whenever I Skyped, she appeared in a grungy kitchen with an electric kettle plugged into a green wall and a Union Jack tacked over the sink like a stage prop—her own declaration of independence, I supposed, though geographically backward.

In our family, her earnestness and sense of justice were legend. Always, she had been the rescuer of stray cats, injured birds, the keeper of lost caterpillars. Once, when she was four, she’d asked tremulously as I was giving her a bath, “Mommy, what happens to all the soap bubbles when they go down the drain?” When I told her they popped and dissolved into the sea, she’d cried inconsolably. “All the bubbles die? And the sea gets full of dirty water? But then who washes the sea?” Her empathy, to me, was stunning—and admirable—and poignant—but, also, good God, exhausting. At one point, Joey had a standing offer of $20 to the first family member who could make Ashley laugh hysterically (an extra ten for milk-out-the-nose!).

Now, occasionally over Skype, she’d mention going to the British Library or the Tate Modern. But mostly, she seemed consumed with tweeting her moral outrage over the world’s injustices to her 39,672 Twitter followers. I squinted down at my phone: What the hell were Homs?

So often, I felt like I didn’t have an actual brain anymore; now that I was into my forties, my mind seemed to have been reduced to a sushi train at a cheap Japanese restaurant: nothing but tiny plates circling around on a conveyor belt, offering little substance, only reminders about PK demos, doggie tranquilizers, weight gains—Good God, I’m putting myself into a coma just thinking about it—but there on the balcony, all my internal chatter came to a halt. Dumbly, I stared at the airborne waitresses in their glass pyramid. It was like watching exotic fish undulating in a giant aquarium.

“That takes guts.” A man in a rumpled suit jacket emerged from the men’s room. He stood planted in the path between the reception alcove and the kitchen, rattling the ice cubes in his glass, eyeing the girls.

He was heavyset, baby-faced, perspiring. A forelock of grubby blond hair fell into his eyes like a comma. The smudgy lozenges of his eyeglasses gave him a slightly robotic look. He seemed to be one of those men in their thirties who, due to indulgence, work, and junk food, were not aging well. A wedding band winked dully on his left hand.

As a waiter passed between us holding aloft a tray full of ravaged hors d’oeuvres, the man held up his hand like a stop sign. “Hey. Hang on a sec.” He motioned to the platter. “Got anything good?”

Surveying the leftovers, he plucked an untouched mushroom tartlet from the debris and popped it into his mouth. “Mmm. Not bad.” Pulling out a napkin that appeared to be clean, he nimbly piled on it two remaining triangles of spanakopita, a congealing baby lamb chop, and the last pancetta-wrapped fig.

I felt a prickle of irritation. Freeloading hors d’oeuvres was something my husband would do. Whenever we found ourselves at a restaurant buffet, Joey piled up his plate multiple times with crab salad, pasta, miniature pizzas. “Go back for seconds,” he’d instruct the kids. “I want everyone eating our money’s worth.” Anytime we stayed at a motel on our way to Mackinac Island, Joey wrapped up danishes and mini-muffins from the breakfast bar in paper napkins and smuggled them out under his shirt along with single-serve boxes of Kellogg’s cereals. “What the hell are you doing?” I always said. “You hate Fruit Loops. You tell your patients this crap rots their teeth.”

“And let it all go to waste?” he’d say. “We paid for it!”

Scavenging food was something I believed only starving actors, musicians, or homeless people should do. It was the very behavior I’d once hoped I’d left behind for good.

“Are you an entertainer?” I said to the man on the balcony.

If he detected any acidity in my voice, he ignored it. “Sure. Absolutely,” he said cheerily. “I’m a magician.” Dangling the bacon-wrapped fig by its stem, he tilted his head back and opened his mouth exaggeratedly. “See? I make food disappear.”

In spite of myself, I smiled. “Cute.” I raised my club-and-cranberry salutatorily in his direction, then turned back to watch the girls. They were as dizzying to watch as window washers, suspended above the dining room like human mobiles. Their mothers would have heart attacks, I thought, if they could see their babies like this. It was nighttime now, and the ambient music in the restaurant had been turned up; a techno version of “La Vie en Rose” throbbed across the dining room. The walls themselves seemed to pulsate.

