The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

THIEF OF NAMES by Lucy Taylor

Afterwards, Nicholas wondered how he could have ever thought the little blonde with the tattoo on her tit could have been worth the risk she posed to his marriage, his self-respect, and – as it turned out – so much more. Yet still, there was that moment of insanity when he actually debated the point, before admitting that nothing could have been worth what the encounter cost him. It was that second’s hesitation, though, that gave an indication of how much Nicholas Berringer valued sex – or at least what sex represented to him. Fucking, to him, had always meant freedom and conquest and masculine power. Even when consensual, the act was at heart, forced entry and violent gratification, the plundering of empty space by protuberant member. It was also safety and solace and the warm dark heart of his mother’s womb, the sacred place where there was no Nicholas, where nothing was named and there was only One.

Although he would not have put it quite that way. Had he been asked, he would have simply said that fucking made him feel alive, gave him the willingness to make the effort of drawing the next breath. He would have said that, as exclamation points marked memorable sentences, so erections punctuated the climactic points of a man’s life.

Now, as he drove well above the speed limit on I-75 in the pouring rain, headed toward the Ambassador Bridge and the US/Canadian border at Detroit-Windsor, he wondered if trying to track down Sonny Valdez wasn’t the journey of a masochistic fool, a pathetic attempt to feel like he was taking charge, doing something, for God’s sake, to try to save his own life.

I’m going to ask Sonny Valdez for help, he thought, grimacing at the irony of it, for he could scarcely stand to inhabit the same planet as the man. The three best years of his life, of his marriage, had been when he believed that Sonny Valdez was dead, having expired wretchedly in some flophouse in Toronto’s commercial sex district. But Valdez, as it turned out, was still very much alive, and now Nicholas needed his help. Jesus, I am fucked, he thought bitterly, I am truly royally fucked.

“Do you like to fuck?” the cute blonde in the blue satin blouse had asked him.

Her exact words. He’d almost dumped his beer in his lap. She had to be a hooker, of course, but still – talk about coming on strong.

She read his expression and giggled, showing slightly crooked front teeth. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a working girl. Well, I mean I work, all right. I work on a road construction crew. I’m what they call a flagger, which basically means I’m one of those chicks stands out in the broiling sun on the highway all day holding a sign says Slow Down and the good ol’ boys goin’ by in pick-up trucks holler at us and try to grope our tits out the window.”

“I never knew that,” he said, quietly bemused.

“I don’t usually talk to guys in bars, either, but my boyfriend – ex-boyfriend, that is – he’s off with some trailer trash whore he met in a honkytonk. I figure what’s sauce for the gander’s goose is – I mean, sauce for the goose -” She giggled raucously. “Aww, you know what I mean.”

She was drunk, of course, and he reminded himself that he didn’t care much for sex with drunken women. They had nasty habits like throwing up on your cock or passing out in the middle of sex. They tended to walk off with your Rolex or look through your wallet when you went to the John.

“So do you?” she said.

“Do I what?”

“You know.”

“What you said?”

“What’sa matter, you scared to say the F-word?”

“I think you’ve had too much to drink.” He turned to the bartender, signaling for his check. He was only in Cincinnati for the one day to look at some lots zoned for residential development. The lots had proved disappointing – people in the market for half-million dollar homes didn’t usually want a view, however distant, of an industrial park – and he was scheduled to fly home to Detroit the next morning. Beth was going in late to work so she could meet him at the airport.

Beth – God, what about Beth? If she had been homely or overweight or uninterested in sex, that might have been one thing, but she was lush and lithe and seductive and fucked the way he did – like her life depended on it. Every time he cheated on her, he swore to himself it would be the last time. Afterwards, he would go to church like the good Catholic boy he once was and confess to the priest and vow to be different: yet, sooner or later, it would happen again.

“C’mon, honey, you look like you need to relax.” The girl leaned forward, allowing him to look down her blouse and see the tattoo of a bumblebee on the inner swell of one breast. It was done in vivid black and yellow, its stinger pointing downward at her nipple. “I can help you relax real good.”

“I’ll bet you can.” He debated, but only a moment, for his dick had already decided that she was his type. Her slender, sinewy little body was thinner than he would have preferred, but she exuded that slutty decadence that always made him feel like a conqueror on the verge of sacking some foreign city notorious for its depravity. Eau de wench, essence of whore.

Having made the decision, he felt emboldened, eyeing her up and down with overt and calculating lust, before he said, “But regarding your question, the answer is, ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ ”

Was it his imagination, or did she flinch slightly? Maybe she’d just been trying to shock him. Maybe this was some kind of game – somebody had dared her to come on to a man in a bar, and secretly she’d been hoping he wouldn’t take her up on her offer. For a second, her lower lip quivered, and her boldness seemed on the verge of disassembling into little-girl sobs. Then she rallied, took a deep breath, and seemed to pull herself together from sheer force of will. From the looks of the effort she exerted, it didn’t seem like she had it in her to do that too many more times.

“My name’s Elise.” She slid her fingers through his. Her skin, he noticed, was surprisingly cold, but she managed a grin as she said, “You got a room?”

“718.”

“You got a wife?”

Now it was his turn to grin. “Not tonight.”

The rain hammered the windshield of the Volvo with such force that the wipers couldn’t work fast enough to sweep it away. A semi, lumbering past like a maddened triceratops, sent up an arc of grey water that inundated the car and forced Nicholas for a few moments to drive blind. When he saw the lights of immigration at the Detroit-Windsor border crossing up ahead, he braked cautiously and pulled up next to a booth, where an immigration agent, after glancing perfunctorily at his license plates, waved him on.

Accelerating back into the rain, Nicholas let out his breath which, until that moment, he didn’t realize he’d been holding.

Although his business trips took him to Toronto three or four times a year, he was always absurdly relieved when it was done, when no need was seen to run his name through the computer to check for misdeeds in his past. Even if the immigration agents pulled his record and realized it was a convicted felon passing through their country’s symbolic portals, there was nothing they could hold him on, of course. In the years since he got out of prison, he hadn’t committed any crime more serious than minor traffic violations. But if they knew about his past, they might be inclined to detain him while they searched him and his car. And this time, for once, there was something for them to find – the 0.9 mm Biretta stashed in the vehicle’s console.

By five o’clock that evening, Nicholas was in Toronto, sipping a Scotch and soda in his lakefront room at the Harbor Castle. He debated whether or not to call Beth, but hated having to add to the web of lies he’d already conceived. Supposedly, he was up here at some kind of Home Builders Convention and would be home Sunday night. Should he need more time, he’d have to invent an explanation for the extended stay and hope Beth wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Too early to hit any of Sonny Valdez’s haunts just yet. He knew he should eat something, but appetite was a memory, these days. His head hurt. He ran cold water over a washcloth and laid it over his eyes as he stretched out on the bed. Outside, the rain was still pounding, grey metallic teeth gnashing against the panes. In the street below, sirens screamed.

When they went up to Nicholas’s room at the Cincinnati Sheraton, the girl – Elise – gigglingly chugged two of the little bottles of Scotch out of the minibar while Nicholas unbuttoned her blouse and reveled in the enchanting sounds of her skirt zipper going down and her silk stockings unrolling. Naked, she was even thinner than he expected, and the untanned areas of her skin stood out in pasty contrast to the rest of her body’s dark, glossy-looking bronze.

Appraising her, Nicholas reflected that she was certainly no prettier or sexier than Beth; her body hinted at no mysteries to be uncovered or exotic depravities to be unleashed, nor did he get any inkling of a psyche ariot with new and perverse fantasies. Indeed, if anything, there was a certain sad banality to the girl, as though she were somehow grievously miscast in her role as a slut, a tramp, an easy piece of ass.

And yet, for all that, Nicholas could no more not fuck her than he could have not fucked the women who had preceded her. Like a compulsive gambler viewing a slot machine or a lottery ticket, for Nicholas, each new sexual encounter seemed to promise the possibility of some as-yet-undreamed-of ecstasy. Each pussy was the potential passage to some state of higher bliss that flickered across his mind in dreams and yet always eluded him.

He went over to the bureau and unzipped his shaving kit.

She looked up. “What are you doing?”

“Condom,” Nicholas said.

She came up behind him, smooshed her tits into his back. “I hate those things. C’mon, you don’t have to worry. I’m just a nice girl getting back at her cheating boyfriend. You don’t need to wear a rubber.”

He turned around to say something sarcastic about what “nice girls” do and don’t do, and she dipped to her knees, his dick disappearing into the tight seal of her mouth, his mental processes magically unraveling.

