Dagger Key and Other Stories

ABIMAGIQUE

She’s the girl with the Halloween hair. The Morticia Addams Cut, dyed jet black, with asymmetrical streaks of orange. She’s twenty-four, twenty-five. A child-woman, you imagine, who dotes on books about famous poisoners and has several of the more painful piercings. Typical Goth material. But once you get past the hair, the vintage dress, the pearl ring shaped like a bulbous spider, the tattoos on the backs of her hands (a vampire’s skull, a human heart), and the extreme make-up, you notice that her face has a maternal sensuality and softness that seem too unguarded to be part of the modern world.

Most weekdays she has lunch at this little teriyaki place just off the Ave on 45th, in the University District of Seattle. She usually sits at a table where Bill Gates once ate, an occasion memorialized by a framed Polaroid of the great man on the wall above it, and she always orders the Number Three (Veggie Special) and a bottle of water, and reads while she eats (trade paperbacks as a rule), except when it’s raining—then she stares out the window, absently forking up bites of food. This suggests she might be native to the region, because people born in the Pacific Northwest don’t generally view the rain as depressing; they’re more likely to accept it as a comforting veil drawn across the world, one that encourages contemplation.

No one hits on her, and that surprises you. Some guys are doubtless put off by her personal style (which you suspect is less a statement of cultural disaffection than a disguise), and some will assume she’s a ball-buster and that any approach could trigger a barrage of insult. Yet others wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded. She’s a beautiful woman—no, a lovely woman; lovely being a word more evocative of her antique quality. Her breasts, always displayed to advantage, are large and milky white, zoftig, like the breasts of models painted by Titian and Raphael, and the remainder of her body conforms to this unfashionable standard of voluptuousness. There must be a special atmosphere around her, you think. An envelope of force that keeps her space inviolate. One way or the other, you understand she’s not a girl who can be easily acquired. You can’t just walk up to her and say, Mind if I sit here?, or, If you’re going to break my heart, do it now, because later it’ll be too painful, or, Didn’t I see you at the Crocodile Club last Saturday?, and talk about the cool bands you’ve both seen and then ask for her number, and by then you’ll have gone past the need for conversation (it’s really more of an animal preliminary), and you’ll either wind up in bed together or you won’t. Though you desire the same thing that guys who use such uninspired openings desire, you recognize that if you are going to reach that night, that bed, you’ll first have to desire everything about her. You’ll have to fall in love, succumb to her, so when you introduce yourself, employing no greater wit than that typically employed by anyone else your age, your introduction will be supported by a depth of emotion, a weight of knowledge, and by then you will have discovered that conversation is rarely a trivial matter for her—a moral conviction underlies her words—and you’ll have learned she works with the handicapped as a massage therapist and lives alone in a frame house on a fir-lined street in Fremont, and that her eyes are green as bottle glass under strong sunlight, and that she’s called Abi, which is short for Abimagique.

Of course no one would name their daughter Abimagique. It’s a self-chosen name, a name that, when you first heard it, caused you to harbor derisive thoughts, to imagine her the victim of some Wiccan delusion, and this appears to be more-or-less the case. On the walls of her house hang classic representations of the angels; Tibetan and Native American masks; curious constructions of dried vegetable matter and silk ribbon; ankhs, crosses, backwards 7s, and other symbols less readily identifiable. Long strings of beads—silver and amber, topaz and lapis lazuli—drape the bedroom mirror, carving reflections into slices; herbal sachets that yield peculiar odors are strewn everywhere; scraps of paper bearing inscriptions hand-inked in a Tolkienesque script are tucked beneath pillows, in the backs of drawers, under potted plants, inside tins and jars, many of these featuring a backwards 7. After you’ve been friends with her for a month (you’ve insinuated yourself into her life as a client, seeking treatment for back problems you suffered in an automobile accident years before), you realize that these arcana don’t announce her character, they merely reflect it; they’re natural expressions, like sprays of foliage from a central trunk. When she talks about God, gods, spirits, ghosts, miracles, monsters, the magic of animals, of plants, the circles of Hell, the potency of angels, the entirety of the mystic landscape she inhabits, she expresses herself neither defensively nor assertively, but with a calm certainty that inspires you to argument. You want to debunk her beliefs not because you’re such a huge fan of empirical truth or because you’re so locked in to your science-geek grad-school thing, but rather because a vague male reason demands it. She refuses to argue, she merely submits there may be some things you’re not yet aware of, and that’s not something you can argue, though you try.

Just past the turn of the year, you become lovers. Rain falls intermittently and the firs enclosing Abi’s house lend the pewter light a greenish undersea opacity in which her skin glows. You discover a backwards 7 tattooed on the inside of her right thigh, close to her sex; you trace the blue ink with a finger, puzzle over it a moment, then make gentle play with her genital piercing. She tells you that she loves you, but her tone is oddly dispassionate and, once you’re inside her, though you experience the ferocity of desire, your feelings seem muted by a tranquil energy you recognize as uniquely hers, as if you’ve penetrated that protective envelope you sensed, that atmosphere, and now it surrounds you. You’re lulled, cradled by her acceptance. It’s like you’re adrift on the undulations of a tide, not moved by female sinew and bone. But the instant before you come, she breaks the languid rhythm of your lovemaking; she places her hands on the small of your back and presses down hard with her fingertips, manipulating the nerves and muscles there. Electricity snaps along your spine, heat floods your brain. You cry out from spasms of sensation so violent, they take you to the brink of unconsciousness. Once you recover, you ask with a degree of anger (because it hurt), but with a greater degree of wonderment (because you’ve never experienced such an intricate orgasm), what the hell was it that she did to you?

“It’s a massage technique,” she says. “Didn’t you enjoy it?”

You start to say “no”—you’re accustomed to having more control in bed than, in retrospect, it appears you had, and you’re annoyed. “I would have enjoyed it a hell of a lot more if you hadn’t sprung it on me,” you tell her.

“That doesn’t say much for your sense of spontaneity.” She fixes you with her green gaze. You’re startled by how specifically it communicates her disappointment; you suspect that her emotions may be more deeply held, more genuine than your own, and thus easier to read. Whether true or not, the thought that it might be increases your annoyance; but then she cuddles against you, her softness a distraction, and says, “I won’t do it anymore if you don’t want.” You’re coming to understand that’s how things work in your relationship, and how they probably always will work—she cedes control to you when control is no longer an issue.

Days, weeks, months fly past, and you move in with her, but what you know about her never gets much more detailed than the fact that she likes teriyaki. Oh, there are things you discover through observation and experience. Things about her character, her quirks. She believes the world will end in a series of cataclysms for which we should prepare. She loves the rain and likes to run out into it without an umbrella, sometimes without clothes. She keeps a large aquarium filled with water, with a pump that gurgles loudly, but no fish—she explains that she hasn’t found the right kind to put in it, but enjoys the sound made by the pump, so having fish is unimportant. She eats a weird vegetarian diet, flavored with herbs grown in a garden at the side of the house, that you also must eat (though you supplement it with burgers you sneak after classes or while at work in the microbiology lab). She has the habit of calling you “angel,” a term she also applies to taxi drivers and restaurant workers, random people, and when you ask why she does this, she says that some people are descended from angels—she recognizes them by their aura—and she’s just acknowledging them as such. She practices Tantric magic, sexual magic, a discipline you’re coming to appreciate, being a direct beneficiary of it. But her history, the plain truth of her, remains elusive. She says her parents died when she was young and she was brought up “…all over the place…” in foster homes, but she pushes the subject aside so quickly, you have the idea that it may be standing-in for a more unpleasant truth. She doesn’t appear to have any friends, but claims to have a few and promises you’ll meet them soon. As far as you’re concerned, the fewer friends, the better. Your fascination has grown to the level of obsession and you want to monopolize her time. Trying to explain how you feel to your best friend, Gerald, you’re reduced to cliché and hyperbole, and say that she’s redefined your view of women.

At twenty-four, Gerald’s a full year older than you, yet he still wears his baseball cap backwards and acts like an idiot. He tells everyone he’s in a band (he’s not), shares an apartment with a lipstick lesbian whom he claims is his girlfriend (she’s obviously not), and is employed as a barista, manning the coffee cart outside the University Book Store. Nevertheless, you maintain the illusion, held since you attended high school together, that his opinion has value. He slams an espresso shot, wipes his mouth and shudders as if in reaction to raw whiskey.

“Yeah?” he says. “She a trannie?”

You tell him that the qualities you perceive as flaws in other women, Abi possesses as strengths. Her skill at manipulation, for instance. You never feel used, you say, when she manages to get her way by manipulating you, because there’s always something in it for you, and also because she performs the act with such subtlety, it’s as if she elevates it beyond criticism. And that has allowed you to see that the art of manipulation in the female is pure and necessary, as essential to her well-being as body mass and muscle to a male.

You understand that you’re talking utter bullshit. You’re trying to convey Abi, all of her, by describing, ineptly, one aspect of her, and that can’t be done. Gerald isn’t listening, anyway; he’s leafing through a skateboard magazine.

“Dude, is she hot?” he asks.

“Why don’t you tell me? You want to meet her?”

“’Cause if she’s hot…” Gerald swats at you with his magazine and grins. “None of that other shit matters.”

Gerald’s partner, a white guy who’s too cool to talk—he nods, he grunts, he gestures—and has nasty-looking blonde dreadlocks that have been dipped in blue dye, takes over at the cart and you drive to Abi’s house in Gerald’s shitbox. It’s raining steadily by the time you arrive and Abi is out gathering herbs in the garden. Her T-shirt’s plastered to her body, reminding you of an old Italian flick in which Sophia Loren wandered around for half the movie wearing a ragged, soaked-through dress. You park across the street, point Abi out to Gerald, and the two of you sit and watch for a minute. Her curves accentuated by wet black cloth, Abi looks nothing if not hot.

“I don’t get it,” says Gerald. “She’s a plumper, dude. I didn’t know you’re into plumpers.”

You gape at him.

Gerald turns his eyes toward Abi once again. “She’s got some potential, okay? But seriously, man. Way she is now…I mean, she’s built like your mom. What’s your mom now? Forty-five, forty-six? If Abi-whatever is this big at twenty-five, time she’s forty-five, she’s gonna be like one of those freaks they have to cut through the roof to lift ’em outa their bedroom.”

“Fuck off!!”

“No, really. I’m trying to help you out, okay?”

“No, really! Fuck off!”

“Hey, man! Since you been with this chick, she’s got you so whipped, it’s like you’re not even the same guy. You’re all fucking oh-I-love-her-so-much-she’s-such-a-big-fat-goddess. You should hear yourself. You got me thinking about doing an intervention.”

Gerald has adopted an earnest expression that doesn’t quite cover up his underlying attitude, which you perceive now to be one of jealousy—you haven’t been spending much time with him since you hooked up with Abi and he’s taken it personally.

“I’m serious,” he says. “I’m thinking about it.”

“You’re being a real asshole, y’know.”

“You’re the asshole! Letting this cow lead you around by the dick!”

You open the door and Gerald, angry now, says “Carole, man. She was hot. I can’t figure why you broke up with her. But this one, she’s got a butt on her looks like a bagful of oatmeal. Maybe you got a thing for chicks who look like your mom.”

You jump out of the car, slam the door.

“Maybe you got a thing for your mom?” Gerald shouts. “Little Oedipal thing? Maybe that’s why you’re so into Miss Piggy!”

He says “edible” for “Oedipal.” You tell yourself it’s time you put high school behind you. Gerald’s trapped in a universe of Tool concerts, stoner weekends at Rockaway Beach and raves in some scuzzy warehouse with underage girls on Ecstasy, whereas you have moved on. Steaming, you flip him off as he pulls away from the curb, shouting something about “…fat bitch!”

