Her mouth wet his face, her tongue trailing lazily across his cheek to his mouth. The warmth fled from her touch, leaving a cold trail of saliva across his skin. He thought of silver slug tracks on sidewalks in the morning. She put her wet mouth against his, her lips moving as if to devour him.

“Stop it!” His grip tightened on her wrists as he twisted his face away from hers. She laughed lightly and sagged against him. Something unhooked in his brain and his equilibrium went. He fell back on the mattress. and she landed heavily atop him. She giggled at his game of reluctance. Her harnessed breasts nosed against his chest aggressively. She let her head loll forward on her neck so that the weight of her long hair fell across his face. He released her wrists and foundered beneath her, feeling trapped and entangled in her body. Lynda giggled again. The sound galvanized him.

“Get off me!” He struggled madly, pushing her from him as he rolled away heedless of her tangled hair. She didn’t care.

She was laughing helplessly as she rolled across his mattress.

He tried to sit up, but the directions of the room changed around him. He closed his eyes and it spun even faster.

“Let me be on top,” Lynda begged, very close, her breath warming his face. He pulled back from her, slapped away the hands at his throat. Her busy fingers dropped to his belt. “I’ll do all the work,” she offered, pulling his shirttail free. Ancient urges rolled down his spine to squirm in his belly and erupt unnervingly. Earlier today, his magic had been shut down, the switches thrown to plunge him into emptiness. Now Lynda was reactivating this other part of him, putting systems on-line whose flashes and thunderings he had stilled long ago. He groped within himself for control, but it was all set on override.

His hands gripped her hips.

He squeezed his eyes tight shut, reaching for sanity and order. He found only her weight on his thighs, warm and solid.

“I don’t do this,” he said, but his voice sounded far off, even to himself. He wondered if Lynda could even hear him as he tried to explain. “There are certain things denied to me.

Things I must not do if I am to retain my controls and my magic.“ Her hands were cold on his belly, sliding around under his shirt and up his chest. She pinched one of his nipples, hard.

He divorced himself from the pain-pleasure. “I must not carry more than a dollar in change. I must not harm pigeons. I must listen to people and tell them the Truth when I Know it. I must not harm pigeons…” He caught himself circling and tried to find his track again. He couldn’t remember the other taboos.

It didn’t matter She wasn’t listening. Only their bodies were in the same room. He was just a warm prop for her in her fantasy game of seduction. He coughed and felt her fist grip him.

“Feels ready to me,” she chuckled throatily. “Isn’t it always the best. the first time with someone new? And stoned. It puts all the magic back into it.”

“All my magic is lost to me,” he corrected her. He was aware of his body’s betrayal, but he scrambled frantically away from it. trying to keep the memories out, to block away the sensory input that stirred up such strong images from the past.

All the forbidden and dangerous things came pressing out from the comers of his mind, to leer and snicker at him. There were so many things he could not bear, things severed from his life with the cold precision of a surgical scalpel. Now they came, one by one, to hook their claws back into his flesh, to press then“ sucking greedy mouths against his veins. He lost track of where and who he was. The thing he must not do became the thing he must do, a sightless appetite to appease before he could know peace again. The world was rocking with the rhythm of a railroad train picking up speed. He was along for the ride, on the night express back to the black pit.

“Mitchell,” sighed Lynda.

“Yes,” he confessed.

MORNING AVALANCHED INTO HIS EYES when he opened them.

Gray light was pouring through the window, drenching the mattress. and tousled blankets and the cardboard and blanket from the window on the floor beside them. He stared out through the cracked pane at the dark silhouette of the building across the alley and the overcast sky above it. None of it was coming together. He groped vaguely after the tails of memories, but they scuttled back into corners. He pressed his palms to his eyes until two things came clear. He should phone home today.

And check with the damn VA office again, to see if they’d straightened out the mess they’d made of his records.

Tempofa! continuity ripped suddenly, spilling him from its sling into chaos. This was no cheap motel room. His pants were not slung across a chair under a cheap painting by a bureau with a Gideon bible on it. He sat up, staring around. His brain bounced sickeningly against the top of his skull. He must have gone drinking last night. He knew he had to quit soon. He eased back down onto the flat and stinking mattress. A gray pigeon took sudden alarm and swooped into the next room.

From one corner of the room, a scrawny black cat regarded him with flat eyes. A damn zoo. A wave of stress rose in Mitchell, (Messing his headache to the top of his skull. He was tired of mornings that started at the bottom. His whole body ached; his mouth tasted foul. Something very bad was going on here. He squeezed his eyes hard shut and tried to put his mind in order. What had he done yesterday? How had he gotten to today?

All that came to mind was phoning home. The number loomed large in his mind, spurring him. He hadn’t called in a long time; he hated to call when all he could say was that he was still working on it. He had promised to get it all straightened out, once and for all. They were counting on him. He was going to make it right with all of them.

There was a phone booth in me train station, with a decent chair in it. He had used it so often he had memorized me graffiti. He leaned into the privacy of the booth, telling the operator to make it collect. The ringing sounded very far away.

He couldn’t identify the voice that said so softly, “Hello?”

“Collect call from Mitch. Will you accept charges?”

He heard wind blowing in me receiver, that was all; as if all me miles of wire between him and home were taking a long and steady breath. The operator repeated, “There is a collect call from Mitch. Will you accept charges?”

“I… wait a minute. Yes, I will. Go ahead, operator.”

“Hello?” His own voice was so cautious he hardly recognized it himself.

“Mitch?”

“Yeah. I woulda called sooner, but this is such a fucked up mess, every time I go in Acre—”

“Mitch. Wait a minute. Listen to me, Mitch. Just a sec.”

She took a ragged breath and he suddenly knew she was weeping. Weeping on the other end of the line. Why? “Look, I gotta say these things. You don’t want to hear them and I don’t want to say them, but I gotta say them now, on the phone, while you’re not looking at me. Listen.” She cleared her throat, but her voice still came out husky. “There’s a lot of things.

There’s Benjy, for one. He’s back to sleeping alt night again.

He’s nearly back to how he was. He plays outside and his little friends come over again. And he seems so sunny and fine, it breaks my heart to think, of how he was. He found one of his old plastic army men in the sandbox yesterday. He wouldn’t touch it. He made me come out and get it and wrap it in a paper towel and throw it inside the trash can for him. After we did that, he asked when you were coming back. I told him I didn’t know. He seemed worried by that, so i told him pretty soon. Then he got scared and wanted to sleep in my bed with me last night. Mitch, it’s too much for him. Too many blowups in front of him, too many weird-outs. Too many times of you going away and coming back fine for a month or two, and men a disaster. He’s just a little boy, and it’s too much for him.