After that, they did all the things Nicholas enjoyed most – with a few other things thrown in for extra. He fucked her standing up, her spine pressed into the wall, while she stood up on her toes and dug her nails into his shoulders, moaning. Then on the bed, driving himself between those ivory tits, until the bumblebee was covered in come that looked like droplets of honey.

When her eyes started to close and she grew sleepy and sated, Nicholas shook her and said, “We’re only getting started. You asked me, do I like to fuck? I’ll show you just how much.”

He flipped her over then and fucked her from the rear, butt raised, head buried in a pillow. For the last half dozen or so thrusts, he put his hands down on her back and leaned his weight into her. Took note that she must be used to rough stuff, because she didn’t protest, but took what had to be a painful compression of her ribcage stoically, drawing in tiny gasps of air as best she could.

“Like that?” he asked when he was finished for the moment. Recovered from her near-asphyxiation, she snuggled against a pile of pillows and opened up a bourbon from the minibar.

“Christ, you sure can fuck.” Her smile was sly and silly, a drunken smile, and yet threaded through with something else, contempt or fear, something dark and ugly that he tried to pretend he didn’t see. The cheating boyfriend, he supposed. Her anger at the boyfriend spreading out like the hood of a cobra, directed at any man that came within her line of vision.

Reaching for something to say, he remarked, “You look like you spend a lot of time in the sun. What do you do, flag cars in a bikini and a hardhat?”

“Tanning booths.”

“Those are bad for you.”

“Yeah, they give you skin cancer.” She laughed giddily. “But look who’s talking.”

She started to unscrew another of the tiny bourbon bottles. He took it from her. “Enough, OK. I don’t want you to pass out on me. You won’t be any fun to fuck.”

“How about your wife, Nicholas? Is she any fun to fuck? Or is she fat and frigid or maybe fucking someone else, even as we speak?”

“Don’t talk about my wife. You don’t know anything about her.”

“What is it, she don’t satisfy you?” The honey in her voice was laced with venom. “Aww, Nicholas’s wife won’t fuck him, so he has to cheat.”

He grabbed her arm, gripping it tight enough to get her attention, but stopping just short of causing pain. He wanted her to know he was playing, but also to realize he could shortcut play and go straight to something a lot stronger, a lot more serious, real damn fast.

“Yeah, I cheat on her with little blonde sluts who come on to strange men in bars.”

“I never do this kind of thing.”

“I know, you were a virgin till just now. I could tell the minute I saw you.”

She tried to extricate her arm from his grip. He tightened it a fraction, taking pleasure in the hint of fear that crossed her features, then let her go. She rubbed her biceps, glared.

“That hurt.”

“Sometimes I like to make it hurt.”

“Aw, you’re no fun.”

“I beg to differ. Why don’t you pour what’s left of the booze you didn’t drink over your tits, so I can lick it off?”

He still remembered the rich, dizzyingly sweet taste of the bourbon as it dribbled down her deep cleavage, the scent of her sweat and her floral perfume. He remembered having fleeting thoughts about Beth at home in Detroit and asking himself, “What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this?” even as he was getting hard again, turning the girl over onto her hands and knees, roughly prying open the cheeks of her buttocks, and ramming himself inside.

And later, although normally he liked to keep some lights on, liked to see a woman looking freshly fucked, he made the room darker as she was getting dressed, because he didn’t want to see her eyes. Something in them, the despair and shame that was also tainted with that ugliness he’d noticed earlier – not directed just at Nicholas personally, but at men in general – filled him with a queasy kind of fear.

He watched CNN until a little after ten, then drove away from the waterfront lined with clean, brightly lit luxury hotels to the narrow, congested little lanes where the sex trade thrived. The sleaze end of the sex trade, anyway.

Toronto was a city where you could find anything, and Nicholas, at one time or another, in one capacity or another, had provided or partaken of all. As he drove the depressingly familiar streets, he saw that nothing had changed significantly since his days here – the whores still strutting on stiletto-thin spikes, the prancing drag queens in glitter and fake fur and tiny, tight leather skirts, the hustlers cold-eyed and crotch-heavy, sexy dangerous. Fuck me, fuck me, buy me, buy me – the eternal mantra of desire and despair.

The rain had tapered off, leaving a chilly moistness in the late summer air and grey, glassy puddles. Nicholas parked the car under a stoplight and walked up Yonge Street, checking in sex parlors and bookstores and gay clubs as he went. Valdez’s name elicited little response in those he queried, other than occasionally, feigned ignorance followed by a sudden, apparently urgent, need to be somewhere else.

“Sonny Valdez? Yeah, I know him. But didn’t that fucker croak years ago? Didn’t he have heart cancer, dick cancer – or maybe he just was a cancer?”

The slant-eyed woman who was speaking was a sodden wreck, breasts like huge jellyfish that swayed beneath her see-through blouse, a pendulous belly, eyes ringed with grey-yellow smudges. She sat at the end of the bar in the Cha Cha Lounge and tried to pick up guys, and people moved their seats to get away from her.

“No, Sonny Valdez didn’t die,” said Nicholas. “He was supposed to die. They let him out of fucking prison so he could go home to die, but then he didn’t die.”

The woman eyed him with bleary, wet-brain eyes. “So you already know that, then why you asking me?”

“I need to find him.”

“You want sweet pussy, you don’t need Sonny for that: you found it right here.” She leered and spread her bloated thighs, thumped a hand on her crotch.

Nicholas threw down some money for his drink and headed for the door. The barmaid, a tiny girl with crooked lips and short, raggedy black hair, dashed after him. The expression on her face was so intense he thought that, in his haste to escape, he must have miscalculated his tab.

“You after Sonny?”

“I’m not after him. I want to find him, though.”

“Wellll… maybe…”

He pulled out his wallet, counted off a trio of bills.

“Where is he?”

“He’s got a suite at the Mayflower Hotel.”

“A suite? Last time I saw Sonny, he was holed up in a fleabag hotel without a pot to piss in.”

“He was sick, then. Now that he’s back on his feet, he’s got business deals going again. Entrepreneurial endeavors, he calls them.”

Nicholas snorted. “Right. Anything you can snort, shoot, smoke, or fuck, Sonny’s got a hand in it. How do you know the son-of-a-bitch, anyway?”

“I do him favors. Bring him his groceries a coupl’a times a week. Hold his hand, suck his dick, listen to him babble.”

Nicholas felt a twinge of alarm. “The cancer – it didn’t come back?”

“Oh, no, he’s healthy,” she said, “but he don’t like to go outside if he don’t have to. His head’s fucked up. He’s scared of something, scared so bad he don’t even want to talk about it.”

He’s healthy. How those words sang in Nicholas’s head. How ironic, given how fervently he’d once wished Sonny Valdez dead.

A few years back, he’d actually gone up to Toronto just to see for himself that what he’d heard was true, that Sonny had been released from prison, where he’d done five years of a twelve-year stretch for drug dealing so he could come home to die. Nicholas had wanted to be sure. He’d told Beth that Sonny was a buddy from his old neighborhood in Chicago, and he was going up to Toronto to pay his respects. Which, in a weird way, he supposed was true.

He’d found Sonny much as he’d imagined he’d be, living in one room of a hotel for the indigent subsidized by the government, looked in on by a sour-faced Filipino hospice worker who barely spoke English. By the time he got there, even to an untrained eye, it was obvious that death was on the verge of crawling into bed with Sonny. He lay staring at a tiny TV set, eyes rheumy, vacant, skin the color and texture of old newspaper. He didn’t recognize Nicholas, but kept both hands underneath the dirty sheet, rubbing at himself as though his flaccid dick were an Aladdin’s lamp from which a genie or orgasm might yet appear.

Nicholas took a long look, saw what he wanted to see, then muttered under his breath “Rot in hell, Sonny,” and turned to leave.

He didn’t think that Valdez could even hear him and was shaken when the man said, in a cracked, tortured voice, “Maybe so. But you’ll get there before me, motherfucker.”

The false bravado of a dying man, Nicholas had thought. The cancer coring out his brain along with his vocal cords.

Although he bought the Toronto paper for a few weeks after that, he never saw any notice of Sonny’s death: but then, why should he? How many drug-dealing pimps rate a paragraph in the obituary column anyway?

With Sonny presumably gone, Nicholas had exhaled a three-year long sigh of relief. The scumbag he’d once run drugs for was dead, which meant he didn’t have to fear his former colleague’s long-term propensity for vileness. Didn’t have to worry about Sonny reappearing in his life, exposing parts of his sordid history that not even Beth knew about or trying to blackmail him with the threat of doing so.

