Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

HOLY FAST, HOLY FEAST

Baby Jenny’s last breath was a quiet one. Sealed in her space-heated radiatored bedroom, wrapped and swaddled inside a pale-yellow bassinet, the three-month old preemie lay buried beneath a miasma of ammonia. Bowel and bladder had emptied hours ago, excremental bacteria colluding with tinkle, one neglected diaper wick white-lipped out to soak her sleepsuit and blanket her snuffled nose in deadly gas. Her limbs were listless. A long wrinkled thumb lay by one cheek, too far, too detached to move closer. Its nail bed and those of her curled fingers were tinged blue, as were her lips, sleep-sucking the sour nipple of a ghost breast, then quiescing, falling dormant, faint indraw and outflow of breath simply dropping off.

A cold gust of wind rattled the ground-floor window, but double-reinforced glass kept the Montreal winter out. A scatter of spicular snow swirled against it like tossed sand, then fell restless to the stone sill outside. Once more. And again.

Two minutes later, Jenny’s daddy eased open her door and reared back at the rankness of the smell.

Travis eased open the door. The air in here was warm and close as always, but one good thing about that, Travis supposed, was that it concentrated the sweet baby smell of his daughter. He loved holding Jenny high on his chest so that he could caress her smooth pink cheeks with his nose. Now, as Laura followed him in and wrapped an arm about his waist, he contented himself with leaning over to watch his baby girl’s tiny nostrils ride the pulse of life, the odor of crushed rose-petals sweetening the air about her.

“She’s so beautiful,” Laura said.

“Like her mother,” said Travis, and Laura gave him a squeeze. Divorcing Carol, painful as the process had been for them both, and signing on as associate professor with McGill’s Computer Science department, had been the wisest decisions he’d ever made. Never in the two decades since his first visit to Montreal had he felt so vividly alive. And now, with Laura so passionate and bright by his side and baby Jenny shining her marvelous light into his life, a sense of all-encompassing, all-infusing vitality filled him brimful with joy.

“Maybe I should give Marcie a call.” Fret-voice.

“She’ll be here,” said Travis, glancing at his watch.

“Seven-twenty. She’s never late.”

“I haven’t seen her in three days. Have you?”

“No, but that’s not—”

“What if something happened to her? She lives alone upstairs. Brings home those strange men since Pierre got booted out. Poor guy. I really thought he was the one.”

“We’re the one. You and I could make her very happy, and both of you know it.”

“Shhh, you’ll wake Jenny. You’re such a tease. Come on, let’s get our coats.” Kissing a fingertip, Laura laid it lightly against the slumbering baby’s cheek.

Travis closed the door softly after them. Laura gave him a hug and he brought her in for a deep slurpy kiss, an ever-renewed appreciation for her stifling smothering lips and tongue. Luscious lips, luscious labia to match, juicy as a warm ripe peach. He kissed her earlobe, swept inside her ear, made her moan. Tenderly, jokingly, he whispered, “Fucking you was the best thing I ever did.”

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Laura said, laughter in her voice. Travis was halfway to hard now and he knew his wife was dripping. “Maybe,” she said, “we ought to try it again right now.”

“Love to, but Marcie’ll be here any moment and we’ll be late for the swami.” Carol had been an icicle. Laura was an oven, twenty-six and Canadian-hot, with the lovely sexual openness he’d known in Montreal from so many young women in the early seventies. He’d attended satsang then offered by Shyam and Satchitananda; she’d spent a month or two in Apadravya’s makeshift ashram four years ago before the guru closed it down and returned to India. Computers and holy men had been the commonality that had brought him and Laura together into initial conversation. And now the swami, falsely rumored dead, had returned for one evening to begin an American tour, Laura’s chance to renew an old tie and Travis’s to experience the master in person.

Laura brought his hand up under her skirt, guided his thumb, coaxed it under the thigh-elastic of her panties so that, to the knuckle, it sank into the moist clench of her vulva and grew slick. “Fuck the swami, and fuck Marcie,” she said, gyrating on his thumb.

“I’d take you up on half your proposition,” he joked, but Laura had his belt undone and his zipper down and was tugging on his pants and briefs so that they fell to his knees and he sprang into the warm and eager caress of her hands.

Heaven’s sakes! They must not have locked the front door nor heard Marcie’s knock, for suddenly it flew open and there she stood, legs apart, in boots and bustier and crotchless panties, a riot of red hair bushed below and a double sweep above, crimson-tinted and silken-smooth and curled in twin licks about her upjutting nipples. “Well, well,” she said, fists on hips, whip handle like a braided blacksnake erect in her right hand, “what yummies have we here?”

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Laura said, laughter in her voice.

She took his hand, about to say something else when they heard the stairs to the second-floor apartments creak and a clumsy someone stagger into the hallway.

“It’s Marcie,” he ventured.

“Doesn’t sound like her.” She broke away. “I’d know her footsteps anywhere. More like a slow-moving cripple, somebody with a bum leg, that sound.”

Whoever it was stopped outside the door. There were fingernail scrapings swirling chest-high. Then the handle jump-rattled once-twice as if it were being sharply yanked upward, and when that stopped, muffled fists cottoned upon the door like distant booms of cannon fire.

“What the hell—?”

Laura laughed. “Remember Halloween a year ago? Her and Pierre coming down to get us for the costume party at Place des Arts?”

He relaxed. Flashed back upon him. “They pulled the same shit: lumbering and giggling, playing ghoul’n’zombie even after we opened the door, wrestling us to the rug.”

“Precisely, though it’s kinda morbid with Pierre gone and no giggling.” Laura gave him a look. “Get the coats, honey. I’ll let her in and give her some kind of hell for isolating herself three whole days.”

Travis agreed. He was just at the hall closet, ready to tug it open and unhanger their long heavy fake-otterfur coats, when Laura said, “Okay, Marcie, you sick puppy of a neighbor,”

and pulled open the door.

The sight struck him and then the smell, a subliminal skirl of stench curled around the doorframe moments before and now fully bloomed into a gut-wrenching skunk-and-offal stew.

It was Marcie, and yet it couldn’t be: Her yellow terrycloth robe hung loose and open like old drapes yanked back from a window onto hell. Above the bloat and sewage of her flesh, the eyes in her creamed face were dead egg-yolk eyes, and yet they moved, swimming sentient yolks in colloidal pus. Her hair hugged like wet parentheses about her head, and her hands lifted (they lifted, unspeakable act) seemingly to wrench at the draped strands. One found its foul bell-pull, but the other shot out and grabbed at Laura, gripping its puffy fingers at her nape and pulling her off-balance toward a gaping maw.

“No!” he said, no air behind it. He was as paralyzed as Laura had been, half hero, half coward, and completely a shock in the shape of a man. By the time he made up his mind to move, the bloated Marcie’s teeth had scraped deep gouges in Laura’s face, nose and mouth crammed inside the creature’s jaws, her hands pushing without effect against dead breasts, her eyes a horse’s eyes in terror all teary and looking back at him. Her muffled screams grew louder and clearer as Marcie’s jaws closed and pulled and yanked away her skull-cover, front teeth crunching and crumbling into the moist chew. As Travis came on, the blood-soaked thing worked bits of his wife’s face into its cheeks, let cheek-flesh hang loose from its mouth like pizza toppings, but (surprising strength) grabbed the hand he raised to it and stuffed it gullet-deep, coming down, breaking skin and bone, turning spattered egg-yolk eyes on him as, no longer heroic, he tried to free his flesh from the mangling vise and yelled louder and more ineffectual than he’d ever done in any nightmare.

Through his pain, he saw Madame Robichaux, groceries in hand and oblivious to what was going on, fumble her key into the inner door by the mailboxes.

“Must be Marcie,” ventured Travis.

“Not her usual spry step,” his wife observed.

“Losing a lover takes a lot out of anyone,” he said, and, as if in affirmation, Marcie’s familiar rap sounded, but slower and less sprightly than usual. “I’ll get it,” he said. “Bring the coats, okay?”

He turned the deadbolt and opened the door. Marcie stood there, one arm behind her back. Striking redhead, her love-scent clinging to his mustache from their lunch hour together, Marcie gliding the rubber Metro back here from the symphony office, flumpfing down naked, raw, and ready on her bed, crying for Pierre as Travis roused her, but he didn’t mind, not with the vulnerable taste of her sex filling his mouth and the way her coming brought his name to her lips as Marcie sheathed him, stabbing at his eyes with that voracious hunger of hers.

“Hi, Marcie.” How obscenely normal he sounded, how hollow. Past the mailboxes, Madame Robichaux was coming through the vestibule door, juggling bulgy grocery bags.

“Have you told her yet?” High-strung, a taut steel wire toe-gripped, every muscle working against tilt.

“Marcie, why don’t you—?”

“Told me what?” Laura had the coats folded over her arms like wheat sheaves. He barely glanced at her, but it was enough to see recognition glimmer and flit, denial her first impulse.

Again to Marcie. Love was so complicated. He wanted both these amazing ladies, but if he were forced to choose, he preferred, truth to tell, Marcie’s passion, her quirky big-boned ways, the refreshing raft of musical friends she brought with her, a far cry from Laura’s Bell Canada dullards. But there was the baby to consider; not his idea, true, but a daughter was a daughter, no matter how you sliced it, and he—

Marcie shot daggers at him, then turned to Laura, and he saw Madame Robichaux’s eyes widen at what Marcie’s hand gripped behind her back, even as it was coming around, the movie glint surely imagined, but it flashed by so fast and sank into Laura’s chest, right above her armload of coats, faltering blood-parabola darkening the fur as she fell and Marcie shouting, “He’s mine!”, turning then to chase down a hapless neighbor frozen in place but then bolting, her two bags of food absurdly clutched to her and slowing her down so that the knife hilting into her back sprang her arms up and open and celery stalks and egg cartons flew like birds alarmed out of the bag-rustle of her flushed life.

In her apartment on Rue Peel, between l’Avenue des Pins and Docteur-Penfield, Aysha sat grieving by her dead son Vish. Three years old, looking hurt and bewildered in his high delirium, Vish had had his father’s dark eyes, if none of his realized serenity. Her fault, that. Her year in the ashram, becoming Rajib’s preferred wife in his last months here, had done nothing to conquer the unquenchable ego-longings in her. They still plagued her, despite her ongoing efforts to purify herself, and they’d given Vish, who deserved better coming from such seed, not the quiet mirror that suited him, but a restless, breeze-perturbed, disease-inducing, Western jitteriness. High fever, food and drink refused, all her natural remedies for naught— and all she could do was watch Vish dwindle and die, her tears for him a weakness she despised, even as she cried them.

The shutters accordioned over his window rattled as a gust of wind shook the glass. The oil lamp’s flame danced in its glass chimney, then settled. It reassured her, as it always did when she meditated on it—not the pasteboard reassurance of the material world, but a true soothe from her inner depths.

Surely, it said, Vish’s dying, arriving as it did on the day of Rajib’s return, was an irrefutable unmistakable sign. And that was particularly so given the report, six months past, of his death and burial in India, and now the rumors that he had returned, like Christ long ago, from the grave. If that were true, these rumors of resurrection, it might well be that Rajib would pass his hand over the boy, his unknown son, and flood the breath back into his airless lungs. It might well be that Vish would once again unlid his eyes and, in the calm depth of his father’s love, find his way swiftly to nirvana.

