You need to get dressed, she says.

Why?

Because we have a meeting.

I don’t understand.

A meeting, she says. It’s when two or more humans sit down together and talk.

Oh, I say. That sounds horrible.

Too bad, she says. It’s been three days and Miller is getting clinical. I told him we would meet him for cocktails at six.

What does he want?

What do you think he wants? To discuss the film.

I shake my head, violently. Fuck that, I say.

Please, she says. Pull yourself together.

No, I say. Not gonna do it.

I want her to stop bouncing and I’m about to say so when she springs across the gap between bed and chair and lands in my lap. Jude is very light on her feet and somehow I don’t start hemorrhaging upon impact. Now she sinks her teeth into my nose and my peripheral vision disappears.

Get dressed, she says.

Yes. Why not.

A walk sounds fine. The legs are functioning like never before. Brilliant glowing hole where my face used to be but that’s no trouble. Personal supernova. I rumble around the room, negotiating with my clothes. Black jeans and black T shirt and brown leather jacket. Feeling colorful, yes. I dress myself without difficulty and I’m confident it’s a pretty rapid process but when I finish lacing my boots, Jude is smoking maybe her ninth cigarette and gazing at me with disgust. I see that she is wearing a much more complicated outfit than mine. Pale silver boots that buckle up to the knees and a black skirt with steel zippers up the sides, a transparent orange shirt and some kind of black nylon vest that looks to be painted on. She has applied immaculate lipstick and she still holds that gun, I notice.

On your feet, she says.

She takes my outstretched hand and drags me over to the vanity area. Taps the mirror with a short blunt fingernail. The mirror ripples like water but does not break.

Look, she says.

I look in the mirror and I see what she sees. My hair is dirty but not so short and frightening now that I have stopped cutting it myself. I could use a shave, but none of my clothes are inside out. Probably I have looked worse in the past, a lot worse. Jude looks great, though. She looks like she should be with some other guy, someone much younger and cooler and altogether more hygienic than me.

You’re staring, she says.

I like to look at you.

Jude hands me a pink CD jewel case that previously held a mysterious software called Darkstar. Jude has a slick new laptop and lately she likes to disappear online when I become dull or impotent. I was sure she would spend most of her time hitting porn sites but was somehow not surprised to learn that she is in fact a compulsive day trader. Jude has changed since I saw her last. She has become infinitely more competent and dangerous than even before. There are two fat lines of coke chopped onto the pink plastic case. I reach for a red cocktail straw and snort them without hesitation.

Phineas has a dubious policy about cocaine: When it’s offered him, he tends to do a lot of it.

I rub a little into my teeth and suddenly I look much better in the mirror.

I’m a handsome motherfucker, I say.

Jude opens the drawer that contains the stash of bad heroin. She removes the foil lump and shows it to me. Her left eyebrow goes up.

Are you paying attention?

I nod and follow her into the bathroom and watch as she flushes the little package down the toilet without comment.

There’s still plenty of cocaine, I say.

Jude turns. You’re not that handsome.

I smile provocatively at her, then turn and vomit into the sink.

thirteen.

INTERNAL DISTORTION, OVERLOAD. Too many conflicting desires and anxieties and I walk five blocks without thinking about where I’m going.

Flesh, perhaps. Inexpensive flesh.

Jude was pretty irritated about the vomiting. She said some very nasty things that I’m sure she didn’t mean, then went to meet Miller without me. I took a couple of Vicodin and went to sleep.

That was yesterday.

I woke up the next morning and she hadn’t come back. I took a bath and called room service for some breakfast. I needed a drink and thought solid food would be an interesting plot twist but I found the bacon too crunchy and alarming and the Western omelet downright objectionable. I drank the bloody mary and went back to sleep. There was no sign of Jude when I woke up and I formed the theory that she was busy fucking Miller to death and taking her sweet time about it.

I want to lose myself for a while. I want the anonymous touch of a whore. The streets are fuzzy. The hiss of traffic on wet blacktop sounds like analog, like vinyl. I’m angry and not sure why. I vaguely remember telling Jude that I don’t get jealous but now I’m thinking that was a lie. The swirl of cigarette smoke and ruined voices around the corner. I come upon two women with thick, muscled shoulders and narrow hips, heavy thighs. Terrible mouths and the bodies of men. I ask them to point me in the direction of the Tenderloin and they commence to hoot and holler. They ask me what I’m looking for.

Gratification, sympathy. False intimacy.

I don’t know, I say. Maybe a massage.

Honey, says one. I know just what you need.

Lord yes, says the other. Four hands better than one. You come along with Sorrow and me and we gonna take care of you. You think you gone to heaven.

Sorrow? I say.

That’s right, says the first one. My name is Sorrow and this my sister, Milky Way.

Temptation.

I am briefly tempted by the horror of another rented room. The sour sheets. The stink of boiled skin, the heavy perfume. The flicker of dying light. The panic and grind of Latin pop music. The raw, foreign hands of two transvestites with such unlikely names.

Invasion, humiliation.

I could easily lose myself, I think.

No, thanks. I’m looking for a regular girl.

Oh, honey. Now that’s rude.

I believe you want to apologize, sucker.

I’m sorry. I’m looking for a different girl.

Uh huh. You sorry as can be.

What kind of girl?

I don’t know. Foreign.

They laugh and screech like mad chickens and Milky Way finally tells me to go fuck myself.

Jude and I are two people, not one. Funny but I have to remind myself of that sometimes. The velvet warms and binds but I don’t really know her. I don’t know what’s in her heart. I am safe with her for one day, two. The cocoon is temporary and what do I want. Obliteration. The ability to fly.

I tell myself to shut up, to keep walking. I have four hundred dollars. Enough to take me back to Flagstaff, to a mattress on the floor. Dishwater skin and bourbon in a jelly jar and a window with an unbroken view of the sky. The edge of the desert. I can listen to public radio and daydream about Atlantis and I can satisfy my physical hunger with my own two hands. I can destroy myself, if necessary. I stop in the middle of the street and look down at my open hands. The little finger of my left hand has twice been broken, and is now crooked. Otherwise they are ordinary hands with but one visible scar between them. Twenty-nine stitches on the palm of my right hand that effectively wiped out my life line. I tell people that it happened in a knife fight but the truth is that I was the only one involved. The wail of a car horn and someone yells at me to get the Christ out of the road.

I keep walking, keep walking.

This is the wrong way.

I am moving slowly uphill and I have a feeling that the Tenderloin should be down from here. I should be moving in a downward spiral. But perhaps this is metaphorical thinking. Or would that be irony, symbolism. These things are vaguely defined in our culture. This is San Francisco and eventually I will find whatever it is I’m looking for.