Abi stands at the edge of the garden, her fingers black from grubbing in the dirt, and there’s a smudge on her chin, too, where she’s wiped her face; strands of wet hair cling to her pale cheeks. She looks like a sexy vampire fresh from a dirt nap. “Hey, angel,” she says, and asks who was the guy in the car and you say, “Just this assbag.” From the way she kisses you, a promise of more and better to come, you imagine that she must have heard some of what Gerald had to say and the kiss is your reward for defending her.

Gerald’s dismissal of Abi, however, has planted a seed and in the weeks that follow you spend a good deal of time wondering if your entire experience with her has been the product of a newly manifested perversion. The suspicion that your feelings might be unhealthy or somehow unreliable causes you to notice things about her that are less than ideal and you become aware that she’s far from the perfect woman you described. Her refusal to talk about personal affairs now strikes you as pathological. While she’ll go on at length, say, about the relationship between astrology and electro-magnetism, or the role of angels in human affairs, she’s reluctant to speak of anything regarding your relationship. This frustrates you—it’s like you’ve switched roles with her, like you’re the sensitive woman and she’s the uncommunicative guy. Equally frustrating is her tendency to talk about the end of the world as though it’s already occurred. Because of this, it’s impossible to make plans more than a couple of weeks in advance without prefacing the discussion by saying, “If we’re still around…” or something of the sort; otherwise she’ll point out the omission and maneuver the conversation onto a different track. Her passion for the rain seems demented, cracked, fetishistic; her diet gives you gas. Perhaps the most problematic of her flaws is a lack of empathy. Crossing a Safeway parking lot with her one evening, you encounter a deaf couple having an argument, a man and a woman of late middle age, reeking of alcohol, wearing soiled down jackets and baseball caps. Instead of making delicate, quick speech with their hands, they jab at one another with fists and fingers, gesticulating wildly, their fury all the more intense for its silence. Abi laughs and says disdainfully, “From a distance you’d think they were Italian.”

Taken by itself, it’s not an important failure. But it opens a door that’s difficult to close and you’re persuaded to believe that what appeared to indicate an insensitivity goes much deeper: Abi is contemptuous of everyone and, though you’re getting the best part of her, the kisses, the smiles, the sex, you conclude that her passion for you must be counterfeit and what you have assumed to be gentle teasing in regard to the movies you like, the books you read, your favorite foods, everything, has always borne the stamp of contempt…and yet you refuse to accept this as true. Your ego won’t permit it, nor will logic. If she feels nothing for you, why hook up with you? You decide you must be missing something. She displays such a narrow range of emotions, perhaps you’re overlooking some nuance that distinguishes her disdain from her affection. You can’t quite accept that, either (you’re not sure which are less trustworthy, your judgments or her emotional responses), but it makes a good fallback position.

One night, coming home late from lab, you round the corner onto your block and spot Abi standing in the doorway, dressed in her green silk robe, talking to two figures on the porch—they’re partially silhouetted by the light issuing from inside the house and are wearing purple sweatshirts with the hoods up. You can’t tell much about them, but you assume them to be men since they’re considerably taller than Abi. Startled, because this is the first time you’ve seen her speak to anyone except busboys and waiters and the like, you slip behind a fir trunk across the street and spy on them. You can’t hear what’s being said, but every so often, over the ambient noise, you catch a fragment of a gruff voice. Abi stands with her arms folded; the men’s hands are at their sides. Solicitors, you think. You get lots of Greenpeace people in the neighborhood, Secretaries For A Better Tomorrow, that sort of thing, most of whom Abi rebuffs, pissing them off by saying it’s too late to save the planet their way. But that notion takes a hit when one of the men puts his hand on Abi’s shoulder, a gesture you interpret as affirming, as if he’s saying, Be strong or something similar. With that, the men trot down the steps and walk briskly away. As they pass beneath the streetlight, you notice their sweatshirts are identical, each bearing letters that spell out Washington Huskies Athletic Department. Their jeans and running shoes, also identical, look to be brand new, but the light shows nothing of their cowled faces. Abi gazes after them and, with a sharp glance in your direction, goes inside and shuts the door.

“I saw you lurking,” she says as you enter and toss your pack on the sofa.

“I wasn’t lurking.”

“Do you always hide behind a tree before you come in?”

“I was surprised you had company.”

“Well, if you’d acted normally, I could have introduced you.”

“You should have called me over.”

“I didn’t want to interfere with your lurking.”

She passes into the kitchen and you follow, watching her ass roll under the green silk.

“Who were they?” you ask.

“Just some friends. Mike and Rem Gregory. You’d like them.” She peers inside the refrigerator.

“Rem? Like rapid eye movement? Like the band?”

She moves a Tupperware container aside. “I think it’s short for something.”

“So are they twins?”

She frowns at you over her shoulder. “No. Why would you say that?”

“Because they dress alike. You don’t see a whole lot of that these days…adults dressing alike.”

She takes out a bottle of water. “They’re eccentric, but they’re angels, really. I’ll have them over to dinner some night.”

“That’s cool. Maybe next week sometime.”

“They stopped by on their way out of town. I’m not sure when they’re getting back.”

“Yeah, well, let’s do it for real. I’m looking forward to meeting them.”

“For God’s sake, stop it!” Abi gives an inarticulate yell and throws the bottle at you. Thankfully, it’s plastic and her aim is off. “You’re always picking at me! You’re always prying and sneaking around!”

“What do you mean? I’m not sneaking around!”

“What do call hiding behind a tree? Then you stroll in asking all these questions about Mike and Rem.”

“Are you insane? I was making conversation. I don’t give a fuck about your fucking friends!”

Abi stares coldly at you; she takes off her pearl spider ring and sets it on the edge of the sink.

You laugh. “What…you gonna take a swing at me?”

“I’m insane, I’m liable to do anything.”

“Calm down, all right?”

Without further warning, she hurls herself at you, scratching, clawing at your face, and slams you back into the stove. You cover up, but a fingernail clips you near the eye; you feel wetness on your cheek and push her away. She reels off-balance and goes staggering through a door that leads into a hallway. Her robe fallen open; breasts swaying; panting; hair in disarray; she looks like the poster girl for a bad acid trip. She rushes you again. This time you control her wrists, spin her around and the two of you go dancing across the kitchen. Momentum carries you out into the hallway, where you manage to pin her against the wall. She tries a knee that you block by flattening her with your body.

“Calm the fuck down!” you shout.

She snaps at you, snagging your lower lip. She struggles to break free, but gives it up after a few seconds. She slumps, her face empties.

“You okay?” You relax your grip slightly, and she tries to head butt you. “Goddamn it!” With your right hand, you clamp both her wrists above her head, and put your left hand at her throat to restrain her.

“Want to rough me up?” She lets out a peal of laughter that would not sound out of place echoing down the corridor of an asylum. “Come on! Rough me up!!”

“What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Can’t you handle it?” She grinds her pelvis against you. “Come on, bitch!”

“Take it easy!”

She snaps at you again, but less fiercely, more a love bite, and keeps saying, half under her breath, “Come on, come on!”, taunting you, turning the fight into animalistic foreplay. You’re bleeding from the corner of your eye and from your lip, but you go with the moment and drag her into the bedroom, shove her down onto the bed. She raises her knees, opens to you, laughing now, and soon you’re going at it like beasts.

You expect her to apologize afterward, but she merely inspects your wounds, says “You’ll live,” and then gets out of bed and slips on her robe.

You watch her searching for the sash. “Can I ask a question without setting you off?”

She finds the sash, ties it, sits on the bed. “Sure.”

“Why do you get so defensive?”

“It’s not defensiveness, it’s I’m irritated. You do pry a lot. And that hiding-back-of-a-tree thing was just stupid.”

“Maybe so, but you totally overreacted.”

A shrug. “Didn’t you have fun?”

“Fun? At the end I did. It wasn’t much fun earlier.”

“I enjoyed every minute.”

It takes you a moment to absorb this. “You mean you weren’t angry?”

“I was angry…but not that angry. I thought letting the anger out would be a healthy exercise.”

She’s a wholly different woman than she was a half-hour before. The way she’s sitting there, fussing with the end of her sash, giving off a cheerful, self-possessed vibe. It’s difficult to picture her shrieking, infuriated…though not so difficult as once it was.

“So you were…” You grope for the right word. “Acting out? We could’ve gotten hurt.”

“I have complete confidence that you’re my physical superior. I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“You hurt me.”

She makes a wry face. “Oh, yeah. You’re scarred for life.”

You tell her you don’t see how going straight from minor disagreement to a violent confrontation is going to do other than muddy the waters.

“Do you feel muddied?” she asks. “I don’t. I feel perfectly clear. And we went from a disagreement to violence to sex. You left out the sex.” She stands, cinches the sash tighter. “Life is the reasoned exercise of passion. When it’s not, it’s death.”

You’re becoming accustomed to her use of homespun aphorisms, but still it tends to piss you off, as do the lectures that invariably follow. But you’re too worn out by the reasoned exercise of passion to do other than listen.

“People today are like tigers who’ve forgotten how to be tigers,” she says, moving toward the door. “Which explains why everything’s so fucked. We have to teach ourselves to be tigers together. That’s how we’ll last. I realize I haven’t been forthcoming with you, and I realize that makes you crazy, because you’re the inquisitive type. We have to push back the limits slowly, gradually reveal our natures. You’ll learn everything about me in time. And about yourself. Until then we need to snarl and claw on occasion, and let sex heal us.” She pauses in the doorway, gives her sash a final tug. “Want something to eat?”

Each Friday you catch an early bus to the U District and prepare for your 11 o’clock seminar in one of the coffee shops along the Ave. One morning in late May, while you’re poring over an article on protozoan genomes amid conversational clutter and the smells of exotic grinds, a little man stops beside your table, bracing on his cane. He’s got snappish blue eyes edged by crowsfeet and deep lines bracketing his mouth and unkempt reddish-brown hair and beard that make it seem he’s peering at you through a hedge. It’s an odd face, an old young face like a leprechaun’s. Hard to put an age to him. He could be in his late twenties or, just as easily, in his forties. He has on scruffy jeans and a denim jacket covered in patches that celebrate Jimi Hendrix, marijuana, Peter Tosh, and a sampling of leftist political causes. His torso is twisted—there appears to be something wrong with his spine. With a labored movement, he lowers himself into the chair opposite, draws a deep breath and releases it unsteadily.

“So you’re her latest,” he says; then he cocks his head and says in an altogether different voice, a reedy British voice, “Latest what?, you might ask. Lover? That would be the obvious assumption.” He leans forward, pushing into your space. “Perhaps he’s referring to something else. Something more sinister, eh?”

You’re accustomed to being approached by whack jobs—the U District is their natural habitat—and experience has taught you to be brusque. Yet in this instance, you’re pretty sure that “she” refers to Abi and you ask him what he’s talking about.

“About Abimagique.” He stares at you intently. “Your fat whore. Are you aware you’re sleeping with a fucking monster?”

“Watch your mouth.”

“It cost me a lot of pain to come here today, man. You need to hear this.”

You begin stowing books and papers in your pack.

“My name’s Richard Reiner,” he says, and tries to connect with your eyes—you look away, make a pretense of signaling the waitress. Maybe he knows Abi, but he’s still a whack job.

You tell him your name’s Carl, thinking it would be unwise to tell this madman your actual name. His face tightens, he swallows dry. Managing his pain, you suppose.

“I met her five years ago,” he says. “She wasn’t my type, but there was something about her. You know what I mean. Once you hook up with her, it’s like an addiction.”