Aysha raised the old watch she’d put away years ago, held it close to the light, saw that soon they would need to be on their way.

He turned the deadbolt and opened the door. Marcie stood there, one arm behind her back.

“Well, look who’s here,” he said.

“Hello, you two,” she said, bouncing in behind a huge grin and whipping out a wrapped gift. “A little something for my two favorite people in the world.” Juggling a pair of grocery bags, Madame Robichaux finagled her way through the vestibule door.

Laura came up with the coats. “Jeez, you didn’t have to do that.” Her eyes bubbled and brimmed. Lovely Laura, the Canada Dry of his life. “Open it, Travis,” she said.

“Okay, okay. Hardly guess what it is.” Marcie gave his shoulder a playful punch as he unribboned the telltale rectangular shape and husked the wrapping paper off.

“My boss’s latest.” Maestro Dutoit’s face, a skilled musician and an engaging personality from the brief hello they’d shared with him at the opening night reception that fall.

“Tchaikovsky’s Sixth,” Laura read aloud.

Marcie nodded. “Good crying music,” she said.

A raw twist to her tossed-off words gave his heart a twinge.

“Come here, Marcie love,” he said, gathering his upstairs neighbor’s big-boned body to him. Laura let fall the coats in a floomph to the floor and joined in a three-way hug. “You’re so sweet and good and giving, the world owes you a good long cry-free zone, and if you can’t find that upstairs, you just come down here any time. It’ll be waiting right here.”

Marcie’s eyes were moist. “I love you both so much,” she said, planting a huge soft kiss on his cheek and then dipping down to cover half of Laura’s petite face with her lips. What a turn-on these two women were. If he weren’t blessed with dear Laura, he would surely, he thought, make a play for Marcie. Passionate thing. He fancied she’d be the sort to take the initiative more frequently than Laura did, surprising him with silky nothings, stripping for his delectation to sultry music, cherrying those luscious lips about his arousal and deepening downward.

Laura broke the embrace first, a fluster in her ways.

Madame Robichaux went past on the way to her apartment, an odd look on her rubbery face. “Bonjour, Henriette,” Laura sang out and after a pause, the woman’s answering “‘jour,” clipped and suspicious, came floating back.

Travis placed the jewelbox on a small drop-down table near the door and rustled up the coats from the floor. He held Laura’s for her, then shouldered his own on, as Laura jabbered inanely about where things were, how often Marcie was to look in on Jenny, how late they thought they’d be, where (for God’s sakes yet again) the diapers and the pins and the formula and the bottles were. For some reason, he could not catch her eyes as she gabbled. Overprotective, hyper, even paranoid—that’s the way Laura had been about Jenny from the first, dressing her too warmly, leaving the thermostat on way too high, fussing interminably over her face and clothes when she held her. But something beyond nervousness was working at Laura now.

And when he tested his puzzlement on Marcie, the flat plane of her gaze told him she knew what it was, that they were both holding back from him, and that Laura was ready to spill something that made Marcie at least mildly uncomfortable.

“…oh, and in case of emergency, I’ve put a signed medical form on the kitchen table. You know where to find us, and… oh shit, Marcie, I know it’s not a good time but it never seems to be a good time, please can’t we tell him now, it’s—”

“Tomorrow. Now you two go and have a good time—”

“Tell me what?” The air felt odd. Were they hiding a great gift, a bludgeon, what?

“Take a hike, ya lousy swami-lovers,” said Marcie in her best tough-guy voice, hustling them toward the door, “or the baby buys it.” God she smelled great, her sweet strong face set off by her chop-cut red hair, new kind of tai-kwon-do affectation, but it looked great on her. And he loved being strong-armed by her; what a wrestler she’d be bare-naked, the full spread of her huge firm breasts a treat in teased evasion, her flexed oiled thighs coming up and about to encuntify his mouth, to force him to feast as she devoured him below, parting her labia nose-deep around his nasal wedge and—

“Marcie and I are lovers.”

With barely a hitch, Marcie freed him, veering Laura off to the right. “Now you’ve done it,” she said.

His mind went umpteen ways, putting together dropped hints, unanswered phones, misinterpreted looks. Confusion passed. Elation lit and flared. “Oh, but that’s—!”

“No!” Laura’s voice exploded through her sobs. “You don’t… he doesn’t…” She grabbed breath, riding its blast.

“You’re out of it… it’s just Marcie and me… and the baby, I’m taking her with me.”

Marcie seemed put off by Laura’s display, even as she put a protective, supportive arm about her. In the baby’s room, Jenny cried sharply as if a safety pin had opened to stab her out of sleep.

“Take a hike, ya lousy swami-lovers,” said Marcie in her best George Raft, “or the baby buys it.”

Laura blurted out, “Marcie’s pregnant.”

Marcie veered Laura off, then with overblown disgust and genuine dismay: “Jeez, you had to tell him.”

“Well I think it’s great,” his wife protested, “and I’m sorry—I won’t tell anyone else!—but I just couldn’t keep it from Travis one second longer.”

“Marcie, that’s incredible,” he said, going after her to catch her in a hug. He was amazed at his thoughts. He wished the child were his, though his lovely neighbor had, God damn her eyes, rebuffed his one early advance and had never invited a return attempt; he wondered which ungodly creep it was, or whether—and he imagined that this would be worse for her—

it had been Pierre, in one of his final dribble-shots into her; he saw instantly their households fusing, him as her Lamaze coach, loving her child, as she and Laura did likewise, and welcoming her inevitably into their marriage bed.

Then, two feet shy of an embrace, the baby screamed. It was not a troubled whine ready to lapse as soon as it began, nor was it even a wide-awake startle and wail that required backpats and pacings-about and soothings before she could be replaced in her bassinet. No, these sounds meant sudden pain or upset, a slipped pin rolled over on, or something worse.

Laura reached the door first but he was close behind and felt the blast of frigid air over the incessant whine of the space heater. He saw the window thrown wide and a lingering glove gripping the casing and then gone, flings of slush still flying through the air from a disappearing boot.

Race to the sill, past the empty bassinet, Laura’s misgivings about a first-floor apartment replaying in his head, and there, through the diminishing squit-squit-squit of boots on snow and the wrenching wails of his child, he saw her kidnapper, her white-slaver, dwindling swiftly in the ill-lit alley, pools of light by backdoors, dumpsters lined along brick walls. “Catch him, catch him!” Laura’s hands were shoving him over the sill, almost throwing him off balance, but he kept his eye on the nightmare, so that just as he found his feet and felt the cold seep up inside his pantleg and was poised to run, he saw their ski-masked nemesis look back even as two shadows emerged from the dun of a dumpster and shudder-halted him so jarringly that his boots went awry and his bundle of baby flew into the hands of a slighter third figure. Saved, thought Travis, elated as Laura and Marcie joined him out the window.

But then, instead of beating the man into submission, they appeared in the dim light to be pushing their heads against him so that he jittered and screamed as though electrified. And the third carried Jenny into the light, and he saw a meat-slung jawbone and a wandering eye and his daughter brought like some corncob to that mouth; and her sleepsuit bunched and reddened, her cries punched quiet from her, as, behind them, packed snow squeaked and Travis turned too late.

Laura reached the door first but he was close behind and took in the overheated room, the space heater humming at full capacity as Laura lifted Jenny into her arms.

“She okay?” Marcie asked.

Laura nodded, arching her back and soothing the tiny face open wide in terror at her shoulder, features almost lost in the laced, peaked, buttoned sleepsuit-head.

“Must’ve been gas pains,” he said.

Laura replaced the baby in her bassinet, zip-slashing the zipper, reaching in to feel diaper, rezipping, kissing one mittened hand. Travis was starting to sweat, the room was so hot and his heavy coat was meant for fierce cold.

“Diaper’s a smidge damp, but she’ll be fine.”

The baby sneezed but her lid-heavy eyes did not open. Her lips parted for air, a soft pooch of pink budding. No more than two dark dots, her nostrils.

“Poor baby has the sniffles,” Laura said and pointed them toward the door. The instant it closed behind them, Jenny’s face winced as if to scream again, but her bowels and bladder gave way then, emptying, and her face relaxed into sleep.

Where Laura had felt for sop, a lip of cotton bridged between the freshly soaked diaper beneath plastic pants and the layers of cloth working outward to the soon-to-be-ammoniated sleepsuit.

“Say,” said Marcie, “hadn’t you two better be on your way?”

Travis checked his wrist. Quarter to eight. “We’re a brisk ten-minute walk away, so we’re cutting it close, I guess. One last hug, Marcie dear. Mmmmwah! What a woman you are.”

Her kiss lingered like a warm slap on his lips.

Laura began: “Now don’t forget to—”

Marcie swept his compact woman up in a tremendous hug and stopped her frettings with a kiss, short, startling to them both, not wet. “Hmm,” she said, “what an interesting impulse.”

“Hold that thought,” Travis said. “If Apadravya can no longer strut his stuff, we may be back quicker than we expect, ready to explore other paths to salvation.”

Laura’s eyes still held shock. “Help yourself to the fridge.

Nothing’s off-limits.” She brightened, kept back from saying something, then tugged him out the door. Try as he might, Travis couldn’t shake two contrary feelings: that something very wonderful awaited them at the end of a very wonderful evening; and that venturing out tonight was a terrible mistake, one they might not live long enough to regret.

As she dressed her dead son, Aysha only kept herself from coming apart by holding Rajib’s eyes centrally before her. She had had to call him Swami Apadravya when others were about; but alone in the quiet calm of his room, dark hands sculpting her white flesh, he was her Rajib, loving her so totally it hurt.

And when he entered her, his eyes a searing mirror of bliss, the world split open anew until she thinned and thickened into slow explosion.

Vish lay cold under her fingers. As she joggled his body, she expected any moment he’d inhale suddenly out of sleep, find his thumb, offer a long protesting groan, and eye her archly.

But the chill of his skin and its pal or, like an all -over faint, kept his death at her fingertips. Underwear, undershirt, tight white socks, futile nonsense, must be insane, long corduroy pants, a pull over shirt with dead arms at angle around a halfwit’s lolled head that made her break down weeping—until Rajib’s eyes, cased in quiet brown wrinkles and containing the wisdom and compassion of all the world, brought her out of it. Sweater played his arms the same way, but by the time she rocked his coat on, it was like dressing a weighty ragdoll, both her and Vish more insulated from his death. But no. Had to experience it, had to keep it before her like a candleflame. Visions required faith, and faith could only function in the harsh light of the truth.

She would carry her boy to his father and he would interrupt satsang—or rather, he would surely incorporate her arrival into what he was saying (no agenda that excluded the world’s surprises) and then Rajib would touch his son, re-blood his cream-tan skin, re-bellow his lungs, infuse through the eyes his resurrected boy. But no. She couldn’t count on that. “Make no appointments,” he had said, “receive no disappointments.”

Why was that such hard advice to fol ow?

Aysha zipped up her boots, then muffled her neck and double-buttoned her night-blue coat. She jammed the knit cap down on her flattened blond curls and, Vish’s pillow cold against her knuckles, worked his cap over his scalp and down around the tops of his ears. She blew out the oil-lamp and stagger-lifted her son until he was snugged on her left arm and his head rested against her shoulder. Would be a test of her will, this walk: five blocks west and nearly as distant south; no new snow for two days but brisk winds, and there’d be snowbanks and patches of snow between scraped sidewalks.

