Rachel realizes how much she hates herself as the Uber, a dented Mercedes, lurches up the mountain road. It’s something to do with how the driver, Anatoly, mutters unintelligibly, how she’s squeezed in the back seat between Rusty and Patrick, how the ski trip, which wasn’t her idea, is becoming more real than any other journey she’s taken. Sunlight burns her eyes. She’s strangled by shoulds. She should have the courage to break up with Rusty, whose arm around her is a hot implacable burden. She should be more than a suburban white girl with a badly concealed eating disorder and a chattering mind that jumps from her makeup to the scuffs on her shoes. The drop-off beside them, thousands of feet, is a swarm of shadows that call to her, because maybe obliteration could lead to absolution. Or at least an ending, which would transform her mistakes into a story. She’s pretty sure there’s no heaven but she wants one anyway.

So I inherited this bird from my grandmother, says Patrick. He pokes her side. You listening, Rachel? You look a thousand miles away.

Course, she answers. Tell us about the bird. The car jerks and sweat effervesces up her back. A blurred thicket of pines appears, disappears.

Well I can’t stand him, says Patrick. His name’s Eugene and he’s got a foul mouth. Know what he said to the FedEx man yesterday? Fuck the police!

Ha, says Rachel. At least he’s a fan of the classics.

He shits everywhere. Joke’s on me because I thought he wouldn’t live long. But no, apparently they live decades. Eugene will probably outlive me.

Man, shut up, says Rusty, tightening his arm. Only bones and skin, she reminds herself. You and your stories. Every one is a movie starring you. Set pieces, funny interludes. You’re only missing the orchestral accompaniment.

Don’t hear you trying to pass the time, says Patrick. And Rachel here hasn’t said a word since the airport. So go fuck yourself.

Anatomically impossible. Besides I like to leave that pleasure for the ladies. Right, baby? She doesn’t look but she can hear him smiling. He has this alligator smile. He should have been something else—something with scaly skin, slithering through swamps, dreaming of easy prey.

Does he fly, she asks.

Of course. I let him fly around the apartment. He’s beautiful when he flies. Wings every color of the rainbow. But then I have to clean up all the birdshit. Bodies, right? Animal or human, you never live it down.

I quite like mine, says Rusty. Maybe you should work out more. Patrick laughs. Rusty laughs. They’ve been friends since college and their insults always end in companionable laughter, like a wasp nest tied with a satin bow. It’s a rhythm Rachel’s never been able to penetrate. She fails like a child whose fingers are too fat to find the right chord.

There is the lodge, says Anatoly. See the sign. He points and Rachel catches the dry-onion smell of his pits. She sees a smudge of black, then they are in a tiny parking lot, unloading suitcases and skis. Rusty gives Anatoly a ten percent tip and Rachel is ashamed but she has no cash.

Their room is like a hole drilled in splintery wood. A dark space with small dangers—a sharp-cornered heating unit, a slippery just-washed floor. Rusty fucks her on a hard bed that smells of sweat and mold. She extricates herself from the fleshy tangle and stands under the shower, breathing in time with her hunger pangs, tasting Rusty’s kiss in her mouth, tooth decay and the menthol cigarettes he sneaks when no one’s looking. Rusty. The man and the creation of a man. Who cares which you end up with. She dons a robe and leafs through brochures fanned on the dresser. Skiing, more skiing, steak dinners, chocolate martinis. A pair of moose staring blank-eyed into the camera. How did they keep them still for the picture, she wonders. But maybe the moose just aren’t afraid. She’s heard they can kill you easily. If they want to. If it’s worth their while.

The three of them, puffy in ski gear, stand on the glittering slope, awaiting the lift. It descends, they board, and the landscape blurs, trees flattening into paper copies of themselves. Sun and snow, a rush of bitter air, a whirl of colors devoid of pattern. She wonders if even now, the bird is winging around the darkened apartment. If he feels the limitlessness in his wings and the walls that make it meaningless.

I forgot to tell you! says Patrick. I sold another painting. His smile is slow, amazed, showing all his sharp white teeth. You know, I never quite believe it when it happens.

Envy flowers in Rachel’s stomach. Another poisonous outgrowth, as if she isn’t always weeding, spraying useless pesticides. Before she met Rusty, she used to write. She’d even published a few terse, careful poems in small journals. She’d started a novel that began with a woman just released from prison, toiling down a deserted highway. It’s much too hot and her bag is heavy. But then Rachel realized she couldn’t go any further. The scene was too resonant to discard, too pedestrian to keep. And she couldn’t decide what the woman had done. People always write about murder but that’s because it’s an easy secret to tell. She wanted her heroine to be murkier, enigmatic, but in the end she had to delete the files.