You say, “Yeah,” to keep him moving along, certain that his experience with Abi—if, indeed, he had one—could have nothing in common with yours, though his reference to addiction strikes a chord.

“She lived in the same house, wore the same clothes. Looked the same. Nothing ever changes for her. Anyway, I moved in with her. Just like you.”

“How do you know that? About me moving in?”

“Because I been checking you out, Carl,” he says, giving the name a sardonic emphasis. “You want to be Carl, that’s fine with me. But don’t think…”

You zip up the backpack, scrape back your chair.

“Hey! Where you going?” Reiner grips your forearm, but you shake him off. You’ve heard enough to validate your judgment. The guy’s a flake, possibly a dangerous stalker.

“The thing she does when you fuck,” he says. “The thing with your lower back? You don’t want to let her do that anymore.”

That surprises you. Angry at Abi for using that trick, one you’ve come to relish, with another man, and angry at Reiner for forcing you to confront what seems, against ordinary logic, an intimate betrayal on her part, you ask, “Why not?”

“She’ll turn you into a cripple, man. Before she did it to me, my spine wasn’t a fucking corkscrew. I could walk more than ten steps without having to stop. That shit she makes you eat…all that fucking seaweed and algae and herbs. I think that’s tied with it. I think it makes you susceptible. Or maybe there’s drugs in it and that’s how she keeps you under control.” He grabs your arm again as you try to stand. “It’s the truth!! I was her first…”

The waitress materializes and you order another Americano, tell her you’ll pick it up at the counter. She asks Reiner what he’s having and he says impatiently, “Nothing, okay?” and glares at her until she walks away. “I was the first,” he goes on. “But she’s done it to six other guys. There might be more, for all I know. Here…” He two-fingers a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and pushes it toward you. You unfold the paper and look at the six names and addresses written thereon. One, belonging to someone named Phil Minz, sticks in your mind, because it’s in a building where you used to live.

“She must have fucked it up with me,” Reiner says. “Punched the wrong buttons. Or maybe she just needed more practice, because the others are all in wheelchairs.”

“I have a class,” you say.

“You’re not hearing me!” Reiner slaps the table, frustrated. “I used to be into it, man. Way she’d slip her hands down there and start poking around. I was like all…” He puts on a show of panting rapidly, like a dog. “I couldn’t wait for her to set me off. And then this one day, it was like she hits me with the A-bomb. I was fucking drooling. In a stupor. Jesus couldn’t have made me feel any better. The next morning, I was all seized up. Not like I am now. It got worse over a period of about six weeks. But she did it to me. The doctors, they can’t say what happened. When I tell ’em, they don’t come right out and laugh, but…” Reiner leans back and rests his cane across his knees. “You’re not laughing. You know what I’m talking about.”

His manner seems rational, though what he’s telling you does not. Yet you’ve had a recurrence of back trouble since you and Abi became lovers, and you’ve been blaming it on too much sex. “Why would she do that?” you ask. “Even if she could…which I’m not buying.”

“You want to understand her motivations, ask her. I thought maybe she’d messed up with me. Y’know, like it was some kind of dangerous technique and she went too far. But six other guys, that tells me different.”

You stand and shoulder your pack.

“C’mon, man! Talk to her! If it’s bullshit, what’s the fuck’s the harm in talking?”

The waitress pops back over and cautions you to keep it down or you’ll have to leave.

“I’m leaving,” you say.

Reiner struggles to his feet. “You want to end up like this…or worse? Do you?”

You make silent apology to the waitress, slip her a couple of dollars.

“What do you think I’m doing here?” says Reiner as you head for the door. “I’m trying to break you two up? I want to spare you from suffering my fate? I’m crazy but well-intentioned? Fuck you! I want you to make the bitch pay! After that you can fucking die!”

That night before making love, lying with Abi in bed, you tell her about Reiner and show her the list of addresses. Her silence makes you feel contrite, as if you’re confessing, as if you’re guilty for having listened to Reiner. When you’re done, when she says, “I’m sorry,” it’s like she’s bestowing a benediction.

“What’re you sorry for?” you ask. “Some whacko running around saying shit? I shouldn’t even have told you.”

“You needed to tell me,” she says. “Otherwise I couldn’t clear things up.”

“You don’t have to clear anything up. I only told you because I thought you’d want to know.”

She shifts closer, a breast nudging your arm. “Richard was a client. He’s right about one thing. I did make a mistake with him, I got too involved. When I broke it off, I tried to maintain the friendship, but…I should have seen how psychologically damaged he was. He became irrational. He accused me of making him worse. Now he’s taken it a step further.”

You rush to assure her everything’s cool, you didn’t give what Reiner said any weight, but she goes on as if she hasn’t heard.

“The diet,” she says. “I’m trying to keep us healthy. I realize it’s not what you’re used to, but…I don’t know. I can try fixing you a separate meal. I won’t cook meat, though. I don’t even want it in the house. If you need meat, you’ll have to get it somewhere else. This…” She reaches behind her and fumbles for the list. “These are some of my current clients. They are in wheelchairs, but all of my clients are incapacitated in some way. I’m not sure how he got their names. Perhaps he followed me.” She lets the scrap of paper fall between you. “If you don’t want me to manipulate your back when we make love, I understand.”

“No, I mean, if you want to, it’s all right.” You’re eager to compensate for the weakness you’ve shown, for half-believing a lunatic, for injuring her.

“I do it to increase our pleasure. To hurry you, so you’ll come when I do. I like it when we finish together.”

“I do, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You kiss, you apologize for doubting her, she apologizes for getting mad, you say you didn’t notice, her anger as mild as her passion, and you kiss again, a deeper kiss. Soon you’re moving together and the shadows crouched in the corners, the hum and gurgle of the pump on the empty aquarium, the candle flames on the night table flickering…you’re aware of these things as extensions of her. They’re her shadows, her flames, her humid breath. Even you are in process of becoming her, an immersion in another human being such as you’ve never known before, and when her hands slide down to the small of your back, her touch tentative, you encourage her, you submit to her. Afterward, dim with pleasure, you recall what Reiner said, how he didn’t notice any ill effects until the next day. But you’re secure in the moment and, holding Abi spoon style, you indulge in one of those passages that come to lovers during which they ask questions that seek to annotate their relationship, trivial questions like, When did you know? and What did you feel then? and When was the first time you looked at me…I mean really looked? You find yourself asking what was it that attracted her to you? She says it wasn’t anything specific. But you insist, you say, “There must’ve been something you noticed first.”

“Your eyes,” she says. “Your beautiful blue eyes. I’d like to have babies with those eyes.”

This being the first mention ever of babies, you’re a little uneasy, but you decide she’s speaking more-or-less in the abstract.

“Yeah,” you say, trying to sound on the positive side of neutral. “That’d be nice someday.”

She makes a forlorn noise and says, “I don’t know if there’ll be time.”

After puzzling over the comment, you realize it probably refers to her sense of foreboding about an imminent doomsday. You’ve begun to think that her obsession with the end of the world is responsible for her emotional detachment and that she doesn’t allow herself to become exuberant about anything, because she sees the inevitable downside. You don’t know what to tell her, so you hold her more tightly. Ten or fifteen seconds flow past and she says, “I don’t believe you understand how serious things are.”

You’re astonished that she wants to get into this now, that she’s willing to trash the afterglow in order to pound on the lectern and talk about the death of nations. You start to say as much, but she cuts you off.

“No, listen! It’s very important that you listen,” she says. “Our future depends on it.”

You tell her, grumpily, to go ahead.

“I know you think I’m a nut…”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is.” She disengages from you, rolls onto her back and locks you with her eyes. “You humor me. You love me in spite of it. But you think I’m nuts. That’s all right. I’m used to it. And I realize nothing I say now is going to change things. But I want you to try, hard as you can, to give me the benefit of the doubt.”

“Of course I will. You know…”

She puts a finger to your lips. “Just listen. I want you to try to accept that I know certain things, things you don’t know. And I want you to try to accept that this knowledge has an important application. You won’t be able to do it right away, but I want you to try in any case, because there’s going to come a moment when you’ll have to trust me. And if you don’t, everything we’ve working toward will be destroyed.”

“I’m…What am I supposed to trust you about?”

“Everything. You’ll have to place your trust in me completely. Do you think you can do that? No matter how things look? I think you can. I think we have that kind of potential.”

“It sounds like you’re talking about something dangerous.”

“Love’s dangerous,” she says. “And these are dangerous times to be in love. Do you believe that?”

How can you disbelieve such a melodramatic challenge, with her eyes boring into you and her breath heating your skin?

“Promise you’ll always remember this conversation,” she goes on. “If you do, if you can remember us, the way we are this minute, everything will be all right.”

The pump gurgles loudly, the hum cycles down, and the damp smell of the firs is carried inward on a breeze “Do you trust me?” you ask.

“I’m trying to.”

“Then why not tell me what’s up? And this stuff about you knowing things I don’t…what do you know? What’s the situation going to be when I have to trust you completely?”

“I think for us,” she says, “trust has to be like when we make love. It has to come together, you giving your trust and me giving mine, at the moment when we want it the most.”

You’re uncertain of the metaphor, but you think you understand what she means.

“Promise me,” she demands, pressing her body against you.

Though you’re no longer clear as to what you’re promising, you promise. She clasps your head in both her hands and looks at you for a long time, searching below the surface glints and gleams for whatever hides in you from ordinary light. At last, apparently satisfied, she pulls you close and tells you all the things she wants you to do to her, whispering them sweetly, almost demurely, as if concerned that God and his angels might overhear.

Over the summer, you give up hamburgers. You’ve become so accustomed to Abi’s food that even the smell of a burger makes you nauseous. It’s a small thing to have given up—you’ve never been so happy. The way things are going, if you and Abi were traditional types, you’d be renting out a church and looking into rings. You run into Reiner occasionally and whenever he tries to accost you, you sprint away, leaving him to yell some madness about Abi in your wake. One day in the fall, you’re coming back from a meeting with your thesis committee, a distinctly unpleasant meeting, your work’s been slipping badly, and Reiner limps from the doorway of a used CD store directly into your path. Your temper flares and you push him back into the doorway and tell him to keep the fuck away from you or you’ll bring in the cops.

His laughter has an unsound ring. “You can’t threaten a dead man.”

You become aware again of your surroundings, of passers-by slowing their pace and staring, of two long-haired guys inside the CD store who appear ready to intervene, to rescue the cripple, and you take a step back.

“Those addresses I gave you…you never checked them out, did you?” Reiner asks. “You haven’t done anything.”

You start to turn away, but he grabs a handful of your jacket and hangs on. “What’ll it cost you to check ’em out? Just check out one of ’em!”

“They’re her clients, man!”

“She made them her clients! She crippled them.”

You twist free of his grasp.

“You still have the addresses?” Reiner asks.

You tell him you do, you’ll check them out, and hurry off.

“Didn’t she even leave you one ball?” he shouts.

The scrap of paper bearing the addresses is long gone, but you still remember the one, the building you used to live in, and a month later, walking past that building, you have a what-the-hell moment and stop to inspect the directory. Phil Minz, 1F. Once inside, you walk down a corridor past apartments A through E, and catch sight of a harried-looking gray-haired man wearing a coverall coming out of F, preparing to lock the door. You inquire of him and he tells you that Minz moved out last week. They took him, he thinks, to a clinic somewhere. Maybe in California. He’s only now getting around to inspecting the place.

“The apartment’s available?” you ask.

“Yeah, but I won’t be showing it until after it’s cleaned.”

“Can I take a look?”

He hesitates.