It wasn’t Sonny who turned up from his past, however, but an ex-con named Danny Sorenson, a guy who’d been a buddy of Nicholas’s when they were growing up in Chicago. Sorenson hustled luxury cars, stealing them in Detroit, selling them in Miami or Fort Lauderdale. He was imprudent enough to be driving one such stolen vehicle when, looped on crack, he pulled his first and last bank robbery. When Nicholas went to prison, Danny had just gotten transferred down to Canon City Penitentiary in Colorado, after serving two years of a ten-year stretch in Michigan. He’d known Sonny Valdez there. Had, in fact, been Sonny’s little helper in various blackmarket scams.

His first December out of the can, Danny got hold of Nicholas’s number and gave him a call. Christmas time and Danny was lonely and looking for somebody to get shitfaced with.

“No, thanks,” said Nicholas, making a mental note to tell Beth they needed an unlisted number. Then, by way of emphasizing his new, domesticated lifestyle, he’d added, “The wife’s from Toronto. She and I are driving up there to spend Christmas with her family.”

“Hey, that’s an idea,” said Danny drunkenly. “Maybe I’ll head up to Toronto myself, see does old Sonny Valdez know some girls can suck dick like a vacuum cleaner.”

“Sonny’s dead,” said Nicholas. “Cancer. Got let out of prison to die.”

“Yeah, well, I guess he’s resurrected,” Danny said, “ ’cause I seen Sonny less’n a month ago. Slidin’ out of a taxi on King Street with some Asian cookie on his arm.”

Nicholas remembered the wasted wreck of a man he’d visited three years earlier. “Don’t bullshit me, Danny. He’s dead.”

“Man, I talked to him. Asked him what the hell was he doin’ alive. He said he found the magic cure. His head’s fucked up, though. You know what he wanted? He asked me to say his name. Just like that. His name. Over and over, while this Asian chick was rolling her eyes, and I’m saying Sonny Valdez, that’s your fucking name, and he’s holding onto my arm, saying, say it, say my name, say it again… And then I mention you, and was that a mistake! He goes off on a rant – said you rolled on him, that hadn’t’a been for you he’d a never gone to prison.”

“Bullshit!”

“Yeah, well, like I said, his head’s fucked up.”

They talked for a few more minutes, Danny wanting to reminisce about prison days, Nicholas wanting nothing more than to get off the phone. Later on, he tried to convince himself that Danny Sorenson was drunk or drugged when he had his encounter with “Sonny”, but it didn’t fly. Bizarre as Danny’s tale was – because of that very off-the-wall bizarreness – there was a ring of truth to it.

And if Sonny Valdez was still alive, there was the chance he might just show up at the door one day and introduce Beth to the Nicholas Berringer she didn’t know – and probably didn’t want to.

The Mayflower Arms was one of the small, swank, boutique-hotels located in the Yorkville district, northwest of Bloor Street. As expensive as it was unsubtle, the lobby Nicholas entered was gilded like a Russian Easter egg, appointed with heavy, dark velvet furniture and Rococo lamps whose shades were supported by languidly stretching nymphs and pirouetting ballerinas. Whatever else was going on with Sonny, he wasn’t hurting for money any longer.

The artfully made-up woman behind the front desk spoke with a French accent so thick it was almost unintelligible, but the fact that she resembled a young Sophia Loren made asking her to repeat herself a pleasure.

Nicholas gave her his real name and was relieved when she rang Sonny’s suite and, evidently, was told to send Nicholas on up. Apparently, Sonny had forgotten the image of Nicholas hovering at his death bed a few years earlier, murmuring “rot in hell”.

The elevator was of the old-fashioned cage design only large enough to accommodate two people. As Nicholas ascended, he found himself imagining how it would be to fuck a woman in such close quarters and such potentially embarrassing circumstances. He thought about Elise, who had come into his life and shattered it and disappeared into the night again like some kind of succubus and about what he’d like to do to her if she were here. Decided the only thing more satisfying than fucking her would be strangling her at the same time.

“What’s this?” Elise had said, looking at the money Nicholas put on the dressing table as though she’d never seen currency before. “I told you, I’m not a hooker.”

“Take it,” he said. “I’d feel better.”

“I hate taking something from somebody when I don’t give nothing back,” she’d said. An odd comment, he’d thought, coming from a woman he’d just spent the last few hours boinking.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, you gave me plenty.”

She cocked her head, pursed her cupie-doll mouth, pinned him to the wall with her blank blue stare. “Well, you know, you may be right, Nicky. Maybe I did.”

The elevator groaned open. He didn’t need to look for Sonny’s door. It was already open, the view within obscured by the portly drug-dealer’s squat bulk. He wore white sweat pants, a white sweat shirt and running shoes – an outfit which, considering the fact that he must weigh close to two hundred and fifty pounds now, gave him the air of a thuggish gnome. A highball glass, clinking with ice cubes, was in one hand.

“Nicky-boy, long time, no see.” Despite the distinctly unwelcoming tone, he extended a spade-shaped hand. “To what do I owe the honor of this impromptu social call?”

“I heard you were still alive, and I wanted to see for myself.”

“Then this is a social call?”

“Not exactly. You gonna let me in?”

Sonny’s face split into two portions, the grinning mouth below, the eyes, fraught with hate and cunning, above. Guardedly, like someone relishing a private joke, he motioned Nicholas in.

They sat opposite each other, in fat-cushioned chairs with an absurdly fragile-looking glass-topped coffee table between them, hunched over like men closing a questionable deal. Sonny drank gin. Nicholas had a Scotch, which he intended to nurse, but ended up swigging down like soda in an effort to make this encounter less unbearable.

For his part, Sonny chugged his drink like a man facing a firing squad the next morning. He filled his glass again, leaned back, stroked his scruffy beard. “You look good, Nicky-boy. You look – respectable, prosperous. You must be proud of yourself. From a hot-looking young street kid to drug-dealer to hard-timer to – look at you now, what are you, thirty-five? – a well-dressed businessman, probably married to some sweet woman who has no idea about your past. You are married, am I right? Her name’s Beth, I believe.”

“How the hell do you know about her?”

“Oh, I got ways. That fuck-up Danny Sorenson, he needed a job, so I hired him to do a little PI work. He says you made a good life for yourself there in Detroit. You got a lot to be proud of, Nicky-boy. Not many men could make the transition you did. If the streets don’t eat them alive, prison does. Hell, I remember when you -”

“I didn’t come here to reminisce,” said Nicholas. “I came because I want to know why you aren’t dead. I want to know what happened, the name of your doctors, what drugs you took, the clinic you went to, if it was one of those places in Mexico that deals in holistic stuff or something experimental or -”

“Hey, hold on, just hold the fuck on,” said Sonny. “What are you talking about? Who says I went anywhere or did anything to get cured? Who says I was even sick?”

“I saw you, Sonny, remember? I stood by your bedside. You were down to skin and bones. You smelled like a morgue. Plus you were destitute. You didn’t have shit, let alone the big bucks to pay for some fancy cure. So don’t bullshit me. I want to know why you didn’t die, what drugs you took, where you went to get well.”

“Who says I took anything? Who says it weren’t the grace of God? A miracle?”

“Bullshit.”

“What is this, Nicky-boy, you thinkin’ about med school? Trying to get published in some medical journal? If Sixty fucking Minutes shows up wantin’ an interview, maybe I’ll have somethin’ to say, but why the fuck should I talk to you?”

“Because you’ve got to,” Nicholas said. “Because I’m dying.”

So he told Sonny about the night with Elise and the blood test a couple of months later, just being on the safe side, and how the test showed that his white count was decimated, that he was about two T-cells away from full-blown fucking AIDS.

When he finished, there was a beat of silence, like stopped time, while the words hung in the air between them. Then Sonny gave a deep, satisfied sigh, like a man who’s just put away a prime cut of filet mignon, and said, “Will you excuse me a minute, Nicky-boy? What you just said, this shocks me a little bit. I need to take it in.”

Maybe it was the Scotch that dulled Nicholas’s thinking, but he figured Sonny was only going to take a piss or get another drink. Only when Sonny eased himself back into his seat did he recognize the dramatic change in the man’s demeanor, the dreamy slackness of his features, for what it was.

“Fuck, what did you do?” He grabbed Sonny’s wrist and yanked up the sleeve of the sweatshirt – track marks, some old, some very recent.

