I found a jacket that remembers a missing girl, and it’s rewriting my body one day at a time. Now I have to solve that girl's murder before the coat finishes its work and I disappear into someone else’s life.

I wrote the three explanations on the facing page, because if you are going to be rigorous about a thing you should be rigorous in writing, and because the alternative was thinking about it.

1. sleep 2. the gabapentin 3. hypnagogic

Three is the one I liked best, so I did three first, and three died on Monday afternoon at ten past four.

Hypnagogic means the state on the edge of sleep, when the machinery has started shutting rooms down and puts up a picture on the way. It is common, it is documented, and it explains a person at two in the morning after nineteen hours awake, staring into a mirror.

At ten past four on Monday I was sitting up at the kitchen table in daylight with a cup of coffee in my hand, working out whether I could make the bus pass last past the fifteenth.

And I was in the stairwell.

It was maybe four seconds. Same cinderblock, same gray-green, same rail, and this time I was further down it, or she was, and the door with the bad handle was closer and there was light under it, a hard white line at the bottom, so that whatever room was on the other side had the overheads on.

Then the coffee, and the table, and 4:11 on the stove clock.

Four seconds is not a dream. You do not dream sitting up with a hot cup in your hand at four in the afternoon, and if you do, you drop the cup.

So I crossed out three.

Sleep I did properly. Two nights, phone off, in bed by nine thirty, which for me is a genuine operation. Nine hours the first night and something over eight the second. I woke up Wednesday feeling better than I had in a month, actually rested, and I sat there in the good version of my body and thought: all right, then. Let's see.

It came at eleven in the morning. Two floors of it this time. And I have never in my life been more clear-headed than I was at eleven o'clock on that Wednesday.

Crossed out one.

Which left the gabapentin, and the gabapentin was the good hypothesis. Three hundred milligrams three times a day for nerve pain in my legs, which is a thing nobody tells you about — you lose the use of them and they hurt anyway, and there is nobody to complain to. And the list of what that drug does to people includes dizziness, confusion, and, in the fine print, hallucinations. It is right there. If somebody had brought me this problem I would have said what are you taking before they finished the sentence.

So I stopped, and I knew while I was doing it that you do not stop that drug flat. I had four days of it left in the bottle and I stopped anyway, because I could not afford to be wrong slowly.

Thursday was fine. Friday was not. By Friday afternoon my legs were doing the thing where it is not exactly pain, it is closer to sound, an electrical whine going down through both of them at once that makes it impossible to hold a thought for longer than forty seconds.

Friday at six I had a fragment.

I was sitting in the dark with my hands over my ears, which does nothing, and the room went, and there was a party. Not the stairwell. Warm, loud, low ceiling, somebody's hand around a glass with three fingers outside and the thumb inside the rim, which is a thing bartenders do and other people do not. Music coming through a wall rather than from a speaker. A woman laughing four feet behind me, cut off in the middle.

Then my apartment, in the dark, with my legs screaming.

I took two capsules and went to bed.

So the ladder had three rungs and I went down all three in five days, and the bottom of it was a floor I did not want to stand on. Which is when I started building the next explanation, which was that there was something wrong with my head — not chemically, structurally. A lesion. Something pressing on something. Temporal lobe, which is the one that does this, which I know because I looked it up on a library computer where nothing gets typed into a browser attached to my name.

I want to be accurate about how that felt.

It felt like relief.

I sat in the Ford Warren branch with my hands in my lap having just read a description of the aura that comes before a temporal lobe seizure — the sense of presence, the smell, the total conviction that you are somewhere else — and what went through me was gratitude, because that was a name for it, and it was a name that could be scanned, and there was a procedure at the end of it, and it happens to people.

The trouble with a lesion is that a lesion is diagnosed in a machine, and to get into the machine you have to go through a doctor.

I had all of Thursday in bed with my legs to work out what going to a doctor actually looks like, as a sequence, as opposed to as an idea. I have had three years of practice at this. Every appointment I have had since the accident has cost me a week of strategy and I am very good at it now.

You call and they give you a date twelve to nineteen days out. That is the first thing. Whatever is happening to you is going to keep happening for nineteen days.

You get there forty minutes early because the drop-off is on the wrong side of the street and the curb cut at the corner has been broken for a year, so you go around the block and come at it from the alley. You do the paperwork on your lap because there is no surface at a usable height, which sounds petty and means the clipboard is on your knees at an angle where anybody standing can read it.

Reason for visit. That is the box. It is an inch and a half tall.

Then a nurse takes your weight, which they do in a chair scale if the clinic has one and mine does not, so they take last recorded and ask if that sounds right and I say yes, and that is one lie in the file already before I have seen anybody.

Then you sit on the table. You have to get onto the table. That is thirty seconds of a stranger deciding whether to offer to help while you do a transfer you have done nine thousand times, and it is fine, and it costs something every single time.

And then a doctor comes in with your chart and asks you a history.

That is the wall. Not the exam. The history.

Because the answer to any changes in the last few months is a face and a jaw and eight measurements in a notebook, and the answer to does anyone else help you at home is nobody, and the answer to is there any family history is that I do not know anything about anyone I am related to and have not since I was seventeen, and every one of those answers is true and every one of them is a flag, and I have spent three years getting my file down to something boring.

A boring file is the single most valuable thing I own. Nothing in it invites a second look. There is a car accident, a spine, a med list, a housing address, and no notes.

There is no way to walk into that room with what I had and come out with a boring file.

I lay in bed on Thursday and I worked it from every direction I could find and there is no version. If there were a version I would have found it, because finding the version is the only thing I am actually good at, and I have found the version for harder things than this.