“You know how hard it is to find an apartment this close to the campus,” you tell him. “Let me take a quick look?”

A beat-up sofa in the living room, some paper trash on the floor. The back room is empty but for a queen-sized bed stripped of covers and, on a counter recessed in the wall, an aquarium filled with greenish water, pump gurgling, empty of fish.

“Guy left his fish tank behind,” the super says unnecessarily.

“What kind of fish did he have?” You peer into the tank, searching for signs of habitation, for algae, fish grunge, food debris. Thoughtful of them to clean a tank that was going to be abandoned.

“Hell, I don’t know.” The super joins you at the tank and for a second you’re both peering into it, like curious giants into a tiny lifeless sea. “I never had to come into the apartment when he was here.”

The presence of an empty fish tank is an odd coincidence, but you doubt it’s other than that. It’s conceivable that Abi thought the sound of the pump might soothe her patient, and it’s more likely that she had nothing whatsoever to do with it, that there were fish in the tank and someone did a cleaning. You promise yourself that you won’t let Reiner undermine your feelings anymore. Abi’s flaws aren’t mysterious or sinister. They’re human flaws and if they have an underlying explanation, it must have something to do with her past, with whatever secret she’s keeping. She says that someday she’ll tell you about it. Someday when the two of you are closer.

“Closer? We’ve been together for months,” you say. “What’s it going to take?”

“You don’t think we can be closer? I do, I believe we’ve got a miles to go.”

The way she deflects your question with half a compliment, half a criticism, implying that the relationship has room to grow and at the same time telling you it’s imperfect—you understand she has the ability to outflank you, that she can switch subjects or turn a conversation into a guilt trip, and you’ll fall into her trap every time. It make you crazy. She plays this game so much better than you, it would be pointless to keep pressing her. But you press her anyway and, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, exasperated, she says, “Let’s get through the holidays, all right? Then we’ll have a talk.”

You’re not sure what’s going to be so difficult about getting through the holidays, since they’re the same for her as other days—she attends neither parties nor religious services, and invites no one over to the house. Yet you don’t care. At least there’s a firm date set for clearing up the mystery.

Either you’re crippled, lying in Minz’s bed, Apartment 1F, staring at the aquarium, empty of water, or you’re dreaming that you’re crippled—whichever, it’s more vivid than you want it to be. Your vision is blurry and your thoughts are muddled by meds that aren’t doing their job. The least movement triggers intense pain in your lower back; your spine feels brittle. Abi, naked and hugely pregnant, is standing next to the bed. You call out to her—you’re dying of thirst, you require different meds—but she doesn’t even twitch. She’s a lifelike statue to which a neatly trimmed strip of pubic hair, nipple rings and a genital piercing, glinting silver in its rosy cleft, have been applied. Hands resting on her swollen belly, staring into nowhere. Yet despite her silence and immobility, she seems to have a more genuine reality than the rest of the room. She dims and brightens as if, somewhere out of view, thick curtains are blowing in and out, each billow altering the light. Her breasts, delicately clawed by stretch marks, milk-heavy, nipples distended, areola darkened and warped into oval irregularities, seem more the emblem of her pregnancy than her belly. Their taut skin has a waxy sheen. You imagine a bowlful of them, Still Life With Humongous Tits, on the night table by the bed, placed there for your nourishment, like those wax confections from childhood made to resemble pop bottles and holding flavored syrup.

You gaze at the ceiling, seeking solace in the patterns that melt up from the wormy patterns of paint, but they yield a medieval imagery that’s not in the least consoling: a solitary hooded rider shouldering a scythe, mounted on a skeleton horse; a reclining giant, propped on his side, examining a gaping wound in his belly from which tiny men and women dressed in medieval fashion are escaping; a man with a stylized crescent moon for a head and a red lolling tongue. You close your eyes, hoping for someone to come, and before long two men in purple hooded sweatshirts wheel a big-screen TV into the room, plug it in, and toss the remote on the bed. You assume them to be Mike and Rem, Abi’s friends, but you’re frightened of them. They’re much taller than you thought, both almost seven feet, and their faces are shadowed, indistinct…and that’s not a product of your blurry vision. It’s as if their features are being manufactured out of the dark stuff that’s in flux beneath their hoods. Once they finish with the TV, they lift Abi—she remains rigid, hands clamped onto her belly, legs straight, like a mannequin—and stand her next to the aquarium. One presses a spot on the small of her back and her belly opens like a Chinese puzzle, two panels with interlocking teeth that fit together perfectly, their joints invisible to the eye. Inside is a many-galloned bottle full of greenish water. This they remove and empty into the aquarium; they switch on the pump. Then they close up Abi’s belly and carry her into the front room, handling her more easily now that she’s lighter. You’ve watched all this transpire in a state of shock, but now, horrified, you struggle to get to your feet. That failing, you rack your brain for a means of escape. After a while, having nothing better to do, you hit the power button on the remote.

The men bring you food. Cookies, potato chips, sandwiches, ice cream. They also bring meds and provide you with a wheelchair. Desperation fades beneath an onslaught of calories, drugs, and soap operas. Now and then you try to come up with a plan, but you can’t walk and the men, who station themselves in the front room, check on you frequently, so you can’t shout or wave out a window or toss down messages into the parking lot. You begin to tell time by what’s on TV. It’s half past The Amazing Race or a quarter to the Guiding Light. You drowse, eat, fall asleep watching a movie on the SciFi Channel, eat, wake to Sportscenter, develop an interest in Law and Order reruns, in celebrity. You think Oprah’s a beast no matter how many pounds she loses; and you decide that although Donald Trump serves the Evil One, he’s just an enormously powerful nerd; you hope the blond girl wins on American Idol and you can’t wait for the new season of Battlestar Galactica. You speculate that it might be possible to conduct a conversation upon any subject by limiting yourself to the career of John Travolta as a metaphorical construction. The only things that undergo a change in your environment are your weight—you’re getting fat—and the aquarium, in which a number of white sporelike things, perhaps a hundred of them, are floating.

The appearance of the spores, if that’s what they are, causes a renewal of desperation. Since they were bred in water removed from Abi’s belly, you’re forced to accept that they well may be her children…and yours. This notion kindles dread in you and, when next they bring food, you beg one of the men for help. His head swivels toward you and for an instant the lineaments of a disfigured face surface from the turbulent flow of dark matter. He makes a noise like static heard underwater, a faint seething, and leaves you quaking and alone amid a pile of fried fruit pies and doughnuts and potato chips…Maui Sweet Onion chips, you see on picking up the bag. Excellent!

Your fear abates the next day, your attention captivated by an X-Files marathon, and it abates still more when you realize that the number of spores has diminished. Some of them are turning into tadpoles that eat the remaining spores. Once the spores are gone, a process that occupies about two weeks, the tadpoles begin to eat each other, until finally a single white fish, the exact shade of white as Abi’s skin, circulates in the tank. Mike and Rem feed it daily and it grows fatter and more active while you fatten and grow sluggish. You become accustomed to its presence. That it may be your child amuses you. Boy or girl?, you wonder. You decide it’s a boy and name your son Gerald. Despite your amusement, there’s a horrific tinge to these thoughts, but the men have increased the strength of your meds and you can’t take anything seriously.

You sleep most of the days, waked by an internal alarm clock in time to catch your favorite shows, and when you manage to think at all, you think about Abi. You miss her. Not the inhuman Abi, the vessel you filled, but the Abi you imagined her to be. You miss her so very much that you weep at the slightest emotional cue. You remember the good times, kissing in the rain, making love, listening to her disparage diners in restaurants, passers-by, people on TV…you even miss the massage technique that left you a cripple. You take to watching the Lifetime Movie Channel because it enlists these same emotions, and you sob in sympathy with the plight of battered wives, rape victims, girls on the run from lustful dads, women with deceitful lovers and abducted children.

One morning you wake to discover that Gerald’s not in his tank. A large damp spot stains the carpeting beneath the tank, and a trail of wetness leads toward the foot of your bed. You try to sit up, wanting to learn if Gerald’s still alive, but Mike and Rem have increased your meds again—you can barely lift your head. You shout out to them, you want them to save Gerald, to restore him to the tank, but no one responds. They haven’t been in to check on you for two days now and Gerald must be starving. No wonder he hurled himself onto the floor. The bedspread tightens convulsively down by your feet, as if it’s being tugged, and the next thing you know, Gerald heaves up onto the bottom of the bed. His fins have developed into primitive hands, and he’s half-wriggling, half-hauling himself along, moving past your ankle. He’s even bigger than you thought, he must weigh nearly three pounds. His face is an obscene caricature of the human, a squashed, round, dolorous face gashed by a wide mouth that sports rows of barracuda-like teeth. A chill apprehension steals over you. With another heave, he succeeds in flopping up onto your pelvis, where he snoots at the spread overlying your genitals. His glabrous skin shows a tracery of blue subcutaneous veins, like Abi’s breasts. He has your eyes…

As absurd as this nightmare is, as explicable in terms of its imagery, it unnerves you. You can’t get it out of your head. The next morning, newly suspicious, you go through Abi’s address book and copy down the names of her male clients. It’s not that you believe she intends you harm, you tell yourself. You’re the one with a problem. It’s your ambivalence toward her that’s causing you to pursue these fantasies. You did the same thing more-or-less with Carole, suspecting her of cheating on you, then dumping her before she could. By making a thorough investigation, you’re certain you’ll be able to defuse your suspicions and defang your nightmares.

You dedicate the weeks after Thanksgiving to checking out Abi’s clients. Your master’s thesis is circling the drain, but you hope that by cutting classes following a vacation holiday, you can build the grounds for an excuse, an emotional crisis, illness in the family, something, and perhaps your committee will be lenient. You don’t much care one way or the other, though. The relationship is what’s important. Five of Abi’s clients have moved away, including Phil Minz. With the others, you pretend to be taking a survey for a study designed to improve handicapped services. Those you interview during the first week have all been injured prior to meeting Abi and have discernable reasons for their disability, whether disease or accident or congenital defect. Your investigation doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere and you think you must be coming down with something. Your energy’s depleted, you’re running a mild fever, and you’re having trouble concentrating. To top things off, Reiner has re-entered your life, popping up here and there in the U District and shouting profane threats then hurrying away. Two or three more days, you decide. After that, you’ll pack it in.

On Tuesday of the second week, you interview one Nathan Sessions, a muscular black guy with a spinal injury who’s three years older than you. He opens the door wearing gym shorts and a gray T-shirt, a pair of dumbbells resting on his lap, and asks if you would mind talking in his bedroom? He’s been exercising and would like to lie down. As he precedes you in his wheelchair, you observe a backwards 7 tattooed at the base of his neck and, when you enter the bedroom, you see an aquarium set on a table, almost obscured behind stacks of books, pump gurgling merrily. No fish. Books are scattered about the room, on the floor, in chairs. The pile on the chair beside the bed, which you clear in order to sit, consists of works treating with the nature of time. A sheet of paper falls out of one; on it, the word “Bottom” and, depended beneath it, a list of numbers that appear to be longitudes and latitudes. You ask him about it, and he takes the paper, peers at it, shakes his head, and says, “I had a geography class last semester. Must be some old notes or something.”

With practiced agility and a notable lack of effort, Sessions transitions between the chair and his bed, settles himself, and cheerfully tells you to fire away. After a battery of inessential questions, you ask how he came by his disability. He says it’s a degenerative condition that relates to an injury he suffered on the wrestling team back in high school, and was later exacerbated when he was “messing around.” His attitude strikes you as buoyant and energized—you remark that he seems extraordinarily well-adjusted compared to others you’ve interviewed.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” he says. “I’m more alive now than I ever was. I can’t begin to tell you how much my life’s improved.”

