But out the window…

"Mel…" Nora said. What is that moment between a man and woman when he starts to see her face as skin, the pores, the sweat, the small swells and hollows that he will fill, swell for hollow with his own? When his eyes become tactile organs? When her breath warms the air between them, and they feel themselves drawing nearer, like buns proofing under a warm, wet towel?

"Nora, do you look like him underneath, like a snake or something?" I said.

"Didn’t Izzy tell you?"

"No."

"Run!" Gone Joe clamored.

We were leaning together like tin leaves in an electroscope. Our knees touched. "Mel, why don’t you know what you are?" Her nose grazed mine. We rubbed. I groaned.

"Shaman wants to eat me," I said. "How do I know you won’t eat me too?"

"Why would I eat you? I love you, Mel." She kissed me. A purple dye seemed to swirl through the room, tinging everything. The walls, tables, paintings, juke boxes, bus and condiment stations, cashier’s desk, melted as they changed hue. Everything shrank and became cylindrical. I felt her kiss in my stomach, in my toes.

She peeled her lips away slowly. I wanted to cry. She was tearing my heart out. She never broke eye contact. We were in some sort of space vessel, it seemed like. I was a hundred million miles from home, I think. There wasn’t a single fact I could rely on. I looked around. As soon as Nora stopped kissing me, the spaceship looked like a rest stop cafe again.

I said, "I was hitchhiking…"

She said, "So was the Sphinx."

Gone Joe was like a man half-buried in the sand. He had grunted himself into the hairline fissure between Izzy’s bung and the lip of Shaman’s puncture. The tip of one fingernail?the ring finger of his right hand?was actually protruding from my mind. It dipped in and out of my field of vision like a phantom scimitar, like a crescent moon, or like a glint off troubled water, half-hypnagogic, half-real. Sometimes, pressing hotly against Nora, my cheek slid against her cheek, and I was lost in the jungle of her wavy hair. I opened my eyes, as if to breathe through them, so breathless did normal air leave me then. I blinked out the window into the daunting black, star-speckled and streamered with burning lights, and I caught Gone Joe’s moon, at home in the cosmos and traveling with me as the moon follows a traveler on Earth. It seemed distant and large; really, it was near and small.

Gone Joe’s nail scratched things. It scratched Nora’s long, perfect flank. She seemed to like that. She uttered a small cry that I could feel vibrating right through my breast bone as we undulated together. I was straddling Nora on her chair, like Ganesha’s shakti. I lapped her and thwucked breast to breast and belly to belly with my shirt pulled off. We were tongue and palate smacking. I tore her T-shirt up over her head; during the seconds of eclipse, when Nora’s face was inside the T-shirt, I was panic-stricken, desperate to see her again. Without her eyes, I was perdu. Embracing her, I tried to swallow her through my whole skin, to engorge her like an amoeba. It enflamed and infuriated me that she was outside me. She groaned and kissed.

Gone Joe kept appropriating parts of Nora. He was superimposed on her, like shower screen lilies on a bather. Once, when she smiled and blinked?I had made hungry babies’ mouths of my palms, pulling at her breasts?the movement of one eyelid was Gone Joe’s mouth: "Run!"

"What?" she said.

"Nothing," I said. "I love you, Nora. I’ve always loved you."

To Gone Joe, inside, I said, "Stop it! Shut up! Go away."

"You’re crazy," he said. "This chick is a geek. You saw her brother. She’s a pit viper inside, and yellow! Not to mention, we’re in outer fucking space. She’s using you."

"What do you want me to do?" I said inside.

"Is something wrong?" Nora asked me. She started unbuckling my belt.

"Kill her. Strangle her. Get away. Get that boa constrictor in the kitchen and run us home with the automatic dishwasher, right? That what she said, the dishwasher? You know how to use a dishwasher?"

"Dad…"

"Don’t call me that. What’s she doing with your belt? Pay attention to me, will you? Get control. Pull your pants back up, damn it all to hell! Hers, too! What’s she doing with your belt? Your mother never did this with my belt. Mel, if you don’t stop this and get us out of here, I’m going to give you a headache you’ll never forget."

Suddenly, Nora jerked backward, toppling the chair, with me on top of her. "There’s a finger in the air," she shrieked. "It’s pointing at me!"

"Please, Dad, get back in here," I said out loud.

"Don’t call me that," he said, inside me. He was out, though, from the tip of his right forefinger almost to the knuckle. It was hairy near the bottom. It was heavily callused, a workman’s finger.

The finger did not come out of my head. If you followed it back from the edge of the nail, across the lunule, the joints, and the knuckle, it didn’t terminate anywhere; you just eventually found that you were looking past it toward something else. It wasn’t distinctly placed in three-dimensional space, but hovered somehow against it, solid, yet incommensurable. Gone Joe’s finger was not coming out of my head. It was coming out of my mind.

"Gypsy, what is this?" Nora squirmed under me on the floor.

Gypsy poked his head out the kitchen door, the human head, the one with eyes and whiskers. "It’s Gone Joe!" he said. Gypsy pushed through the kitchen door. It snapped and swung on sprung hinges, creaking as he strode to us. "God damn Izzy! He really botched it. A guy’s leaking out of the kid’s mind."

"Mel, Mel," Nora said. She held my face between her two hands. "Make love to me, Mel. Make love to me now." The finger was playing mumblety-peg around her head. She turned to avoid it, back and forth. "You don’t need Gone Joe, Mel. You don’t need Izzy. You don’t need anybody. Take me, Mel."

"Yeah," said Gypsy. "You’re the only Earther for half a billion miles. Plant your flag, Mel."

Gone Joe’s wrist showed, his forearm, his elbow, one shoulder, then his neck, chin, face?scrunched like a newborn’s?and the watchcap, drenched with my thoughts. "Run!"

Holding me on top of her, Nora nudged the chair away with her hips. Gone Joe was someplace indeterminably near, in our way, but not fatally so. I had to have air. My senses burned and beat as if on smelling salts. I wanted to toss like a netted fish. When I arched up to take in more air, I saw the window above our table fill with rosy, supernal light.

"Shit," Gypsy barked. "It’s Shaman."

Shaman had a voice like incense. It permeated us. His words were not the main thing. The words were trails in a cloud chamber. It was something else that moved us, the things that made the trails, powerful, terrifying, small. Waves of meaning effulged from Shaman. Striking our minds, they crystallized into words:

"He’s mine. You know that."

Gone Joe was out up to his navel. "Run!" Both arms were pushing against the edge of my mind, the meaty part of him making no way, but the part still cerebral gaining purchase and levering his body still farther out.

Gypsy pranced idiotically from table to table, reaching high and low, trying?impossibly?to place himself between my eyes and Gone Joe. Where Gypsy stretched, an occasional crack formed, revealing the slither inside his clothes and skin. But he didn’t want me to be distracted by Gone Joe. He wanted me to concentrate on Nora.