Hand asked again that we be taken to the jazz club, and I wanted Hand back in St. Louis. He was the wrong guy to have brought. The picture. What kind of -? I couldn't go home, couldn't leave him, though, because we were in Dakar and only had this week.

Five minutes through deserted streets and the next place was precisely the same but worse and without Val Kilmer. "In every part of the world," explained Raymond, "cabbies are trained to bring men to clubs like this. We go in, the cabbie gets a kickback, everyone's happy. We are merely cargo. The way you guys are traveling, you're gonna be targets everywhere. You're perfect prey."

This time, immediately upon entering, we were all attacked in a very real way – women pushing each other to get closer to us, throwing jagged looks at each other, one grabbing Hand's crotch in a way less erotic than territorial. Raymond wound up next to a large woman with bursting eyes and Hand ran to the bathroom. I was being left more or less alone so ordered a drink and saw, across the bar, the two Sierra Leonian sisters, in the corner, beyond the dancefloor. They saw me too and laughed a warm and commiserative laugh.

They were still on the make. The place was full – more French sailors, three dozen hungry Senegalese women, and the rest a hodgepodge of Italians and older European businessmen sitting alone, still waiting, waiting. We watched the dancefloor crowd, clear and change and at one point the Sierra Leonians were dancing alone and I decided then to give them the contents of my left sock, about $400, before we left.

Hand returned from the bathroom with a story. Apparently there had been a few French sailors inside and they'd asked him his nationality. American, he said. "America!" they said, "you pay for the world!" Then they both cheered and patted him on the back. He probably made it up.

"The crazy thing is," Hand said, "I think they were serious."

"You show them any pictures?" I asked.

"Fuck you," he said.

"They're young. They'll learn," said Raymond.

"Learn what?" Hand asked.

"Derision," he said.

I was impressed by Raymond. He could break out a word like derision, in his second language, and even better, he was an aphorism kind of man, who could conceive of such things – We are merely cargo -- and slip them into conversation – You give chaos, chaos gives back. I always wanted to be a guy like that.

I watched the dancefloor, full of slack shoulders and heads hung and swinging, arms reaching passively up, up. Women tucked their hair behind their ears and men pecked their heads to the beat, hands as fists.

What was wrong with Charlotte? Nothing. Every complaint now seemed ridiculous. She had long dark hairs that swirled around her nipples and I'd seen this as problematic instead of loving her indifference to them. And I'd disliked her sighs. She sighed too much, I announced to myself one day, and worse, her sighs were too sad. Too full of sorrow. When I held her she sighed, and her sighs were weary, were groaning and exhausted, the sigh of an old person who'd seen everything and couldn't believe she was now being held, at the end of a journey she could never describe. The sighs were withering, were mood-killing, and finally I complained about Charlotte's sighs, to no avail. She'd responded with another sigh and that, I know now, was the end of the end.

I was a fool. She was full of soul and now I was in this place, and the women here assumed I needed them.

"Let's go," said Hand. "This is too sad."

We moved for the door. A huge woman with enormous fingernails, not just long but wide, was tugging on me. I was flattered by the attention but it was unclear what she wanted. Another woman, her friend, smaller and with red-ringed eyes, patted my crotch like you would the head of a muzzled dog. Hand was ready, close to the door.

But I wanted to unload the cash on the Sierra Leonians. They were harmless and hopeful next to the rest of these women. I slipped past the clawed woman and to the bathroom – just a hole in the floor in a room like a closet – to secretly retrieve the bills, wrapped around my ankle like a manacle. The wad stifled within my closed fist, I walked across the dancefloor and found the two young women sitting on a watcher's ledge, bored, and said "Sorry" to them while stuffing the bills in the older one's hand. She didn't even look at the wad; she felt it but kept her eyes on mine. It was, I realized in a shot, the first time any of these women had really looked at me. I jogged across the dancefloor, getting a running start before the throng of grabbing women at the bar.

Raymond was outside. The street was crowded and the bouncers said goodnight – that was nice, I thought – and we waited in the taxi in the dark. Hand was not with us. "Sven's inside," Raymond explained.

Hand emerged with the Sierra Leonian sisters kissing him on the cheeks and rubbing his chest – he'd taken credit for my gift – and he left them on the steps. He crossed the street and strode to the cab smiling grandly. He opened the door and got in with me and tried to close it but jesus – a body, again! – a body stopped the door from closing, prevented us from moving. It was my huge clawing prostitute. She had seen me give the money to the Sierra Leonians and wanted her share. She was enormous. I tried pushing her back but she was strong, at least as heavy as me, and was halfway in the car, preventing us from leaving or even closing the door. Her hand was out and she was talking quickly, in French. Then English: "Give me I see you! Give me I see you!"

I found a 50 dirham note and threw it to her. It fell to the street. She picked it up and I closed the door, narrowly missing her head. She turned around quickly and walked back into the bar, stuffing it in her pants as we drove away.

We were exhausted and home by one. In the cool black lobby we waited with Raymond for the elevator, watching the steel doors.

"So where to next?" he asked. "Tomorrow."

"Not sure yet," Hand said. "You?"

"I go to Portugal, with my friend. A vacation after his race. Then back home."

"You think he'll win?" I asked.

"Win? Not a chance. But that's not the point."

I thought it was the point. "Why not?" I asked.

"The point is to offer yourself to death and see if you're chosen."

Hand turned toward him.

"He wants to make sure God wants him to live. So he spends a lot of time asking. He brings himself close to the edge and he feels God's breath on his back. If God wants to take him, all he needs to do is blow."

"Jesus," I said. The elevator arrived and opened.

"Not him."

"Who?"

"I don't believe in Jesus," Raymond said. "I think He would be horrified that we called Jesus Christ His son."

He was losing me. Hand steered us back onto the main trail. "So Portugal," he said.

"That should be nice," I said. I don't know why I said this. I didn't think of Portugal as nice, though I'd never seen a picture, or couldn't remember one. When I heard the word Portugal, I, thought of Madagascar, scrubby, dry, poor, the trees crowded with lemurs. I knew nothing, basically, but couldn't bear the fact that of the nations of the world, I had only ill-formed collages of social studies textbooks and quickly-flipped travel magazines.

"Well," said Raymond, "I dread it, frankly. I love being here. I love wearing my clothes in these new places. Same shirt, new country! It's the only thing I love maybe – travel. I am finished with women," he said, chin jutting with a stagey defiance.

Raymond's floor rang and the doors opened.

"There is travel and there are babies," he said, stepping out. "Everything else is drudgery and death."

I glanced at Hand. What the hell? He held the door open.