“What do you mean? How’s it improved?”

“Before I was paralyzed, I was bored with my life…though I didn’t understand it that way. Not so I could say it. I wasn’t interested in the world, except for the pleasure it could give me. Now I’m interested in things. Passionately interested. There’s not enough time in the day. I suppose my attitude’s partly compensatory. I’m determined not to get depressed.”

This seems right out of the Abimagique textbook of new age morality, and you wonder if Sessions actually feels that way or if he’s been drinking the Kool Aid. You wonder also if that’s a meaningful distinction.

“There must be some things you miss,” you say.

“If I sit and think about it…sure. I don’t like being in crowds anymore. Can’t see over people. Things like that. But I don’t worry about that shit. I’ve got too much else going on.”

Employing as much sensitivity as possible, you ask about sex.

Sessions fold his arms and gives you a cool stare. “Isn’t that outside the scope of your survey?”

“Not really. I’m hoping to get a complete profile on everyone I interview. That way, when I analyze it, I’ll be dealing with more than just statistics. If you prefer not to answer…”

“No, it’s fine. I’m fully functional.”

You pretend to make a note. “Isn’t that unusual with spinal injuries?”

Sessions starts to respond, pauses, and then says, “My massage therapist, she…”

It seems that he’s debating whether or not he wants to touch upon the subject of his therapist. You wait for him to continue.

“Okay,” says Sessions. “My therapist…we had a thing, you know. She did stuff to my body, man, that you wouldn’t believe. With her knowledge of muscles and the chakras, you know. She really got me off. Especially when she did this thing with my back. It was incredible. So one morning after we had sex, I woke up with bad pain in my back and I couldn’t move my legs. My doctor said it would have happened eventually, anyway. But what she did probably accelerated the deterioration. I was pissed, man. Full of negativity. But Abi, my therapist, she wouldn’t let me cop an attitude. She brought me back physically and mentally. She helped me with my diet, my rehab.”

“She must have had a lot of guilt.”

“With Abi…she’s not easy to figure out. But I never tripped on her about what happened, you know. I was the one begging her to do her thing, so it’s on me.”

It appears that Sessions has said all he intends to about the subject and you’re having difficulty framing a question that will start him up again, one that won’t give away your position—you’re not sure about Sessions’s disposition toward Abi. It’s possible he’s her complicitor, though to think that would be quintessential paranoia, and the question arises, complicit in what?

“That’s a cool tattoo on your neck,” you say. “The backwards seven.”

“It not a seven, it’s a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. I had it done when I was with Abi. She’s got one like it.”

“Does it stand for anything?”

“It’s got something to do with angels.” Sessions shifts uneasily, flicks a glance at the door, as if expecting someone.

“Seems like this woman’s been a big influence on every part of your life.”

“Oh, yeah. Abi’s unique. If I told you some of the stuff she can do…Man!”

“Like for instance?”

“That’s okay,” says Sessions. “You can live without hearing it. I’ll tell you this much. She made me realize that we can change our destinies. Abi’s all about destiny. Hers, mine…everyone’s. She’s trying to change the world, and I think she just might do it.”

“How’s she going to change it?”

“By changing the planet’s dharma.”

It’s a rote answer, glibly stated, and you don’t know how to respond; you shuffle your papers, pretending to be searching for something. “So you’re not with her anymore?”

“We’re doing a project together, but we’re not…like we were.” A distracted expression comes over Sessions’s face. “Listen, I need to get working here.”

“You mean work on the project?” Grasping at straws, you pick up one of the books you cleared off the seat. “Does it have anything to do with time?”

Sessions swings himself back into his chair and precedes you toward the door, obviously eager to have you gone. “That’s right, man. There’s never enough of it. We need to make some more.”

The Hebrew letter tattooed on Sessions’s neck and Abi’s thigh is Chof. As far as you can determine, there’s no connection whatsoever between this letter and the various hierarchies of angels, but while searching the internet for such a connection, you happen across a webpage entitled Fallen Angels, a section devoted to a group of such angels known as the Grigori, also known as the Watchers. According to the page, they looked like men, only larger, and were appointed by God to be the shepherds of mankind, there to instruct and lend a helping hand when necessary, but never to interfere in the course of human development. Sort of like that Federation rule, the Prime Directive, that Captain Kirk used to break every other episode of Star Trek. The Grigori, too, broke the Prime Directive by teaching mankind the forbidden sciences of astrology, divination, herb craft, and magic (the very disciplines, you note, in which Abi claims proficiency). To compound their sin, they began to lust after human women, to cohabit and have children with them. For this, they were banished from Heaven. Two of the princes of the Grigori were the angels Michael and Remiel.

Mike and Rem Gregory.

Abi’s friends, the purple sweatshirt non-twins.

…they’re angels, really…

You wish you hadn’t stumbled across the webpage; you don’t want conjecture about angels, or any peripheral matter, cluttering up your head and interfering with your ability to make judgments, now the essential circumstance that’s confusing you has been revealed. Though Reiner and Sessions corroborate each other’s story to an extent, the stories have different outcomes. Sessions may have been under pressure to tell you what he did—that could explain his haste in getting rid of you; but his anxiety could be also be chalked up to boredom or, as he indicated, to time considerations. Whatever, the bottom line is clear. Either you’re misinterpreting a series of coincidences, or Abi is serially fucking and crippling clients for purposes unknown, purposes that may involve the complicity of angels and will, if Sessions is to be believed, affect all of mankind.

After interviewing everyone on Abi’s client list, you conclude that if Reiner is correct in his assertion, if she’s crippled six other men aside from him, five of them must be the five who have moved away from Seattle, because—except for Sessions—none of the rest qualify. Accepting Reiner’s thesis that he was Abi’s mistake, those five men plus Sessions plus you equals seven, the same number as Abi’s tattoo…yet according to Sessions, it’s not a backwards seven, it’s Chof, thus the number seven is irrelevant. Maybe it’s both a seven and a Hebrew letter. Maybe an upside-down L, too. You can’t fit all the details into a single theory. Angels, sevens and Hebrew letters, time, empty aquariums, Abi transforming men into cripples, the end of the world, etc.—you consider the possibility that one or more of the details may be extraneous, and if you removed it from the mix, the rest would cohere. That’s the crux of your problem. Your witnesses are unreliable. Reiner’s vituperation and Sessions’s nervous evangelism equally nourish your capacity for doubt and serve to cast everything you yourself have witnessed in a shaky light. You can’t tell how much to keep of what they’ve said and how much to throw away. Confronting Abi won’t provide an answer. She’ll only dissemble, or she’ll speak the truth and you’ll mistake it for dissembling.

You finally come down with whatever it is you’ve been coming down with and are dog-sick for two weeks, debilitated for several days thereafter. Abi nurses you through the illness, a consolation for which you’re slavishly grateful, but your gratitude is tempered by the dreams that accompany your fever. In their basic architecture, they’re similar to the dream you had about your son, the fish—you’re crippled, bedridden, but instead of occupying an apartment, you’re in Abi’s house. From those fundamentals, the dreams diverge wildly in character and have different endings, some ordinary, some dire, some ecstatic, some perplexing. Especially memorable is a dream in which Abi proves to be a mental patient escaped from an asylum in the future, and has come back to the twenty-first century to save the planet, but bungles the job. In one, she assumes the role of an alien, a member of an invasion force bent on destroying the environment; in another, she’s a sexual demoness, a spirit named Lilith devoted to torturing young men; in another yet, she’s a Gaian incarnation with noble intentions and extraordinary powers. In the remaining two dreams (there are six in all, seven if you count the one with the fish) she’s the Abi with whom you’re familiar, a human female. In the first of these, she makes your life hellish with her psychotic fits, eventually setting fire to the house and incinerating you both; in the second, she nurses you back to health, you walk again, and the two of you embark upon a life of accomplishment and good works.

The dreams are exceptionally vivid and too organized to be typical expressions of your subconscious, but you don’t concern yourself with them until they begin showing up in rerun, variants of each repeating night after night (except for the nightmare about the fish, which never resurfaces). The most significant variant elements are the endings: the dream about the time traveler, for instance, ended badly the first time, but ends well in rerun. The aquarium, Rem and Mike, and other facets of your life with Abi figure in all of them to one degree or another. You wonder if Abi’s responsible for the dreams, if she’s gotten into your head that deeply. But then you imagine that you may be on the wrong track altogether. Suppose you and she are at the center of a cosmic hiccup, an eddy in time, a branch poking up from the surface, disordering the flow, that must be cleared before the temporal stream can resume its customary race? The way the dreams are circulating in your head lends a physical resonance to this idea and you have the sense that you’ve given up your destiny to a game of musical chairs; when the music stops, you’ll be stuck with one of six possibilities. In essence, if not in actuality, you’ll wind up with a well-intended madwoman from the future, an ordinary psychotic, a seeker after truth, an alien, a sexual predator, or a goddess. It’s ridiculous, you think. Yet each of these roles signifies a color you have assigned to Abi’s character at some point or another, and you can’t avoid the feeling that one of your dreams will come true.

You understand that you should put some distance between yourself and Abi, that the relationship has become entirely too unrealistic—in your head, anyway—and you should tell her that you need some time apart; but the thing is, aside from the fact that you love her, this has all come to seem normal, this world of mystic possibility, of dreams and portents, of secrets and Tantric orgasm. You’re dizzy with it, yet you don’t mind being dizzy, you’ve come to enjoy the spins, the drama, the meta-fictional weirdness. As is the case with Abi’s food, you’ve adapted to her ways and you don’t believe you can function without them. It could be simply that you’ve gone too far—or are too far gone—to jump ship. You’re in a canoe going over a falls, right at the edge, and it makes no sense to start swimming now.

The day after Christmas, 2004. You wake early, before first light and, leaving a note for Abi, who’s still asleep, you go for a walk. You intend it to be a short walk, but the day dawns clear and crisp, a rare sun break in the gloom of winter, and you keep on walking until you reach the U District. Around 8:30, you’re idling along the Ave, browsing store windows, and there’s hardly any traffic, pedestrian or otherwise, but suddenly there’s Reiner, recognizable by his cane, his crookedness, standing on the opposite side of the street about a half block away. In reflex, you start down a side street, but decide that this would be a good time to deal with him, with nobody about. As you draw abreast of him, he stares at you grimly, but doesn’t speak or try to approach. Though easier to live with than his curses, his silent regard is disconcerting, and you suspect that he sees some new crookedness in you that has made you not worth hassling.

You call Abi, but she’s not up or not answering; you step into a chapati place, recently opened, and order the Mandalay Combo, watch patches of ice melting on the asphalt outside. Once you’ve eaten, you call Abi again—she’s still not answering—and head home, keeping to the sunny side of the street. By the time you reach the house, it’s gotten cloudy and colder. You hear the TV muttering in the bedroom as you enter. Abi’s sitting in the chair by the window, still wearing her robe, watching CNN. “I tried to call,” you say, and fling yourself down onto the bed. On the screen, in a tropical setting, people are weeping, being consoled, digging into a wreckage of palm litter and concrete. You ask what happened and Abi says it was a tsunami.

“A tidal wave?”

“Yes.”

She makes it clear that she’s in no mood to talk. The screen shows a replay of the wave, caught on tourist video, striking a Thai resort; then a pulsing red dot in the Indian Ocean with little cartoon waves radiating away from it to strike the coasts of Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia. The death toll, it’s estimated, may rise into the hundreds of thousands. A commercial for L’Oreal intercuts the news and you try once again to talk with Abi, but she flounces out of the room, goes to stand by the kitchen sink, staring out the window into the back yard. Her shields are up, maximum power, and she’s sealed inside her envelope of intimacy-rejecting force. Though you follow her, you don’t say a word. You sit at the kitchen table and wait for her to speak.

