Comet. Vomit. Not the best rhyme, no.

There was a young fellow named Ted,

who had a radio put in his head.

Long wave or short,

he did it for sport

- and to improve his reception in bed.

Okay. But what rhymes with Jason? Basin? Maybe.

There was a young lady from Venus,

whose body was shaped like a penis.

A fellow named Hunt

was shaped like a cunt,

so it all worked out fine, just between us.

It made no sense at all, but I loved it. It rhymed and it was filthy as hell. I wanted to stand up in church and recite it aloud. Nascent? No, bad rhyme, and too obscure.

Jase?

Trace. Face. Place. Disgrace.

He said, with a trace

of the stuff on his face,

No, not the internal couplet. And not Jase. It would have to be Jason.

Disgracin'? No.

The problem gnawed at the back of my brain. I could hear a thousand little voices scrabbling around for answers; but I had ta solve this one myself to be free.

There was an old bastard named Gene,

impotent, selfish, and mean.

His dick was so shamed

by what the man claimed,

it pretended that it was a spleen.

That one was easy.

Probably because I didn't know anyone named Gene. Jason.

There once was a fellow named Jason,

whose horrible death I would hasten.

That was it.

Jason had left me incomplete.

No. I had let myself be incomplete with Jason. Incomplete-meaning there's stuff you haven't said. You need to say it to be complete; but you haven't said it, so you're walking around carrying all this stuff you haven't said and need to say-and you're going to say it to the first person you meet who looks like Jason. Heaven help them.

So what did I want to say to Jason anyway? Fuck you?

It was a start.

No. I knew what I wanted to say.

I'd say, "I don't like being cheated and robbed and manipulated and lied to."

But Jason wouldn't see it that way. He'd just see it that I'd betrayed him. He wouldn't see it from my side. He wouldn't see it the way I'd experienced it.

"Fuck you," would have to do.

Except he wouldn't squirm. He'd see it as an honor. I wondered how the worms would feel about it.

That made me smile. Then it made me laugh. Out loud.

That would be the ultimate irony-if everything Jason said about the worms was bullshit.

What if Jason was wrong? What if the worms didn't care? What if he was just one more piece of food-but useful food because he kept the rest of the food from running away.

Ha ha. Oh God.

With a French lass, it's unwise to trifle.

They have urges they simply can't stifle.

A woman of France

will pull down her pants

at the sight of a towering eye full.

I didn't know where it was coming from; once it got started, I couldn't stop-but I didn't care.

I'd write them and I'd laugh and feel pleased with myself. It was so satisfying to be able to do something that didn't have to mean anything at all.

The rest of the world could go to hell.

"My God!" screamed devout Mrs. Pike,

as she fondled her stableman's spike.

"This is quite out of place,

and a great loss of face

- but I think I have fallen in like!"

I'd feed him to worms,

just to see how he squirms

but they'd vomit his crap in a basin.

I made up my mind. I will never be food again. I took long thoughtful baths.

I masturbated and thought of Lizard.

I left the TV to babble about shuttle launchings and lunar ecology projects. I turned on all the machines in the house and surrounded myself with music and words and pictures and smells. I went from one house to the next, all of them abandoned, looting through the shelves for discs and tapes and books and games.

I got angry. I got afraid. I cried.

I screamed. I did a lot of screaming.

I slept and ate and shivered and after a while I didn't cry as much, and I didn't rage as hard, and one day I even found myself laughing at something somebody said on the TV because it was silly and stupid and funny, and I marveled at myself.

A well-endowed fellow from Ortening

prepared for an evening of sportening,

with a boy from a disco,

till he lubed up with Crisco,

and discovered, alas, it was shortening!

I was learning how to be ordinary again. I felt terrific. I could be ordinary!

And then I felt sad again for a while, I didn't know why. But now I knew what was happening. I was getting better. Something bobbed up to the surface of my mind. Something I'd heard about the Revelationists, from way back before the first plagues appeared in Africa and India. Somebody had left a Revelationist tribe and written a book about his experiences. He'd said that he'd lived at such an intense, incredible peak of emotional activity, day after day after day, that when he was finally free of that kind of continual stimulus, he went into a profound physical and mental depression.

That was what was happening to me now. It was all right. It was part of the process.

When I finished being depressed, I would be me again. Whoever that was.

But at least, now that I knew what was happening, I could begin to be really responsible for myself again.

I walked outside for the first time in days. The sky was drizzly. Cold droplets spattered into my eyes. It was beautiful. For the first time in months, water rolled down my cheeks that didn't have salt in it.

I should have headed north. To San Francisco. I turned south.

I didn't know where the place was exactly-I wasn't even sure why I was going there-but it was someplace to go and I knew I could find it.

Highway 101 was a long straightaway of tall trees and burned out buildings. The people of San Francisco had fled south along this road, spreading the dreadful plagues they were fleeing. Every burned-out building or abandoned automobile was a monument to someone's death.

The highway was empty now.

The abandoned cars had been pulled off. Many of the burned buildings had been bulldozed flat. Some new greenery was beginning to creep into the war zone, but still the highway seemed carved down the center of a bleak scar of rubble.

All the roads in America were like this.

There had been no escape from the dying, but people had fled anyway. The very act of fleeing had only hastened the spread. The National Science Center at Denver-had still not identified all of the different diseases. Not all of them had attacked human beings. Animals and plant species had suffered too.

At San Jose, I turned west across the mountains. There had been fires here. There were blackened tree stumps dotting the hillsides. The new growth would take a long time to cover the wounds.