“China white,” said Sonny, answering the unspoken question. “Pure as twelve-year-old pussy.”

Nicholas recoiled. “You always said only assholes use their own product.”

“Helps me relax,” said Sonny. “Some primo smack and a coupl’a whores and it’s almost like I’m back the way I was before.”

“Before what?”

“What you came here to find out about – the secret to my great good health, the miracle cure.”

Nicholas realized he had only minutes before Sonny nodded off into that floaty, pink-lined dream state between sleep and wakefulness. Heroin limbo.

“So talk, Sonny.”

“You say you’re dying. That’s too bad, Nicky-boy, but you tell me, why the fuck should I give a shit?”

Nicholas had prepared for this. Calmly he pulled the 0.9 mm Biretta out of his jacket and aimed it at Sonny’s head. “Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I kill you. Right here, right now. I got nothing to lose, Sonny. I got AIDS, so I’m dead anyway. Taking you with me will just be a bonus.”

Sonny grinned at the gun like it was somebody’s index finger and let loose a laugh. “You can’t kill me, Nicky-boy. Wanna know why? ’Cause there ain’t no me to kill. There is no me. I never was. I never will be. It was all a dream, a fucking fabrication.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Sonny moved as if to stand up. Nicholas cocked the gun, said in a whisper that was sibilant with menace, “Sit the fuck down.”

“I need a drink.”

“You don’t need nothing, Sonny.”

“Say that again.”

“What?”

“What you called me. I like to hear it. Say it again.”

He’s trying to con me into thinking he’s crazy, Nicholas thought, into putting the gun away. Either that, or he’s drugged himself out of his mind. But he answered anyway. “I called you Sonny. That’s your name, isn’t it? Sonny Valdez? Scumbag par excellence. A consummate shit. How’s that?”

“Sonny Valdez, Sonny Valdez.” He shut his eyes, swayed slightly and chanted the words like a schoolyard ditty. So enraged was Nicholas by what he assumed had to be a performance that he shifted the gun to his left hand and backhanded Sonny a stunning blow to the side of the head.

Sonny keeled sideways. But for the heft of the chair arm, he would have collapsed to the floor. Instead, he sagged limply for a second, then righted himself with a slow-motion deliberateness that, under other circumstances, Nicholas would have found unspeakably satisfying.

“How’d you get well, Sonny? Just give me the name of your doctor or your guru or your medicine man and I’ll be on my way. You can OD in peace. I don’t give a fuck.”

Sonny’s eyelids fluttered open. He grinned and shook his head like he was trying to dislodge a gnat from his ear. His eyes gleamed with dark joy and a perverse, soulless pleasure.

“So you stuck your dick in the wrong hole, huh, Nicky-boy? So did I, only that’s not what gave me the cancer. That’s what took the cancer away. Took everything away.”

“What?”

“I’m talking about a piece of ass. A fucking piece of pussy.”

“A woman?”

“You deserve her, Nicky-boy, and everything she’ll do to you. One thing, though – I tell you who she is, you find her, I want you to come back to me and tell me where she is.”

“Why’s that, Sonny?”

But the drug-dealer’s eyes were easing shut. He sighed and snored and then jerked semi-awake, a tic twitching at the corner of one eye.

Nicholas shook him so hard his head bounced back and forth like a dashboard dog’s. “Why, Sonny?”

“ ’Cause I got unfinished business with the bitch,” he whispered slowly. “She stole from me, the fucking cunt. I’m gonna kill her, ’cause she stole my fucking name.”

“Fucking crazy smack-shooting, son-of-a-bitch,” muttered Nicholas as he left the hotel.

The rain had started again, warm and stinging, driven in spurts by the wind. Nicholas walked with his head down, avoiding the puddles, trying to think.

The Biretta was back in jacket, unfired. His brain was brimming with booze and the Volvo must’ve been stolen, because he could swear there was some other vehicle in the space where he’d parked it.

At first he thought of going back to his hotel and trying to sleep, then saying screw it, driving back home to Detroit, explaining the whole nasty business to Beth and facing the consequences. At least, he knew that she was healthy. Her system couldn’t take the Pill so, for years now, they’d been using condoms for birth control.

He couldn’t face her, though. Not yet.

Not while Sonny Valdez, for all his demented ravings, had given him a shred of hope.

So he called Beth and made his excuses. Then, for the next week, he stayed in Toronto, taking in the live sex shows, the backroom peepshows, investigating the upscale callgirl services, the street hustlers and whores. He didn’t have sex, paid or otherwise: which was remarkable for Nicholas, since these streets were his old stomping grounds. They reeked of all his old addictions – bought sex and booze and the oblivion brought on by a trio of hot whores, a few grams of coke, and enough Jack to numb out everything but reptile brain lust. Names, he thought, remembering Sonny’s babbling, who even wanted a name then? Who needed to know?

“Myriam, her name’s Myriam,” he said to the stringy-haired hustler who sidled up to him outside the strip bar where he’d just spent the last hour trying to get information out of girls so stoned or high or just braindead that they made talking to Sonny seem intellectually stimulating.

To Nicholas’s surprise, the boy’s sallow face lit up; the somber blankness of his eyes gleamed with animation and a hint of fear.

“Myriam?”

“You know where to find her?”

“No, but if you make it worth my while, I know somebody who might. My lover. She saved his life.”

No marquee advertised her. No promoter delivered his pitch or handed out fliers outside a dark doorway. There was only a stairway leading down to a basement underneath a boarded-up adult bookstore. When Nicholas took out his wallet, the smokey-skinned East Indian manning the door shook his head. “No more audience tonight. Full up.”

Sonny had told him this might happen, so he took a chance. “I’m a friend of Sonny Valdez. He knows Myriam.”

The man shrugged. “Don’t know no Valdez.”

“Fuck it, man, I’m sick. I know what it is that she does. Sonny told me all about her.”

The man nodded knowingly. “Maybe you come in anyway,” he said, unblocking the door.

The stage was small and furnished only with a mattress covered in yellow satin sheets and a leather swing of the type sold in sex boutiques. Crimson curtains were gathered back on either side. White carpeting and stark white walls, against which the curtains stood out like stigmata.

The audience sat on a semi-circle of tiers facing the stage. Saffron-tinted track lighting rendered their faces bleak, surreal, and jaundiced-looking. Some of the patrons, almost all men, had removed their shoes and sat cross-legged, like yogis, but any resemblance to an ashram ended there. The room reeked of sex. Half a dozen nude and semi-nude women slunk on their hands and knees along the tiers, offering their mouths to the seated men, a few of whom unzipped in the detached, dispassionate way of bored despots exercising droits de seigneurs.

Nicholas aimed himself at a seat at the end of the tier farthest away from the stage. He tottered a bit getting up there and plopped down with an unintended grunt, like an old man losing a grip on his walker. Fuck, not only had he let Sonny Valdez send him on this wild goose chase, but he was shit-faced as well. He thought about getting the hell out of there, finding his way back to the hotel, assuming he still could, and decorating those snazzy gold bathroom fixtures and cushy white towels with part of Sonny’s frontal lobe, then he looked down and saw the brunette with her round tawny rump in the air and decided maybe that would be hasty.

She was crawling toward him, naked except for the gold armbands on one wrist and biceps and darker bands, tattooed ones, around her neck and ankles. Gazing up at him, she ran her tongue around full lips that, in the weird light at least, looked purple-black.

“You want to fuck?”

The phrase, in its similarity to Elise’s opening remark of so many months ago, jolted him. He ran a hand along the sweet, smooth curve of her buttocks and bent down to cup the furry mound between her legs.

“God, you are fucking beautiful,” he said.

She cocked her head, shiny black hair swishing against her breasts. “You want my ass, my tits, my cunt?”

“God, yes, I want,” he murmured, “but how about a drink first? Or, better yet, a joint?”

“No drinks,” she said, “just fuck. No drugs, just fuck. You understand?”

“Right, I got it,” said Nicholas, more perplexed than ever.

So Sonny Valdez had sent him to a place where neither drugs nor alcohol were part of the picture. The very bizarreness of such a scenario made him uneasy.

Someone further along the row was requesting the girl’s services. She crawled past Nicholas, long hair sweeping the carpet, ass uptilted, the pierced lips of her vulva hanging meatily between her legs.