“I knew this would happen,” she says without turning from the window.

With anyone else, you would offer comforting platitudes, but she takes these natural disasters personally; platitudes would only provoke her.

“I didn’t know it would be today.” Her voice catches. “Over the holidays…yeah. But I didn’t expect it today.”

You stretch out your legs, enlace your hands behind your head.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” She whirls on you, her face full of strain, spoiling for a fight, needing to vent the frustration and pain she feels. You no longer doubt that she feels it. She has this general empathy, this overweening concern for the species, though she seems to lack empathy in the specific; you remain dubious as to its authenticity, thinking that she may be like a Method actress, submerged in her role.

“What can I say? This is so huge, you can’t feel it. Maybe you can, but it’s tough for me. I walk in and see a little red dot on the TV and cartoony wave symbols striking map countries. It might as well be a hundred thousand cartoon people are dead.” You shake your head, as if sadly bewildered. “I think there’s something that protects most people from feeling so much death. A basic indifference that kicks in when it’s needed. You don’t seem to have that protection.”

Practice makes perfect. Whether or not it’s bullshit, you’ve said exactly the right thing; perhaps you even halfway believe it. Mollified, she sits beside you and caresses your arm. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You know how I get.”

You shrug. “It’s okay.”

She draws circles on your arm with a finger. “I have to start making things ready.”

“Things?”

“Me, mostly. I have to prepare myself.”

You’ve got a feeling of prickly numbness in your left foot, sciatic damage from the old car accident, and you react to this with a noise that, it appears, she assumes to be a sign of disapproval.

Exasperated, she says, “Do you remember the conversation we had months ago? I told you I wanted you to accept that I knew some things you didn’t?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew this would happen in late two-thousand-and-four. I didn’t know what form it would take, but I knew where, more-or-less, and I knew it would involve water. In two-thousand-and-eight there’ll be a second cataclysmic event. Much worse than this. In Latin America, I think. It’ll involve the earth. Maybe a quake…I’m not sure. From that point on, there’ll be a string of disasters, all coming close together. In two-thousand-twelve…it ends.”

“The disasters end?”

“Everything ends. I can’t explain it. I could make up a story that would present an explanation, but no matter how hard I tried to be truthful, it would be so far off the mark, it might as well be a lie. I could tell you I’ve seen it happen, but how I’ve seen it, it’s too diffuse to explain. What you said about me not being protected like most people? That’s more accurate than you know. I’ve exposed myself to a force that…” She clicks her teeth in frustration. “If I could explain it to anyone, I’d explain it to everyone. All I can do at this point is try to remedy it.”

“This remedy,” you say, recalling Sessions and his books. “Does it have anything to do with time?”

“Yes, partly. And the Tantra…and other things.” She gives you a sharp look. “How did you know?”

You’re tempted to lie, but can’t come up with one that would be persuasive. “I talked to Nathan Sessions.”

“Nathan? How did you…?” She breaks off. “You looked at my client list.”

“I needed to know what was going on. You wouldn’t tell me, so…yeah.”

“What did Nathan tell you?”

You’re astounded that she’s not furious. You report the conversation, as best you can recall it.

“I should have trusted you,” she says. “If I had, you might not know much more, but you’d be more grounded in the ritual.”

“Us having sex, you mean? That’s part of it?”

“An important part. Your body’s the launching pad that makes everything I’m going to do possible.”

You don’t particularly like being characterized as a launching pad, but you let it pass. “Then do I have to prepare, too?”

“I’m going to fix a special tea that’ll help you be more receptive.”

“It’ll get me in the mood, huh?”

She smiles at your joke, takes a pause, and then says, “You’re worried about a mistake, but I won’t make one. I won’t hurt you.”

“You’ve made mistakes before?”

“Things haven’t always gone the way I wanted them to, but I didn’t know as much as I do now. You’ll be safe, I promise.” She worries her lower lip. “I can’t walk you through this. There’s too much for you to learn and I don’t have time to teach you. What I need now is for you to trust me.”

“Okay, but…”

She sits up straight, hands in her lap, face neutral, her pre-annoyance pose. “What?”

“I still don’t get why you can’t explain it better.”

“I don’t know what more to tell you. I’ve given you the basics. I could give you some specifics, but without any context they’d be meaningless. If I told you there’s a power out there that hates mankind, that derives pleasure from tormenting and torturing us, deceiving us, fooling us so completely that millions, maybe billions of people worship it, and now it’s tired of us and it’s getting ready to close the show…would that help?”

“It sounds like you’re talking about God.”

“It’s got lots of names. That’s one of them, for sure. Legion’s another. But what’s that tell you?”

“You’re saying God, the creator-of-the-universe God, he made all this just so he could have someone to screw with?”

“I don’t pretend to understand its motives, and that’s probably an oversimplification, but that’s how it seems. If you look at the world, anyone rational would conclude that God’s the ultimate villain. Cruel and uncaring. Vicious, whimsical. Trouble is, God’s got this great PR department. Anytime anyone jumps up and says that, thousands of idiots start preaching about you’ve got to have faith, mysterious ways, his master plan, all that crap. You’ve got to trust in God, they say. So what if he sponsors rape, usury, genocide, cancer? You can’t see his real intentions, they say. You can’t know him. You just have to trust him. What I’m saying is this. You can know God, you can learn to see him, to detect his hand in things. And once you do, you discover that your original impression of indifference and cruelty, that was the correct one. And once you reach that point, you begin to be able to understand how to thwart him.” Abi rests her hand atop yours. “Does that help?”

You think it has helped, but now that she’s stopped talking, now that her words have become merely words in your head, without her conviction to back them up, they seem generic, lacking solid foundation.

“The disasters,” you say. “You’re going to stop them? Just you?”

“My friends and I. It’s a coordinated action. We’ve been preparing for this a long time.”

“Mike and Rem?”

“Among others.”

Sleet begins falling, sounding like a series of little slaps against the tarpaper roof, slimy drops oozing down the panes like the thick crystalline blood of some magical creature—a translucent angel, a hazy gray gargoyle—who’s been crouched up there for years. Abi studies the tattoo on the back of her hand, waiting for you to say something, but not pressuring you—it’s a conversational habit the two of you have developed, these bursts of dialogue that border on argument, followed by silences during which an accord is reached. The room seems colder and smaller than when you entered, as if it’s settled around you, revealed its mystical drab, the secret order of second-hand refrigerators and chipped coffee cups; the air is aswarm with tickings and small hums, and out in the wild world, the horn of a Chevy Suburban or a Volvo, three quick blasts, gives voice to urgency or impatience. You have a feeling of great sobriety, the sense of an enclosing moment.

“I trust you,” you say.

For the next seven days, the house reeks of bitter incense and herbal candles that Abi’s had custom made—tall candles placed at the four corners of your bed, sallow in hue, with dark thready stuff embedded in the wax. The overall scent reminds you of a Paris outdoor market (which you visited one undergrad summer), but damper and more cloying. Abi speaks rarely, but you gather she’s purifying herself for a ritual that must be performed soon. She sits naked on the bed, meditating for hours, and when she’s not in bed, she’s bent over the kitchen table, scribbling symbols on scraps of paper, which she will burn later in the special candles, as if she’s writing cheat sheets for a supernatural exam; or she’s taking baths in hot water so dense with herbs, a greenish brown matte is left in the tub after it drains. Twice a day, she asks you to fuck her Yab-Yum style, with you sitting in as close to a Lotus position as you can manage and her facing you, astride you, scarcely moving. During these encounters, her eyes roll back, the whites visible beneath half-lowered lids, and at such moments you appreciate the strangeness of her sexuality, its eerie mix of the sublime and the sensual; but you mainly appreciate her power. It’s like you’ve embraced a dynamo. She throbs and shivers, undergoes surges of heat and tremor. Even after you’ve disengaged, you feel her energies coursing around you.

You no longer doubt that she has the power to cripple you (okay, maybe there’s a little doubt), and while you can’t quite wrap your head around the whys and wherefores, how a union of crippled men and friendly, kicked-out-of-the-club angels and Tantric witches is going to be of much help to the world in its hour of need, you’ve gone a ways toward conceding that she and her pals might have the power to avert a planetary disaster, or at least to minimize it. The issue of trust…well, you understand that trust isn’t really at issue. You’ve been drawn into unnavigable waters, committed yourself to Abi’s deep, and you have no choice except to let her steer. If it eventuates that you’ve opened yourself to a particularly vile form of torment, if Abi turns out to be a psychotic, or the embodiment of a demoness, or a more ordinary crippler of men, a deluded Goth chick who’s wrong about everything, you’ll have to deal with that. And you will. You’ll find a way. You won’t be anybody’s chump. With that settled in your mind, you give up your pursuit of answers and live as happily as you can in the green house—it seems to have gone green from the fresh charge of her vitality, so much so that you half-expect the furniture to put forth sprigs of leaves and blossoms—and assist Abi by fielding her phone calls.

The first four days of Abi’s purification, you catch twenty, thirty calls a day, all announcing themselves by giving their first name and the call’s point of origin. This is Frannie from San Diego, Ted from Vero Beach, Rene from Medelin, Jonathan from Perth, Lisa from San Francisco, Terry from Madison, Pat from London, Syd from Duluth, Pauline from Chapel Hill, Jean-Daniel from Nantes, Lamon from Paris (“Kentucky, dude…”), Patrice from Diamante, Juana from Taxco, and so on. They don’t need to speak to Abi, they say. Just mention they called. Most sound young. Since the phone hardly ever rings under normal circumstances, you assume these folks are the mystic warriors of her alliance signaling that they’re ready to rock n’ roll. Your personal favorite is Mauve from Oberlin, whose voice is such a fey, wispy instrument, you imagine a pixie hovering beside the receiver, and that two other pixies have helped her lift a pencil that dwarfs them to punch in the number. There’s Marko from Volgograd (baritone)—you picture a bullfrog the size of a compact car wearing a tattered pro-Satan T-shirt. Ving from Chiang Mai (lisping tenor) becomes a gecko in a spandex body stocking. Anne from Mataplan (grating contralto) you morph into a Sasquatch transvestite. You become downright chatty with some of the callers—making light of what’s happening helps dispel your nervousness. On the fifth and sixth days you receive far fewer calls, but you get one that, albeit brief, achieves the opposite effect.

“Hello.”

“This is Rem…from Olympia.” A hoarse voice that sounds squeezed-out, as if he’s been gutshot or has a great weight on his chest and, unable to use his diaphragm, it’s an effort to speak. He may have, as well, a slight accent.

“Abi can’t come to the phone. Take a message?”

“Tell her…I called.”

Like, “Tell her…” Gasp, shudder, gasp. “…I called.”

“Hey, Rem?”

A grunt that may have been a mangled, “Yeah.”

“They say the eagle flies on Friday.”

Silence, then: “I don’t…understand.”

“It’s the password, guy. You’re supposed to say, ‘I have yet to feel its shadow.’”

“Abi told us…you had an…inelegant sense of humor.”

“She did, huh? She used that word? Inelegant?”

A round of heavy breathing, then: “Fool.”

