Last summer they removed two tonsils and an embryo. Troublesome growths,more of a hindrance than a help they said about all those dangling appendages. The embryo, of course, did not dangle. The embryo, for a brief moment, sat in a warm sac of blood, whispering “Tu danse trés bien, en fait.”

I feel very light now, without these extras. I think I’ll go for a kidney next, two always seemed a little excessive, a little too bourgeois. It was on Bastille Day that Mohammed, swaying, spoke into my neck (he missed my ear by a few centimeters). In the jostling crowd, he asked me to dance after we’d already begun.

Two tonsils, no embryo.

We valsed to soul and accordions, drinking tinny wine and tepid beer. His girlfriend was an hour late, he told me, laughing. She’s Italian, he added, as if to explain. We danced haphazardly for hours, and the crowd formed a circle around us. It was not because we were any good, you see, but we were clumsy, we battered grumpy Parisians with every turn and dip. We danced a souk and during “I Will Survive,” he kissed me.

“J’aime tourné aussi,” he said like a child. He turned me again, and I fell into the crowd. He caught my wrist before I hit the ground and tried to keep his own balance. “Doucement, prudement,” he said half to himself, palms out and down in a steadying gesture. Drunken confetti shimmied from the sky.

My lymph system, you know, is partially gutted. I am systematically removing my innards and soon I’ll be retrofitted to a sterile body, clean and sleek. I have no glands in my neck. I had them removed the summer before last. They were infected with a rare filth. Better to discard the whole lot, n’est-ce pas? The tonsillectomy was a matter of aesthetics, la pièce de resistance.

I’ll skip the romance, if you’ll permit: the looks askance, the smell of fresh mint, the discussions of Maupassant as Brazilian music wove through silences. On Rue Magenta he fell flat on his face. We’d been walking away from everything. Away from La Bastille, away from the crowds and the lights, away from my temporary home. I helped him up. The metro was closed and I had two euro in my pocket. So we walked.

We came by a warm rectangle of yellow light, men and women dancing to Moroccan music in a bar across the street. It was two in the morning. I suggested we go there. Inside, the crowd created a welcoming steam. The light was bright, the hips undulating, arms upraised. A pale, chubby French couple pawed at each other in a corner, and the rest of the patrons reveled. So we danced too. And they stared. And I found myself an exhibitionist, dancing for the crowd, fat drops of sweat puddling on my face, under my arms, rayon clinging. The floor cleared and Mohammed and I continued to dance. I tried to follow his feet, looked at his swinging hips. And he told me they were all staring because I danced well, though I felt us flailing under harsher light.

When Mo went to the washroom, I stood awkwardly to the side of the bar. A man with shrewd dark eyes and a mole on his chin offered me a beer and when I told him I was only drinking water he apologized, asked if Mo was mon petit ami.

“Pas vraiment,” I said to my immediate regret. He repeated my words, nodding as if he suspected as much. Mo returned and kissed me (although I didn’t want him to), and the other man backed off, watching from afar.

We grew tired. I could not possibly dance until the metro opened again hours later. We continued to walk and moisture gathered around my feet. He lived near Clignacourt, end of the metro line. Six flights and a barking dog.

As if to keep up with some romantic mood, Mo left all but a string of fish-shaped lights off in the living room. We ate cherries and drank tea and talked. His bookshelves were filled mostly with Spanish language texts, music, a few guidebooks to Brazil and Vietnam. On a fake mantle were two large photographs: one of himself in black and white, with a gorgeous mass of glossy curls (now shorn) smiling with eyes much sharper than what I saw before me; and one of an elderly couple (unsmiling), wrapped in white cloaks and head scarves, standing a foot apart from each other in some red-brown desert town, two lonely white buildings and a great big mountain behind. He was astounded—astounded—to discover that we were both “fishes,” said he didn’t know any girls to have a birthday so close to his own. C’est comme ça, I shrugged.

I lay on his couch in my sweaty clothes, watched the sky turn purple behind the silver slit of the moon. He slept in the other room. You can’t sleep for just an hour, he had said, c’est ridicule. But what could we do, I asked naively. I wanted to be on the first metro back.

He repeated my question languorously, enunciating every word, a glint in his sobering eyes.

“Oui, qu’est-ce qu’on peut faire?”

I only need an hour of sleep, I replied. He nodded, and set up the couch. If you need anything, si tu as un cauchemar, my door is open, he said before going to bed.