She prayed she’d meet no one on the way out of her apartment building, and that proved true. A blast of air, caution on the icy concrete of her front steps, and she was on her way.

The moment they cornered off Drummond and headed west on Maisonneuve, Travis sensed something wrong. They were still three blocks from Sir George Williams University, a mostly evening school in one several-story building where the talk was to be held. Couldn’t guess what it was as he and Laura crunched along, her enthusing about their baby’s precocity as he tuned her out—but it increasingly nagged at him and then turned to disappointment. Volumetrically speaking, pedestrian traffic was too light: a first sign. And when they crossed Crescent and had a clear view of the corner of Bishop and Maisonneuve ahead, Laura interrupted her parental ravings with an “Oh shoot!”

Save for security lights on the central stairs and on the walkways left and right around them to the auditorium, the building was dark. “Look at this!” Laura said, and he joined her at the glass doors. Her hands were thrust into her coat pockets; she jiggled from the cold and her breath was dragon steam, comical from her Cupid’s-bow lips. Upon the door, taped askew on the inside, was a pasteboard sign in bold black: SATSANG POSTPONED UNTIL NEXT WEEKEND. SRI APADRAVYA IS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. NAMASTE.

“Didn’t you check the paper?” she asked, accusing.

“Yesterday’s.” He caressed the back of her coat with his thick gloved fingers. “Hey, no big deal. We’ll go to the Cafe Au Lait, have some steamy roasted coffee and that honey-drenched dessert you like.”

“Baklava.”

“Right.”

“I had my heart set on a little spiritual well-being tonight, not to mention seeing old friends from the ashram and Apadravya himself.” Laura leaned her forehead against his shoulder-fur in mock sorrow.

“Make no appointments—”

“I know, you doofus, I know.”

And that’s when, with a shadowed crowd of pedestrians penguining oddly toward them south on Bishop, twin snicks of metal sounded behind them and two burly men yanked them apart and brought sharp blades and faces impossibly close.

“Your wallet in two seconds, sucker, or you’re dead,” and as much as Travis wanted to look after Laura and the other mugger, the hopped-up urgency in the man’s eyes went right to Travis’s nervous system, the arm, the hand, tearing off a glove to reach between the lower but ons of his coat, to lip the heavy fabric back, an inconsequential drag on his wrist as he gripped and drew out his black eelskin wallet, no shake in his hand, no time for fear, too much a luxury when faced with that much need.

And then the smell of death stung him. His own? Had he been slashed? But his assailant’s eyes bulged as Laura screamed, and still he lived. His wallet fell. A purpled foot toed forward and Travis saw a matching hand jam down, like a receipt on a spindle, upon the switchblade, fingers closing on the mugger’s glove, a sharp snap of bone. Time enough to feel blooms of gratitude mixed with astonishment before the rescuer dropped his head upon Travis’s shoulder and bit, as easy as baklava, through the thick fur, thick leather, the multi-layered cloth beneath, into muscle and bone, a sudden frenzied cramp of pain there.

The moment they cornered off Drummond and headed west on Maisonneuve, anticipation lit his soul. They quickened their pace, he and Laura, grinning like idiots. “Namaste, dollface,”

he said, side-hugging her as they walked.

Laura, laughing, scolded: “That’s not nice, making fun of spirituality.”

“Get me started on Jesus sometime.”

“I know, I know. My favorite blasphemer.”

Inside, the crowd was lumbering along the guideropes, halfway vestibuled, halfway inside the auditorium: an odd mingle of young and old, his generation touching once more a thread which guided them to the gold of an earlier time, Laura’s coevals refreshingly glint-eyed in their twentyish claim upon the world’s possibilities. On their way to the line’s end, Laura exchanged joyous if hushed hellos with a number of young men and women he’d never met, scrubbed and more naive-looking than his wife, wearing yoga-whites some of them and holding coats, although, inching past the side door they’d come in, blasts of winter assaulted them every time anyone entered the building.

At last the double doors. Travis let Laura unpurse a five-dollar bill for them and place it on a small mound of money in a box labeled DONATIONS. He took a flyer about a potluck, avoiding the fervid eyes of the redeemed druggie, or so he appeared, sitting, one knee pistoning, behind the table.

“Let’s try close,” Laura said, ever one for ring-side seats at plays and concerts.

“Right,” he said, but she was already on the way down the carpeted slope of the aisle. She tapped the sweatered arm of a petite Oriental woman, blowing a kiss to her wave and signaling later as she backwarded and then rightwarded herself toward the sparsely populated—because spiritually too presumptuous?—front rows.

The air was redolent with incense, sandalwood mingled with a fruity vanilla scent. The stage, as he approached it, brought him back twenty years, the oriental rug at its lip, fringe hanging over, the cushions, the flowers, puffs of incense rising nearly straight up like Lionel trains in mid-chug from an ornately carved table—and out of context yet never somehow out of place, the angled mike on a squat stand so that the reputedly soft-spoken Apadravya could be heard throughout the auditorium and so that his talk could be preserved for those unlucky enough to be elsewhere.

Laura draped her coat over her seatback in row two, a clack as a button brushed metal. He did the same, gazing back at the rising sweep of attendees, noting how animated their faces were, yet how subdued their chatter. This, he thought, was how church ought to be but never was.

“You’re really going to like him, Travis.”

Sweet woman, her face so vibrant and alive. “I like him already,” he said, and gave Laura a squeeze.

Marcie hummed as she bumsteaded her sandwich, habits both she’d picked up from her father, a man chubby-not-fat who favored a puttering hum over silence in the car. Hand on meat drawer, drew it open, packaged sliced turkey ready for unsealing; salami, the same; tuppered ham on one shelf still looking worthy; lettuce head with a few hacks out of it, snatched up; jars of mayo and dill spears precariously balanced at her breasts. She brought her armful of prizes to the table, arrayed them, and dove in, rye slices peeled open waiting on the plate.

As her hands worked, she wondered if she should check on baby Jenny. Time enough for that later. Laura, lovely pert-nosed Laura, was such a hoverer, it would probably do the kid good to suffer a little neglect. She and Travis’d moved in, going on two years now, and it had been a relief and a blessing after the beer-guzzling, once-overing, trio of scum-buddies who’d lived here before. They’d been away at a hockey game in Toronto the weekend Pierre brought her here and had committed them to a lease.

Pierre again. Bring him up, even fleetingly, and his residue lingered and spread, reviving the sweet and bitter ache of times buried and buried and buried again. Stopped over the table, knife in hand, kitchen clock relentless in its forward hurtle.

Brought up Freya Cole, leggy sad-eyed sandy-haired first-chair violist she had found solace with for a while: a quiet, caressive time, very few words, two lives lived, one here in seeming isolation, one there idle and indolent on Freya’s bed, her Scandinavian fingers sure and angular and rich drawing tone from her viola, then dry and light and loving on Marcie’s freshly inflicted wounds. It died away. Trombonist dork Kyle Kinney pursued his pet violist with bizarre gifts, won her, took them both off to Chicago under Maestro Solti’s baton.

Hey, what could you do? Heartache sucked, and there were plenty of people out there willing to leech off your grief. Go on, sniff the air, keep your bullshit detector in fresh batteries: That was the way to get by.

Stupid lump stood in her throat. Wasn’t fair. If she were a drinking woman, she’d be drunk. Instead, she lifted the triple-decker to her lips, opened her mouth as wide as it would go, and chomped the biggest bite of meat and bread and bitter sorrow she could manage.

He left-armed Laura’s coat-bulged seatback and craned about to scan the crowd. Odd how gatherings culled from a city this size a mini-population of like-minded souls. He felt (grand illusion, that) immediate kinship here; rebuke followed instantly, no call for cynicism, there could be a grand gathering of these same people, one massive handfast to bind them all, spark to spark—enduring fascination and interest here, if they wanted it enough. These people, he fancied, lived, like him at his best, aside and apart from the weary fray of illusion, not tangled up in the snags of samsara, or not often, or with sufficient awareness to put a spin of redemptive humor on the human predicament.

“Elephant-shitting again?” Laura asked, knuckling his left temple playfully.

Fritz Perls’ term. “Yep.”

“Know you pretty well, don’t I?”

“What can I say?” Travis returned her smile. “I’m an outie, you’re an innie.”

It was enough. Laura tucked her cross-legged ankles tighter under her buttsplit, rocking to rectify them, and rested her hands, palm up and thumb-to-index-finger, upon her knees. Seemed affected to him, but what the hell, if it got her through the night, it was good.

He observed the trickle of aisle activity, new folks scanning or pointing or scarf-sweeping their hunched-over, side-swaggling, pardon-my-heels-on-your-toes way toward a brass-ring grab at enlightenment. Man four rows back was scratching his face, listening to a companion. A cluster of incandescent young women, mid-auditorium, set his mind-cock afrisking for an instant, then he veered off them in deference to their privacy and on to a couple of executive types, glint-eyed from the backglow of money in their day-to-day lives, he thought, Jacob Needleman readers who were easy straddling both worlds.

A quick movement, or jarring. The man scratching his face looked sallow, no great complexion to begin with, but his scratching wasn’t helping any. His fingernails seemed to be tracing welts from cheek to jaw, but then Travis saw runnels of blood down to the first knuckle and realized he wasn’t seeing welts but gouges and that they weren’t being traced but opened. When the man’s glance started to shift forward, Travis took quick refuge in the cluster of cuties further back.

But now their skin too, which had blushed a lively vivacity like reddish glows on golden apples, slung wan and dead from fish-glimmered eyes. Feeling the spread come down like a wave of sun over a windy field, he turned to shield himself and his woman from the impact; but Laura whiffed into his nostrils, and Laura clutched his arm, and Laura quick-leaned her puffed purple face, its reeky mouth glistening open, in toward his neck.

Moving from the wise old executives to the scratcher, he wondered if the fellow had a thing about his face. Did he unwax his earholes with an idle pinkie? Did he pry out boogers when no one was about, or chisel up layers of dead skin beneath his hair, opening and tormenting scalp wounds as his body mounted a slow steady assault upon itself?

Laura nudged him. He looked her way and she eyed him toward the stage. There was a stirring at the curtain off stage right. Then a tall blond-bearded man in Deva pants, whom Travis had seen somewhere before, came out far enough to step backward into the heavy red billow of the curtain, making way for the short Indian man who ambled out, hands cupped prayerfully before him as he walked. The tall man seemed stricken, though Travis couldn’t tell if his state reflected agony or ecstasy.

Seats flipped up behind them in the auditorium. His wife dug into her coat pocket and brought forth the baggie of rose petals she’d plucked from a bought bouquet an hour before. They went out her side, him feeling a little like a fool following her. Someone from McGill saw him, they’d hound him forever. Well, fuck ’em. Anybody in a position to see him was as blackmailable as he was. Laura put some petals in his palm and for the next many seconds, the tall air was filled with silent tiddlywink flurries of pink and white and red petals, flinging up and drifting down around the holy man’s upstretched arms and face. When the gentle rain was done, he lowered them and Travis had a first good glimpse of his eyes.

No one there, everyone there, a guru trick he’d seen before but never like this: the dark dead glint hinted of tarnished brass, and behind it lay at once the calm of total resignation and assent and the agitation of a star about to go nova. But he couldn’t be certain of that—it was one of the things he liked about Indian fakir types—and the man’s gaze had made its profound impression on him and moved on.