The seventh morning, Abi makes a few calls of her own; she cautions you that tonight, should you wake and find her still involved in the ritual, you’re not to interfere, you’re to keep clear until she tells you otherwise. She pounds home this point until she’s sure you grasped it, then retreats into seclusion. You try to study, but give up after an hour and veg out on the living room sofa, alternately napping and catching up on your comic book reading. It’s late afternoon, already dark outside, and you’re deep into Alan Moore’s collected Promethea, when Abi emerges from the bedroom, goes into the kitchen, and fixes you a cup of herb tea. You take a sip. The taste is horrid. You ask what’s in it, but Abi’s not communicating. She’s withdrawn, pulled back inside herself; she urges you to drink it all and returns to the bedroom, leaving you to contemplate a cupful of brackish liquid with pieces of brown vegetable matter floating on the surface. You know it’s a drug—nothing else could taste that bad—but you drink it. At heart, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, you can’t accept any of this. Teen witches versus the Apocalypse. It’s just not happening. The only part to which you lend the slightest credence is the possibility that your back will get screwed up and, at this juncture, that’s not enough to do more than give you pause.

An hour, two hours, or twenty minutes later, you’re not sure, your sense of time has been wrecked, and you’re not sure about anything, especially your decision to drink the tea. You’ve passed through a period of sweats, intense physical discomfort, and major stomach pain, and now, though your head’s not in a bad place, it’s not a particularly good place, either. It seems you’re sitting beside a fire, included in a circle of old half-naked men, who’re talking in booming voices, in a language you don’t understand, and you’re terribly confused—you get that they’re discussing you, that by being there you’re making a kind of expiation, but you’re confused by the flickering firelight, by noises in the vegetation beyond the light, by an inner unsteadiness. Furthering your confusion, this hallucination winks on and off, and, when it’s off, you have a distorted view of the room, of yourself lying sweaty and disheveled on the sofa, tossing and turning. There’s this relationship stuff about your mom, too. Scenes revisited from the past. Arguments, emotional confrontations, and the like, replayed at lightning speed, a fast-forward mind movie. Your dad’s in some scenes, but he’s a peripheral figure. It’s all about your mom, really, and you’re overwhelmed with sadness on realizing that these conflicts remain unresolved. And then you re-experience your first childhood memory. You’re two or three, you still have blond hair, and you’re playing on a hooked rug, the sunlight falling around you, and you’re seeing yourself from a height, from your mom’s perspective, through her eyes, her mind, and you feel love, the powerful bond between mother and child that can never be entirely broken…Suddenly you’ve left pain and confusion behind. You’re in a small boat passing along a green river, bordered by low jungle. This is no ordinary river, you understand, but the river of time. A metaphor made visible by drugs and Tantric sex, a stand-in for the literal functioning of time, which—for reasons doubtless plain to Steven Hawking, but unclear to you—cannot be grasped by the human mind. Though it’s a metaphor, it’s an unusually accurate one. Its currents and eddies are representative of actual structures within the timestream and now, somehow, you’ve become separated from it…or not separate, exactly, but able to control your movements within its medium. How you know all this, you’re not certain, but you suspect the old men of having imparted this knowledge. You sense them close by, but they’re no longer participants in your life, merely observers. You find that you can switch off the hallucination at will, but the house is too cluttered for your tastes, too modern in its complexity, so you go with the flow of the green, green river, content to lie back, thinking long riverine thoughts, letting its serene currents carry you nowhere and everywhere the same…

And that’s when Abi comes back into your world.

At first you assume she’s a creature of hallucination, a river goddess, a spirit made flesh. She’s painted her body with elaborate green designs, vines framing her face and spiraling round her breasts, columning her arms and legs, most profuse about her sex, as if it’s her center or is central to the issue at hand. She is, without question, the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, the manifestation of a fabulous unearthly tropic. In a daze, you allow her to lead you into the bathroom, where she bathes you meticulously, using aromatic oils afterward to polish you, drying your erection with her hair, never speaking a word, and neither do you speak, not wanting to break the erotic spell she’s weaving with her hands and tongue and breath. Her eyes, adorned with kohl, resemble caverns with green fires in their depths. You both smell of flowers. As she leads you from the bathroom, you notice that her back and buttocks also bear designs. Someone must have assisted her, they must have come to the house while you were going through your changes on the sofa. That doesn’t trouble you. Nothing does. You’re atop a chemical peak, too high above the world for trouble to reach.

In the bedroom, where candles are pointed with glittering flames, smoke ghosts thinly rising from them, the air disturbed by currents only you can see, you sit in the Lotus posture, achieving it easily, as if the tea has made you more flexible, and when Abi mounts you, when her weight descends, the gorgeous intimacy of your union seems to have rendered you both weightless and you’re floating up from the green satin bedspread, levitating, nudged this way and that by impalpable eddies. Abi begins chanting softly, but with prayerful intensity, and the rushed rhythm of her words, impassioned utterances followed by turbulent silences, her breath shuddering out, it becomes your mutual rhythm, orchestrating miniscule squeezings and shiftings. Her eyes are wide open, all white, and you have the idea you’re making love to an idol come to life, that she’s possessed by a spirit too large to fit within her skin, compressed to the point of exploding. But the distance created by that thought closes quickly, and soon there is only her other body and yours, indistinguishable one from the other, trembling with energy, an engine harnessed to the task of salvation.

How long this goes on, you can’t say. Hours, minutes, days…your time-sense is still wrecked and that strikes you as odd, because time is flowing all around the ship built of your two bodies, a green river carrying you everywhere and nowhere, its currents visible even when you shut your eyes, so real it seems you could lift your hand from Abi’s waist and cause a splash that would disrupt its flow and destroy some yet unenvisioned future. She brings you to the verge of orgasm over and over again, but holds you from the brink, her chanting slowing, easing you down into your animal self, storing up power until it can no longer be contained and achieves maximum release. It’s almost painful, this denial, but pleasure and pain are blended together, even as you and Abi are blended, and your mind admits only to delight. She kisses you, tongue of idol flicking forth to taste your soul, and her fingertips fit to ten familiar places along your spine. Your hands glove her breasts. You’re enthralled by their softness, by her dress of vines, her white-eyed stare, her scarlet mouth and Halloween hair. It’s a mental snapshot you’ll keep forever…or wherever it is she’s about to send you.

You’re in and out of consciousness for a while. Mostly out. Your eyes open once and you see her standing at the foot of the bed, head bowed and arms upraised, like a diver preparing for her big finish, the air watery and rippling around her. Your dreams are muddled images and vignettes, nothing special, and when you wake, cracking an eye to see a faint lightening of the sky, thinking you haven’t slept all that long, you realize that you’ve moved your legs. Not only have you moved your legs, you have no pain—your back’s sore, but it’s always a little bit sore in the morning, and you feel incredible. Strong and well-rested, as if you’ve slept for a week. You test your legs again and lie there for a minute, thankful that you’re not crippled and that you didn’t make a mistake in trusting Abi…which seems an upset, because what she did earlier, it felt as if your nervous system short-circuited. You swing your legs onto the floor and, keeping one hand on the headboard, afraid that you’ll collapse, you stand and stomp your feet, bounce on your toes. All good. You pull on pants and a shirt, and go looking for Abi…and for food. In the kitchen, you cut a thick slice of bread, a hunk of cheese. You cram it in. Shit, you’re hungry. You hope Abi’s okay. It might be that you’re going to have to buck her up. Boost her spirits. Because the chances are, all that Yab-Yum boogaloo abracadabra worked out to be was a great fuck. Chewing, you push open the door to the living room.

Abi is there.

Either you’re still high, and why wouldn’t you be? you only were out a couple of hours and the world’s still as unstable as a mirage, flocked with pinpricks of actinic light…either you’re high or else you’re still asleep and dreaming you’re awake, because what you see can’t be real, and yet you deal with it as if it is, you try and understand what’s happening.

Let’s say once again, metaphorically speaking, that time is a river, a green river consisting of separate and discernable currents, and that seven of these currents have pierced the walls of your living room, penetrating windows and walls, bookcases and doors, visible as six translucent scarves looping through the air, liquid spokes joined to a central scarf, which is much thicker than the rest, a column connecting ceiling to the floor. In sum, a vaguely treelike shape, an exotic anomaly among the thrift store furniture and cheap oriental rugs.

Let’s further say that the water in those currents has been frozen, transformed into tiny ice particles, trillions of greenish particles, each the size of a dust mote, hovering in place…that’s how you interpret what you’re seeing. The metaphorical representation of time, or something to do with time—its underpinnings, its internal structures. Abi’s encased in the central column, poised within it, her right arm lifted, looking as if she’s about to pick a flower from a branch above her head. Naked, white-eyed, skin decorated with vines. She, too, appears frozen. And then, almost imperceptibly, she moves. The thumb and forefinger of her right hand rub together, as if she’s selected one of the particles, pinched it loose from the rest and is rubbing it away between her fingertips. She makes a quarter-turn inside the column to face you, smiling a ghastly smile. Any smile might seem ghastly in relation to those white eyes, but it puts fear in your heart and you start to freak out.

Witch, you think, and take a step backward.

The smile grows more ghastly and gloating, stretched impossibly wide, and you think that the rubber, the latex or whatever, of the Abi costume she’s been wearing will split, a great seam will open between her breasts, and the skinny demoness inside with shiny putrescent skin and black nails hard as horn will step forth.

Vile, unholy witch.

Enemy of God, the god whom you’ve never believed in, but in whom you now yearn to seek refuge.

Kali lacking her necklace of skulls would look no less fearsome, her face no more devoid of human qualities, and you can’t help thinking that this is her nature revealed, this voodoo bitch in her green viney gaud. She’s been waiting for this moment, waiting to show you, waiting to laugh at you. You reject the notion, but then she stretches forth her hand to you and you know she’s about to cast a spell—she’ll lure you close, snatch out your spine and brandish it aloft, a dripping bone spear to plunge into your heart, mash it into pudding, and then she’ll slurp up your soul as it squirts from the torn flesh. Her vast life surrounds you, surrounds all things. She dwells in the timestream, a pearl spider god dances on her finger, and she is reaching out to slaughter whatever her hand encounters, be it a strand of DNA or a burning city whose flames she’ll snuff out so as to inhale the fumes that ascend from its dying…

In your panic, and it’s not even a full-on panic, because you don’t entirely credit your senses and also because you recall what she said about not interfering…in your partial panic, then, you’ve forgotten that the kitchen door only swings one way, and when you turn and attempt to flee the room, you slam headfirst into its unyielding surface. The impact stuns you, sends you staggering sideways. You lose your balance, instinctively grope for something to hold yourself up. Your hand catches at the bookcase, the same pierced by one of the frozen currents of time, and, as you fall, your hand locks onto the edge of a shelf, pulling the whole thing down atop you. Digging out from beneath a cascade of trade paperbacks, you hear a tremendous crack, followed by an ear-splitting shredding noise. You come to one knee. Abi’s staring at you, her eyes no longer rolled up into her head. The voodoo bitch of whom you were so terrified has been replaced by a frightened woman who realizes she has lost some crucial measure of control. Behind her, it looks as if something has bitten a chunk out of the corner of the room, creating a ragged hole that’s as wide as a church door. The treelike shape, the green confluence of time, has lost its structural integrity, and its currents, unfrozen now, are washing past Abi, flooding through the hole and merging with a flux of darker stuff that appears to be flowing just beyond it. She’s about to be washed out along with them, and she, too, is losing her structural integrity, her limbs elongating and bending in odd ways, as in a funhouse mirror—yet she’s struggling to keep her feet, still reaching toward you, fingers splayed, silently imploring you to help. You have an instant to become aware of this, but before you can act, she’s sucked back toward the hole, strikes her head on a broken board, and is gone. There’s a scream, fainter than you’d expect, muted by some imponderable distance as she pinwheels away, her pale figure dwindling against the dark flow of…you don’t know what it is, but it seems infinitely deep and, if you had to give it a name right now, you’d call it God.

