"How much do you weigh?"

The voice, thin and high, interrupted Tess's reverie. She was keeping herself awake by coming up with new nicknames for Baltimore neighborhoods. They were in an old ballroom in SoWeBo, Southwest Baltimore, once home to H.L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe, now home to restaurants like Mencken's Cultured Pearl and the Telltale Hearth. But how about SoO (South of Orioles Park at Camden Yard) or SoPoeBo, near where Poe was buried? So-SoBo, which could encompass the isolated south side neighborhoods. It was a mark of how tired she was that this seemed incredibly witty.

"What?" she asked groggily, stealing a look at her watch. Almost 3 A.M., up for twenty hours. She had caught a second wind about 11, over Afghan food followed by a round of Galliano liqueur. She was reasonably sure the Galliano was not authentically Afghani, but it had made a nice kicker. The licorice-like syrup reminded her of prescription cold medicines, the old-fashioned kind that really made the pain go away for a while. And it had kept her going through the first three bands, but it was wearing off now, just when she needed to radiate the kind of mindless devotion and appreciation expected of a Musician's Girlfriend. Not to mention a certain proprietary zeal. While her mouth smiled at Crow, her eyes were suppose to flash "no poaching" signals to all the females present. It took a lot of energy, this Musician's Girlfriend gig. But she really did care about Crow, who was possibly the nicest man she had ever known. And he would get over being twenty-three. After all, she had.

"I asked how much you weigh," the chirpy little voice repeated. It was Maisie, one of her two cohorts in the Poe White Trash Ladies' Auxiliary. She was sure it was Maisie, because Maisie had the pierced nose. Actually, the nose stud was a fake, a gold ball she attached to her nostril with a small magnet. Maisie's boyfriend, the bass player, had told Crow, who then shared this useful piece of intelligence with Tess. It allowed her to tell Maisie apart from Lorna, the one who wore those tight little necklaces that appeared to be choking her. But that was probably just wishful thinking on Tess's part.

"I don't know. I don't own a scale."

"She doesn't own a scale," Maisie told Lorna, who squealed in delight.

"What about at the doctor's office?" This was a familiar topic, but a favorite one, the tyranny of the tiny. Their weight barely registered in the three digits. Lorna could be particularly tiresome, talking about the high-protein shakes she had to drink because pounds just fell off her.

"I don't look."

"She doesn't look," Lorna informed Maisie, giggling.

"But, like, what if you had to tell someone your weight?" Maisie persisted. "What would you say? Like, if a cop stopped you and wanted to know if you fit the description of some crazy woman who was killing a bunch of people, and she was, like, two hundred pounds?"

"I'd tell him to lift me over his head and make his best guess."

Maisie and Lorna stared at Tess, unsure if this was a joke. With their curveless bodies and fluffy hair, they always reminded her of the not-quite-human girls in some Dr. Seuss stories, Cindy Lou Who carving the roast beast for the Grinch. Tess reminded them of their parents. Al though she had done the math for them several times, they refused to believe she was only nine years older. To them, twenty-nine was Almost Thirty, which was Awfully Close to forty, which meant she was almost their parents' age, for God's sake.

Luckily, Poe White Trash crashed into its opening number just then, so Tess could pretend absolute absorption in the music and ignore Lorna and Maisie. It was not unlike exchanging nails on a chalkboard for longer nails on a chalkboard. Despite Crow's sweet, true tenor, or perhaps because of it, Poe White Trash was determinedly anti-melodic, chaotic, assaultive. They were loud. Maisie and Lorna couldn't quite make Tess feel old, but putting that adjective in front of music did the trick.

When she'd first started going with Crow, she had tried hard to pretend an interest in his musical ambitions, had even trotted out the little intelligence she had gleaned from the city's almost-progressive radio station, WHFS. Crow had laughed, convincing her she could never keep up, so she might as well fall behind. She wished he would sing just one standard, one ballad, for her. Sid Vicious had sung "My Way." No one did "So in Love" better than k.d. lang. Certainly Crow could assay "All the Things You Are." Or "My Heart Stood Still." Just once, just for her.

A stray lyric became audible, probably the result of a malfunctioning sound system, "tongue-kissing the black dog." Inspired by Esskay? At any rate, it was as close as she would get to a ballad tonight.

She leaned back against the wall, sending little flakes of lead paint into the air, and took a long drag on her drink. No alcohol was allowed at the Floating Opera, only LSD and various new synthetic potions, so Tess had settled on one of those ubiquitous iced teas that seemed more religion than beverage. Behind her closed eyes, she imagined young people running down a beach, hand in hand, deliriously happy because they had raspberry-flavored iced tea. The boy looked like Crow. The girl was skinny and short. Unlikely as it seemed, she dozed off. It was morning when she opened her eyes again, or some time of day that passed for morning, and Crow's band was taking a final bow. Time for breakfast.

Jimmy's had just opened its doors by the time they returned to Fells Point. Tess was feeling much older than the twenty-nine years Lorna and Maisie found so fascinating. For once, she was glad the waitresses at Jimmy's automatically served her the same thing, even when she didn't want it. Today, their presumption saved her from the effort of forming words. Her bagels were on the griddle the second she crossed the doorstep, along with toast for Crow's egg-and-hash browns plate. Her coffee reached the table before they did. Tess thought of asking for decaf, then decided against it. If she fell asleep now, it would only screw her body up more. Might as well push on through the day and go to bed a little early. Say, at 6 P.M.

Crow was quiet in the morning, especially after a gig. He chewed ice, drank tea with honey, and skimmed the soft sections of the Beacon-Light while Tess pretended to read the New York Times. Well-kept secret of the news business: Sunday papers were comfortingly soporific, devoid of any real news. The usual words swam before her groggy eyes, as familiar and sweet as lullabies, so familiar as to be meaningless. Bosnia . Pact. GOP. Dow. Future. Remains to be seen.

Crow crunched a large piece of ice, inhaled it by accident, and started choking. "Sweet shit Jesus," he said, after coughing it out.

Tess, who knew that many things could prompt such a response in Crow-an interesting fact about wool-gathering in China, for example-did not react immediately. The soothing gray of the Times had begun to resemble one of those hidden 3-D pictures. The copy swam in front of her eyes so she couldn't make out the words, only shapes. She was seeing the paper the way Dorie Starnes and Howard Nieman did. Computer coding. Black stuff on white stuff. Big boxes and little boxes.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," Crow said, shoving the front page of the Blight toward her. Tess had no problem making words from the bold black lines she saw there.

WINK WYNKOWSKI FOUND DEAD, APPARENT SUICIDE;

BEACON-LIGHT HAD UNCOVERED SECRET PAST

By Kevin V. Feeney

and Rosita Ruiz

Beacon-Light staff writers

Gerald "Wink" Wynkowski was found dead last night, an apparent suicide victim discovered just hours after he had learned the Beacon-Light planned to publish a story about his role in the death of a West Side shopkeeper almost thirty-one years ago.