As Nicholas looked after her longingly, he was aware of a hush and a collective intaking of breath on the part of the men around him. He turned toward the stage, where a voluptuous, big-hipped blonde with enormous, low-swaying breasts had emerged from behind the curtains. She wore red leather, high-heeled boots that laced up the back of her thighs to below the knees. A black leather thong that made a pretense of covering her crotch disappeared into the crack of her ass. She looked yielding and smotheringly soft, like loamy earth from which a man might not emerge without a struggle. To Nicholas, who preferred his women firm and muscular, she would have merited no more than a glance, but the audience appeared entranced, almost mesmerized. As one, they murmured, “Myriam.”

She undulated her lush body along the edge of the stage in rapt silence – no catcalls, no whistles, nobody rising to thrust a bill under the thong. Silence – tense, awestruck, respectful – reigned.

She selected an overweight man from the third tier. Haltingly, as though the sex-steamy air must hurt his lungs, he lumbered onto the stage. Began to remove his clothes with trembling fingers.

Nicholas watched, at once fascinated and repulsed. The guy was no sex-show stud, that was obvious. With agonizing self-consciousness, he undressed, then stood naked, hands flopping nervously over a pendulous abdomen. To Nicholas, he looked pathetic and ridiculous. The woman ran her hands along his chest, arms, crotch. He didn’t move: nor did his dick, which peaked softly, shyly from beneath the mound of belly. The only rigid thing about him was his spine, the vertebrae of which seemed to have been fused by pure panic.

Without further preliminaries, Myriam lay down on the mattress, legs spread, back arched. The fat man knelt ponderously over her, his body language and facial expression suggesting he was placing his dick onto a guillotine. Even at this distance, Nicholas could see his hands were trembling, his dick so soft it might have been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube.

Nicholas squirmed, finding the guy’s public humiliation almost too painful to watch.

Myriam played with the man’s penis for a few minutes, using her hands and mouth: but, if anything, the exercise seemed less about an attempt at copulation than a graphic demonstration of his utter inability to get an erection.

Finally, the two reversed positions, with Myriam guiding her partner down onto the mattress while she squatted above him. Slowly, with almost balletic grace, she removed the thong and lowered herself so that her parted lips touched the crown of his penis where it rested slack against his enormous belly. The oiled muscles of her thighs and abdomen flexed powerfully. Six, twelve times in eye-blink fast succession. Then, again. The fat man gave a little cry. Slowly, like a snake being charmed, his dick began to rise. From what Nicholas could see, it looked like the muscles of Myriam’s pussy were tugging at it, lifting it erect, then sucking it inside her.

The fat man started to buck and moan. Soaked with sweat, he puffed and grunted. Tears rolled down his cheeks as his cock disappeared inside. She settled herself on his hips, shut her eyes, and rested motionless. The man beneath her began to shake and sob. Finally, Myriam eased herself up and released his cock. It popped back against his belly, majestically erect.

The hush of the room erupted into cheers. Some of the masturbating men rushed to the stage and surrounded Myriam, anointed her with their semen. One came on her face, another spurted onto her breasts; thickly clotted strings of it were in her hair and glistening on her thighs.

Amazed, but also disappointed, Nicholas turned to the scrawny, blemished-faced man next to him. “So that’s all she does, she cures impotence?” he said.

The man glared at him. “That’s what you think the guy’s problem was, a limp dick? He had stomach cancer. That’s what she was pulling out of him, the cancer.”

Afterward, Nicholas waited until Myriam emerged from a bathroom off the hall. Nothing glamorous now – she wore a baggy white shirt over black tights. Blonde hair clipped back from her round face. Her only make-up a smudge of mascara and a dab of fuschia lipstick.

Nicholas blocked her way. “A man named Sonny Valdez claims you cured him of cancer.”

“Oh, does he?” Her cool green gaze washed over him. The scent of her, gardenia with undertones of musk, filled his head.

“I have AIDS,” Nicholas said. “Can you help me?”

“If you want it badly enough.”

“How much money?”

“How much is your life worth to you?”

“Two cents on a good day. Cut the crap, lady, how much do you want?”

“Nothing,” said Myriam. “If I heal you, then you make a gift to me. Whatever you think is fair.”

“That’s a funny way of doing business.

“This isn’t a business.”

“And I won’t do it in front of an audience. It has to be in private. Just you and me.”

She smiled. “A lot of people feel that way. But the sexual energy of others is important for the ceremony. It makes the healing faster. If you’re shy about -”

“I’m not shy,” said Nicholas. “But I’m not performing for a bunch of perverts, either. I already know what that feels like.”

“You know so much, then maybe you don’t need me.” With surprising strength, she put a hand on his chest and shoved past him.

Contrite and frightened, he went after her. “No, wait. I’m sorry. Please. I need your help.”

She glared at him a moment, then her features softened and she drew a long, slow breath. “Tomorrow night, then. Not here, though. Never in the same place twice. I hope you have a good memory. I never write anything down.”

“It’s good enough,” said Nicholas, and she told him an address.

“Take your clothes off and lie down with me,” said Myriam. They were in a third floor efficiency of a squalid hotel off Dundas Street that catered to transients, addicts, and hookers, who rented the rooms by the hour. It occupied a tiny nook between a take-away Chinese joint and moss-encrusted St Benedict’s Cathedral on the corner and, although Nicholas had cruised this area a hundred times, he didn’t remember ever noticing the place before.

Now, awkwardly, as though he were stripping for some unpleasant physical exam, Nicholas undressed and crawled into bed next to Myriam. He laid a hand on her breast, but she only continued staring at the ceiling, her expression meditative, pensive.

“Now what?” he said angrily.

“Do you believe in God, Nicholas?”

“No.”

“Do you believe that I’m God?”

“Of course not.”

“That you’re God?”

“What is this? Is this about getting it on or are we having a fucking prayer meeting?”

She turned onto her side, breasts lolling in great vanilla mounds. “You’re here because you believe – even a little bit – that I might have the power to cure you. That isn’t rational, Nicholas. And clearly you’re a rational man, who doesn’t believe in God, who doesn’t expect miracles. So maybe you’re just here for one last good fuck.” She traced a fingernail around his nipple, teasing it erect. “So what are you waiting for, Nicholas? Don’t you want to fuck me?”

“Damn right,” he said, affecting his old bravado from the past, but unconvincingly so. As her fingers played with the curls of his chest hair, fear did a counterpoint jig on his spine.

“I told you what’s wrong with me,” he said. “You don’t want to use protection?”

Merriment danced in her green eyes, in the creases at the corners of her smile. “I already have protection, Nicholas.”

She pulled his face to hers, kissed him long and wetly. Tongue rimming the roof of his mouth, the tender edge of his gums. Licked his eyelids and throat, filled his ear with the heat of her breath. Her meaty body felt heavy and powerful. Her smell enveloped him, old odors and fragrances, scents of passion and longing and loss. He wanted to fuck her and he wanted to weep, and the juxtaposition of those two conflicting sensations brought up his anger, a sense of brute self-preservation.

He rolled her over, got on top and thrust her open. So she didn’t need protection from his disease? Fine: maybe she needed it from him. He rammed his way inside her. Their skin squeaked together. He could hear the thumping of their bellies, the slurp and sputter of moist flesh.

But the instant that he entered her, he felt her grasp him almost to the point of pain, her inner muscles pulling him inside. Tugging his penis, but also something else – his essence, his energy, his very Nicholas-ness – for which his dick seemed to be becoming the conduit. The sensation that he was in the process of ejaculating not just his infection, but his very soul, galvanized all his energy into his thrusts. He fucked her desperately, with the savagery of a man trying to dig his way out of prison, and she was the passage to freedom, to hope. Carving her out with his cock, widening her up until her cunt seemed to expand to suck in the whole world. She was wet and dark and hot, and somehow he was not only fucking her, but seeing her from inside as well – she was a black galaxy pulsing with what seemed at first to be stars, but what he realized were sperm, countless millions of seething, glittering sperm aswarm in her hothouse interior.

The energy built toward an orgasm. Not yet, his ego protested. For some perverse reason, he wanted to impress this woman, this harlot, this hooker, this bitch, he wanted to fuck her like she’d never been fucked. The excitement intensified, not just in his cock, but at the base of his spine. White energy that burned and blazed, stoking the fire that kept his cock hard as he fucked her and fucked her and fucked…

Then suddenly, there was no one fucking her at all or getting fucked. Nicholas – the fiction of Nicholas – was drowning in Myriam’s depths. What remained was pure silence, a crystalline nothingness marred only by the swelling of his own primitive terror.

The white radiance of sexual energy blazed like a fiery tree from the base of his spine. It consumed him, reduced him to ashes.