You stand there, racked first by the beginnings of anguish, then by guilt (she told you not to interfere), then by disbelief. The tea, the drug she gave you…maybe this has all been a production of the drug. But the hole in the wall presents incontrovertible evidence against disbelief, stable and solid, its edges displaying strata of plaster and insulation undeniable in their authenticity; though the dark flux beyond it lacks a certain reality and may be, like the tree of green time, a metaphorical construction, the simplified rendering your mind has contrived to represent an unfathomable phenomenon.

Something is gathering in its depths, accumulating form from the void. A face, you think. It acquires detail, growing larger, swelling from the darkness, and, yes, it’s definitely a face. Abi’s face, pale and painted with vines. Improbable though it seems, she must have found a way to fight against the flow, she’s forging upstream, coming back to the world. But the larger her face grows, the less you believe it. It’s rippling, wavering, like the painting of a face borne upward on dark water, threatening to dissolve at any moment…and it’s enormous. Close to the hole, all that’s visible is its lower half, chin and lips, a bit of jawline, the point of her nose, and, drawing closer yet, it’s reduced to a huge photo-real scarlet mouth that’s pressed up against the hole.

The lips purse convulsively, making a squelching noise that puts you in mind of someone worrying at a sliver of meat stuck between their teeth. The mouth opens and an immense human tongue lolls forth, expelling the mass of bloody tissue, bone, and hair that rested upon its tip. This lands with a soggy thump and is, most assuredly, no metaphor. The pulped organs and macerated bone shards, they’re Abi’s remains. You recognize them by the orange streaks in her matted hair. Something breaks in you, and you run through the kitchen, out the back door, expecting God to swallow you and spit up your bones…but you don’t care. If extinction’s what it takes to wipe that image from your brain, let it come.

The cloudy sky is ancient water-damaged wallboard, the motionless firs are stage props, the dim rush of the freeway is a sound effect. It closely resembles the world you once knew, but now you’ve seen what lies behind it, you know it was never what it seemed. The black chow mix in the yard next door is going insane, barking and hurling itself to the end of its chain. You move to the opposite side of the house and sit, resting your head on your knees. Grief sets in. Or maybe grief comes later, and this is merely shock. You welcome it, whatever its name. You seek refuge in tears, in the hot weight lodged in your chest, the absence in your skull. You still can’t believe what’s happened and these physical proofs of loss are all you have to rely on. Abi warned you not to interfere and you fucked up, you blundered, you bungled her to death. Grief and guilt mixed together are too much to bear. Shivering from the cold, you get to your feet and walk stiffly to the kitchen door. You can’t bring yourself to go inside and that’s when the problem of what to do next surfaces from the moil of your thoughts. Call the police. Run away. Join a monastic order and devote yourself to good works. Off yourself. That’s tempting, but you’re not that kind of coward. Not yet. The chow takes up barking again, like barking is its fucking religion, and that drives you back inside.

The phone’s ringing.

Could be it’s your mom forgetting again what time it is in Seattle, or your neighbor calling to complain about how you upset his dog, or a friend who knows you wake up early. Whichever, it offers you temporary relief from being alone. You pick up the kitchen extension and say hello.

“Is Abi there?” The inimitable voice of Mauve, the pixie from Oberlin.

“No.”

There follows a silence that she apparently doesn’t intend to fill.

“Abi’s…” you begin, but can’t finish.

“Yes? Is she all right?”

Your voice catches. “Not really.”

“What happened?”

Picking up the phone, you think, wasn’t such a great idea. “I don’t know you.”

“Goddamn it! Tell me what happened!”

Hearing her curse is like hearing Tweety Bird getting salty with Sylvester—it’s almost funny.

“Who are you?” you ask.

“Is Abi dead?”

It’s a question you can’t resist. “Yes.”

A pause, and then: “Tell me what happened.”

You glance up to the ceiling and, as if that flat white surface were a poignant reminder of Abi, or just by lifting your head you disturbed a frail emotional balance, you burst into tears.

“Do you know how many people died tonight?” Mauve asks. “Nobody gives a fuck how bad you feel. If you cared about her, tell me what happened. It’s the only thing you can do for her now.”

Haltingly, you tell her, you hold nothing back, and when you’re done, in her teensy voice, like a diminutive hanging judge, she says, “She should have paralyzed you.”

“I wish she had.” Then, thinking about what Mauve said, you ask, “Why didn’t she?”

“Because she loved you, because she doesn’t like hurting people. Fucking jerk!” A second later she says, “I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that. It’s not your fault.”

You don’t want to deny that.

“I have a…” Mauve begins, but you break in: “You said some people died tonight. How many?”

“A lot.”

“How many of them did I kill?”

“Don’t concern yourself with that. What you need to do now…”

You laugh. “Don’t concern myself?”

“You haven’t got time for guilt. Bottom’s got your scent now. It’ll find you again, you can count on it.”

Bottom, you say to yourself. Bottom dweller? Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom? Then you recall the sheet of paper that fell out of Sessions’s book. “What the hell is Bottom?”

After a second, she says, “The Bottom. Didn’t Abi explain it to you?”

“No. What is it?”

“Jesus.” After a pause she says, “You totally need protection. I want you to take the next plane you can catch to Cleveland.”

The next plane. For a moment you’re thinking astral plane, plane of existence.

“Call me after you’ve got a flight, and I’ll meet it,” Mauve says. “You have my number?”

You check caller ID. “Yeah.”

“Get out of the house now. Don’t pack. Don’t…”

“What about Abi…her body?”

“You don’t have time to worry about her. Just get out. You’re not going to be safe ’til you’re here.”

“You can protect me?”

“Yes.”

You’ve been flipping back and forth between despair and mild hysteria, but her saying this jams you up into full-blown hysteria. “Excuse me,” you say. “But it looks to me like you’re seriously fucking up here. There’s these guys with twisted spines, people are getting swallowed and spat out. It’s like you’re playing things by ear, you know? That didn’t work. Let’s try this. Oops! Lost her! Well, you better come to Oberlin and we’ll see what happens. How can you protect me when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing?”

“Okay,” Mauve says. “You have to keep it together or you’re not going to make it. This is not something we trained for, you understand? We didn’t study it in college. We found out something was happening that no one else noticed and there wasn’t time to educate the public. No time to build a consensus. Got it? We were just suddenly in the middle of the shit. We’ve had to learn on the job.”

“What’s the Bottom?” you ask again. “Are you talking about God?”

“If you don’t leave soon, you’re going to find out. I’ll explain when you get here. I can protect you. I may not always be able to, but I can protect you for a while.”

“Why? Why would you?”

“Because Abi would want me to. And because you’ve become a resource. I need another partner and you’ve been prepared…at least to an extent.”

The implication is that she intends to perform the ritual with you, or a similar ritual, and you tell her that you’re not interested in having sex with her.

“I’m not going to be your lover,” she says. “Don’t worry about that. Look at it as a job. An awful duty that might keep you alive.”

“So I’m supposed to come to Oberlin and what? Let you paralyze me?”

Angry, Mauve says, “I see why Abi didn’t tell you much—she’d have been explaining herself all the time. If you can put aside your skepticism, I won’t paralyze you. But if it needs to be done, you bet your ass I’ll do it. You’ll be taken care of, but you’re not going to be walking for a while.”

“How did your partner die?”

Silence.

“You had a partner, right? And something happened to him?” You wait for Mauve to comment and, when she does not, when all you hear from the receiver is silence, you ask, “Was it your fault or mine?”

“I’m done,” she says crisply. “You have a choice. Get out of the house or die. Catch a plane, don’t catch a plane. Absolutely up to you. I don’t really care. Give me a call if you’re coming.”

The bus to the airport is about a third full. At first you sit in the back, far away from everyone, but then you think that if anything happens, if the freeway, for instance, bursts asunder and a giant claw thrusts up from the Bottom to snag the bus, you wouldn’t stand a chance; so you move up to a seat with a window that pops out. Wearily, you rest your head against it. Transmitted through the glass, the sound of the tires on asphalt is amplified into a whiney high-pitched insect choir—like Alvin and the Chipmunks on helium—chanting Abi Abimagique, Abi Abimagique, Abi Abimagique, over and over. You don’t need your loss pounded home and you sit up. It’s funny, albeit not funny ha-ha, that you’re off to Oberlin to hook up with a woman who sounds like no less a ball-buster than Abi, off into the same mystery, the same basic relationship, because you don’t think Abi loved you, not in the way you loved her. And yet no matter how firm Mauve’s expression to the contrary, the Tantra involves emotion. You and Mauve will have to arrive at some emotional accord, no matter how impossible that seems at the moment. Unless she’s bringing you to Oberlin for the purpose of revenge, to wreck your health and torment you as payback for the people who died, one probably being her partner…you hate that word in context of relationships. It’s no less redolent of inequality than wife or indentured servant; it merely omits the modifier. Managing partner, junior or senior partner, sex partner, and so on. It makes juiceless and dry the concept of a life together, and it presents the idea that handing over your heart to another animal for safekeeping involves a rational decision.

Those thoughts, irrelevant as they are, provide a short vacation from even bleaker thoughts—when you return from it, you find your head’s in awful shape, full of tears, recriminations, regrets, and you rest it on the window glass again, preferring insect choirs commemorating your dead girlfriend to the alternative. The rhythm’s changed ever so slightly:

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…

you kind of get into it, singing drowsily along under your breath, and that starts you thinking how she was when she wasn’t all deranged about the cause, she could be so damn funny—she had this dry sense of humor you often mistook for insult and you didn’t understand until later how clever what she said really was

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique…

that time in the lab when you made love by the light of the Bunsen burners, she wandered about afterward in the dark, materializing as she passed by the flames like a voluptuous spook

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi…

you’re not sure you want to fly to Cleveland, because what if it’s a trap, what if it’s all the Bottom now, what if God now owns everything except this one scrap of protoplasm, you, and the rest has been swallowed up and spat out and reconstituted as evil

…Abimagique Abi Abi…

you don’t know anything, you have never known anything, and the chances are you never will, because here you are running off to meet this Stevie Nicks sound-alike who promises she’ll explain everything later, who likely wears gypsy skirts and plays a mean tambourine, stands four feet eleven and fucks like a champ, a woman to whom you’ll be no more than a dick, a launching pad

…Abimagique Abi Abi…

fuck it, you’ve had it with all the mystic claptrap, all the you-cannot-hope-to-understand-it-until-you-experience-it bullshit

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…

you’re glad the bus is close to the exit that leads onto Airport Drive, it runs for miles past hotels shitty burger joints topless bars and if you decide you don’t want to know how it ends, you can tell the driver to let you out anywhere

…Abimagique Abi Abi Abimagique Abi…

but who’re you kidding, you’re hooked through the gills, you’ll fly to Oberlin, you’ll have Mauve or, should you say, she’ll once have you, because that’s the only way you’ll find out what happened and is happening, and even if what you find out is bad, painful, the end, well, at least you’ll understand the reason why you went through all you did with

…Abi Abimagique Abi Abi…

you do know one thing, though it’s certainly nothing cosmic—she’s already unraveling in your memory, and part of the pain you feel comes from trying to hang on to her reality, and you’ll keep trying to hang on until the pain is all you have left of her

…Abimagique Abi…

there should be permanent memorials in the mind, shrines with candles, enormous tombs stuffed with tastes and sights, cenotaphs and gigantic statuary, and not just these gauzy tatters of memory

…Abi Abimagique…

and what does this say about you, about us, about the way we are as friends, children, lovers, about God and the Bottom and human nature, that when people die, all that seems to happen is they fall out of the dream we’re having about the world

…Abi Abi Abimagique…