Hands thrust past Travis’s either shoulder stretched out to touch the swami. Devotees lightly laughed as they leaned by him to touch the moving hand. A few arms pulled away, a few laughs died on the vine, but mostly it was an ineffable grasp at joy. Travis figured what the hell, who was he to hold back. He leaned out, Laura’s patient white palm next to his, and two dark hands gripped them and held for an instant.

Travis focused on the hands, riveting his attention there: not the dry healthy brown he’d expected, but a slick grayish-khaki like ground round just beginning to move off raw-red on a grill; translucent amber droplets oozed from back-hand pores, tree sap on bark, and the oily heat around his gripped hand suggested the holy man exuded from his palms as well.

Travis looked faceward. Towelled off, perhaps, before he hit the stage, the brow and cheeks now, like saturated sponges, obtruded pinpricks of oil, as numerous as beads of flopsweat.

The eyes, though: Behind them lay that same cosmic struggle, but just as the guru’s firm grip passed over into discomfort and the static greet of contact turned to tug, Travis realized that composure’s hold was crumbling in those eyes.

But by then it was too late. Whether it was some odd attraction about the two of them that set him off, or just the luck of the draw, the wiry lightweight deadweight holy man pulled them, kneecaps slammed hard on stage-edge, over the upflipped rug and inexorably toward his hungry gape of a mouth.

His hands left theirs. Travis’s palm tingled. As he withdrew it, he pooled his ring finger into the exudate at his lifeline, a substance as thick as honey but not sticky or unpleasant in any way. Returning to his seat, Laura at his side, he sniffed his finger and thought of coconut oil slicked on moist pussy.

Laura took his other hand beneath the end of the seat-arm that separated them, giving him an odd look; her fingers slid lubriciously where they grasped him, assuring him and being assured.

Onstage, Apadravya was nodding and smiling, getting a sense of the room, taking its measure.

Laura tugged his arm. “He’s not breathing,” came her taut whisper as he lowered his ear to her.

He eyebrowed her, turning his attention back to stage center. Nonsense. The man was breathing. Had to be. He knew Laura was dead right, knew it like the flare of truth in a night of lies. Beneath the unsettled counterpoise of peace and Armageddon in his eyes had been this unsettling, unobserved other phenomenon: no breath, no om, no shanti. Days gone by, Shyam or Satchitananda would bring the crowd together with shared chants, shared breathing. That would have begun by now, if it was going to happen at all.

Ripples of laughter took the hall. Not nervous, just the delight of those deep and innocent souls who know that the guru turns time into timelessness, teaching impatience to cease, wordlessly wise before satsang begins.

The blond-bearded yoga teacher set a filled glass and a pitcher of water on a tray near Apadravya. A dismissive glance gave it and him invisibility. On the periphery, he slunk away.

The pitcher, the glass, remained untouched as long as Travis and Laura remained in the auditorium.

Apadravya’s eyes scanned the hall.

Any moment now he would speak.

Any moment now.

Marcie wolfed into her sandwich. Couldn’t taste the fucker worth shit. Chew your food, mama voice gentle from Winnipeg, fancied recollections of warm tit in her mouth, an overwhelming plane of flesh, Pierre’s penis swallowed past the gag reflex, dim ringlets of private hair like a sneeze tickling her nose. The back of her throat took a wrong turn in mid-swallow, and suddenly there was no air.

She dropped the sandwich, top lettuced slice falling off and bouncing like a mattress hurtling out a window to concrete below. Her chair scraped. Her hands flew to her neck, overlapping V’s like mercy-me, and she staggered to the sink.

Disposal side, already picturing the vomit but better here than on their floor; a cereal bowl, its spoon in water, unclog the windpipe, get air in, wash the sucker off after. But leaning over, willing expulsion, thrusting her fingers deep inside her mouth as blood oceaned in her head, had no effect. No time for cops, even if she could communicate with them. She jammed her abdomen against the sink edge, absurdly worrying about the baby growing there. Again and again, punish the body, wake it up, get it to do the right thing, oh yeah, windpipe blocked, jig this n jog that n she’ll be good as new, sorry for any trouble ma’am. But the outrage persisted and the saliva dribbled from her lips to the sink below, and the air was not there, and not there, and not there. Flat patches of black cloth dimpled on the periphery of her vision, then the sink edge slipped upward, eluding her fingers, and the flat hard palm of the floor, dull wool, coldly smacked her.

“In Muslim tradition,” his quiet voice rode unneeded intakes and outflows of air, disturbing at first to Travis but then quickly mesmerizing, “King Solomon died in this fashion: By means of a magic ring, he enslaved the djinn, the demons, and made them build his temple. Leaning upon a long staff, he stood there as they worked, his wise gray head bowed in meditation, for days at a time. Still they toiled, the gleam of Solomon’s ring calling to mind their enslavement.”

Laura squeezed his hand. He could feel her disquiet, her thrill, without looking at her. He felt it too. This man, sitting not ten feet from them, showing every sign of sentience and launching satsang with some sort of parable, was not quite alive. Travis could almost see the suck of gravedirt on him, his body emerged from earthgrip just far enough to hide its hold on him. He embrowned the flowers around him, the pillows, the patterned rug. The movement of his facial muscles was minimal, sufficient to bear his message but no more—and this was not the just-enough of a living holy man, though closely akin, but the articulated willed urge of once-living flesh to reclaim its place and find in reassembly its fix on vitality.

“One day, Solomon came out and stood where he always stood, propped up by his staff, head lowered for nearly a year, unmoved. And in the same year, a white worm gnawed its way up inside the staff, eating, eating, hollowing it out until it was a shell. The djinn worked, not daring to interrupt Solomon in his involutions, and the temple was finished. At the moment the final brick was mortared and the work done, the staff could no longer bear the king’s weight. And so he fell. And the djinn discovered that he had been dead for an entire year, though his body had not, in all that time, corrupted in any way, so right and good and blessed a person this good King Solomon had been.”

Marcie started. Disorientation, like a hot nap ended on a bad note. And a great gape of need. Tangle of limbs moving, cabinetry blurring by, a fleeting realization that she was rising, but no memory stuck and there was movement only. Toward the satisfaction of her need. Fixtures went by, hanging beaters and spatulas, door frame, wall photos, light switch. Caught on a couch end, room sweeping like a fan, then a righting, and onward again.

Veer left, dark here but no matter. Buffered against flat cool something, a barrier. Dim wispings of some easy way past it, but it was flimsy stuff, a loud cottony noise as it splintered inward and gave and duddered aside. Odor of need, food call in the hot dark place—dancing mushroom spun by, foreskin, gone. Threaded the sound. Groped down to find it, found it, lifted it, twisted the right side to tear some off, sharp crack and sharp increase in the sound of its need to be taken in.

Lolling leftward, the exposed part, pure scent of noise and the stuff she craved. Shuck of her jaws opening, tight skin dry and protesting. Noise lowered like a dream, yes, yes, jaws closing, toothscrape, the hot fluids freshening the dryness in her mouth, a wash over face, the noise still pulsing but abruptly out as she munched past the bony part and tore the yellow batting off to go further.

The holy man paused. And Travis swore that what sat on the stage was little more than a corpse. But then the head moved and the hands clasped one another on his robed lap and Travis heard the unneeded (but for speech) insuck of breath.

“Certain holy saints, it is thoroughly documented in Roman Catholic records,” his head nodded as he spoke, and his grave eyes twinkled like mica, “lived such pure lives that even in death they did not bloat or decay, preserved in some cases for centuries. Saint Angela Merici died in the year 1540. In 1672, her body was found to be intact, incorrupt, sweet smelling.

And again in 1867, they found the same incorruption.”

Inside, Travis felt disoriented yet not disturbed, a quiet rush that satsang always brought but weirdly warped, and yet nothing less than fascinating. He felt as if he ought to want to bolt, yet he felt perfectly safe and, in an odd way, holy, to be sitting near this whatever-he-was balanced on a crest of oblivion, conveying its message.

“Eleven years following the death of Saint Camillus de Lellis, at his official recognition for sainthood, his exhumed body was as fresh and supple as in life; fragrant liquids exuding from him were referred to as copious. So too with Saint John of the Cross, whose flesh was found to be incorrupt for more than two and a half centuries.” The holy man let it sink in. His eyes scanned the crowd, then fixed for a soul-searing moment on Travis, before lifting lightly away like a mosquito refraining from puncture and suck.

On the north slope of Mount Royal, in La Cimetière de Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Huguette thrust gloveless hands into her fleecy coat pockets and shifted uncomfortably from one boot to the other, waiting for her idiot boyfriend. Chill air was seeping its way under her coat, spiraling up where clothing ought to be protecting her, but where instead, at Louis-Phillipe’s insistence, she wore nothing at all. The English spoke of freezing your ass off; now she knew first hand—and wished she didn’t—what that phrase meant.

This was stupid. Black Angel with her head bowed and her hands angled open at her sides, thumb-tops dusted with snow: he had said it was good luck to make love under her gaze, but Huguette suspected it was just one more excuse to have sex in an odd locale. Why not? She was finally free of her parents. They were crazy in love. And she had to admit, for all her discomfort and in spite of the shocking overtones of making love in this place—her grandmère, she had to keep reminding herself, was buried not two hundred yards away—

she was turned on at the thought of his impish grin backlit, over the blanket she’d brought, by the black sculpted frown of the Angel. Looked awfully thin, spread out on the ground, that blanket.

Then she saw Louis-Phillipe coming from the direction of l’Université de Montreal below, sleeping bag rolled up under one arm. He lurched among tombstones and she hugged herself and jiggled, shouting for him to hurry. Crunching to her, he gave her a huge warm kiss, then untied the bag and unzipped it open atop the blanket. While he was busy, she bit the bullet, unbuttoning her coat and flinging past him onto her back, coat a third layer but bare naked above except for her arms. These she lifted. “Vite, vite,” she said. “Cover me, I’m freezing.” Her nips were tight with cold and her slick chatte tingled with winter wet.

He jittered his fingers down his coat, unbuttoning to expose himself, raw red funny-finger upjutting, then flew down upon her in a rush of cold. Squirming on her: “Take that side, I’ll do this.” He fumbled his buttons into her holes by her left thigh, while she struggled with the ones on the right, laughing with him as, farther up, it became impossible, arms atangle; but with all the squirming, he’d slipped the yummy tip of his thickness inside her, and the body heat was intense enough that she coaxed his lips down to hers and slow-groined more of his love inside her.

Startled upward. Broke the kiss: “It looks like the Angel is about to fall on us,” she said.

Louis-Phillipe laughed. And then they heard shuffled boots from behind the Black Angel. His head craned up as hard white faces under knit caps bobbled through the black night. Hands wrenched him off her, his penis slipping out and exposing her. She tried to cover up, but boots jammed down on her shoulders. “Hey, guys, lookie here. Anybody wanna fuck a frog? Nice froggie, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit.” Mittened fingers tweaked her right nipple and she smacked them away, but they jammed between her thighs and roughly thrust inside.

“Placeholder, assholes. First pecker out gets to go first.”

“Get away from me!” she screamed, as Louis-Phillipe tried to fight them but took a fist in his belly, falling to the snow like Christ toppled from the cross.

Flat patches of black cloth dimpled on the periphery of her vision, and then abruptly the food dislodged. The splash and rattle of spoon in bowl sounded, as her hungry lungs drank air, rounds of coughing and gasps alternating. She hung her mouth over the sink, vision still patchy but coming back. The shiny silver crook of the spigot in her left hand’s grasp reassured.

