"Unchanged. Okay. This wasn’t the big one. He didn’t manage it. And Mel’s still here beside us. Okay. Good. We got time. Johnny’s out looking, and we’re in the pink. I’m taking a nap."

"Wait. What is four degrees that was three before?"

"Relic background radiation, Savvy. I never told you this? It’s like a pilot light. It flares up when somebody does an epoche. It didn’t work though. I’m taking a nap." Brooking no protest, Izzy turned off the radio and scooted down in his seat.

"I am driving with a mad man, and still no female action."

Thoughts smoked from my skin.

"Is he a werewolf, Izzy?" Sarvaduhka whispered.

Izzy said, "Let me snooze."

I squeezed Mel’s eyes shut to keep from slashing too brutally the delicate inner membrane, with my light. Rising open-armed before Sarvaduhka’s VW Squareback heading east out of Albuquerque, I bathed them, squinting in the munificence and splendor, till Izzy yanked down the visors.

"Snooze, he wants to snooze!" Sarvaduhka said. "Snooze, Izzy, but when do I get my female action? Everything you want to do, we do. Now we have the boy and you are satisfied. But I still have no female action. I never should have left my videos." He pinched a cone of incense from a slot under the ashtray, stuffed it into a compartment in Ganesha’s back, and lit it clumsily with a cheap butane lighter. Smoke spouted from Ganesha’s trunk.

"You horny bastard," Izzy grumbled, "didn’t I tell you, you get some nooky in Memphis? We gotta finish with the kid first, but I’m too tired now. I gotta cop some Z’s, Sergeant Ducky. Can you clam it?"

I was terrified. A slug in the kill jar?the sting of jasmine like carbon tetrachloride?I curled away from Izzy’s body, my skin electric with loathing. He yawned and stretched. His arm looped across my shoulders. His head lolled against my chin. The feel of that clammy bald spot. I tried to be the sun, huge, distant, omnipotent.

Through the hole in my mind images stuttered: Mayan priest pederasts; surgeons, masked and gloved, their hands in my bowels; Shaman shaking and shaking his head; the Space People, the desert, my father?Run! "Please let me out," I said, one of me.

"Shit!" said Izzy. "I forgot this happens." He stopped the hole with his finger.

How did you do that? He didn’t hear me.

"Savvy, stop the car," said Izzy One-brow. Sarvaduhka groaned and pulled onto the shoulder. "We get no rest until he’s cauterized."

I felt as if I were being buried alive. The sudden constriction, even though it produced a more normal-sized, more workable mind, was suffocating. Izzy amputated the world. As soon as the car stopped, he pushed open the door and shoved me out. He fell out on top of me, wrestled me down. "Sarvaduhka!" he shouted. "Help me."

"Is this legal?" the Indian said. I heard his door open, then slam shut. He was pressing me down. I was scrambling and wheezing after something like breath or like my name, or else I was trying to cough it up. My name, too small for me, was wedged in my windpipe. Izzy was butterfly-bandaging Shaman’s hole. Or plugging it. Or welding it. Or sewing it closed.

"This is just a temporary," he said.

I coughed up my name. "I’m Mel Bellow!" I said, astonished, I who had been the sun, the sky, Ganesha’s shakti, wind-blown sand.

"We know who the hell you are," Izzy said. "You left home the day after the US pulled out of Vietnam and President McCarthy ended the draft, May 6, 1970, right? Happens to be one of my bench marks. No more sitting by the mailbox chewing on your lottery number, right, Mel? Slam goes the door. Up goes the thumb. Izzovision, case you’re wondering."

"Izzy, be civil. He is traumatized," Sarvaduhka clucked.

"Sure," said Izzy. Now I could see he was sweating, exhausted, still straddling me on all fours. His sweat fell into my eyes and made me blink. I knew which one of us I was! He said, "I’m Izzy. This guy here is Mr. Sarvaduhka, the motel mogul. We’re pleased to make your acquaintance. Now let’s haul ass back into the vehicle, because we got a lot of miles to cover before we hit the launch site, and the Duke is hot for nooky."

"My name is Izzy Molson," he told me over watery coffee from a machine at a rest stop outside Amarillo. Sarvaduhka was looking at magazines. "Some people think I’m psychic, other people think I’m psycho, but I’m here to tell you that I’m just an ordinary Joe with his ear to the ground. I’m currently employed at the Gibson plant in Lockport, New York, setting up tool machines, which I got because I lied about my medical history, which you would too if you had a back like mine, and I’d appreciate it in consideration of which, if you didn’t wrestle me quite so vicious next time I do you a favor."

"Sorry." I sipped my coffee slowly, just to feel the warmth spread, like dye staining the part of my world that was me.

"Forget it. Anyways, I happen to be able to see inside things, like your noggin for example, past, present, and future, regardless of distance?sometimes. Certain responsibilities accrue. Which is why I am spending half of this vacation, which I only get two weeks of at my present level of seniority at Gibson, and my next vacation also, when it comes up, on you. Gawd, I guess there’s no limit to how bad you can make a cup of goddamned coffee." He wrinkled his nose and swallowed the rest of it at a gulp. Then he squashed the Styrofoam and threw it down with a shiver.

"Spending your vacations on me? What’s going on? A guy did something to my mind…"

"Shaman."

"Yes! Then you fixed me somehow. That’s all I know."

"How can you drink that stuff so easy? You look like you like it! You know, you can tell a lot about various civilizations by the kind of coffee they put up with; that’s what I find… Listen to me. Shaman is trying to set you up to be his pabulum, Mel boy."

"He wants to eat me?"

"Yes, Mel, he wants to eat you, farm you and eat you. He’s tired of hunting and gathering, let’s say. He’s been living catch-as-catch-can for five, six thousand years, and now he wants to cultivate, raise a family, like. Between you and me, he doesn’t know what he’s in for in that department, but try to get Shaman to listen to my say-so.

"Now, I’m just a little guy, see, but we can play the star guys off against him, because they want you back on Sanduleak."

"Ah."

"Listen. Shaman’s gotta start fertilizing now to plant seeds next year and harvest the year after that, when his larder gets echoey. This is why I have committed two vacations, though God knows there are things I’d rather be doing, named Fay in East Tonawanda. You kapeesh, Old Lower Forty?"

"Why do I believe you’re not crazy?"

"It is written."

Many things were written of which I was unaware then, but where I now live, folks know everything. Time flows differently two hundred thousand light-years from my old galaxy. I look up at the sky from Sanduleak, rotating five times a second, and I see there the histories of all the worlds, compiled by epoche…

Shaman chose the womb of a twentieth century North American woman to be born from. Egyptians, he had found, were too hard to proselytize, Indians too easy, Japanese too slavish, Australians too anarchic, but the American bourgeoissie?perfect. He magnetized their children, told them tales of Pharaohs and extraterrestrials, himself always in the middle, Tuthmosis, seed of Chephren, son of the Great Sphinx. Compare Chephren’s statue and the Sphinx: were not their faces the same? Anciently, as Tuthmosis, he had excavated and restored the man-lion from the stars.