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the first time, he wonders what happened to the bodies.
    An icy sweat coats his skin. “Please pull over.”
    John swerves to the hard edge of the highway, and Edward pushes open his door, hangs his body out, and throws up onto the gray dirt. Oatmeal and orange juice. Cars hurtle past. Lacey rubs his back. He pretends, as he does every time her face isn’t directly in his line of vision, that she is his mom.
    He can’t stop vomiting; his body coils up, releases.
    He hears her say, “I hated when the nurses told you that you were going to be okay.” Lacey’s voice is more strident than his mother’s; she’s his aunt again.
    “You’re not okay. Do you hear me, Edward? Are you listening? You are not okay. We are not okay. This is not okay .”
    His body has paused, and he’s unsure whether the violence will continue. When he realizes he’s done, that his body is scraped clean and pulsing with emptiness, he sits up. He nods his head. And somehow, that statement and that nod loosen and break apart the air between the three of them. There is a note of relief. They have somewhere to start, even if it is the worst place imaginable.

9:05 A.M.
    The spiky buildings of Manhattan can be seen out the window, the raised right arm of the Statue of Liberty, the swipe of a bridge across the river. The passengers shift in their seats, searching for positions comfortable enough to occupy for six hours in the sky. Top buttons on shirts are undone. Shoes removed. Passengers with the gift of being able to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, do so now. There’s no need for consciousness, after all. On the ground, people’s bodies are utilized, but on a plane, a person’s size, shape, and strength have no utility and are in fact an inconvenience. Everyone has to find a way to store themselves, in the most tolerable fashion possible, for the duration of the flight.
    Florida peers past Linda and the sleeping woman with the blue scarf. She has a hunger to see the city before it disappears behind clouds. Different locations have different energies, and for her, New York is glittering eye shadow, Basquiat graffiti, and strangers with bold dreams. She sees herself dancing in bars, slow-walking across cacophonous streets while men hoot at her womanly goods, wringing all the life she can out of her days in that snap-crackle-pop city.
    Florida lived in New York during her twenties and early thirties, but she never pictures only one period of time; she has to think of them all, layered on top of each other like a Mexican dip. She’s lived many lives, in many bodies, so her memories are oceanic—a body of water she swims regularly. She tried to count her lives once and reached thirteen before the project bored her. Some lives she entered as a walk-in, which meant she’d entered the body of someone whose soul had departed after either a physical trauma—like a car accident that left the person in a coma—or an attempted suicide. Those entries were innately exciting, and therefore her favorite kind. There was nothing like waking up in a new adult body, suffused in someone else’s aura. She was always a little disappointed when—as in her current life—she entered in the traditional manner, as a baby.
    The plane climbs, and Florida finds herself remembering her most recent wedding, only seven years earlier. Two dozen friends on the piece of Vermont land she and Bobby had recently bought. The five acres were pristine then, a meadow dipping down to a stream, with a forest on the far side. They’d only just started to plan—Bobby was in charge of this, a fact Florida would later regret—and were several months from building their home. Florida’s friends had traveled up from the East Village, and there was a tent with Christmas lights and a local band. They danced in the smoky blue air to Pinoy music. Florida drank wine and shook her ass and tits and hair and sang along, her hand in her husband’s. It was one of those magic evenings when