For a time, Marcie cried in relief and gratitude, mashed bread floating in bowl-water like an abortion. Her fetus was probably that size now. She worried that her exertions against the sink edge had harmed it, then dismissed her worries as absurd.

When she could walk, she made her way to the living room and settled on the couch facing the windows, blinds drawn full up onto Rue Drummond, where a car scooped its headlights south and out of sight. She liked the feel of this apartment. The people made the place: both of them such friends and such flat-out attractive people. Marcie wondered if Travis had been at all serious about exploring a threesome, and she especially wondered what dear Laura’s enigmatic look had meant. She didn’t want to blow a great friendship, but maybe it could evolve into something very interesting indeed.

Across the street a woman went by carrying a sleeping child. From the blanket wrapped about it, one socked foot dangled, a wide patch of exposed skin between the sock and its rucked-up trouser cuff.

Minor alarms in Marcie’s head. A mother oblivious to the situation could be unwittingly causing her child harm.

She rose, okay now, and went to the window, unlatching and lifting it wide enough to shout out, “Hello there!” trying that first, against an invasion of cold air, then, “Hello over there, your child’s foot is uncovered!” She pointed, saw the woman turn, repeated what she’d yelled, hoping it carried.

The woman never broke stride—if anything, quickening her pace—but moved away as though engaged in kidnapping.

Marcie gave it up and lowered the window, then the blinds, rubbing her hands. Only do so much, then you had to leave things to the fates or to other good Samaritans. Hmm, and speaking of children, it was probably time to look in on baby Jenny, just a peek in, a finger inside her sleepsuit, then gone.

Travis felt so strange as Swami Apadravya spoke, as if he were hearing forbidden wisdom: not the content so much as what strange breath it was riding on. The light greenhouse feel of satsang was with him as always, but as well there was a dark tinge to it, a flair of ginger-root concentrate teasing the corners of the air.

“In the Hindu tradition, holy men find control of the body a trivial matter. Sri Ramakrishna scorned to heal an illness he suffered, though he could easily have done so. He preferred to fix his mind on God rather than turn it to what he called this worthless cage of flesh. A yogi named Haridas had himself buried alive for six weeks, guarded by the skeptical, and came out of his hibernation unharmed in the presence of many witnesses. There are numerous other accounts, well documented, of the control of the physical body which comes with spiritual realization.” Again came that dead silence of no-breath as he paused. The insuck, obscene and oddly enthralling.

“Why do I relate all this to you? To what revelation are these arcane citations the necessary prologue?”

Startled upward. Broke the kiss: “It looks like the Angel is about to fall on us,” she said.

Her boyfriend laughed. “Yes, and you make the earth move for me.” But the statue’s head jostled against wisps of cloud on black sky, and sharp screech of bronze protest on stone mixed with its swift stiff pivot and fall, a sick blast of cold on Huguette’s face as the huge dark head fell with a meaty thud upon Louis-Phillipe’s back. She heard a crack of bone, felt him press against her as if urged into the earth by a slab-hand. He swore from the pain, crying, a scared child. The square of the angel’s base had stayed on its pedestal as though hinged on one side. A dark form wangled out from behind the squarish base, seemingly loath to show itself. Mute, muscular, all shadow as if a shamed retard. Had the dumb thing pushed the statue? But that’d have taken ten strong men. “Help us,” she said, “please.”

The shadow-head turned as if alerted to something. A crack like an icicle separating from an eave; then another more distant, then a series closer in, invisible houses in every direction letting ice crack and fall but never land. A vision came to her, pinned there: the sprung latches of meat lockers opening in the earth.

Then the stench came on, writhing in ravels along the snow, twisted lanyards of decay and rot. Two more bobbing heads joined their shy tormentor-savior, moved past him, a draw for him to follow; and then the moon lit them so that if Louis-Phillipe’s crushing weight had not prevented her, she would have screamed. One found his left arm and arced it upward slowly so that Louis-Phillipe’s coat wrinkled in elephant shift and his arm snapped free of its ball joint, skin tearing like an uncooked turkey leg but with blood in his cries; while it was still partway attached, the thing sank its teeth into his hand.

Another knelt, grabbing her boyfriend’s long hair so that his anguished face came away from her breast. The thing peered close at her, then the head craned to peer at Louis-Phillipe, and slowly it came in to sink a kiss deep into his cheek, tearing away flesh and beard like the marshmallow batting on a Sno-Ball; but what was exposed was not dark cake, but something wet and red, tongue fluttering in a shuddering mouth. Blood fell steaming on her, then cooled, chilling.

Sirens rose in the distance.

The two turned at the sound, mouths closed upon meat.

Huguette could almost see the wheels turning: memory, the walking trove, a surround of life. They haltingly joined others, dark nightmarish shapes of stench staggering down the slope.

Louis-Phillipe breathed his last. She tried to tug free, worried they might return or that other new-hatched monstrosities would pause to feed on her, but all her attempts came to nothing but pointless exertion. The winter air touched her, touched her, kept touching her.

“You have heard, perhaps, that I died, that by some miracle of resurrection I was restored to life.”

My God, thought Travis, he’s going to say it. It was one thing to see him up this close, a veneer of shockingly beautiful holiness animating his corpse as it maintained a mindful hold over a dynamo of mindless need behind; it was quite another to hear the man confess it aloud.

“I did not resurrect,” Apadravya said, slight headbob like a dummy on a stick, eyes in useless blink. “Nor have I been restored to life.” Laura’s grip tightened and some tight fear let escape a far faint air-brake from her lips. “Those of you who have touched me understand. Those whose eyes are brought close know what I am: I died. I was put in the ground. I came out of the ground. I remain dead.”

Anyone else had said such a thing, a ripple of laughs would have swept the hall. Instead, a brief murmur fanned the air, punched the gut of elation and left it foundering in dismay.

Swami Apadravya did not lie—it had been alien to him in life; it was so now. Hackles stood at the back of Travis’s neck, a feeling both harrowing and fulfilling.

“I am the first of many,” he told them. “Others will come, and soon—others mired in samsara during their lives who will therefore be subject to unthinking appetites when they return. This eventuality cannot be prepared for, and yet you must prepare. Many in this room will be turned by them and will turn others. That is why I begin satsang in my beloved Montreal and carry it throughout this continent and beyond if I am able. It has not been given to me, the knowledge of when this upheaval will begin; but it will be soon, and I am here to witness and warn.”

Travis was filled with dread. He’d seen a news photo once that had brought a similar horror: the close-up shot of a man’s face, the caption saying that so-and-so watched helpless as his family and all his worldly goods burned up in the trapped inferno of his home. Travis flashed on his parents down in Florida, his brothers in Colorado and New York, Laura and Jenny and Marcie. What if it was starting right now? What if the streets were teeming right now, an army of corpses with the same thick hunger (but unchecked) he read now in Apadravya’s eyes, pushing their way through his door, attacking Marcie and the baby?

Marcie reared back at the pungency of the stench, an oh-no sounding in her head: too close in the room, window shut tight, space heater roaring, and the sting of ammonia wrinkling the air. Flooding the room with light, she rushed to the baby.

No movement. No blinkback of brightness. Just stillness and a bloody froth coming from Jenny’s nostrils and mouth.

Panic rising, Marcie scooped up the lifeless child, sog to the sleepsuit, and hurried her to the changing table. A box of tissues, whip-whip-whip, three in her hand, wiping the froth away, gentle but quick. Then her mouth went to the baby’s nose and mouth, grasping at vague CPR memories. A sour taste there. Think! What was different about CPR on an infant.

You could blow out their lungs if you tried too hard. But how much was hard enough? Dead hand lay on baby Jenny’s chest, its tiny fingernails tinged with blue. “Come on, come on,” she pleaded, then back into mouth-to-mouth, preventing herself the luxury of sobbing, damage to the brain with each moment it missed oxygen, fingering the tiny cold palm.

Then came an abrupt clamp on her fingers. And before she could straighten to assess, the baby-head jerked up to her departing mouth and sank sudden ferret teeth deep into her lower lip, vicious and wild. The eyes were pooled and open and dead, but the teeth chewed and stung and the hand squeezed her fingers in a deathgrip and wouldn’t be shaken loose. Her lip felt as if it had been snagged in a sewing machine gone out of control.

Behind her, a tremendous startle of shattering glass as she turned herself and her nemesis about to feel grave-stench and winter chill and to see (double disbelief, was she half-mad already and had she now gone completely over the edge?) what lurching horrors had ushered them in.

Marcie snapped on the overhead light and ran to the bassinet, an oh-no heating her thoughts as surely as the space heater was overheating the room. She’d read about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome a few years back, realizing now, with a why-didn’t-I-see-it rising inside, how prime a candidate lit le Jenny had been.

Blinking back the brightness. Listless, sopping, but okay.

Lifting her free of the miasma of ammonia, carrying her to the changing table, Marcie comforted, “There there, little Jenny. We’ll get you out of these wet things, give you warm dry diapers, open the window a tiny bit, I don’t care what crap your mommy gives me for it, you and me, we know what’s best for baby, don’t we?” The sleepsuit felt like an unwrung washcloth. She draped it over the wicker basket for non-stinky refuse, noting it would need a rinse in the kitchen sink when she was done here. Ruffle-soaked plastic pants joined them. Then the diaper, a damp runway of streaked brown as she unpinned and hourglassed it open: free it came, and she diaper-wiped the baby’s bottom until it was clean enough for tickle cream; then a fresh new one efficiently pinned, and a t-shirt, and the green oversized sleepsuit, a lecture at once serious and funny bubbling in her head to deliver when Travis and Laura came home.

Behind her, the window gave a sharp rattle.

Travis was walking along cleared mounded sidewalks, the sound of sirens echoing one another from two distant parts of the city. It’d gotten to be too much—the dead holy man not ten feet away—and he’d mumbled some excuse to Laura, something about needing water. She’d be safe. He’d just pop home to reassure himself about baby Jenny and about Marcie, unspook himself from all this palaver about cemeteries disgorging their dead.

As he approached his building, he felt not a little foolish and decided that maybe the walk had been enough. He wouldn’t disturb Marcie—or more to the point, he’d be damned if he’d give Marcie and Laura something to razz him about for weeks to come. But one peek through the window at baby Jenny sounded appealing. And the bathroom window was just this side of it: Maybe he’d catch Marcie, seized by an urge to luxuriate in a bubble bath, toweling herself off, her breasts bunched over terrycloth like buoyant pink balloons tipped with giving.

Dream on, he thought.

His boots were loud and scrunchy on the sanded press of snow underfoot, but he was halfway there and slowed to soften the noise. Odd. Jenny’s room was bright. He came closer, saw the bassinet empty, saw Marcie at the changing table, solidly sveltely female, her red sheen of hair in a fetching chopcut that brought Tinkerbell to mind. Window was… hmm, yes it was, it was unlatched and open, the width of a swizzle stick.

Christ, what an urge! What was the worst that could happen?

He’d scare the shit out of her. She’d never speak to him again.

She’d think he was one blasted dumbfuck and cool toward him from this moment on.

And the best? What the heck. He fingertipped under the sash. The window gave a rattle and Marcie turned her head.

Game up. As he lifted the damned thing and slipped in, Marcie said, “Jesus, Travis, what are you up to?”