“Croissants et café à neuf heures et demi,” he called from across the hall.

Two hours later, the sun drew obese flies in the room, buzzing slowly above the pile of cherry carcasses. My stomach hurt, I felt congested. I jumped up and ran across the hall, to the bathroom. Saw him sleeping in the other room, naked, door wide open. In the bathroom, a thick yellow liquid dripped from a tank above the sink. On the mirror was a small square of paper, asking the faucet not to emit discolored water, a frowning face drawn on. On my way out, I glanced back in at him, sleeping and exposed, a smooth brown body. Slender. More youthful than his face, which was stubbly and marked by deepening smiles-lines. I left without saying anything, unsure if I would see him again, hoping this would be the limit to my stupidity. Outside, confetti fell from my hair. Pink, blue, white on the cool cobblestones.

I bought a croissant from a woman who smiled and yelled il commence to the backroom of the bakery in the early morning, post-festivity rush. On the metro, I felt something rupture in my nose. Blood dripped in rapid succession. I had nothing to stop it with. I broke open the croissant and used that until a woman on the other side of the car walked over to me with a tissue. I gave a muffled merci and held the bloodied croissant in my lap for the hour-long ride across Paris. If only I didn’t need my nose.

I saw Mo again the next day. I had text-messaged him, thanking him for his hospitality, and he wanted to spend the afternoon with me. We took a catnap in Place Vosges, the sun beating down through the cloud cover. We walked, and drank large cans of beer by the green Canal St. Martin. Mo wondered why there were so few people around. The city already emptied out for the summer. I liked the silence, I buttered it on with reticence. It was comfortable that way. I didn’t care, and he didn’t try to fill the spaces with small talk. We simply drank together, punctured the silence with the occasional exchange, looked back at the people staring at us.

That cheerful, child-like attitude he had during the national holiday was crumbling. In a manner both serious and off-handed he invited me to dinner. I know a good Pakistani restaurant, he told me. He finished his third beer and we went.

We ate lamb and spinach in Faubourg St. Denis, the spices a welcoming shock to the system after weeks of mild French fare. Our laconic conversation limited now to food. How good the spices are. Yes, we agreed, how good.

We returned to his apartment and sampled rum from Guatemala and Les Antilles.

Sweetened with extra cane juice to take off the edge. Music played loudly, I couldn’t hear what he said. I asked him to sit closer and he said he’d shout. He was saying something about how talkative his now-back-in-Italy girlfriend was, but I didn’t listen much. The word copine confused me.

The rum began to nauseate me. I felt a vast network of gunk growing inside me. I imagined it was green and gangly, swaying in the darkness of my belly, attaching itself to vital organs. I needed the sharpness of scalpels, the burn of pure alcohol. I reached for the strongest rum, from Martinique.

“Mais tu bois vites,” he said. “Tu m’inquiète.” I lay on the couch, filling the space where I had hoped he’d sit and stared at his ceiling. He changed the sad Brazilian music to a lively salsa.

I got up and walked over to Mohammed, took his hand grinning. Made him dance with me, swirling drunk about the small room bumping into chairs, the coffee table. We danced like this for one song, almost deliberately pushing each other around. (Or was it just me, pushing him?) And then we fell into each other, and onto the couch (not without some violence), and when I asked if he had condoms he immediately searched and procured them, while humming some child’s tune I couldn’t quite place.

In the morning, forgotten words over croissants and globs of honey, flaking and plopping over the table still sticky with cherry juice. Maybe we’d see each other before I left Paris, we said over coffee that smelled like rotten vegetables. A curt farewell kiss, devoid of feeling. On the metro home, I shrugged at the inevitable. I returned to the brown haze of New York City and he went on vacation to Mozambique. La chaleur en Paris, he wrote in his final email, it keeps me up at night.

Five days later I birthed a latex condom. It emerged slowly, to my bewilderment and horror, trailing with it its contents. My baffled and panicked noises echoing against the tiles in the bathroom, unheard in the empty house. The condom, once white, was discolored. Red.

We’d talked about Maupassant and the value of concision. Perhaps I’ll go for the appendix next, a vestigial organ of no use, pure kitsch. Go for the spleen, that laughable bundle of cells. I’m removing the superfluous, the pathways and vessels of infection. My body is efficient. Light.