There was a swishing noise, like fabric rustling, and the sensation of light entering the room with a rush, but he didn’t dare open his eyes.

For a moment, it seemed every question was answered, every terror assuaged, every evil forgiven. There was no separation. Ecstasy thrilled through his body, his soul. His soul – for he knew now that he had one, that it was his soul that was real, nothing else, not the Nicholas shell he’d accepted as his true self all these years.

He cried out as he came, opened his eyes, and then recoiled from the shock of what he saw – rows of naked men and women observing him in all his fear and vulnerability. He was no longer fucking Myriam on a bed in that miserable hotel room, but back in the basement room where he’d first seen her, performing on stage before an audience of aroused and worshipful voyeurs.

Slowly the watchers filed up onto the stage and began the ritual Nicholas had seen the night before, only tonight it no longer disgusted him – their semen streamed into his mouth, his hair, mingled with the come on his own cock, and he didn’t object, didn’t feel soiled or outraged or betrayed, but threw his head back, opened his mouth, and drank their spillage along with Myriam.

“God,” he breathed, “what happened?”

And she smiled up at him exultantly, and said, “Yes. Exactly. God happened.”

The day after the experience with Myriam, Nicholas went to two different clinics and had his blood drawn. A week-long wait for the results at the first one, five days at the other. He could have gone back to Detroit, but the idea never even occurred to him. As long as she was here, he would be, too.

Am I in love with her? Nicholas thought. Am I in thrall to her?

Not to Myriam herself, he decided, but to the experience she’d given him. For the first few hours after their lovemaking, the wondrous sensation had lingered. His reality shifted. He felt whole, he felt one with all of Creation. Entranced by the feeling, the knowing, that he was not defined by his skin or his mind or his name, Nicholas, but that God Himself was playing peekaboo, peering out from behind his eyes looking at God peering back from the eyes of everyone else. Love suffused him. He no longer hated Sonny Valdez, no longer regretted his past or longed for some fantasy future. For the first time in his life, he felt happy and whole.

Then, gradually, the ecstasy faded and Nicholas became just Nicholas again – separate and lonely and flawed, but longing now to return to that place he had briefly visited.

He returned to the boarded-up storefront and banged his fist on the locked basement door. No one answered, and a passing policeman finally stopped by and shooed him away, thinking him tipsy, but harmless. He went back the next night and slept on the stones by the door, but no one came. Nor the night after that or the next one.

Despondent and heartsick, he asked about Myriam, but the few people who admitted to knowing her said only that she moved around. Here a few days, then somewhere else.

On the fourth day of useless searching, furious and frustrated, he picked up a hooker and took her back to his room, where he tried to recreate the experience he was seeking. When that failed, he found another young woman and did coke with her before they had sex. On coke, Nicholas could stay hard almost indefinitely. But nothing happened, except that both he and the girl were sore the next morning.

His stay at the upscale Harbor Castle was becoming too costly, and he decided to move to a modest, inexpensive hotel near Queen’s Park. The phone rang as he was packing his suitcase. He hesitated, then picked it up. Wished that he hadn’t. The pain in Beth’s voice stabbed his temporal lobe like an icepick. Worse, though, was the fact that he had to jog his mind to recall the face belonging to that distraught voice. He felt as though decades had passed since he’d last seen her. Since he’d lain down with Myriam and everything changed.

“I’m sorry, Beth, but I can’t come home yet. There’s a deal in the making, some more property that I want to look at -”

“Stop lying to me, Nicholas.”

“Beth, listen -”

“I’m sick of excuses. I want you to come home now. Whatever’s happened, whatever you’ve gotten involved with, I can forgive it, but you have to leave now, just leave and come home. Can’t you do that?”

He wanted to tell her, yes, yes, of course, I’ll come home, but what he heard himself say was, “No, I can’t do that. This deal is too important. Leaving here now is out of the question.”

She gave a long moan that escalated into a wild wail, like an animal lost and wounded. He held the phone away from his ear, but the sound still reverberated chaotically through his body, ripping synapses with its discordant notes of anguish.

“Don’t give me that bullshit, Nicholas. Don’t treat me like an idiot. What is it? Are you in love with someone else? Is that what it is? Are you leaving me?”

“No, Beth, no, I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know I can’t come home yet, I have to stay here a little bit longer. I can’t explain. I want to, but I just can’t.”

Then there was silence, which was scarier somehow than the grief-stricken wail of a moment before. “This has something to do with that Sonny Valdez character, doesn’t it?” she said finally, her voice flat and jagged, like ice chipped from a block with an axe. “He’s got you involved in something illegal, some drug scam. Jesus, Nicholas, are you that big a fool? Do you want to go back to prison?”

“No, no, I don’t.” Tears started pouring out of his eyes, heartfelt and wrenching, but responding to her words in a way completely different from how she meant them. He didn’t want to go back to prison: that was the whole point. Prison was what his life had been like before, prison was his separate identity, his separate skin. Prison was his narrow, rigid identity as Nicholas Berringer. It was the same realization, the same awakening, that must have turned Sonny Valdez into a paranoid recluse. But how could he tell her that, how could he say it so she didn’t think he’d gone back to drugs, think him insane?

“It’s this, Beth,” he said finally. “I know it sounds crazy, but I had – how do I put this? – some kind of experience. It was something spiritual, something so incredible – I can’t just walk away from it now.”

She gave a high, raucous hoot. “A spiritual experience? You, Nicholas? So what are you saying? Did you get Born Again, join the Moonies, give up your soul to Lord Krishna?”

“Please, Beth, I’m serious.”

“Then fucking tell me what you’re talking about!”

“I can’t. I want to explain, but I can’t. I do love you. Please just believe that. Please just be -”

“Are you leaving me, Nicholas?”

“I just can’t come home yet, I -”

“Then you know what, Nicholas? Go to hell. Just go to hell!”

She hung up the phone.

“This isn’t enough. I want more – everything you can do to me,” Nicholas said to the dominatrix. “I don’t give a damn about pain. I don’t care if you make me bleed. What I want is to go beyond my normal limits, to be outside myself. Whatever it takes, I want you to do it.”

Madame Yvette was gossamer pale, ethereal-looking with grey eyes like circles cut from glassy envelopes and long hair, braided down her back, a violent shade of red. Her milky, finely freckled skin contrasted vividly with the black leather regalia, the fetish boots and studded wrist bands, the black lipstick and the riding crop that Nicholas had watched her wield with delicate precision against the buttocks of the bound and blindfolded “slave” that he’d just fucked.

“You’re not one of my regulars,” she said. “I like to move slowly with a new client. I need to determine your tolerance for pain and humiliation. I’ve had clients lose it in the middle of a scene and try to rip my throat out.”

“My tolerance for pain is high,” snapped Nicholas. “And if I were going to ‘lose it’ in the middle of a sex scene, I’d have done that long ago. What I want -” he hesitated, groped for the right words “- is to be transported mentally, to lose myself so where I end and you begin becomes unclear. Does that make sense? Can you give me an experience that’s so intense it clouds the mind and yet, at the same time, clears it?”

“Short of killing you, you mean?” said Madame Yvette.

“Short of killing me.”

“You don’t mind blood?”

“Not if bleeding gets me to the place I want to be.”

Madame Yvette considered this. Finally she said, “I don’t like dealing with crazy and unstable people. They’re dangerous to me and to my business. Neither am I interested in assisting suicide. So tell me, Nicholas: are you one of the crazy, unstable people?”

“I don’t know.”

Madame Yvette touched his wrist with her bright, black nails and left a tiny scratch. “Then perhaps we will find out.”

Her dungeon was considered the priciest and best equipped in Toronto, where Madame and her girls had served the masochistic needs of some of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful for many years. Suitably foreboding, it was a pod of individual cells connected to a central hall. Gloomily, it reminded Nicholas of the time he’d spent behind bars, although the prison accommodation he remembered had been vastly more cheerful and definitely better lit.

She ordered Nicholas to strip, which he did, then manacled him to a crossbeam, arms above his head, legs splayed. His first instinct, when the manacles were tightened painfully around his wrists, was to try to free himself and fuck her till she screamed. Submissiveness was not his natural inclination. All the more reason then, he figured, that he should experience it. Maybe that was the key, he reasoned. Maybe subservience and suffering would bring him to that transcendent point where Nicholas ceased to exist and something else filled the void.