I did not call anybody.

I am not going to dress that up. Friday morning I put the list inside the lining of my bag through the hole in the seam, and I buttoned the coat up to the throat, and I went out into the hallway, and that is what I did instead of calling a doctor.

Oriole opened her door on Saturday before I finished knocking, which she always does, and she looked at me for what I would put at nine seconds.

I know what nine seconds is. I have counted a lot of things.

She did not do anything with her face. She was in the doorway in a cardigan with a dish towel over her shoulder and she looked at me from the collar up, once, unhurried, the way you check a stove you have already turned off, and I stood it because there was nothing else to do.

"Come in, it's freezing out there. It's freezing in here." She was already turning. "That collar's wrong."

"What?"

"Sit at the table, I'm not chasing you around the kitchen."

I went in. Her apartment is the mirror of mine and it is much too tidy for a woman who is home all day. She came back with a scarf and a cardigan that was clearly a man's and clearly older than I am, and put both on the table, and sat down across from me, and did not ask me one single question.

That is what I keep going back to. Not one. Not are you all right, not have you seen somebody, not what is going on with you. She had looked at my face for nine seconds and then she went and got a scarf.

"Two things," she said. "First one. Where do people look."

"At the chair."

"Good." She seemed genuinely pleased. "Yes. They look at the chair, and then they look at your hands, and if they are polite they get to your face fourth or fifth and by then they have decided they have already looked at you and they leave. You have got maybe a second and a half of anybody's actual attention and it is not at the top."

"Okay."

"So you do not fix your face. Fixing your face is what people do and it never works, because a face somebody is managing is the most interesting thing in any room. You put the weight somewhere else." She pushed the cardigan across. "Bulk at the shoulder and the chest. Not tight. Loose and heavy, so the biggest thing in your outline is here" — she put her flat hand across her own collarbone — "and not here." She touched under her own jaw with two fingers, once, and took the hand away.

That was the only time she came near it.

"Second thing. Second most interesting."

"Second most interesting what?"

"In any room you go into, be the second most interesting thing in it." She got up and put the kettle on with her back to me. "People think hiding is being invisible. Being invisible is very hard and it is a full-time job and it fails, because a person who is not there is a hole and a hole is a shape. Second is easy. Second is free. You find the loudest thing in the room and you stand near enough to it that the eye goes past you to get there." She turned around. "The fire panel, two weeks ago. Everybody in that hall looked at 227."

"You were watching me."

"I was watching everybody. That is the job." She said it lightly, and it went by, and it was about eleven days before I picked it back up.

Then she came around and did the collar. She turned it up at the back and left it flat at the front and put the scarf around my neck in one pass and tucked the end under, and stood back about eighteen inches and looked, and moved the tuck maybe half an inch to the left.

"Go out in the hall," she said.

I went out in the hall.

Alma Reyes was at the mailboxes with her walker and Curtis was there, and I went past both of them at a normal speed. Alma said the elevator was slow again. Curtis said something about the Nuggets to Curtis's own phone.

Neither of them looked at me twice, and neither of them had looked at me twice the week before either, but the week before I had not been holding my breath.

I came back and Oriole had the tea out and I sat down in her kitchen with my hands around it, and I did not feel relief, exactly.

She had solved it in about six minutes. That is the thing. Whatever was wrong with me, and I did not know what was wrong with me, she had made it invisible in six minutes with a cardigan and a scarf and two rules, without asking a single question, and she had those rules ready.

Nobody has rules ready.

It was Tuesday before I asked her, and I only asked because of the tuck.

She did it again on the way out — I was going to the theater and she caught me in the hall, and she put her hand on the end of the scarf and moved it about half an inch, the same half inch, to the same place, without looking at what she was doing, the way you shift a rearview mirror in a car you have driven for twenty years.

It was not a judgment call. She was not deciding. She was doing something she had done ten thousand times.

"Oriole."

"Mm."

"Who taught you to hide?"

She did not flinch and she did not stop. I have thought about that a lot. A person with something to conceal flinches, or goes still, or laughs, and she did none of those, because she was not concealing anything in that moment. She was choosing what to hand me, and she took about a second and a half to do it, which is exactly as long as she said you get.

Her hand was still on the scarf.

"The scarf," she said, "not the coat."

Then she pulled the collar of the coat down flat under it, and put both hands on my shoulders and squared them, and stepped back.

"You want the wool against you and the scarf on the outside. Everybody does it the other way round and then they wonder why their neck is wet. It's coming in off the mountains tonight, they said fourteen. Fourteen and wind. You want to be home before dark, and if that bus is more than eleven minutes you come back up here and you wait, I don't care about your class or your load-in or whatever it is."

"It's not a load-in."

"I don't care what it isn't."

And that was it. She went back inside and I heard her lock go and I sat in the corridor for a second.

I could have followed her in. I want to be clear that the door was not locked against me, she locks it out of habit, and I have knocked on that door forty times and it has opened forty times.

I did not knock, and the reason is not complicated and does not do me any credit. Oriole Williams was the only person in that building who talked to me. She had just given me the only working solution anybody had given me for anything since this started, for free, and she had not made me explain one word of it. If I pushed on where she got it, she might tell me, and then it would be a thing between us, and it might be a thing she wanted back.

I had one neighbor and one friend and no doctor, and I was not going to spend either of them on a question.

So I went down to the bus, in the coat, with the wool against me and the scarf on the outside, and I was home before dark, and it went to eleven degrees that night with the wind.