"John and Milly didn't move the commune till the day after I saw you last; they thought it would be safer."

"Then we went to Teddy's to look for you. Only it wasn't open yet. And I had a lot of wine with Bunny — you know the guy who dances there. I gave him a message for you."

She nodded. "Yes, he gave it to me… the day before yesterday!"

"No," he said. "Because I gave it to him this morning." The water reached his loins, poured into his scrotum; his scrotum shriveled. "Then I went out, and ended up at that department store downtown. That's where I met the other guys, and we broke into the place. There were people living in there. We got out. But they shot one of the guys. We just got him out of there, on the God-damn bus that happened to be coming along!"

"That happened two nights ago, Kid! Some of the scorpions came into the bar and wanted to know if anybody knew where they could get a doctor. Madame Brown went with them, but she came back in about ten minutes. Everybody was talking about it all yesterday."

"He was bleeding and moaning on the floor of the bus!" The water roared around in Kid's chest, then filled the column of his neck, fountained inside his head. "I got off the bus, and I came—" He choked, and for a moment thought he would drown. " — came here." The water reached his eyes, (and the work bulb grew knitting needles of light); he brushed it away, before more of it rolled down his face, no longer cold, but hot.

He kept rubbing at his eyes with one hand.

Something burned the knuckles of the other: coffee had slopped over.

He raised his cup and sucked the bitter liquid from his skin.

"Oh, give that here!" She took his cup from him and put them both down on the sofa arm. "I'm not fooling you!"

His hand, lost with nothing to hold, hung like something torn from among roots and still clumped with earth.

Lanya took it, pressed the knuckles to her mouth. "I'm not kidding you at all. That morning, in the park, when Nightmare woke us up was five days ago. And I haven't seen you since!"

At her touch, he found himself ponderously calm, and kept trying to determine if the submarine silence that filled him hid anger or relief.

"Look, you said Mr Newboy was here with the galleys. You can't set type on a whole book overnight, can you?"

"Oh…"

"When we were all talking about you, last night in the bar, he came looking for you with them then, too."

"Talking about me?" He wanted to pull his hand away, but felt embarrassed.

"About you and the scorpions. They said you saved somebody's life."

"Huh?"

She took his other hand now; the familiar gesture only made him less comfortable.

The hurts among her small features and his own made something ugly between them. He raised his hands and pulled her to him, to squeeze it away. She came up against him with her arms crossed over her belly, and there was a hard thing over one breast — her harmonica. She moved her head against his chest. "Oh, for God's sakes," she whispered.

"I'm not fooling you either!" He didn't sound, he thought, nearly as desperate as he felt. "I saw you this morning. I… I thought I saw you this morning."

"You've been running around with the scorpions all week. Everybody thinks you're some kind of hero or something."

"What'd you think?" Her hair brushed his moving chin.

"Shit. That's what I thought: 'Shit.' You want to go off in that direction. Fine. But I don't feel like getting messed up in anything like that. I really don't."

"This afternoon," he said. "I mean it was by accident I found them. And I didn't save anybody's life. That was just…"

"Look at you," she said, not moving away. "You're dressing like them; you're hanging out with them. I mean go on: If that's what you want, go on. But it's not my scene. I can't go there with you."

"Yeah, but… Hey, look. You: you say you've got a house and all. Where are you staying now?"

"Would you mind," she said softly, "if I didn't tell you?" But opened her arms and put them around him. "Just for a while?" The harmonica corner cut his chest.

He wondered could she feel the anger inside him, pulsing under her hands. "I," he said, "saw you this morning."

She pulled back, all his anger on her face. "Look!" She made fists at her hips. "Either you're lying to me for some kooky reasons I don't even want to know about, and I shouldn't have anything to do with you, right? The night before I saw you last, you lost three hours. Now you've lost five days. Maybe you really are crazy. Maybe I shouldn't have anything to do with you! That's pretty irrational, isn't it? I haven't seen you in five days and Christ, am I angry at you!"

"Then why the fuck were you looking for me!" He turned and stalked down the hall, a great bubble about to burst inside his ribs.

At the piano, he realized Harrison must have opened the curtains on the low stage. The backdrop — and there were stands with photographer's floods — showed a painted moon, some seven feet across, and indications around it of trees.

He turned at the apron, surprised again to find her behind him. "Why did you come?"

"Because this is the first time I've known where you were. I didn't know…." She gasped. "I didn't know if you were all right. You didn't come back. I thought maybe you were angry at me for something. You used to always come back. And suddenly, for all that time, instead of you, all I got was what people were saying about you. You and the scorpions, you and the scorpions." Something spent itself in her eyes. The lids lowered on the shadowed green. "Look, so far we haven't had one of those 'I'll-follow-you-anywhere' relationships. I still haven't made up my mind if that's where I want to go. And I just get a little nervous when I find myself thinking I might. That's all."

"A week." He felt his face twist. "What the hell did I do for … five days? When did I…" He reached for her.

Her face crashed against his, hitting his mouth, but she pushed her tongue against his, and was holding tight to the back of his neck. He kept trying to pull her even closer, leaning against the stage.

He loosed one hand to dig between them, till he could pull the harmonica from her blouse pocket. It rattled on the stage behind them.

"You're not going to hurt anyone," she said once. "You're not going to hurt me. I know that. You're not."

The hysteria with which she made love to him on that dark stage was first furious, then funny, (wondering if someone was going to walk in, and excited by the idea); he lay on his back while she bucked above him, clutching his shoulders, wondering should he feel this way. But the sound she was making that he'd thought was crying cleared to laughter. Her buttocks filled his hands, and he dug between them.

She reared too high, and lost him to the annealing chill. While she reached for him, he rolled her to her side. Legs in the clutch of denim, he crawled down to the sweaty corner of her blouse and pushed his tongue through her salty hair. She lifted a knee to let it fall wide. After she came, (he had worked his pants free of one foot) he straddled her, pushed his penis into her again, lowered his belly to her belly, his chest to her chest, his wet face against the crumpled shoulder of her blouse, and began long final strokes, while her arms tightened on his back.

Coming burned his loins (he remembered the spilled coffee) and left him exhausted and still burning (he remembered how it felt after masturbating when all you started off with was a piss-on), and exhaustion won. Lakes of sweat cooled around his body. She nodded in the crook of his shoulder, where he knew his arm would numb soon, but didn't feel like doing anything about it. He slid his hand down his own chest, till his fingers caught in the transverse chain, beneath angular shapes.