As I packed my bags, something alternately rose and sank in me, like a tide. I’d be going home—home to New York and my real life and my real friends and family, where I could remember who I really was. Would I turn right back around?

At the party the night before I left, my friends among the Asian girls buzzed around me. They never got to go home until they were going home for good, so they wanted to hear all about what I was going to do and whom I was going to see and where I lived and what my family was like.

Winston, with his kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, asked me, “What are you going to do when you get back to reality?”

I answered coyly, carefully. This was my default mode in Brunei, even with Winston. “This isn’t reality?”

“No,” he said, with rare clarity. Everyone in Brunei usually acted like the parties would go on and on. “This isn’t reality for any of us. It’s a dream and someday we’ll all wake up.”

Eddie took me out into the hallway and sat down with me on the staircase, where the peach-colored carpeting shone with threads of real gold. He handed me a fat stack of notes each worth 10,000 Singapore dollars and then he put a wide, square box in my lap. I opened it to find a gold Tiffany set that belonged on Cleopatra—a basket-weave choker and a matching bracelet and earrings. The jewelry no longer shocked me. I would have been crestfallen if, after all that time, I hadn’t received an outrageous gift. I had Eddie help me with the clasp.

When I returned to the party, Fiona said, “I hope your father feels better.”

She looked at me like she was on to me.

“I know you’ll be back soon. I’ll say bon voyage, not good-bye.”

I added my new Tiffany set to the heart necklace, the Cartier watch, and the diamond-face Rolex that Robin had given me already, threw my jewels and my money into my carry-on to Singapore, and managed to cram the rest of my clothes into four suitcases. Ari gave me a lecture on how to get my loot and myself back into the country safely. Then she gave me a hug, my passport, a ticket home, and a ticket to return again in three weeks. My housemates all stood behind the porch’s marble banister and waved good-bye as the car pulled away.

Ari had instructed me to change my money at a bank in Singapore in order to avoid the IRS inquiry that would result if I changed it over in the United States. In line at the bank in Singapore, everyone stood about three centimeters from the person in front of them. I breathed in the earwax smell of the pomade in the hair of the man in front of me, could smell the bubble-gum breath of the woman behind me.

I was no longer a leaf in a stream. I was halfway home in my mind and I had a duffel bag to fill with cash and shit to do and I wanted those people out of my face. A belt of panic tightened around my chest and I swayed, unsteady on my feet. I felt the temptation to surrender to it, to black out, to fall into velvet darkness and wake with my skull on the granite floor. I tried to breathe. I closed my eyes. There is something about being almost to the finish line that makes me start to unravel. My mantra went from “You are a leaf in a stream” to “Don’t blow it now.” Do. Not. Blow. This.

What would Patti Smith do? She wouldn’t be there in the first place. Really, she wouldn’t. I was far out on the water without my fairy godmother to guide the needle of my compass. When had that happened?

But I didn’t blow it. I collected my cash and loaded it, stack by bound stack, into the duffel bag. I walked out the door with piles of hundreds. I could have bathed in it. I was back in my personal spy movie, walking down the streets of Singapore with a duffel bag full of cash, checking the reflections in store windows to see if anyone was behind me. I hailed a cab back to the hotel, where I’d make the drop to a bartender with a yellow rose on his lapel. Cut.

Next shot: morning of my departure. Whatever cash didn’t fit into my two money belts I stuffed inside my stockings. I got rid of the jewelry boxes and wore the jewelry.

I threw a loose sweat suit over the top of the jewelry and became a nervous-eyed, thick-waisted girl with big gold earrings on. I sweated the whole flight to Frankfurt and then scarfed Chinese food and drank Jack Daniel’s at the airport. I got back on the interminable flight feeling sick to my stomach and not nearly drunk enough.

Many hours later the spiny peaks, right-angled valleys, and soaring bridges, the floating Marvel comic metropolis that is New York seen from high above, brought tears to my eyes.