"Yes. That too," she said. "What have you seen?"

"Not enough," he replied.

"Will you make love to me again?"

"No."

Every now and then, moving from state to state, he got a glimpse of what the letters had schooled him in. He saw the secrets peeping out, only daring to show themselves because he was passing through and they knew him as a coming man of power. In Kentucky he chanced to witness the corpse of an adolescent being hauled from a river, the body left sprawled on the grass, arms spread, fingers spread, while a woman howled and sobbed beside it. The boy's eyes were open; so were the buttons of his trousers. Watching from a short distance, the only witness not to be ordered away by the cops (the eyes, again) he took a moment to savor the way the boy was arrayed, like the figure on the medallion, and half wanted to throw himself into the river just for the thrill of drowning. In Idaho, he met a man who'd lost an arm in an automobile accident and while they sat and drank together he explained that he still had feeling in the lost limb, which the doctors said was just a phantom in his nervous system, but which he knew was his astral body, still complete on another plane of being. He said he jerked off with his lost hand regularly, and offered to demonstrate. It was true. Later, the man said:

"You can see in the dark, can't you?" Jaffe hadn't thought about it, but now that his attention ss drawn to the fact it seemed he could.

"How'd you learn to do that?"

"I didn't."

"Astral eyes, maybe."

"Maybe."

"You want me to suck your cock again?"

"No."

He was gathering up experiences, one of each, passing through people's lives and out the other side leaving them obsessed or dead or weeping. He indulged his every whim, going wherever instinct pointed, the secret life coming to find him the moment he arrived in town.

There was no sign of pursuit from the forces of law. Perhaps Homer's body had never been found in the gutted building, or if it had the police had assumed he was simply a victim of the fire. For whatever reason, nobody came sniffing after him. He went wherever he wanted and did whatever he desired, until he'd had a surfeit of desires satisfied and wants supplied, and it came time for him to push himself over the brink.

He came to rest in a roach-ridden motel in Los Alamos, New Mexico, locked himself in with two bottles of vodka, stripped, closed the curtains against the day, and let his mind go. He hadn't eaten in forty-eight hours, not because he didn't have money, he did, but because he enjoyed the light-headedness. Starved of sustenance, and whipped up by vodka, his thoughts ran riot, devouring themselves and shitting each other out, barbaric and baroque by turns. The roaches came out in the darkness, and ran over his body as he lay on the floor. He let them come and go, pouring vodka on his groin when they got too busy there, and made him hard, which was a distraction. He wanted only to think. To float and think.

He'd had all he needed of the physical; felt hot and cold, sexy and sexless; fucked and fucker. He wanted none of that again: at least not as Randolph Jaffe. There was another way to be, another place to feel from, where sex and murder and grief and hunger and all of it might be interesting again, but that would not be until he'd got beyond his present condition; become an Artist; remade the world.

Just before dawn, with even the roaches sluggish, he felt the invitation.

A great calm was in him. His heart was slow and steady. His bladder emptied of its own accord, like a baby's. He was neither too hot nor too cold. Neither too sleepy nor too awake. And at that crossroads—which was not the first, nor would be the last—something tugged on his gut, and summoned him.

He got up immediately, dressed, took the full bottle of vodka that remained, and went out walking. The invitation didn't leave his innards. It kept tugging as the cold night lifted and the sun began to rise. He'd come barefoot. His feet bled, but his body wasn't of great interest to him, and he kept the discomfort at bay with further helpings of vodka. By noon, the last of the drink gone, he was in the middle of the desert, just walking in the direction he was called, barely aware of one foot moving ahead of the other. There were no thoughts in his head now, except the Art and its getting, and even that ambition came and went.

So, finally, did the desert itself. Somewhere towards evening, he came to a place where even the simplest facts—the ground beneath him, the darkening sky above his head—were in doubt. He wasn't even sure if he was walking. The absence of everything was pleasant, but it didn't last. The summons must have pulled him on without his even being aware of its call, because the night he'd left became a sudden day, and he found himself standing—alive, again; Randolph Ernest Jaffe again—in a desert barer even than the one he'd left. It was early morning here. The sun not yet high, but beginning to warm the air, the sky perfectly clear.

Now he felt pain, and sickness, but the pull in his gut was irresistible. He had to stagger on though his whole body was wreckage. Later, he remembered passing through a town, and seeing a steel tower standing in the middle of the wilderness. But that was only when the journey had ended, at a simple stone hut, the door of which opened to him as the last vestiges of his strength left him, and he fell across its threshold.

The door was closed when he came round, but his mind wide open. On the other side of a guttering fire sat an old man with doleful, slightly stupid features, like those of a clown who'd worn and wiped off fifty years of makeup, his pores enlarged and greasy, his hair, what was left of it, long and gray. He was sitting cross-legged. Occasionally, while Jaffe worked up the energy to speak, the old man raised a buttock and loudly passed wind.

"You found your way through," he said, after a time. "I thought you were going to die before you made it. A lot of people have. It takes real will."

"Through to where?" Jaffe managed to ask.

"We're in a Loop. A loop in time, encompassing a few minutes. I tied it, as a refuge. It's the only place I'm safe."

"Who are you?"

"My name's Kissoon."

"Are you one of the Shoal?"

The face beyond the fire registered surprise.

"You know a great deal."

"No. Not really. Just bits and pieces."

"Very few people know about the Shoal."

"I know of several," said Jaffe.

"Really?" said Kissoon, his tone toughening. "I'd like their names."

"I had letters from them..." Jaffe said, but faltered when he realized he no longer knew where he'd left them, those precious clues that had brought him through so much hell and heaven.

"Letters from whom?" Kissoon said.

"People who know...who guess...about the Art."

"Do they? And what do they say about it?"

Jaffe shook his head. "I've not made sense of it yet," he said. "But I think there's a sea—"

"There is," said Kissoon. "And you'd like to know where to find it, and how to be there, and how to have power from it."

"Yes. I would."

"And in return for this education?" Kissoon said. "What are you offering?"

"I don't have anything."

"Let me be the judge of that," Kissoon said, turning his eyes up to the roof of the hut as though he saw something in the smoke that roiled there.

"OK," Jaffe said. "Whatever I've got that you want. You can have it."

"That sounds fair."

"I need to know. I want the Art."

"Of course. Of course."

"I've had all the living I need," Jaffe said.

Kissoon's eyes came back to rest on him.

"Really? I doubt that."

"I want to get...I want to get..." (What? he thought. What do you want?) "Explanations, " he said.