The Palace of Illusions. Kim Addonizio

of Margaritaville, I woke up bleeding from the wrong part of my anatomy and had to call a friend to take me to the Emergency Room. After waiting an hour to be seen we gave up and went to get some wine. Going to this guy’s room is probably an error in judgment. But that’s where we’re headed—me, Mona, Don the salesman, and Nietzsche the warlock, who has introduced himself as Joseph.

      We head down Geary Street two by two—me and Mona in front, arm in arm, the men following. That’s how it is in nature: stallions nickering after mares, boring-colored male birds having to sing just to attract a mate. I’m savoring the moment, because usually I’m alienated from nature, sitting by the phone. My last date was with a loser named George who made me pay for dinner, and then demanded BART fare when I refused to drive him home across the Bay Bridge. The one before him—Jack? Zack?—was overmedicated, and about to be evicted by his roommates for not paying his share of the rent. For our date, we sat in his living room sharing cheap chianti and takeout pizza, while his roommates walked in and out muttering “Asshole” under their breath. His hands never stopped shaking the whole evening. I woke up beside him at four a.m., watched him twitch for a while, then went to find some Ibuprofen to kill my wine headache.

      The streets are full of people, but no one’s in costume. Women in short dresses and shimmery jackets, men in suits, homeless people saying “trick or treat” from doorways. Right now, in the Castro, men are mincing down the street in sequined gowns and tutus and leather chaps. In the Mission and Noe Valley, little gypsies and devils and ballerinas and hobbits are going door to door. Here on Geary Street it hardly feels like Halloween at all, but then we turn a corner and I see there’s a full moon, huge and orange in the sky above the Bay Bridge. I’m beginning to feel like maybe the night’s not as lost as I thought. Maybe Joseph will surprise me and turn out to have a real job and a live-work loft. He’ll let me move in, and he’ll selflessly support me through graduate school, disproving Nietzche’s belief that all altruistic sentiment is cowardice. We’ll tell our children how we met on Halloween under a full moon and they’ll roll their eyes and say, Mom. Dad. Not that one again.

      “Look at that moon,” Mona says.

      I wonder how she can sound so sober, when she’s had as many drinks as me; sometimes Mona seems impervious to alcohol. I wonder if she has ever woken up hung over and depressed, and had to drag herself to a job she hates, and offer friendly, polite service to people who are stupider, shallower, and more successful than she is. I think not. She points to the moon with one elegant finger, her hair blazing in its light.

      “Mona, you are a goddess,” I say.

      “We are in the company of goddesses,” Joseph says, and I want to lick his face.

      Here’s what Hume thought: he thought that morality was basically utilitarian. We do things because they’re useful, not because they’re right. According to Hume, the rules get suspended when you don’t need them. In war, for example, the rules go out the window. Rape, torture, indiscriminate murder—that’s pretty much what happens in a war. Hume had other depressing things to say, too, like that our universe might be the fucked-up experiment of some retarded minor god. The god was probably blind drunk and messing around; he probably set our little planet spinning, slapped the first man on top of the woman like they were Ken and Barbie, and passed out. The next day his head was killing him and he’d completely forgotten what he’d done.

      “Hume turned Plato on his head,” I tell Joseph and pour myself more of the champagne Don ordered from room service. But then I can’t remember how Hume turned Plato on his head, only that my former professor said it, years ago. I was in love with him, the kind of love that leads to standing in the street screaming someone’s name at their dark apartment building. When it stopped being useful to him to fuck me, he just changed his phone number and forgot I was alive.

      “Here’s my philosophy,” Mona says. “Drink, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow we disappear like smoke.” She’s sitting in a striped chair, legs crossed, idly dangling one expensive high heel and exhaling perfect smoke rings. Mona smokes almost as much as she drinks.

      “Carpe vino.” I lift my glass and look through it at the hotel room, the walls and furniture wavering inside a tiny lake of champagne, and then I drain the lake. “How come you don’t date, Mona?”

      “Oh, men are such swine,” she says.

      “Not all of them,” Don says from the queen bed. He’s lying there like he’s waiting for one of us to join him, stretched out with his feet in their thin black socks pointed at the ceiling.

      “No,” Mona says, “some of them are dogs.”

      “Arf!” Don says. “Arf arf arf!”

      Joseph is reading his Nietzsche, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Or is it this,” he says, reading aloud. “To go into foul water when it is the water of truth.”

      “I need to be petted,” Don says. “I’m a lonely puppy. Pet me, pet me,” he says. He raises his arms like paws. He lets his tongue loll out and starts panting, fast and shallow.

      “Women,” Joseph says. “You always think you’re better than us.” He puts down his book and upends his glass, chugging his champagne, then looks around for more. I’ve set the last bottle with anything in it—there were three—on the nightstand next to Don. Joseph looks at me, like I’m supposed to get it for him.

      “We are better than you,” I say. “Look who starts all the wars. Who most of the serial killers are. The terrorists. The rapists.”

      “The dentists,” Mona adds.

      “You’re all the same,” Joseph says. He gets up and goes for the bottle. My glass is empty, too, but instead of filling it he takes the bottle and goes and sits back down on the floor with it.

      “No, we’re not.” I go and sit next to him. “That’s a mean thing to say. And it’s also inaccurate.”

      “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said it. I’m an asshole. I say stupid things sometimes. Especially when I like somebody.”

      I take the bottle and pour myself some more. It takes some concentration to perform this act, as the rim of the champagne flute seems to have shrunk in diameter. “What do you like about me?”

      “You’re cool,” Joseph says.

      I lean in to kiss him. I move toward him like a bee aiming for a flower, an insect driven by instinct, not caring that the pollen dusting its feet will aid in the process of plant reproduction. Selfishness and intoxication propel me toward his slightly parted lips. Our tongues wrestle in the dark cave our mouths make, mashed together.

      “Somebody get a hose,” Mona says.

      We kiss some more and then I pull away and look at him. His whole face is soft and open, like a flower that’s just gorged itself on sunlight.

      “Way cool,” he says. “Definitely way cool.”

      “Do you know any other words?”

      Mona says. “Mona, have you ever been married?” I ask her.

      “I can’t imagine anything more tedious,” Mona says, “than marriage.”

      She finishes her cigarette and goes over to the window, where she’s left her glass on the ledge. There are two Monas now, one in the room and another reflected in the window. Ideal Mona and Real Mona. Plato’s world of forms—the phrase drifts through my head, a little boat headed for the horizon without anything like knowledge to anchor it. Now the world of forms is starting to double, too; Mona lifts her glass and there are two of her in the room, resolving into one when I blink, then doubling again. I close my eyes.

      “To freedom,” she says, “from giving a shit.”

      I try on Mona’s idea, like I’m winding one of her expensive silk scarves around me. Marriage is tedious. I imagine growing old alone, forever raising