Oh low estate, my love my love, the song’s hook went, or seemed to, through the wall of the Ladies’. Bill Koslaw felt it more than heard it, buzzing in his back teeth through the sweaty skin of his jaws as he pushed into this toff tart—Sessilie, he thought her name was, and the rest began with a K—from behind with her bent over the lav itself, hands wide-braced, each thrust all but mashing that great midnight knot of hair against the cubicle’s tiling. And he could see her lips moving, too, half-quirked in that smile he’d literally never seen her lose thus far.

Seasick and shivering, Thomas Blacksburg peered out from beneath the orange life boat canopy, watching helplessly as the powerful Benguela current swept him north up the coast of Namibia. For hours, he’d been within sight of the Skeleton Coast, that savage, wave-battered portion of the West African shore stretching between Angola to the north and Swakopmund to the south. Through ghostly filaments of fog that drifted around the boat, Blacksburg could make out the distant shore.

It’s all downhill on a descent. The oldest climbing joke of the lot, but only because it’s true. If I like any bit of it at all, it could never be that slow, painful climb down from the highs of before and the bone-deep exhaustion of after. People make mistakes on a descent because everything’s against them: altitude, time, their bodies. And always their mind. No one gets excited about survival—not like they do about standing on the top of the world. And no one gets a good write-up in Nat Geo or Time.

That’s not what I want to talk about. If you’re interested in hearing about the day to day of a stripper, there are plenty of books you can read. Some of them are pretty good. Or you could watch Showgirls. No, it’s not accurate, but it’s the kind of movie most of the girls I danced with would have made about themselves. So there’s that. It’s a person—Nicole AuCoeur, the girl who told me I should try out at The Cusp, they were hiring and I could make some serious cash. I want to talk about her, about this thing that happened to her.

We have a ’90s model Jeep Cherokee, green and dirty and banged up so bad only the driver’s side doors open. We don’t have a windshield no more, but we never needed it. We have piles of scratched CDs of pirated albums. We have a system in the back, big speakers booming up and down these cracked country roads like a low flying bomber. We have been sixteen and riding around the same small town since the night we died twenty years ago. There are three of us. We have each other, but every year we lose a little more, until we can’t remember our names.