An unnamed woman from the Midwest checks into a hotel, and she recalls a despondent hotel stay a long while ago, back in 1993. She’d checked into the pink Narcissus Hotel in an effort to forget her lover of two weeks, who began dating someone else publicly after three days of being with her. The depressed woman gets drunk, passes out, and then goes to eat in the hotel's public space. There, she hears a voice she recognizes: that of Dr. Benjamin, a Ph.D. and late-night AM radio host. Despite Dr. Benjamin being married, she asks to go back to her hotel room, and he leads her there. She sees a stuffed animal belonging to a woman Dr. Benjamin was supposed to be meeting up with, but who never showed. The protagonist runs a bath and slips in. She calls Dr. Benjamin over, but he sits on the edge and then leaves. She then falls asleep in the bath–one of her few near-death experiences in life–and is woken up by Dr. Benjamin’s wife, Eileen. After the incident, the protagonist decides to be kinder, although she senses something erroneous in the inclination to be kind: namely, why be kind when the world itself is not?