“Stay right where you are,” he said, the authority of winter chill in his voice. “Keep changing the baby.” He brought the window down all the way, latched it.

“Crazy fucker,” she muttered. “Where’s Laura?”

“Don’t talk,” he said, surprised at his boldness. He freed his hands, flopped his gloves like dead trout to the floor, undid his coat and stepped out of it. Coming right up to her, he set his left hand high on her hip and found, under her skirt with his right, the hot inside of her left leg just above the knee. No stockings. Firm warm flesh.

“You’re insane.” It was a whisper. There was a hint of admiration there, a turn-on.

“Shhh.” Hand upward, soft muscled widening grippable inner thigh, Marcie not moving to stop him. Expecting the breechable barrier of panty elastic, he found sheer smooth undelineated flesh and then the moist archaic vulval pouch in lip-receptive mode. He thought of a one-handed unbelt, unclasp, unzip, a comical jog-dance behind her getting his pants and jockeys down past his dick. Uncool. Just a zip then, deft twist of the white cotton slit, up and over head and shaft, so he sprang out, zipper-teeth down by the balls like dead shark mouth. Up under her skirt like a silent-movie photographer, baby Jenny nonjudgmental over Marcie’s shoulder, Marcie bending and widening to receive him, her ready vagina fisting him amazingly in, her bent-neck gasp as her hands knuckled protectively about his daughter.

Behind them, suddenly, the window exploded inward.

Baby’s room smelled sweet if too close and warm. She felt along moonlight to the bassinet. Poor darling’s lips weakly probed thumbward, her brow a wrinkle, then relax.

Marcie slowly zipped down the sleepsuit far enough to sneak fingers inside. Smooth plastic; beneath, still dry.

Wonder baby, hundred-percent absorbent bladder and bowels.

She hushed the zipper back upward, led the long red thumb back into the mouth where it stayed in renewed suck.

Too damned hot in here. She set the space heater two notches lower and the thing shut off. Then, yes, Laura be damned, she unlatched the window and tugged it open not so wide as a pencil. One more glance around the room and she headed for the door. The moment it closed behind her, the baby’s forehead wrinkled sharply up. But her poop blurted out in great profusion and the tinkle flooded from her and her face eased into relieved sleep.

Travis was walking along cleared mounded sidewalks of snow one moment. The next, Laura was nudging him and the hall came back up around him. He was grateful, realizing he’d been simultaneously drawn into the dead guru’s stare and impelled by revulsion into a desperate psychic escape, something involving Marcie and baby Jenny and a zip-gutted woman dragging her nude booted body over shards of jagged window glass to reach them.

“In life, there were many desires: Attentiveness and constant observation, appreciating them in their totality, in every articulated detail, led to their dying away. But in death, this death you see in me, there is but one clear and burning desire: to chew the red root of life in hopes that it will wake the palate, slide down the dead throat, revitalize the cold silent organs, and trick the walking shell of life into thickening inwardly even unto the cold core. As my words come forth, my witness is ever on that desire. There is no ‘I’ to control it, but only the fact of witnessing, the lifetime of making that my craft, which keeps me detached from that desire.” Apadravya’s teaching was, to Travis’s astonishment, a strange mingle of comfort and terror. His thoughts went again to their child and to their upstairs neighbor.

But then, the auditorium doors let out a high squeal. Down the right aisle, people craning in their seats to see her, strode a woman, calling, “Rajib, save our son!” From under a knit cap, her short blond hair arched over a face of anguish. At her right shoulder, she held a slumbering child, blanket swaying as she came.

Huguette shivered fiercely under her dead boyfriend, a cold hoarseness in the throat she’d screamed silent. Warm numb tingling in her fingers and ears frightened her most, a first sign of frostbite setting in. She’d die here, the dark hump of the Black Angel’s wingtops filling her vision and the incessant whine of sirens scouring her ears.

Then a miracle: Louis-Phillipe stirred.

No shuddered intake of breath, no pained groan at his mutilations. His intact cheek moved on her breast, stuck frozen in bloodpool, and she felt a surge of power stream through his body. “Louis-Phillipe?” she said, every sound but empty gasp gone. And then instead of lifting his eyes to her, his mouth found her nipple. Through the torn gape in his cheek, she saw him shred it, suffering the ravaging outrage of pain even as she denied it. Rousing blood, his teeth mauled her. She tried to shove him away, but he was as unmoving as the statue—and yet, under her boyfriend’s exertions, the Black Angel now bobbled. Zagging greedily down her body, he took huge bites as he went, and the top of the Angel’s head gouged a raw furrow up his back. When he began scavenging the soft pit of her belly, the scandal of it put her into a merciful faint and then to death.

Louis-Phillipe’s teeth furrowed lower.

“No, do not stop her.”

The yoga instructor had risen to intercept her, had followed her onto the stage, but he backed away to sit in uncertainty, cross-legged on the stage edge, watching from a distance.

Stepping onto the oriental rug, she unwrapped the blanket from about her son, letting him fall-flop into her arms. Only then, Travis saw, did the woman register what Apadravya had become. She flinched back, but almost immediately resumed her mission, the boy clearly not sleeping at all.

“Is he—?” Laura whispered.

Travis cut her off with a nod.

“This is my dear Aysha,” said the guru. “And this is our son.”“He died this afternoon, Rajib.” The woman’s voice, unamplified and thrown upstage, only carried a few rows, but Travis and Laura were close enough to hear. “You can bring him back. You’ve been there. You have the power, I know you do.”“Oh my Aysha,” said the holy man, and the way he said it touched Travis to the heart, “I have no such powers nor would I want them. He is well quit of the world. It were best he did not come back.”

Travis saw a shaving of slush fall from her boot-heel onto the carpet. She swayed forward and laid the dead boy in the guru’s lap. Then she knelt wordlessly, raising her hands in prayer.

Apadravya watched her. A sleeved left arm prevented the boy from twirling senselessly off his lap. He raised his right hand, training his attention on the child as his dead fingers rested on dead eyelids, thumb and pinkie upon the hinges of the boy’s jawbone.

The eyelids eased open. Travis saw that. Glisten of dark pupils, motionless and glazed. Then the swami’s hand cupped to one side of the neck, and at once the small body convulsed violently, the nostrils flared and subsided, the limbs flexed.

He came to as one sick and enfeebled, fixed on the dead eyes of his savior, whined for his mother, who crushed him in an embrace that seemed never ending. Sweep of murmur ran through the crowd.

And that’s when the guru lost it entirely and leaped upon mother and child in a feeding frenzy so swift and so voracious it froze Travis and Laura in their seats even as it parabola’d them in hot freshets of blood.

Apadravya’s dead fingers rested on the boy’s face for what seemed an eternity. Then they came away, relaxed to a curve, as the holy man shook his head.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Laura warmed into her husband’s ear. Not really, he thought. Just weirded out was all she was.

“Me too, hon,” he said, but his eyes were riveted on the woman as she came forward and wept over the boy, still on the guru’s lap. Compassion but not commiseration stood in the holy man’s eyes, a light hand falling on his wife’s shoulder.

Then it happened. At first, Travis thought it might be simple gravity, the turn of the boy’s hand—or a brush past it by Apadravya’s hand. But then it rose and gripped the woman’s arm, and the boy’s face was up and kissing his mother, her shuddering in amazement. And then they turned as, stumbling, she rose out of obscurity: There was blood between them, slick and new, her beige sweater red-icicled about the neck and her neck now below the ruin of her face a clutch-mouthed feast for her son.

The yoga teacher had risen and come forward, thinking clearly to separate them. But as soon as he laid his hand on the boy, it turned from its fallen mother and clung, an activated magnet, to him. Tar baby. He backpedaled. Too late. The bloodmasked dead boy was working its bloody way up the off-white cotton of his thigh.

Famished. An aching gape of hunger. Then, eyes in a scudded night opening. Dark lean-to. She peeled off from it, turning to rise, coat shrugged away and one thick numb gash bandoleered across her bloody front. Woozy thrumble, a catch on tombstone, neither cold nor hot at issue, but a hole into infinitude where her belly used to be. Mounded plots, spear-crunched under boot, slope gradual into black wink-gleam below. She led; she followed. A thing caromed against her, tumbled her groundward, scented her, stumbled on. She rose, followed sirens, lights, and a sear of cars scouring along Côte des Neiges. Down the mountain, down, down. Hunger flared.

Her journey was long.

It happened so fast. He and Laura sat stunned, eyes on the besieged yoga instructor, who fell under the chomp of the dead boy onstage in a bloody heap. They didn’t see his corpse-mother in one motion rise and fall upon the man sitting alone in the front row. His seat wrenched. Laura leaped up and Travis followed her leftward, shoving at the backs of those blocking the way: there was rude and there was necessary. Behind, the gutted yoga instructor rose to follow the toddler to the edge of the stage and over. The swami—one panicked look toward him sitting there with his legs crossed—was undergoing a titanic struggle and it was clear to Travis that his gentler side was losing. A woman screamed in the far aisle, and a high-pitched man shouted, “Keep your hands off mmmmrrrrh—!”

They gained the aisle. Travis glanced behind. The front-row guy was pulling himself up, bloody half-hands on his seatback. Red wattles drooped from one cheek. Jesus, why had they sat so near? The aisle ahead was jammed with panic: people shoved, fallen. To the right, a steel door with a bright red Emergency Exit sign, clogged with clever folks possessed by the same brilliant idea.

“This way,” said Travis, gambling on the side stairs to the stage. He shotgunned up them, reaching back a hand to Laura, pulling her free of the missed grasp of a newly risen ghoul. Ahead, the holy man was uncrossing his legs, a look of terrible conviction flaring upon his face. They veered left, past black hanging curtains, counting on some stage exit. Ropes and pulleys. A sound board. There it was, the way out. They took it. Stumbled down icy stairs into a dim-lit alley, Rue Mackay ahead if he was clear on where they were. They raced past dumpsters, light-pooled doorways, rounding northward out of the alley onto Mackay and straight into a moving crowd of hungry corpses, hands on Laura, hands on him, and then the cold crunch of teeth inevitable, biting deep.

Out the stage door, instinct shot his hand out to his wife.

“What?” she said, frantic. “This way,” said Travis and veered her rightward, down the alley away from Mackay, toward Bishop. Felt safer. Halfway in, past snow-crusted dumpsters, he glimpsed backward a mass of shamblers moving past the far alley-end. “Don’t look back,” he said, panic tight there, and Laura hunched her shoulders and quickened her pace to match his. Broke free of the alley’s grasp, a clear breath on Bishop, then past the Musée des Beaux-Arts and scurrying along Sherbrooke, eyes sharp, past Montagne, one more block to Drummond—crazy as it was, if a taxi had come along, he’d have hailed it—turned north, home plate, their building in sight. A few blocks away, Travis heard a brake-squeal, impact of metal on metal, horns flaring up inside the confused weave of sirens that had followed them home.

A large man was heading south toward them, confusion in his walk. “He’s too close,” Laura said. “Run,” Travis urged, and they did. He was poised to cut them off, blood glistening on his bald head. “Wait!” he shouted, a living man; “back there!” pointing in horror. “Sorry, can’t help you. We’ll call the police,” Travis said, stunned that he and Laura kept walking, diagonaling across the dusted lawn to their apartment door.

They might be dooming the sorry son-of-a-bitch. No matter.

