I'm the bartender at The Guest. My shift is on weeknights. I mix drinks with a silver tumbler, and I wear a robin's-egg silk tie over my white shirts. Today is a Wednesday, and the kinds of people who visit on Wednesdays are those who've recently forgotten themselves. The structure of the week has fallen for them. They are unable make decisions on their orders. Their eyes are livid with desire. They swagger against each other when music plays, and furrow their eyebrows when provoked.

More often than not, the best cure for identity crisis, at least here, is a bartering of flesh; hurried, simple, limpid. Warm breath, drumming heartbeats, music–how simple it is to brush against somebody's groin and have it be welcomed, even craved. On weekends the place is a heated, biological mess: a rainforest, where creatures feel each other in the humid dark without having to show their eyes.

Right now the dance floor is occupied by the young and unemployed. Some of them have snuck in from the fire escape on the second floor. The music is a humming, jubilant rap, far away as if at the end of a tunnel.

I spot a glass of water on with a strand of copper hair floating in it on the barstool one seat from where I stand. A woman hunches over the counter next to it, frowning, rummaging her huge leather purse. She is in her mid-fifties, with her red hair cropped short and jagged. Out of her purse she pulls out tooth floss, lipsticks, fabric-patterned flask, bottle of turquoise-green pills, a pair of metal scissors.

"Excuse me, miss," I say. "Do you need any help?"

She looks up. "Bloody Mary, please," she says, handing me a couple of rumpled dollars. I recognize her. It's strange. I've met her once. I've been to her house. It's surreal, but her face is unmistakable.

I cannot pinpoint it at first, and so I stand there, stiff, without digesting her order or collecting her money. She leaves the dollars on the counter and continues ransacking her giant purse. It is the color of something bright and violet and when I look closer I notice that it is filled with hair. Human hair. Her hair. The purse gaped open, revealing a beautiful copper nest.

"Miss, before I take your order, can I help you in any way? I'm a bit concerned," I say.

"Oh, I just had to make a quick haircut in the bathroom," she says, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "The heat was really getting to me."

"I can see that, but why are you keeping your hair in your purse?"

"No specific reason," she says. She suddenly turns her face toward me and gives me a penetrating stare, long and sumptuous this time, but not warm. At the corner of her lips there was a long, down-curved lipstick smear that made her look clownish, like she was half-frowning.

"Maybe I'll give you some seltzer water so you can cool down," I said.

"I wanted a Bloody Mary."

"The best thing to cool down, at least for me, is some seltzer water and a Clementine."

"A what?"

"A Clementine. You know, those small, sweet oranges? I used to eat them all the time in the summer."

"Ah." To my surprise, she smiles and laughs. "Okay, then. Give me a Clementine."

I pour a glass of seltzer water for her, carefully slicing a lime and putting it on top of the ice cubes. Then I go back to the refrigerator where I keep a plastic bag filled with cold clementines.

"Here you go," I say, and she reaches out to peel it. Her nails are thick and unmanicured, and when she holds the tiny, cold orange in her hand, she encloses it for a second as if trying to feel the weight of it – how small, how miraculous.

She eats it, segment by segment, with careful bites, her gaze straight above me, swallowing everything, even the seeds. I have a strange feeling that she never swallowed the orange seeds before.

"I'm just thinking, in all honesty, I didn't need to cut off all my hair."

"It's not a decision you make on the fly."

"I did it in the bathroom because I was sick of that feeling, of something wrapping you up, of something giving you gravity."

"Keep your hair," I say without even knowing what to say. "Keep it in a box."

"Sometimes it's despair that leads you to these absurd situations," she says between slices of her clementine.

And then I finally remember when I met her. At that time I'd been fifteen, and I was inside her house. Her house was the one with the chipped lemon shutters and the shrunken birds of paradise in the front garden. I was in the newspaper delivery business, delivering copies of the San Jose Mercury in the eight o'clock pre-heat. As I was dropping off the paper, she opened the door and asked if I wanted some tea. She showed me her backyard. They had a swimming pool.

Her house was draped in muted, mauve-ish colors, and she was wearing a matching lavender robe. Her hair tumbled lushly to her waist, flame-red like tomato sauce.

Digging it up now, I feel sheepish for remembering; there are too many things worth remembering that I've forgotten – too many things worth forgetting that I remember. But she had a muddy smile that made me weak at first, how it penetrated softly, not deceptive but merely blinding in its frankness: This is me. I know you're as young as my son, but I'm okay with it. I didn't mind that when I traced my finger down her face I could feel the whiskery edges of her skin, smooth and wrinkled and mottled, when I sniffed her neck she smelled like my mother's black olive soap. If I made any sound at all, she barely stifled a smirk as if watching a comedy, and it made me for some reason miss laughter, and I held onto her longer. Her body was bony and jutting, her breasts felt like clay, but her hair was by far the most memorable. At some point I remember telling her I love her with my nose buried in its strange blood-colored waterfall, and I'd wondered if I fooled her for a second.

But I look at her now–this woman, whose adventures have suddenly disintegrated into strange and meaningless caprices, who swallows her Clementine seeds, who sits on bar stools with her jagged copper bangs and purse full of hair – and I feel something clench inside me, as if the memory I've regained only just became beautiful.