In my peripheral vision, I saw a birdlike flutter. The man eating hors d’oeuvres was beside me now, performing what could only be described as a pirouette, his face flushed. Bowing gallantly to the airborne waitresses, he whipped around—his large body moving with unexpected agility to the backbeat—his hands pressed poetically to his heart. He threw himself against the brushed aluminum railing of the balcony, trying to attract their attention. He did this once, twice, then a third time with operatic passion, clutching his fists to his solar plexus, as the women continued to levitate past him indifferently. He bowed again, torqued halfway around with his arm flung out, then collapsed on the tiles.

It was only then that I realized he hadn’t been dancing for the girls at all.

He had been choking on the fig.

I screamed, but my voice was vacuumed up by the clamor of the restaurant, the amped-up music, the raucous parties at the bar downstairs.

The man lay beached on the parquet. His glasses were mangled and hung off his ear at an odd angle, his skin was turning an alarming whitish-lavender, pallid and waxy as a guest soap. “Somebody!” I shouted. But the landing was deserted.

Instinctively, I dropped to my knees, yanked open his mouth, and jammed my hand down his gullet. I fished around in the swamp of the man’s epiglottis but couldn’t dislodge anything. I pounded his chest. His torso was clammy, tufted with a frisée of hair that crunched beneath my palms like steel wool. Through his layer of baby fat, I could barely palpate his ribs, his heart. He smelled of astringent and, ominously, of mushroom tarts and bacon. “Help!” I shouted. The life was seeping out of him: I could feel it. Trying to remember my first aid from a class at the Y, I pinched his nose, clamped my mouth over his—our teeth knocked violently—and blew as hard as I could. When that didn’t work, I raised myself up on my haunches and slammed my entire body weight down onto the man’s belly. I’m not a big woman—five foot three at best, 138 pounds in my underwear, if I’m being honest—but I pounced on him with all my mass, straddling him as if he were a mechanical bull. It was savage—I landed hard right on my pubic bone—the pain was excruciating—but the force of my landing finally pounded all the remaining air out of the man’s lungs, and the half-eaten bacon-wrapped fig flew out of his mouth like a champagne cork.

I collapsed against him with relief. “Oh my God,” I murmured into his pale, grayish ear. “You’re okay. It’s okay. Breathe.”

But he remained prone, motionless.

I straddled him again, my hands like bellows against his chest. Someone who sounded oddly like me was screaming, “Help! Help! Breathe, goddammit!” and then, finally, there were legs and feet scrambling around me, and the manager was wrangling me to a standing position, and another person—a burly Hispanic man in a chef’s apron—was now astride the man performing violent compressions, and I heard a waitress sob, and someone say: “I just thought they were having sex, otherwise…,” then two figures in EMS windbreakers pushed through with a stretcher and an apparatus, and red-blue lights were rotating feverishly over the far walls of the restaurant from the street like an insane disco ball, and someone was talking frantically into a walkie-talkie, and someone else was saying, “The rear elevator is best,” and someone else said: “Table nineteen needs more bread”—Oh my God! What? I felt my legs give out and a busboy, I think, helped me into a chair by the bathroom. Then a cluster of people moved past like a carnival float—sprouting equipment, rubber tubing—with a tablecloth draped over a supine form with a pouf of blond hair—and I was gripping a glass of melty ice water and staring straight ahead. After a moment, I heard myself whisper: “Is he dead? Did he die?” A hand landed on my shoulder. A voice said: “I don’t think so. They said they got a pulse. You okay? You need a drink? You did good, ma’am.”

I started to shake. Another voice said: “Do you think she should maybe go to the hospital too?”

“No,” I heard myself say. “No hospital.”

“Ma’am,” said the voice gently, “you’re bleeding.”

Only then did I notice that my palms and my knees were serrated with tiny cuts, sticky with blood. Apparently, when I’d first realized the man was choking, I’d dropped my club soda; I could now see shards of glass sparkling on the floor and in the weave of my skirt like frost.

“I’m okay. I’m okay,” I said.

I stood up abruptly and wobble