“Take for example a hypothetical woman, named Maria, who is a brilliant scientist but has lived in a black-and-white room her entire life where her entire life’s work has been to study the red of flowers. She understands red is the longest wavelength visible to the naked eye, and she knows how the brain is excited by and reacts to red. She knows, in fact, all there is to know about red, without ever having seen it, or a flower.

“One day Maria decides to finally leave the black-and-white room. She steps out from her little box, and she sees the world for the first time, and she sees red for the first time, and she sees her first flower. Does Maria know what red is?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Does she?”

“It’s just a philosophical game,” she cooed, stroking me playfully. “Not real life. They like to ask questions like that because I think God does not talk to philosophers very much.”

“Why did you bring it up then?” I was confused, still burning to know the answer to the question.

“Because, baby, I know all there is to know about love.”

She may have said you. She may have said blue. I do not remember. I was high on opium, and she had me in her hands.

She led me through the halls of that ode to Dionysus, to a room carpeted in silk and exquisitely woven cushions, where she slipped off her dress, and led me to a marble bath. She undressed me and drew the water, then led me in, where she washed me and afterward toweled me dry, before massaging my entire body with rose-scented oil. We went to bed and she laced her legs, long as a country day, around me and I felt perfectly within my skin, undivided in a way I had not since I was a boy. We made love and it was as she said, she was a professional lover.

The next morning, as we sat in bed she kissed me before rising from the sheets, looking down at me still amid the pillows. My head hurt, and my cock, and my conscience as well. “We had something, meu amor,” she said, rubbing my temples. “Maybe not what you’re looking for, but something all the same. You should drop me a postcard from time to time. Come back and see me when you can.”

“I do not think I will be back this way again,” I said, even as I warmed to the sound of her saying my love in the unguarded southern way. “So you don’t have to lie to me. I know it’s business. Me projecting a fantasy onto you, and you playing it back to get money. It’s okay.”

“No,” she said, smoothing my brow tenderly. “Sometimes I think when people say anything is only business that’s the lie. Maybe I didn’t choose the best work, but everything is real. I’m still a woman. You are still a man. This is still life. And I’m glad we met, even if you would never let yourself fall in love with a puta.”

“Come back to bed,” I reached for her. Sadly, tenderly. Full of pain and vulnerability that flashed the brighter amid the seediness.

“Just remember what we talked about.” She kissed me when she finally left a while later.

“Remind me.”

“Oh, amor,” she smiled softly. “You will remember. It is what you are truly looking for.”

I tried to recall what we discussed the night before, but it was all as distant as yesterday’s dream. “I can’t remember anything,” I said.

She hugged herself to me warmly, and rested her hand on my chest briefly and just smiled, before leaving. When she walked away all I could think of was an hourglass.

I shambled back to the hotel, still unable to recall the details of the night before. I felt a tarnished, divided joy, sadness and liberation tempered by self-reproach. All I could remember was a feeling between us of pure physicality, an absolute freedom of being completely in the body and completely at ease. If there was no more truth to it than that, at least there was nothing false.

The only falseness was between me and myself.

It was eleven o’clock by the time I reached my room, where I discovered the maid vacuuming, and my luggage nowhere in sight. When I asked where my things were, she shrugged and pointed a finger toward the roof. I knew what she was talking about, and took the elevator up to Doc’s suite, where I found Schoeller and a couple of random guys splayed around the living room in various poses of sin-sickness and suffering. Schoeller was still bumping cocaine from a tiny spoon.

I went to the bathroom to shower and change, then crashed across the bed, where I was fast asleep when Doc showed up half an hour later. He was swaddled in a fresh linen suit, happy as a butter thief, and wide awake as the morning he was born.

He glanced around the room, shaking his head with dismay as he considered us. “Amateurs,” he pronounced, before shoving Schoeller aside on the sofa, to open his bag on the table.

“Where have you been all this time?” Schoeller asked.

“Up Corcovado way, to say confession.”

“There’s a church there?”

“No. I went to speak directly to O Cristo. What I did, no priest could comprehend.”

“Where did we lose Freddo?” I asked.

“In jail. Here. This will even you out.” He was passing out uppers to those who had gone too far down, and downers to those who had gotten too high.

When he reached me he opened my eyes wide with his fingers, before searching them with a penlight.

“First time?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“She gentle with you?”

I smiled.

“Kiss you on the mouth?”

I admitted to it.

“Wrap her legs around you, and rock you in her arms until you felt the heat from the center of the world?”

I laughed weakly.

“Say what you needed to hear? Make you forget your worries, and feel like she knew you? Laugh with you until the darkness shone like diamonds, and make you remember how bounteous loving can be?”

I closed my eyes in wistful reverie.

“Wish you met her under different circumstances?”

I winced.

“You give her all you had? You give her the jailhouse key?”

“I don’t want to play this game.”

“Circle well done. You found a saint in a cathouse.” He grinned at me, and placed a horse pill on my tongue. “Eat this.”

“What is it?”

“This one eases the conscience.”

He turned back to the room. “We need to get moving. We’re driving south to Ihla Grande to surf, and then a little surprise I’ve worked up.”

“No more surprises.”

“Mermaids.”

“Definitely not.”

“Wait till you get there before you decide. We also need to go spring Freddo from the pen, and buy him a new watch.”

“What’s he doing in jail?”

“He refused to give his girlfriend a present last night, like a good little boy, so she gifted herself his watch.”

“How did the police get involved?”

“When he realized it, he lost his cool, then she lost her cool, and security came. He still did not calm the fuck down, so they put him in the tank to chill him out.”

“Why didn’t you spring him last night?”

“And ruin the party? Besides, nobody told him to check his common sense at customs, and, because he is our dear brother, as all of you are my dear brothers, I decided to leave him in peace awhile to remember himself. Just as someday I will find new livers for each of you. Now, when we get him, he will be repentant, and no longer an adjective-defying asshole.”

“I’m fine bailing him out,” Schoeller said. “But let him get his own watch.”

“We have to,” Doc answered, “because he will not have time to do it before going home, and Doris gave him that dumb watch for their first wedding anniversary, when he had no bread and she was making cake. So if he shows up without it she will know something happened, and he will not be able to get himself out of it without lying to her. She will figure this out, of course, and send him to hell. They don’t have the kind of relationship where he can simply go home and say honestly: Sugarstack, I know you don’t want to hear this, and it’s not what I want to be telling you at all, but I was unfaithful to us and as a material consequence lost your watch to a ho in Rio.”