Couldn’t get involved, no need for the inconvenience. Jesus, couldn’t he tell they had their own problems? Anyway, Travis really would call the cops, not that he expected they needed calling.

Closed the sucker out. He turned away from the front door, dismayed. “We should have—” Laura said and he told her he knew. He fumbled his keys, tried the wrong one, it was strange Marcie didn’t come to the door, found it, gave it a turn, heard the click, and felt the knob wrenched out of his grasp from within.

His eyelids eased open. Travis saw that. Glisten of dark pupils, motionless and glazed. It amazed him, a dead toddler—for of that there could be no doubt—assuming the skin tone and motion and sleepy disorientation of a living breathing three-year-old.

Laura gasped beside him. “Let’s get out of here.”

“But why—?”

“I’ll explain outside.” She was already rising. The woman’s face was wet with joy, her arms flung madly around her son.

Apadravya sat quiet, corpse capable of miracles, danger hair-triggered beneath calm.

Travis followed Laura to the aisle, stupidly ducking as if to render his leaving invisible. When they had made their way to the vestibule, he asked her—buttoning up his coat as she hers—what the problem was.

“He’s good,” she said, hitting the doorbar and moving out onto Bishop, “he’s very good.”

“The swami?”

“He always was a mindfucker, but this is too much.”

“What? The boy wasn’t—?”

“It’s why I lasted such a short time at the ashram.” He did his best to keep up with her. Crossing Sherbrooke, he had to pull her back from stepping into the path of an advancing car.

“He always seems so deeply holy, and never more so than tonight, even beneath that ridiculous makeup. But there’s always trickery lurking. Aysha—or Sherri as she was known before he arrived—wasn’t the only one. So wise, so warm, the man’s a snake. Even now, he’s a lure. I can see why I was drawn back tonight.”

“Almost. He almost had me. Bra undone. Exposed to him.

But he let slip a look he thought I wouldn’t see, a hunger. It was enough. I gathered up my things and left. Packed without telling anybody and knocked on my sister’s door in the middle of the night.”

Sirens whipped through the winter chill, but the bare night-time streets were magical and calm. “But Laura, I’m sure that kid was dead. How could a three-year-old—?”

“I don’t know. Apadravya’s hypnotic sometimes.”

Travis recalled his mind wandering into fantasies of one sort or another as he listened. Maybe she was right.

“And dead is dead. It’s not simply breathing, skin tone, the outward signs. There’s brain damage involved. Organ damage.

That child stood up there normal as could be. No, we were set up and I’m upset enough about it to cal the cops. They could probably deport him on charges of drugging that lit le boy.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“He has that effect on people.” Drummond at last. “Ah, home,” she said. “Lovely Jenny. Lovely Marcie.”

Brief surge of Marcie’s face and form. “I love them too.

You don’t suppose that tonight we might… ?”

“Might what?”

“You know,” he said. “What we talked about.”

“Dirty old man. Now who’s the Svengali?”

“Just say maybe, that’s all, maybe.”

The look Laura gave him was the type he wanted to pry off, it promised such sweets beneath the lidded tin of her eyes.

“Maybe,” she said coyly, and they were on their way up the walkway to the front door.

Wet thing cooled as Marcie munched, what she craved from it escaping through her teeth. Lost interest. She let the bunched bone-loose residue floop floorward.

Hint of sound back where she’d come from re-roused a need, same urgency, her bewilderment at the moist thing’s inability to satisfy displaced by the monotonic pounding of I-want in her brain. She retraced her lurch out into brightness, hallway, food photos, crimson twin in mirror, key-jiggle at the door, turn, snick of deadbolt. Caught the slippery knob, crimped it, instinctual twist and tug, quick swing open: the meat, corpus animus, bi-fold. She hooked at heads, her hands thrilling to the warm vibrancy of neckmeat; but her grip held fast and the roaring faces came closer as her neck went sideways like a lover coming in for a kiss and she shoved them, despite a bonetooth of resistance, deep inside her mouth—two ripe breasts vying for the same insistent D-cup.

“Home early, I see.” That smile. It made Travis’s heart do backflips.

“You know how it goes,” he said, following Laura’s terse uh-huh inside. “A certain lovely lady got fed up with a certain guru’s sleight of hand and—”

“And here we are,” said Laura, paused with a hanger.

“How was the little one?”

“Fine, fine. Slept all this time, not a whimper. I checked on her maybe half an hour ago. Dry as a bone.”

Inside, he was feathers in wind. “How about a glass of wine and some conversation before you go?”

“Why not?”

“Let me get it,” Laura offered, giving him a look he wished he could read. “White okay?” she asked, moving to the kitchen door, passing through it at their yeses.

Now, he thought, now. He considered coming up behind her, surprising her with a waistwrap. But she turned from the kitchen and there were those warm inviting eyes again. He held their gaze, opening to her as he approached, needs there yes, but also his naked integrity and his generosity toward her, his longing to comfort and embrace and incite her, to foment riots in her, to bubble her over and watch her glow and explode under his touch.

“What are you doing?” asked Marcie, and then her lips were there full and warm under his, and her amazingly lush body welled up beneath the press of textile. Peeling back off the kiss, he drifted to her ear, whispering there.

“You want me to?” she asked.

“She’s ready.”

“You’re sure.”

“Go on, you’ll see.”

She stepped away, stopped. “You’d better be right or you’re dead meat,” she said, then moved off.

“Don’t I know it.” Travis watched her go through the kitchen door. All he had, riding on this. Would she have the nerve to try? Or would they spar about one another as they pretended otherwise, chicken out, watch the evening’s possibilities fade? It was awfully quiet in there. Corks not popping, no plash of wine on glass, no murmur of small talk, nothing. Outside, the window-dimmed keen of sirens; inside, the beating of his heart.

He closed on the kitchen door, went in, turning right around the leather-tan shine of the fridge. His chest was thick with dread and wonder. And there they stood, corked bottle forgotten on the counter, Laura’s tight blond frame lovingly enfolded in Marcie’s embrace. Familiar kisses in murmur there before him, his wife’s yum-give-me-more under lips that still tingled at his.

Travis went to them, nice unhurried drift into female warmth that opened up to triangulate him. He kissed Laura long and deep, mirrored and modified it on Marcie’s mouth; cupped buttocks—flank of filly and mare—as the two women shared the moist secrets he’d pressed into their lips.

“Let’s go to the bedroom,” he suggested, voice husky as heated flannel.

“Honey? Shouldn’t we check on the baby?” Still shy, even now; and not a little woozy, as if the wine had found its way out of the bottle to her head.

“Not now,” he assured. “Time enough later.”

Then they moved off, riding the dream.

Aysha glowed, uncertain if she were awake or asleep. Rajib had concluded satsang quickly and she supposed she ought to feel guilt, but there was the fact of her living son, once dead and meatlike, now quick and warm, and Vish made all the rest of it inconsequential.

In the car, Rajib’s young countryman driving, she had reached past Vish’s thumbsuck to touch Rajib’s hand. Ooze of warm unguent, tingling as if irradiated. “Stay with us tonight,”

she said, “with me and Vish.” Rajib’s awareness flitted over his eyes like a long-legged fly over stagnant pond-water. Then he spoke to his driver and Aysha offered directions.

She made tea, carrying the tray in to where Vish sat, thumb in mouth, staring at his father and nodding his head to any question. The tea lay untouched in its pot, steam from the thick spout dying down. Aysha walked Vish to his bed, tucked him in, kissed him, tore herself away with the greatest reluctance.

Rajib sat precisely where she’d left him. She took his hand, clasped it palm to palm, pressing the dark back of it against her cheek—a faint sweet smel and a hint of foul. Four years rol ed back. His goodness seemed ever daunting, but he had never stopped her—and he didn’t do so now—from initiating intimacy. Aysha’s knees dimpled the sofa cushion beside him.

In the soft light of the oil lamp, he seemed almost alive.

His eyes tracked her. As she neared his face, slowly drifting in, she remembered how deep he got. Exponential.

Asymptotic. But where once there had been joys unbearable and intense, orgasms of eye and nose to presage the sexual delights to come, now the joys were darkly tinged. In his gaze was the daunt of a hurricane eye. Upon his lips, she tasted bitter forbiddenness. She pressed deeper, his cool tongue flexing in familiar response as she probed. At the taut tease of his bite, micro-struggle at jaw-hinge, Aysha withdrew, rose, took his hand, led him to her bedroom.

Beneath the accordion-shuttered window, upon the slap and sploosh of their waterbed, Travis and Laura took their new beloved first. Marcie melted under their happy chore, her hands idling nicely upon strokable flesh as they found their lingual ways into her hot spots. She gushed and she swelled—and her release, a cataclysmic upheaval of seized and frenzied womanhood, delighted Travis to the depths.

Unlike Laura, who dishragged into limpness for a time after orgasm, Marcie tigered up supercharged from hers and dove for the sweet loins of his wife. Laura’s giggle soon gave way to her yummy lip-gnawing sounds, woven with wind-howls from outside and the rattle of glass above. He gave her a deep kiss, asked her, mid-squinch, if she was having a good time, took her nostril-wheezy devour of a kiss as a positive response, and that then turned into an inhalation presaging the luff and buffet of her coming.

His ear teased him. He thought he heard the scrunch, slow and covered by woman-delight, of snow outside, almost as if someone were approaching the window. Then, shatters to scare the shit out of him, as the wood-slatted shutters angle-arced open over him like twinned jib-swings, booming right and left to let in a stinging spray of glass, abrupt waves of waspish pain carried in on unspeakable stench and winter cold.

Marcie’s back welled crimson under triangles of glass. Laura was screaming, trying to gain her balance on the waterbed, trying to cast off the cracked glaze that coated her torso. But then invader-stench hooked Travis’s nose, and through the misted ache of his unblinded eye, he saw the jag-torso’d dead woman crawl through the window to lay claim to their lives.

Aysha undressed. She unwrapped her lover beside her bed, oil-lit dark skin oily and cool beneath her fingers, his clothing slick with savory-smelling unguent. Decades of hatha yoga had slimmed and toned his body, reminding her always, and especially now, of Jesus on the cross.

“I’ve missed you, Rajib,” she said softly.

“It is good to be with you,” came his reply.

She put her arms around him, standing there, and felt his hands lightly slat above the small of her back. White skin to brown, blond hair to black. Lovely naked embrace, full body.

He was soft below where she remembered whippet hardness, thin sickle of dogtail roused. Her fondling did nothing. She fell to her knees, kissing a quiescent chest and abdomen, no breath there, just aromatic sheens of ooze like ancient spices preserving a corpse. Dark pubic wire. The small retired wrinkle of Rajib’s penis. Aysha took it in like a second tongue, all of it, bathing it with saliva but to no avail. It had a subtle sweetness about it, like salt-sweet taffy, and the tip oozed drops of liquid manna, rolled like honeyed wine on her tongue before sliding down her throat.

“No blood,” Rajib said, resting his hands on her bare shoulders. “No hardening. Lie down. And I will pleasure you.”

