Even the trucker had to stop mopping and look. How could a brother like that have a sister like that? It wasn’t her cup size or complexion. Oh, she was pretty. She was very pretty, in a domestic sort of way. She wore boot jeans and a large T-shirt. Her hair was a tangle of brown cascading halfway down her back, with here and there a strand of silver. Her mouth was wide, the lips full, her dark eyes clear and intense. Her face was washed by sorrow, like a stone worn smooth by water. Compassion, it said. There was her beauty.

The way Nora walked, the way her eyes moved, effortlessly, without a trace of affectation or desire, everything about her won me. Hers was the secret face I put myself to sleep by. I loved her immediately.

Even Gone Joe stopped clawing for a moment. A cool wave spread through the cafe. The tourists stopped jabbering and breathed. The trucker stubbed his cigarette.

Gypsy pulled out a chair for Nora, and she sat down. Gypsy sat again, carefully. He said to her, "He knows."

Our eyes met. When she breathed, I breathed. She seemed to nod, and I understood that she was acknowledging our kinship. "How?" she said. "Please tell me how you know about us."

Her voice thrilled and pacified me at once. I thought, This is what it feels like to be an angel. Through her voice, as through a channel, I felt down inside her, to where her voice came from. I felt the blood bathing in oxygen inside her lungs. I felt the quiver of her vocal chords, the undulations of her tongue, the way the cartilage in her nose resonated with each vowel.

"I’ve been through a lot," I said.

Nora’s forehead wrinkled ever so slightly. With exquisite concern she sighed, "Oh!" She reached across the table and laid her hand on mine. It was all I could do not to burst into tears. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me, Mel. Tell me everything."

"I’m twenty-three. I’m from…" I couldn’t remember where I was from. "I took off because I wanted… you, Nora." Saying that was like coming. She just kept looking at me, unruffled, like a calm ocean, a sunset, a mother, the moon. "I wanted you, and you weren’t there in…" I drew a blank. "So I started hitching around. My mom is…" What was Mom? "Well, of course, I didn’t tell myself I was looking for you. I was headed for Yucatan to see the eclipse. I was headed for Atlanta to visit the Coca-Cola factory. I was headed for British Columbia to live off the land. I was headed for the Grand Canyon to learn the ways of the Havasupai Indians. That’s how it was. I remember once…" I hit a cul-de-sac; my sentence had nowhere to go. "Anyway, I love you. When Shaman picked me up…"

"Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!" Gone Joe was punching and prying Izzy’s bung but making no headway. Detritus from the operation was scattered all over my mind, I realized. There were little lacerations too, creating lapses and blind spots randomly. It had been a quick job.

"Go on," Nora told me.

I concentrated. "Go on," I echoed. "Yes. The Space People picked me up and gave me something to eat at their place, just tents and a few goats and chickens out in New… New something. York or Hampshire or Mexico. Orleans, maybe. Did I say I want to be one with you, utterly and completely, forever?"

She nodded.

"Mm. Then I was alone with…"

"Shaman," Gypsy said.

"Thanks. With Shaman. And he said some words that made a hole in my mind. But Izzy fixed it."

"Izzy!" The word sprang from Gypsy’s mouth like air from a burst tire. As he stood, Gypsy’s jaw dropped again, this time to his knees. The flesh unpeeled from his chin to his navel like tape rolling off a dispenser. There was the snake, yellow and glistening. It turned inside Gypsy’s human facade like an uncoiled intestine. A shadow of displeasure crossed Nora’s face, and she reached over to roll up Gypsy’s chin. She just started it, and Gypsy was shamed into finishing. No one had seen that one but us. Looking at the blithe tourists checking out at the cashier’s, I thought of all the bizarreries I might have missed in my life, just in my peripheral vision.

Look, and it’s rolled up.

Gypsy tucked his shirt in and sat down. Nora said, "Mel, tell us how you know Izzy."

"He and Sarvaduhka,"?Gypsy didn’t stand up?"they picked me up back in New Whatever, in a helicopter or a car or a train or something. It had an elephant in it. Jasmine. He sealed up Shaman’s hole. I feel a lot better now, but I’ve got like shrapnel in here… Yes, it was New Mexico!"

Nora smiled at me, and my heart turned to Silly Putty. "Don’t you have something you want to give us, Mel?" she said.

"Not that I know of. And Izzy said be careful."

"That’s the limit!" Gypsy shouted. He slammed his fist on the table. The hand flattened and cracked away from his wrist. No blood. A grey tendril, like an octopus’s, poked through. "He has to have his nose in everything. I’m gonna kill him, Nora. I’m gonna eighty-six that scum bag. We come nearly two hundred thousand light-years to this backwater solar system, and Izzy has to gum things up, put in his two cents, jimmy everything in his direction. No, Nora. No, no, no! No more!"

Suddenly, Gypsy remembered where he was, and he froze. Moving only his eyes, he sneaked a glance sideways. The tourists were watching. The cashier was watching.

The trucker had just returned. He was sidling up to our table with a fresh, long-stemmed red rose in his hand. He gave Gypsy a nasty squint, then turned to Nora. "This is for you, ma’am. I got it in the gift shop. You’re the nicest dang little thing I seen on this highway since 1957."

I’m pretty sure I didn’t say this out loud: "Help me, Gone Joe! Please don’t go. Help me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. Things are turning strange." I often prayed to Gone Joe when I was in a spot. Once I was alone in my high school locker room with a fullback who wanted to kill me for correctly naming the capital of Massachusetts, after he’d embarrassed himself by saying, "Idaho." Another time I was alone with a girl in her bedroom, during a sweet sixteen party with no adults around. In both cases Gone Joe gave me the same advice, and I took it; he said, "Run!"

But now things were different, because Gone Joe had his fingernails at the edge of my mind, and there was a chance he would escape completely. "Don’t bother me, kid," he said. He was in up to his shoulder. I was looking right through Gone Joe’s cuff, squeezed up his arm past the elbow now, at the trucker’s back. The trucker had gotten his smile from Nora and was walking away. The tourists, alarmed by Gypsy’s sforzandi, were pushing through the door into the glass tube over the highway, right through Gone Joe’s overalls.

I must have been mooning at Nora, my brows bunched skyward, head cocked like a dog’s at the table. My Gone Joe was getting goner. "Poor Mel," Nora said, straight to my heart. "You’ve been very brave. We knew you were being harrowed. We’ve come to stop it, to help you. It isn’t right. Shaman is a bad man. And powerful. How did you ever get away from him, Mel?"?her hand on my forearm, her thumb stroking the inside of my elbow.

"I just left."

"He didn’t follow?"

"No."

"I don’t like this," Gypsy growled.

"You’re right," Nora said to him. "We should leave. We don’t know what Shaman might be up to. Get rid of the other human. We need to take Mel up with us."

"Right." Gypsy shook off his clothes and skin, steamrolled to the cashier, opened his hingeless snake maw and swallowed the fellow whole.