And though she whipped and paddled him until he screamed, tortured him with excruciating nippleclamps, choked him till lights blinked on and off in his head and his orgasms were broken up with spaces of unconsciousness, nothing occurred that ever exceeded the realm of the physical, and Nicholas was always Nicholas – more than ever, in fact, when his ego raged at Madame Yvette’s humiliations, the sadistic whimsy of the many degradations to which she subjected him and the undeniably sweet suffering inherent in each one.

At last, towards dawn, he left the Madame’s establishment – tormented and pleasured to equal degree, physically sated and emotionally drained, but most of all, wretchedly disappointed.

For the third time that evening, Nicholas trudged along Yonge Street, head lowered, oblivious to the sex shop windows full of leather toys, the sibilant whispers of hookers cooing from the darkening doorways. He’d visited every purveyor of erotica that he could think of, questioned anyone who’d talk to him, even tracked down the young hustler who’d originally told him where Myriam could be found.

He got nothing but blank stares and, occasionally, bitter laughter, as though the mere fact that he searched for Myriam rendered him an object of pity and disdain.

Now the hopelessness of it was settling over him. Of course someone like Myriam wouldn’t stay in one place. Or at least wouldn’t permit the illusion that she remained in one place, he thought, remembering how he had begun making love with Myriam in a hotel room and then found himself back in the basement room where he’d first seen her.

She’s gone, he thought despairingly. I’ll never find her again. I’ll never experience that feeling again.

Which is worse, he wondered, to have an experience so life-changing that you’d spend the rest of your life longing for it, dreaming of it, trying fruitlessly to find it again, or never to have had the experience at all? The first seemed a prescription for wretchedness, yet the second seemed an unthinkable choice.

I’m alive, he thought. I’m cured. The test results came back, and I’m fine. Why isn’t that enough? Why do I want more? Why can’t I give this up and go back to Beth – if she’ll have me, that is? I love her: why isn’t she enough?

He passed a hooker of indeterminate gender thunking along on platform heels, a gaudily costumed creature who licked its lips and swished its silken tongue at Nicholas. There was a flicker of interest on Nicholas’s part, but it was replaced almost immediately by discouragement. Since the session with Madame Yvette, almost a week ago, he’d bought the services of half a dozen professional purveyors of sex, including a buxom she-male with a python-like dick, a Vietnamese whore who claimed knowledge of secret Tantric rites, and a submissive who aroused in Nicholas such powerful aggression that he feared equally for her life and for his sanity.

But nothing, in that smorgasbord of guilty pleasures and perverse games of mind and body, did he find anything that resembled even remotely what he’d felt with Myriam, so he shook his head at the lip-smacking whore and trudged on, headed toward Dundas Street.

Since coming to Toronto, Nicholas had walked past St Benedict’s Cathedral dozens of times without giving it more than a passing glance, other than to note the irony of its presence here at the end of a block comprised almost entirely of shops devoted to the sex trade. But he’d been raised Catholic and still had some fleeting attachment to Catholicism’s rites and rituals. There was a certain comfort in the familiarity of a religion that, for the most part, he’d left behind in boyhood. On a whim, he decided to go inside.

A few people knelt in prayer. At the altar, a priest was preparing to give Mass.

Nicholas found a confessional and slid inside. He confessed to his adulteries, to the myriad indulgences of the past few days – the group sex, the gay sex, sex as dominator and as dominated. But finally, having exhausted that part of his confession, he said, “I met a woman here who worked a miracle for me. Only a few days ago, I had AIDS, and now the results of two blood tests have come back negative. This woman cured me. I don’t expect you to understand this. Father, or to believe it, but she cured me by – well, by having sex with me, and now I can’t get over that experience. It haunts me. Not the sex itself, but something else I can’t put into words…” There was a long pause from the other side. Nicholas slammed his fist against the inside of the confessional and said, “Fuck, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You can’t possibly know what I mean. You must think I’m crazy. Hell, I’m starting to think I’m crazy.”

“Don’t go.” The firmness of the priest’s command halted Nicholas as he was rising to leave. “You say you’re haunted by what you felt when you were with this woman. If you could see her again, if you could be with her, do you think this time you could hold onto the experience you describe, that you could absorb it into your soul?”

Nicholas, surprised, responded, “I don’t know, Father. All I know is I want to try.”

“I don’t know if I’m damning you to hell or guiding you along the path to heaven, but maybe I can help.”

Beth had packed the car in a rage, not knowing where she was going, only that it would be in the opposite direction from Nicholas. They’d been married five years. She had known it was dicey going into it, that Nicholas had spent time in prison for dealing cocaine, that his youth was a black hole which he described to her only in the vaguest, most general terms or not at all. She knew the power of his erotic appetites, so the idea that he might cheat on her was more dismaying and disappointing than outright shocking – that he would leave her altogether, though, with no more explanation than that he had no explanation, beggared all comprehension.

She had decided to drive south, with New Mexico as a vague and dreamily envisioned destination. She knew no one there, had never indicated to her husband any desire to visit. It was a destination where, should Nicholas ever tire of whatever adventure he was on and decide to look for her, he would never find her. And, in the meantime, she had her own fantasies of Marlboro Men with studly bulges and swarthy, muscular Mexicans on the prowl for paler flesh. I’ll show him, she thought, before reflecting sadly on the futility of inspiring jealousy in someone who didn’t give a fuck.

All this was on her mind when she got the letter postmarked Toronto. Given the contents, outwardly, it was strikingly genteel-looking. Expensive Mayflower Hotel stationery addressed in an elegant cursive that resembled the handwriting of her elderly aunt, not a psychotic-looking T-bar or manic-looking flourish to be seen.

The very elegance and neatness of it, however, like an exquisitely gift-wrapped package that contains manure, flagged her attention as much as if the letters of the address had been clipped out of a magazine and taped onto the envelope.

Inside she found a sheet of stationery with a single sentence written in that same overly controlled hand, as though the writer were making a conscious effort to contrast the vile inscription with the fastidious lettering. And along with that, a faded Polaroid of a much younger Nicholas. He wore a tie-dyed body shirt that showed off a ripped and gleaming chest. Long hair stringy around his face, eyes blank and strange. Nicky-boy, age 19, the best hustler in the business, the caption read.

Naked, Nicholas sat on the tier nearest the stage, breathing the heady, almost nauseatingly sweet scent of incense and sickness and sex. It was the same basement room that he remembered from the first time he’d seen Myriam, but on a different street in a different section of the city.

A girl so thin, her biceps were scarcely bigger than her wrists, lay on the mattress. Her face was turned towards the audience. Her eyes were huge and frighteningly vacant. The tattoos on her stomach and legs had become misshapen squiggles of color as her flesh withered and shrank beneath the designs. The shroud-color of sickness clung to her.

Behind the blue swirl of incense, Myriam moved over the girl. Her heavy, pendulous breasts lolled against the other’s flat chest, huge, coffee-colored nipples brushing smooth pink ones. She lifted the girl’s head, tongue-kissed her, then lapped her way down the skeletal torso to the straw-colored thatch between her thighs.

The girl didn’t move or give indication that she knew what was happening. Nicholas strained to see if she even breathed. Her eyes were unblinking. He wondered if she might have died.

Myriam angled herself between the girl’s legs. A thick, purple-crowned phallus lolled between her thighs. Never had Nicholas seen a dildo so life-like; nor could he determine where it had been strapped on. For a disorienting moment, he suffered the illusion that the cock was actually Myriam’s, that she had somehow metamorphosed into a male.

As she slid inside the girl, some of the watchers sank into each other’s arms and began to couple with great urgency. Matings of the same and opposite sex in positions both conventional and exotically perverse while, as always, there were men who touched no one but themselves, waiting to anoint the fornicators with their gush of semen.

A woman with long black hair threaded with grey slid her legs through Nicholas’s. She dipped down and took his cock into her mouth, but not even that distracted him from what was taking place on stage. The girl that Myriam fucked had come to life now. Writhing, bucking, whimpering, her back arching so the outline of her ribs showed clearly beneath the blue-white skin.

Tears streamed down the girl’s thin face. Myriam stopped thrusting. The girl calmed. While those in the audience continued their mating, the two on stage lay quietly together, neither of them moving, suspended in that moment of sublime transcendence that, to Nicholas, had seemed to last for hours, that moment which had removed one illness to replace it with another, a kind of hopeless longing akin to homesickness.

He put his hands down on the head of the woman sucking him. His fingers threaded through her hair. He held her still and shut his eyes, forcing himself to remain motionless as he willed the experience he’d had with Myriam to return. It was in vain – nothing was recaptured, only a greater and more enervating sense of futility and loss.