She obeyed, settling on the cool blanket and watching the dark form of her husband part her thighs with bonelike steady hands, blessing her womanhood with his eyes. Lower he went, half on the bed, half off, until his lips touched her labia and his nose and forehead settled into a beloved pattern of duck and rise. She watched him as the feelings began, connecting with his eyes as in the old days, but in them, there cowered that dead thing she’d first noticed on the stage. It gleamed in oil-light. It thrilled, mingled there with his kindness. No breath on her yoni, no coming up for air, just movement and steady rise, soft sly tongue on her clitoris, then teeth, something new, upper teeth to lower trapping the wet nub, slick of cool tongue traveling to and fro, but the stiff enamel pressure crossed the line from pleasure to pain.

“No teeth,” she said. He had taken her hands, as in the past, holding them at her sides, gentling her fingers.

Something sharp in his eyes. He eased off. His brow rose abruptly and she saw mustache and lip and teeth above the curl of her private hair. And then, like a rot weiler let loose, he lunged in and down. His hands closed on her hands, kept closing, crushing bone against bone. Bites of outrage ravaged her sex. Frantic with struggle, she tried her best to escape him, but it was useless: he was strong beyond mortal strength and his black locks flew hither and yon, all glistening with blood. Fear frenzied her, and in the midst of her frenzy she felt her bladder let go inside her red-runnered belly. A bloody gush of urine fountained against his face, awash over eyes which did not blink.

“No teeth,” she said.

At once he eased off. Tongue again played slickly at her sex, its nub tip-tormented by tonguetip. Rajib’s dead eyes shone a dark bloodlight of awareness across the heave and roll of her body. So tender did his corpse-hands move upon her palms and fingers, and with such love, that Aysha felt his touch travel to her nipples, tighten them, a pure twin lick of love unstinting.

Haloed shadows lapped in an array of grays on the ceiling glow, one barely substantial nimbus bobbing like a projection of Rajib’s spirit. Focus rose to that nimbus, its rhythm, as each sensual wavecrash tumbled quicker upon the last, and again, and yet quicker, until there was nothing to do but yield up into the lovely god-glow with heart and mind and soul.

Feathering down, she gathered him up to lie upon her, naked brown corpse more caring than any living lover she’d ever had. His long dark locks tickled her shoulders. And though he slabbed upon her, no arhythmic answer to her in-out of breath, the dance of consciousness in his eyes made her cadaveric embrace all right, nothing freakish about it nor anything perverse: What, after all, animated her from moment to moment? And what distinguished her from him but breath and blood and rates of decay?

Outside, a siren screamed by. Its passing made Aysha aware of the distant weave of sirens in every direction, a thick blanket now, once tentative and threadbare.

“It’s starting,” he said, emotion unreadable as ever. “It seems that I have come too late.”

She hugged him fiercely, suddenly afraid, wishing her touch could do for him what he had done for their son. In her dead lover’s arms, she wept.

Their screams mingled, Marcie’s and Laura’s and his.

Muffled flesh. Shoots of liquid falling everywhere. Arm and elbow flying, warm buttock, wet red hair matted about fingerfucked cuntmouth, hands hot and gone, waterbed slap under greenhouse coziness and the ecstatic shouts of love newborn. They settled down slowly, in a heap, a wild tea party, un-Poppinsesque, bumping the ceiling in an ecstatic display of belly-laughter before parachuting downward.

Sirens whiffled in the distance.

“A restless night,” said Laura.

“With any luck!” said Marcie, fruity alto laughter on the follow-up.

“Wow,” offered Travis, mind-blown. “Wow, wow, double wow!”

“Articulate as always.”

“Where have we been all our lives?” he wondered.

“Um,” said Marcie, “on our way here?”

“I guess.”

Laura surprised him: “I love you guys a whole heap.”

“Same here.” Gratitude in their neighbor’s voice.

“And I love the fuck out of you two.”

Quick Marcie: “As long as you also fuck the love out of us as frequently and as diligently as you can.”

“Oh, Jesus in heaven, what have we here!” He thought then of the baby. “We ought to check on Jenny.”

Laura groaned. “I guess I’d better. No need for you two to get out of bed.”

“No, I mean I want all three of us to go.” He warmed to the idea. “No clothing, just as we are, hugged through the apartment, shushing one another into Jenny’s room, and peeking into the bassinet. I want to hold you close. I’d like to touch your beautiful naked flanks under moonlight, as Jenny sleeps below.”

They grumbled, but they acquiesced.

The air in the baby’s room was warm and close, but it concentrated his daughter’s perfect smell and that was one virtue in it at least. She looked the perfect angel lying there.

Travis reared back at the pungency of the stench, an oh-no alarming in his head. “My baby,” Laura gasped, then rushed in. Marcie followed and Travis came after, praying it wasn’t what he feared.

Laura lifted the limp child in her arms, a wet bundle of laundry. Travis snapped on the overhead: no blinkback of light from the baby, not even a brief squeeze of closed eyelids.

He saw the reddish froth at Jenny’s nostrils and mouth. From the floor, the space heater roared obscenely.

“Quick,” said Marcie. “The changing table.” Box of tissues, whip-whip-whip, wiping the froth away, gentle but quick.

Then Laura’s mouth came down upon her child’s.

Travis felt helpless, paralyzed. Standing beside his wife, he steadied the baby’s forehead, useless gesture but something.

It was cold and dead. He saw the tiny fingers with their blue-tinged nails. His head swelled in the bad heat of the room.

Abruptly, near where his hands held dead temples, the baby’s eyes flew open; and her mouth lit into Laura’s face like a weasel-toothed hair-clipper plowing out of control, gone from his hands. Up her cheek the mouth pranced, path of red gouge gurgling Laura’s screams. There by the table he and Marcie tried to wrestle her away, waltzing absurdly against the table edge as if it were crucial that they not drift too far from it.

Behind them, the window imploded jags of winter night upon them, an angled torrent of glass filling the air, and then, in plain sight behind his lovers, a young dead woman dragged herself over jagged shards, white red-zipped torso snagging there but coming on anyway, bringing in hordes of stenched dead in her wake. His dead infant unlatched from Laura and dove for him like screaming hell, the bright air no barrier to its bloody-mouthed leap.

What the fuck is happening here, was the thought that spun in his brain as the side of his face lit up, what the fucking blue blazes is happening here?

Perfection. Things had come together just as he had hoped they would. Jenny, sleeping peacefully below in her bassinet, held a lifetime’s promise beneath those precious eyelids. After ages of lust for his upstairs neighbor, he had enjoyed her and found her overwhelmingly more sensuous than his most detailed jag-fant of her. And there wasn’t, no not in the slightest, an iota of jealousy—if anything, he found an amazingly complementary desire—in Laura.

A snap at Jenny’s window. He veered his head.

“What, silly?” Laura said.

“That sound startled me.” A tracery of white webbing made the pane appear fractured.

“Just sub-zero stuff.”

But he unhugged them and crossed the warm rug and off on cold floorboards in the moonlit room, peering out upon the smooth blue drifts in the alley, the windowless brick facade over yonder. Utter peace. Marcie, drifting behind him, swept to his left, gentling a hand on his shoulder, a thigh hot against his thigh. “What’s out there?”

“Not a thing, sweet love. Just deep freeze and a lot of sleeping souls.” Even the sirens had stopped.

Laura joined them, her hands like tickling lilies at their waists, her hip-lyre at their buttocks. Saying not a word, she kissed his left shoulder and rested her cheek there, hairfall a new tickle. Travis, replete with peace and contentment, raised a hand to the window, benedictive gesture, felt the wall of cold air an inch away, touched a palmpress to the surface frost, drew away. Marvelous, how thin the barrier was between unsurvivability and a perfect moment. He was grateful, beyond gratitude, to be standing on this side of that barrier, safe, loved, an heir to such bounty as he’d never known could exist on this earth.

It happened when he kissed Marcie’s cheek. A sudden insuck of breath, the pulling tight of soft flat belly at his right palm where it lay above her Brillo-flare of red private hair. He swerved up to look, caught a glimpse of blue-puffed flesh, but was buffeted by the cold coming in on a shatter of glass, nothing there, a flicker of dream, everything there, too sudden the assault, the rag-wrapped gnarled knuckles smashing through triangling glass to lay claim to his life. Flat pane onto empty alley. A flying mass of forced shards and the influx of stench and bodies and hands and mouths coming in too fast to react to. His wife reaching under his cleft to brush against his balls, feeling his prick stiffen in response. The insuck of air filled with slashes of glass and a naked woman—scored at torso like a zipper of guts—diving in to kiss a visegrip chaw deep into his turned cheek. “Let’s go back to bed,” Marcie wantoned into his ear, as, giddying upon a peak of ecstasy, he gazed at a zigzag of bricks over yonder. His legs failed him under the flying assault of his attacker, her arms impossibly strong, her face fastened to his where it bit and tore. Beneath his attempts to scream, his eyes caught Laura, pinned under a half-formed male monstrosity, whose huge meaty hand boned into her breast and ripped it up and away like a flesh balloon filled with pudding, its mouth its goal as Laura screamed and resisted him without effect. Baby Jenny gave a tiny cry of protest, then fell silent, and Travis shared a smile with his lovers. “She’s okay, I think,” he said, “and I bet the three of us could find something nice to do in the other room.” A vision of hunger flickered at the window, nothing, the startle of an eyeblink, emptiness out there. “Help me,” Marcie shouted, but he couldn’t turn and a winterfall of cold air and meat gone way bad assaulted his senses as hands gripped one leg and raised it up to a mouth, and a dead tongue brushed the toes of his other foot. Not a sound outside. The sharded air screamed with sirens, police and ambulance, firetrucks and air attack, a doomsday medley of wails at each other’s throats in a threnody of pain. The women dropped to their knees, backed Travis’s butt onto the cold sill, mouthed at his shaft with teasing warm wet lips and tongue, while his shoulderblades touched and shied away from the flat frosty pane of glass.

Smash to either side and a give as if it’d been open all this time, tumbling backward, then yanked by brute force through and back into an alley full of subway-packed shuffling forms.

They tugged him down onto the rug and one impaled herself on him while the other pussied at his face, Laura’s taste, and from above came the sounds of kissing as Marcie pistoned about his penis, and his tongue did a new-angled, newfangled dance at clit and labia. The woman bit and tore mercilessly at his jaw, and the pain of teeth closing on foot and thigh lit up his head and forced his muscles to the straining point. But then a shambleman loomed up and arrowed down into his belly, a clutch there like food poisoning cramping him up, but from the outside. And it got worse and worse, not subsiding for a breather, but attacking deeper and with pain unending.

Laura came, burrowing and rocking at his mouth so that for a spell he couldn’t breathe, but then he maneuvered his nose in time for Marcie’s climax—Laura having fingered her clit where he and Marcie groined together—and he shot his seed deep into her, his moans muted by the wet luff of Laura’s cunt. He died there on that rug, red bleed on gray, grave-soiled tufts of fabric. They collapsed upon him, laughing at the freeing licentiousness of their hearts, doubled femininity asquirm where it most mattered. Rising, swim of the room into his ken, he watched Laura feeding the baby to Marcie and the others. Its bawling had torn free of siren scowl, but now ripped down into stillness. He kissed their hands and whispered “I love you” into Marcie’s then Laura’s ear, then left Jenny’s room with them, softly closing the door while blowing his sleeping girl a kiss. Bladder and bowel gave way then in the overheated room, but it would be four hours too late before the door again opened. And he went, ravenous, for the smashed window, dragging himself across the shards of glass, watching indifferently one arm slice open like dark gristled meat detaching from chicken wing, lunging away from the window-shattered warmth and on into the unending hunger of a long winter’s night.