I probably laughed very loud then. Maybe beer even squirted out my nostrils. Maybe my sinuses burned all night.

“I got those questions about your book from Tracy,” and she pointed into the constantly shifting crush of bodies. Tracy, by the way, was the girl in the band, whom I’d been dating back when I was writing The Ark of Poseidon,and she’d even helped out proofreading the galley pages. I felt set up and relieved at the same time.

“Cute,” I told her, though I didn’t think it the least bit cute. Mostly, I was wondering what the hell Tracy was playing at, if she thought I was so pathetic I needed her sending fish my way (which, at that point, I probably was), or if she was just messing with my head.

“You think so?”

“No, but it’s more pleasant than if I tell you what I’m really feeling right now.”

Her eyes dimmed and her smile faded a bit then, and I started to feel like maybe I was, by dint of her confession, regaining the upper hand. This assumes I ever hadthe upper hand, that I’d enchanted her with my fib of a dead sea turtle on a Grecian shore. I stared at the crowd, at that place where Tracy might be, observing her handiwork, and took a couple of swallows of the cold beer.

“Well, I hope I haven’t pissed you off,” Amanda said, after a minute or so.

“Nah, you haven’t pissed me off,” I assured her. “When you’re a writer, you learn to live by dirty tricks, or you don’t last very long.”

“You think that was a dirty trick?”

“Near enough,” I replied, and then, changing the subject, because I was still a lot hornier than I was angry, I said, “So, it depends on what I consider art. Whether or not you’re an artist.”

There was a brief pause, long enough that I had time for another swallow of beer, before she nodded her head. “Photography,” she said. “Well, it’s sort of photo-montage, lots of compositing, Photoshopping, image manipulation. You know, that sort of thing.”

“And that’s not art?” I asked, having more than half expected her to tell me she was into body modification (despite any visible evidence to that effect) or flash mobs or action poetry, something more along those lines.

“I think it’s probably my subject matter that gets me into trouble,” she said. “Too dark, I think. Too dark for most people, anyway. I used to do a little freelance magazine illustration, but now I mostly just do commissions.”

I nodded, trying to think of what I would say next, as I knew almost nothing about photography or photo-montage. And, finally, trying to sound interested, I asked, “Is it lucrative, the commissions?”

Amanda seemed to perk up a little then, so I guess I’d said the right thing, or at least avoided saying the wrong thing. Six of one, half dozen of the other. She set her glass down on a cocktail napkin.

“It pays the bills, most of the time. Mainly, I have clients, private collectors who are into what I do, and I take requests. They ask for some specific image, and I create it. Images you can’t get with just a camera, but that they carry around in their heads. And there’s some pretty dark stuff in people’s heads. They bring me their sick shit, and I make it visible.”

“Perverts?” I asked.

“Yeah. Some of them, sure. But not all. Some of them are just. ” And she paused, frowning and stirring her drink with a swizzle stick. “Some of them just need to see with their eyes these images that they’ve already seen in their mind’seye. Sometimes, it seems like I’m a sort of therapist, or a midwife. They might want a photorealistic unicorn, or a woman might want a photo of herself, naked, riding a unicorn, or—”

“A photo of herself fucking that unicorn,” I said.

“Pretty much,” she nodded. “It can get sexually explicit, and intense, and most times it’s a lot grimmer than unicorns and fairies and mermaids and what have you. But that’s the way I happen to lean, anyway. A true disciple of Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Goya, Sidney Sime, of the Mütter Museum, Eighteenth-Century anatomical and obstetric wax models, and so forth. I’ve actually beento the Josephinum in Vienna, and, dude, that was like I’d died and gone to fucking heaven.”

The way she said Josephinum,coupled with that line about dying and going to heaven, I could tell that I should be impressed — or at least that she hopedI’d be impressed — so I made some appreciative sound, then, and apparently did a decent enough job of feigning whatever she needed to see. Truth is, though, she’d lost me after Goya.

“If I had my laptop with me, I could show you some of my work,” she told me, still using the swizzle stick to rearrange the ice cubes in her glass.

“A shame,” I said, more than half meaning it, because she’d managed to pique my interest, even through the obscuring haze of alcohol and horniness.“It’s not all that far from here, my apartment, which is also my studio. Just down in Grant Park, on Ormewood, not too far from the zoo. I mean, if you’d really like to see. If you’re not just saying that.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked Amanda Tyrell. “Women screwing unicorns? Unicorns exchanging the favor? How often does a girl get an opportunity like that? Besides, this fucking music,” and I pointed to a huge speaker mounted on the wall.

“Yeah, I don’t like it much, either,” she said. “But the open bar, you know. An open bar and those little Swedish meatballs on toothpicks, they get me every time.”

And right about then, suspecting I’d lucked out and hit the jackpot, I was wondering if I could find Tracy the fucking busybody, wherever she was tucked away in that noisy, faux-cornpone crowd to thank her and buy her a goddamn drink or maybe a line of cocaine, if that was still her deal. And then, hoping I didn’t seem tooeager, tooobvious, I asked Amanda if she had a car, and no, she said, she’d come with a friend, and, by the way, if we were going to leave the party, she needed to find said friend and tell her, so she wouldn’t worry. Fine, I said, sipping my beer.

“I’ll be waiting right here,” I promised. “Sure as hell got nowhere else to go.”

“I won’t be long. She’s here somewhere. And, yeah, it’ll be cool, you’ll see.”

The party was in some East Atlanta dive, the sort of place that works hard at beinga dive, and we would have taken Moreland Avenue down to Ormewood Avenue SE, I suppose. I don’t recall, precisely. I was too drunk to be driving in the first damn place, but my old Ford truck was a stick, and when she saw it, Amanda informed me that she could only drive automatics. Later, I would learn this was a lie, but, let’s save later for later. And that was muchlater. Not too many concrete memories about our conversation on that drive. I was trying too hard to focus on the road and the street signs and not getting pulled over by the boys and girls of the APD.

Turned out Amanda lived in a huge old Victorian that had been converted into three apartments — first floor, second floor, and the attic. She had the attic, of course. The drive from the club to that house, it’s all a blur of street-lights and traffic lights, stop signs and yellow center lines. The great jungle of urban squalor and gentrification south of I-20. Yuppie condos and million-dollar flip jobs rubbing shoulders with ghetto pawnshops, fast-food restaurants, crack dens, and gangbangers. The neighborhood got a little bit better after we turned onto Ormewood, approaching that great swath of sculpted urban wilderness known as Grant Park. In 1890, a mere twenty-six years after Sher man ordered his troops to burn the city to the ground, the Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts — sons of the great Frederick Law Olmsted — were hired to design Grant Park. But I digress.

Always, I digress. I may have mentioned that already.

So, I followed Amanda up wobbly back stairs and into her apartment. It was small, but nicer than what I’d expected. She complained about roaches and her downstairs neighbors, whom she said were Scientologists. She also claimed they abused their dog, a golden Lab named Shackelford. Amanda said they frequently beat the dog, and that she’d called the cops about it a couple of times. She offered me coffee, and I gladly accepted, wanting to be sober. I sat in a kitchen chair (she had no table), and I suppose we talked about nothing in particular until the coffee was done. I asked for milk, no sugar, and when she wanted to know if half-and-half would do, I said sure. Half-and-half would do just fine.