Did you not recognize him? she says.

I stare into the mirror and see the photos in her bathroom again. I see a sideways flash of dark hair, of blue and black eyes. John Ransom Miller was one of the masked men who’d come to see us in New Orleans. He was the panty sniffer, the one I’d hammered to the floor with the toilet lid. He had lain crumpled on his side the entire time, watching as the others raped her. He barely looked at me, that day.

Yeah. I recognized him.

Well? she says.

This is why you gave me the gun? I say. You want me to kill him.

Jude shrugs. Perhaps you should rethink your ideas about fate.

The gun is heavy in my pocket.

Yeah, I say. Perhaps I should.

Don’t kill him, she says. Not yet.

Why?

Because we need him to get to the quarterback.

Senator Cody, I say.

Yeah. She points at the mirror. If not for him, I’m not looking at this face.

What then? You want me to make friends with this guy?

If you want to hurt him, she says, bring me his finger. The one with that hideous ring.

I stare at her.

Go, she says. You’re going to lose him.

I take the escalator down to menswear. Jude stands at the top of the escalator, hands on her hips and a crooked little smile on her face. I’m going to hell, of course. I turn around to face the descent and when I look back she’s gone. The escalator nears the bottom and I wait for my feet to touch solid ground. Five seconds, four. Time enough to contemplate my situation. Jude wants me to follow this man, but I am not to kill him. Thank god for that. I had an opportunity to kill Sugar Finch earlier today, and fucked it up like a rock star. I tell myself that if I love her, I will not fail her again.

Five years have passed since Jude and I were together. The years just slip away. I take off my shoes and pause to examine my toes and two days disappear. I wander into the bathroom to brush my teeth and a week is gone. I pour myself a cup of coffee and a month floats past. The years tumble past you like bits of paper on the street and you may not even feel the breeze at your back but then something catches your eye, a twist of black hair or a dog leaping to catch a tennis ball. The splintered chorus of a stupid pop song. You turn around and another chunk of your life drifts by like unrecognized trash and it was never yours to begin with.

But look at it this way. Jude and I had a fight once, way back when. The apartment was expanding, warping. The rooms were gelatinous and everything was curved. Our bedroom was taking the shape of an egg. The room was freaking me out and drugs were involved. They usually are. This is a natural law, like the one about gravity. If a body has physical mass, then it will fall to earth. If your hotel room is transforming into a metaphysical bubble, then drugs are probably involved.

Anyway.

Jude was completely nonverbal and I was crouched high atop an armoire, stuck there. I was suddenly terrified of heights. And of her, probably. I watched Jude crawl around on the floor with a knife in one hand, a long bright red dildo in the other. Jude was trying to speak. She was grunting, snorting. I was pretty sure she wanted to kill me, she wanted to fuck me to death. Her shoulders were slick with blood and snot and black grime and her brain was so shredded by coke she would not have blinked if I had spontaneously burst into flames. But that’s just another drug story, a psycho love story. The real Jude lay curled up like a cat beside me less than twenty-four hours later asking me what color she should paint her toenails. She wanted to drink cheap white wine and eat chocolate for breakfast. She wanted me to stay in bed all day and watch MTV with her. Jude put her head in my lap and asked me in a destroyed voice if I still liked her. Jude is composed of claws and teeth and unblinking eyes but she is vulnerable, perhaps now more than ever. She is a wolf but like anybody else she’s afraid to grow old, she’s afraid that one day she will walk into a room and no one will look at her.

I touched her hair and whispered yes, I like you.

There is an obscure musical instrument called the theremin that produces sound without ever being touched. The player moves his hands in a slow circular motion between twin antennae thin as ghosts, calling forth eerie underwater noises akin to whalespeak. Brian Wilson was particularly fond of the theremin. He used it sparingly on the Pet Sounds album, I believe. Anyway, Jude and I have always managed to extract sound from each other, without ever touching the skin. And I think that’s love, or something like it.

John Ransom Miller is nowhere to be seen and I hear Jude’s voice in my head.

Do you believe in fate, she says. Or not?

I want to go back to that hotel room and I might need to bring her a strange man’s severed finger to gain entry. It sounds like a bad joke but now I’m anxious that I’ve lost him. I have lost the owner of the finger and I hurry through a demilitarized zone of postmodern Italian shoes. Gucci and friends. A green and black spaceman’s boot catches my eye and I pick it up by the laces and let it dangle. Prada. Nine hundred dollars and I laugh out loud, nervous. I don’t want to hunt this man and I don’t want to lose him, either. I want to go back to the obscene hotel room. I want to get good and drunk. I twirl the boot and stare at it until mesmerized. I feel like a monkey confronted by the miracle of a yo-yo. A salesman glares at me and I put the boot down as Miller walks right past me.

I follow him. What the hell, right.

John Ransom Miller doesn’t drift and meander the way I do. He knows where he’s going and he obviously expects people to get the hell out of his way. He takes the escalator two steps at a time and bullies his way past a throng of Japanese tourists, then outside. This no-nonsense attitude of his gives me a sense of purpose and I hit the street at a cool ten yards behind him. There’s a nasty wind coming off the bay and I button my coat against it. I light a cigarette and wonder grimly if I will have to ration them, as I have no cash on me. Then I start to worry that Miller will hop into a yellow cab and leave me standing on the sidewalk, a scarecrow equipped with useless skin and teeth.

Options.

If he does get into a cab, then I could get into the next cab and tell the driver to follow him. This maneuver probably doesn’t work outside of the movies, but who knows. I might get a driver who has seen a lot of movies and secretly wishes his life was more interesting and I can always show him my gun when the subject of money comes up. But I don’t like this plan. It has been my experience that big-city cabdrivers are not to be fucked with and you never know when you will meet the one who has his backseat boobytrapped with poison gas and spring-loaded spikes and is in fact driving around all day just hoping to encounter someone like me, a stupid asshole with a gun.

I keep one eye glued to the back of Miller’s head and scan the street with the other. A half block away I see a stout, middle-aged guy buying coffee at an outdoor espresso hut. The guy wears gray pants, a dark blue blazer. Bright red suspenders under the jacket, white shirt. He wears glasses and his hair is long and wispy. The man is distracted and soft. I watch as he pays for the coffee and receives his change.

He puts his wallet into the left breast pocket of his jacket and proceeds toward me. I take a breath. I have done this more times than I can count, with mixed results. But this guy looks like an easy mark. He takes a drink of his coffee and cringes as if he has burned his tongue. He’s perfect. I look ahead to be sure that Miller is still in sight, then lower my head and stumble directly into the guy with red suspenders and that hot coffee pretty much explodes all over his white shirt and now I see that it’s not actually coffee but some kind of giant mocha with whipped cream, which of course not only burns him but makes a fine mess. The poor bastard yelps and nearly falls over, which is not at all what I want. A good pickpocket is fluid and graceful and easily forgotten. He doesn’t cause a scene.