Thought the bird shit on your paintings, says Rusty. Probably an improvement.

They’re at the top, gazing down the slope. It’s bedeviling, coiling like a snake, so steep its end vanishes into whiteness. Patrick puffs. You asshole, he says to Rusty. Why did I let you pick the first slope?

Challenge yourself for once, says Rusty. What’s the point of coming if we just meander down the bunny slopes?

Big fucking difference between bunny slopes and this. You’ve always been like this. This one time, he says, turning to Rachel, Rusty got drunk and jumped out a third-floor window because he thought he could fly. I’m serious. This really happened.

Rusty laughs. See, he says, Patrick always leaves out the beginnings that explain the endings. Before the party he scored all this coke and got me ridiculously high. Coke, it makes you think you’re Superman. I don’t do it anymore. Learned my lesson.

Did you break anything, Rachel asks.

Don’t remember. Anyway, we’re holding up the line.

He gives her a hard shove and before she can regain her balance she’s swallowed by a raging velocity, twisting down the slope, avoiding trees and rocks with less than a second to spare. Icy air screams in her ears. Her legs burn then go numb. Time slips aside and she falls into a pocket of forever, moments stretching, thinning like taffy. The run has no words. It’s too clear and vivid for language. She’s sure she’ll throw up but instead she laughs and can’t stop. It’s so ridiculous that this is how it ends. She’ll crash into a tree, end up in a hospital with terrible injuries, or maybe just a month of headaches, she doesn’t care which, she’s free of future and past. Then it’s over as quickly as it began. She’s still and breathless, blood singing in her veins, stomach growling like a large animal stalking something small that doesn’t know its life is nearly done.

In the bright yawning distance Rusty and Patrick ski slowly, spidering down the slope. It’s several minutes before they reach her. There’s genuine fear in Rusty’s green eyes.

That was fun, she says. Let’s do it again.

Are you crazy, says Patrick. I need a drink after that.

They shower and sit at a scarred bar drinking hot whiskey with lemon. Rusty and Patrick argue over the menu. Rusty wants Peking duck, even though the menu says that the kitchen must have forty-eight hours’ notice to prepare it. Patrick once again calls him an asshole. They order dumplings with hearts of red, sticky pork and plates of steaming noodles. Rachel eats and eats as if her holes can be filled like buckets. She knows it’s stupid but who says she can’t dance in the nothingness. She imagines the proteins liquefying in the rancid basement of her stomach.

I meant to ask you, she says. What was the painting?

Who the fuck cares, says Rusty.

Shut up, says Patrick. Listen. It’s a man, or something like a man. Really he’s more a homunculus. Deformed, stunted. Like an infant but a thousand years old. He’s trapped in the body of a butterfly. The green part that’s still mostly caterpillar. Or it’s supposed to be, I’m not sure I really captured it. For weeks I sat by the window taking pictures of butterflies. But they were all so blurry that in the end I just kind of imagined it. But these tourists gave me fifteen hundred bucks. So who cares, right?

That’s great, Patrick, she answers. On impulse she kisses him on the cheek. A flush creeps through his freckles. Can I see the picture of it?

Sure, he says, handing over his phone.

She studies the pixelated image. She can’t find the man, or whatever he turned out to be. He’s lost, erased, there’s something tilted, strange, about the scale. There’s a tiny amoeba of peach-pink but it disappears when she stares. But, she asks Patrick, eventually he’ll get out, right?

Oh, says Patrick, that’s really not up to any of us, is it? You have to love your cage. That’s what I tell that damn bird anyway.

But does he listen.

Probably not.

Thank you, she says. I really think you should be proud.

Jesus, says Rusty, that’s the last thing he needs.

Rachel smiles at Patrick and shoves a clump of noodles into her mouth, swallows without chewing. She whisks Rusty’s hand off her knee, does it again after he replaces it. She keeps eating. She’ll be sick but it’s all she can do to make the night last, weave the red lanterns and the tinny music into memory. Rusty and Patrick get drunker and sing songs she’s heard before but can’t remember the lyrics to. They move their wet pink mouths and she sees them clearly even though she doesn’t want to. She motions the waiter over.

We want to order the duck, she tells him. Day after tomorrow. She’ll be extra hungry then. She imagines the glistening skin, the thin pancakes, the green scallion rings, and she’s happy, and she thinks maybe the woman in the book finds something on the road. Something to make the journey worth it. Some tiny thing that refracts the sun like a diamond. The woman won’t step on it, won’t miss it, because it’s both desire and fulfillment, beginning and end. When she sleeps that night she dreams of the alligator in the swamp, riding low, assured of his hunger’s satisfaction.