Evening was coming on and the room was growing dark and he didn’t want light to be seen in the apartment. She was applying the zinc salve. He felt his way to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and took the last bottle of Spätlesen, located the corkscrew and opened it. They passed the bottle back and forth as they shared the bag of donuts he had bought on Broadway. Sky had been roughing it for a while and was in poor condition. Actually she was panting with fatigue. Her feet were becoming deformed from constantly being on the move in her platform training shoes that were too small. Her face and neck were red and schmutzy from the sun. But the rest of her, the skin which was covered by her clothes, was unbelievably white and soft and her breasts, with their small soft nipples, were like a child’s. Her elevenses, he thought.

"Do you want sex?" she said.

"You bet I do," he said, patting her pussy. "But I really think you should give this a rest for a while."

They were stretched out side by side on the bed and his hand automatically began stroking her mons, the tips of his index and middle fingers moving in whorls through the stubble of hairs. She snuggled into him.

"Come on, give you an orgasm," he said.

Her childish breasts. Have you ever been faithful to a child? Her shaved, ravaged cunt—like a skinned knee. The palms of people with Down’s syndrome have a single transverse crease, just like Sky’s. He thought about this as she was giving him a hand job. The hands of Walt Disney figures have three fingers and a thumb. It was like getting a hand job from Daisy Duck.

When she came she abruptly fell asleep, and he put his head close to hers to pick up on her imagery content. Was she a hypnagogic? The difference in mental content between hypnagogic and nonhypnagogic individuals. Hypnagogic images operate as a substitutue for feelings of familiarity … the visual associates are integral parts of the development of meaning.

She was a visualized metaphor, Arethusa, a wood nymph who is changed into a spring while fleeing the advances of the river god Alpheus...

He got up in the night and used the toilet, came back to the room where the kid was asleep and snoring. There was nothing deluding him that his sexual energy was going to stand him in good stead this time, nevertheless he had a complete appreciation of this idyllic interlude in his rapid waning to extinction. He stood looking out the window. It was a clear night and the stars glinted on the calmly flowing Hudson. Over in the nebula of Palisades Park the rides could be seen whirling. The kid turned over in her sleep and snored a raspberry.

Ubiquitous is what you are, all your pufferbellies. When you see the moonlight reflected off their fingernails, the shadows of the leaves in your little house whose dirty windows let in the starlight, you operate your pedal locks, make funny shapes with your lips, funny noises out from under them like squirting something out, amplexus of the pneuma.

He lay down beside her. Oh Sky, I don’t know, I just don’t know what I’m going to do on afternoons when the dust falls. Is it better to conclude something begun or to invest anew? Though neither is an option at this point, I find myself favoring a thought for an event so that life might seem a succession of the former, timetight compartments that only, after all, control the flooding. And so we recompense in ritual for the spilled reality, and Nadia replies that it’s too late to begin again, and anyway the children, and on into the night too far gone to caress and make up.

The kid slept for fourteen hours.

"I can’t stay here. There was a key on my keyring. I used to live here. The apartment was a mess like it had been ransacked." He patted the computer monitor; the computer had been confiscated. "Nobody had been here for a long while. The cockroaches had long since abandoned the kitchen, the dishcloth flung splat and dried there the exposed contours browned from the sunlight through the window."

He boiled and dished up the rest of the package of spaghetti and sloshed the last of the bottle of soya sauce over it. It was steaming and plenty. This was their breakfast, and it was the last meal the kitchen contained. He polished his glasses with his shirttail and put them on again. He took them off and placed them on the table. He let them lie there, massaged his eyelids and looked around the kitchen. Things were more lovely. He told her about himself.

"My father worked for the phone company. He rose up through the ranks, became switching systems supervisor. My mother was artistic. She drew a disgusting caricature of me."

Sky’s real name was Sharon, grew up on Long Island. Her ears were pierced once in each lobe for the silver earrings her mother gave her. Her father had given her a charm bracelet, she told him about it. Refreshed, she babbled like a brook.

"Zukhafim, les petites arachnes going up and down…" she said, sounding like she could speak French. She showed him moving her three-fingered hand like baby spiders trying out their spinnerets.

Apartment house noises. The two Jewish sisters in the neighboring apartment talking with somebody in the hall. What those caryatids have to put up with.

The laundered T-shirt with the jockey and 21 was dazzling over her filthy bellbottoms with the tattered downtrodden cuffs. He looked her over. Something was missing in her ensemble.

"Just a minute…"

He went and rummaged in the cardboard box full of Art Zimmer’s clothes and came in with a Rutgers baseball cap. He put it on her head with the bill backwards to protect her neck from sunburn. She turned and looked at herself in the full-length mirror.

"Wow, you’re so kind to me." she said.

When she turned back he was holding out a five. She took it and put it in her pocket. She couldn’t know it was the last bill from his final pay at Republic Electric.

"Maybe I’ll see you around," he said.

The lightbulb in the hall ceiling was burned out—credited by Jim to the influence of Art’s Jewish girlfriend; they were always riding Art about his Jewishness—and he felt his way to the living room. Opened the door and skirted the Lincoln Logs bed Jim had contrived for the declared purpose of scotching Jewish succubas—"I got the plans from a guy," Jim had said, somebody in the extended sodality, "he says it works for him"—the four-by-fours were brought at great expense from the lumber yard over by Central Park. He squeezed between the bed and the back of the sofa over to the far window for a different look at the river. There were no windsurfers that he could see. What caught his eye was a yellow light blinking way off on the West Side Highway.