"Sure, the beast is loose, least is best. But who's the beast in this case? Be careful you don't twist your own neat lyric. Of course that may be exactly your intention. In which case I look on with interest. Ready as a matter of fact to offer whatever aid and comfort you feel you need. Hell, man, we're old friends."

"Old and true," I said.

"Old, true and lasting."

"No doubt about it."

"Absolutely."

"Sure as shit."

I turned off the burners and stood near the window. Steam whistled distantly in the pipes. I wasn't unhappy being where I was. Tilings here were not deprived of their emanations. The distances were correct; noise was undisguised; air was allowed to flow without recirculation. But this completeness seemed less than enough to keep me now. I struck a wooden match and put the flame to one of the candles over the sink. Opel pretended to evade this shallow light, sinking deeper into the bed.

"People are getting to be all one thing," she said. "Look at me, for instance. I used to have shadings. Now I'm all one thing. Civilization by reflex. If we'd been alive in Pavlov's day he could have saved a whole lot of money on dog food. Now take you now. If you want to go back out as a Las Vegas version of what you were, fine with me except I hope you know what it is you're doing. You'll lose the perspective and the edge will crumble and you'll really become the other thing. Maybe it's a natural evolution. You were getting incoherent anyway, album to album, more so all the time. By the end you were making incredible amounts of noise and communicating absolutely nothing. The whole band was all curled up like a burning piece of paper. You know what you did? You embraced the insanity you were telling us about. So maybe it's a natural evolution. You were too much in love with the horror going on because it formed your sound for you and you were fascinated by it as subject matter. It could very well be the natural next step that you crawl out on the stage at the Sands and just sit there in a jockstrap grunting. Ever since I've known you, you've been surrounded by money-grubbing and talk of money and people dealing and operating but that's the last thing you'll ever be corrupted by, money, even if you were literally starving. It's yourself you have to watch out for, that little touch of the antichrist. It happens to be what I like most about you and of course it accounts for your fame and your glory so maybe I'm wrong to even bring it up. But evil is movement toward void and that's where we both agree you're heading. It's your trip. I'd help you get there if I was sure you wanted to go. In my own bitch-genius way I think I've already put a certain teasing idea into circulation, soon to end up on this very doorstep. You have been listening to a panel discussion on a subject yet to be agreed on. Our panelists will now disrobe and paint each other's bodies in colorful native pigments."

Opel's stillness was losing its essential tenor. It was infiltrated by heavy engines, becoming merely a vigil now, that of a lone woman standing in the off-hour calm of a fluorescent tunnel leading to a boarding gate. In candle-flame she seemed almost an after-image, little left of her ascendancy. Again she is reduced to a point in the middle of the sky. On paper one can find her with the aid of a compass and protractor. She is whisperingly civil, seated between an investment banker and a chummy transvestite, thinking ahead to baggage area and customs. Super-freaks are everywhere, smugglers and global dopers contaminating the air lanes, nitroglycerin concealed in their teeth, unripe opium pods surgically sewn under their eyeballs. Slums and revolution on the 747s. She was in rehearsal for departure now. Ever since Hanes. Hanes had stood in the doorway of my Mediterranean dream.

"Places are always what you expect," she said. "That's both the trouble with places and their redeeming feature. I'm certain it wasn't like that in the past. But it sure is that way now. A few places are still different from each other but nowhere do you find something different from your own expectations. Look at post card manufacturers. They take a sleazy tourist-trap lake and try to make it into the canoeing grounds of the gods. But they do such a slick glossy job that you glance at the post card and you know at once this is a shit-filled lake and all the tourists here are either war criminals or people who spit when they laugh. Not that there isn't beauty in such places. That's just it. The whole world is turning into Lafayette Street, the most ugly-beautiful street in New York City. In a way it's nice to get what you expect. It's as though places can be passive just like people. They just sprawl out with their cathedrals and deserts. Passivity is beautiful too. You take what they give you these days and if everything's getting ugly the only thing you can do is try to teach yourself it's beautiful, it's beautiful. Eventually maybe it is. But look at the passivity of Hanes. There's a sexed-out beauty there. Got to admit it, right? Timeless lands. Look at timeless lands. Why do I spend so much time in timeless lands? Because there's no time there, I guess. Because you stop evolving. Because the warm winds polish you like stone. Here where it's cold I develop and become angular and rapidly age. Great Jones, Bond Street, the Bowery. These places are deserts too, just as beautiful and scary as a matter of fact, except too cold for some people. The places where I get coldest are my eyes and my knees. Isn't that a weird number? Eye-muffs and knee-gloves are the obvious answers. Transparanoia might want to get into that. Talk to Globke first thing tomorrow."

I walked around the bed and ended up once more at the window. Opel covered herself to the chin. I had never known exactly what we needed from each other. Maybe it was enough to come and go; we were each other's motion and rest. The telephone sat on four phone books stacked on the floor. One candle burned, the other did not. I exhaled on the window. There was a loud sound in the pipes, the hollowing-out of dank iron. Opel's collection of pennies filled two ice trays in the refrigerator. The bathtub was full of used water. Citing these things to myself was probably an attempt to group the components of a return to order.

"Things evolve just like people and places," she said. "Or to put it another way, people and places are a lot more static than they'd like to believe. Look at me. What have I become in the scheme of human evolution? Luggage. I'm luggage. By choice, inclination and occupation. What am I if I'm not luggage? I open myself up, insert some very costly items and then close up again and get transported to a timeless land. Do you want to know who knows I'm a thing? Customs knows. Customs knows a lot more than we give him credit for. Customs understands the methodology. He knows the way things work. I'm luggage. No doubt about it. Girlskin luggage. But I don't like that word very much. Lug-gudge. Heavy brutish word for a delicate thing like me."

The knife stood in the empty jar, blade up. The unwound clock was on its back in the bottom of the closet, helpless as an insect, legs in the air, winding key partly dislodged. I watched snow come down now, confined in the precise light of streetlamps. There was no wind. The snow dropped straight down, very slowly, asserting itself with the dignity of a country snow, that language of credence and bare trees, milk on the hillsides, old men gigantic in their bootprints. The firehouse doors were closed. A little car went by, yellow, pink, orange and green, no plates visible. When I turned from the window, Opel was dead. The change in the room was unmistakable. I went to her side to touch her once. Her mouth was open slightly. The blanket had slipped to her neck. Very still. Never to be challenged in this particular stillness. There was no expression on her face. Here I am, dead. That was the only thing I could imagine she might be trying to say with her mouth open like that.