Gently he slid himself free of the woman’s warm, willing mouth. Gazed down into her face searching for some remnant of the experience with Myriam – because he felt nothing, did that mean she felt nothing, too?

“Have you been with Myriam?” he asked.

She nodded – but only after a pause, warily, like a child reluctant to confess a minor theft. “I wasn’t sick, though. There was just a lump, a tiny one, that went away on its own.”

“When you were having sex with her, what did you feel?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember it,” and dipped her head again.

“Wait,” said Nicholas, lifting her chin. “Do you think about how it felt to be with her? Do you dream of being with her again?”

“I told you, I don’t remember what it was like,” the woman hissed. Fear capered in her eyes. She pulled away, and Nicholas let her go.

On stage, Myriam lifted the girl up, so that they sat facing each other, the girl astride Myriam’s cock. Again, they became motionless, staring into each other’s eyes.

It’s some kind of hypnotism, thought Nicholas, but even as the idea occurred to him, he rejected it. He hadn’t been hypnotized when he was making love with Myriam, nor in the grip of some sex-induced trance. What he’d experienced, for that matter, hadn’t even been entirely sexual, although perhaps he simply hadn’t recognized it as such, wasn’t as well versed with the parameters of eroticism as he’d have liked to think. Maybe not everyone who coupled with Myriam felt it. Maybe they were too frightened to admit that they did or, like Sonny, their minds could simply not expand to accommodate the magnitude of the experience.

Around him, the orgy grew more lusty, the cries and grunts and moans converging in a strange, atonal symphony. He felt absent from his own skin, detached from the eager pulsings that stirred his cock to stiffness. He stood up, retrieved his clothing from the pile beside the door, went outside to the men’s room in the corridor and got dressed. As he was coming out, a slender woman with a lustrous tangle of frosted blonde hair was hurrying along the corridor. She wore a suede skirt, high heels, a black leather vest over a white turtleneck.

Nicholas considered making some minor witticism about etiquette at an orgy (don’t worry, late-comers are well thought of), but then thought better of it. As she breezed past, she half-turned toward him. He glimpsed her face.

“Wait!”

She kept going.

“Elise!”

He could see she tried to pretend the name meant nothing, but there was a slight cringe when he said it, as though he’d lobbed a small stone.

“Wait, I know it’s you!”

He grabbed her arm, spun her around. “Why are you running from me? What are you afraid of?”

“Let me go!”

“You knew what you were doing to me,” he said. “When I thought back on it, the last thing you said was that you were giving me something, too. You knew you were sick. You did it to me on purpose.”

She pulled away, anger in the twisting of her crimson-lined lips, fear in the overbright sheen of her eyes. “Let go of me!”

“Not until you tell me why you wanted to infect me. You didn’t even know me. Why?”

She turned away, shoulders slumping in defeat. “I know you won’t believe this, but I never in my life purposely set out to hurt somebody like I did you. I’ve thought about you so much, wondering what happened to you and to your wife. I am truly sorry.”

“I don’t give a damn about your being sorry. Answer the fucking question. Why?”

Sooty tears spread from the corners of her heavily mascara’d eyes and tracked down her cheeks. “I needed money. For doctors’ bills, all kinds of things. I needed money, and I had to get it any way I could.”

“You mean, somebody paid you to have sex with me, knowing you were infected?”

She nodded.

“Who?”

But the question was already answered in his mind even before she said it for him: “Sonny.”

“Jesus God, that vicious bastard.”

“He’s obsessed with getting revenge on you. Almost as much as he does -” she nodded toward the door behind which Myriam performed “- her.”

“But that doesn’t make sense.”

“He says you rolled on him years back. Set it up so you walked after only a couple years, and he got sentenced to twelve.”

“That’s not how it went.”

“Maybe not, but he thinks it did. That makes it true.”

“So he wanted me dead. Then why did he tell me about Myriam? She saved my life.”

“Myriam cured Sonny, too, but she couldn’t cure him of all the hate he carries around inside him. She also fucked with his mind. Maybe he thought she’d fuck you up, too, and that would be worse than whatever else he could do to you.” She looked toward the door and fidgeted with the buttons of her vest. “I need to get in there.”

“Go on.”

“I’m sorry, Nicholas. Can you forgive me?”

He started to answer with something along the lines of, no way, you fucking little bitch. Instead he said, “Are you cured, now?”

She shrugged. “So far, so good. It would appear so.”

“Good. I’m glad for you.”

“About Sonny – I shouldn’t have told you he hired me. You aren’t going to do anything, are you?”

“Only what I wish I’d done a long time ago – blow the fucking scumbag’s brains out his asshole.”

“I know it was you who sent me this. I want to know why.”

Sonny Valdez took the photo Beth handed him and stared at it as though seeing it for the first time. “I thought you’d be interested in a side of your husband’s past I’m betting he never told you about.”

“He worked for you?”

“Worked for me. Serviced me, whatever.”

“So you were his pimp?”

“An ugly word, pimp. I don’t like it. I’d rather think of myself as a mentor. Nicky-boy was just a kid then, strung out on drugs. He did what he had to do to survive. I showed him the ropes, helped him along the way. Made a man out of him, you might say. Occasionally made a woman out of him, too.”

“And later on, he joined you in the drug business, is that it? Which was how you got sent to jail.”

“I got sent to prison,” said Sonny, “ ’cause Nicky-boy ratted me out. He rolled on me to shorten his own sentence.”

“Why did you send me that photo?”

Sonny shrugged. “Why not? I wanted to.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean why would anyone do something so evil?”

“Ah, you mean you’re asking me a metaphysical question, then?” He must have caught the change in her expression, because he said angrily, “What’sa matter, you think an ex-con don’t use words like metaphysical? Well, maybe ex-cons like your husband don’t, but I do, lady. I read Nietzsche and Plato and Kant. I get my Tarot cards read too and my astrological chart. So you want to know why I’d do such an evil thing? Because I can. Because I like to stir the pot and see what comes crawling out.”

“I want to know where my husband is.”

“What makes you think I know?”

“Because I know he came here to see you. Something happened – I don’t know what – but he’s disappeared.”

“If he ain’t come home, my guess is that he met someone,” said Sonny. “Name of Myriam.”

“Is she one of your whores?”

“Not mine, but yeah, you could say she’s a whore. She does live sex shows. People pay big bucks to watch her fuck.”

Beth swallowed. A debate raging inside her head: Do I want to know any more? Do I go on?

She said, “Where does this take place?”

Sonny shrugged. “She has different venues, but I can’t say where she is. If I knew for certain, I’d be on my way there now.”

Beth flinched and bit her lip. “She’s that spectacular in bed, you mean? That all men fall under her spell, not just my husband? He can’t stay away from her and neither can you?”

“Yeah, but not in the way you think,” Sonny said. “I find out where Myriam is, I ain’t going there to have sex with her. Having sex with that witch is the last fucking thing on my mind.” His eyes shifted to Beth. “Having sex with Myriam, at any rate. But you now, you’re different. More my type. Dark and slender and kinda classy-looking.”

“Forget it,” Beth said, “Short and fat and flatulent doesn’t do it for me. Besides, Nicholas would kill you. If you’ve ever seen him angry, then you know I’m not exaggerating.”

“Maybe so, but he ain’t here now, is he?” He moved closer, slowly occupying the space between Beth and the door. “See, this is how I see it, Beth. Nicky-boy, he fucked me over. I figure, by rights, anything belongs to Nicky-boy ought to belong to me.”

Myriam stared at him with weary eyes. “Show’s over, hon. It’s time to go home.”

Elise and the rest of the audience had all departed. Myriam and Nicholas stood alone on the small, shabby stage. “What’s wrong? Didn’t you get what you wanted?”

“Yes. The tests all came back negative. My blood’s clean. As far as I know, I’m healthy.”

“Then what are you here for? I’ve done all I can do for you. Go home or, if you have no home, then find one.”

“I can’t,” said Nicholas. “When I was with you, something happened. I have to know what it was and how I can find that again. Otherwise, there’s no point in your having cured me, because I won’t give up searching. I’ll pay you anything you ask. I’ll get myself reinfected if I have to, if that’s what it takes to be with you again.”

He realized what he must sound like: either pathetically desperate or dangerously obsessed.

Myriam brushed at a lock of her platinum hair, shook her head. “Forget about what happened. Go back to your family, if you have one. Make up for the time that you’ve wasted.”

“But that’s just it. Everything in my life feels like a waste, now. It’s all a sham, a lie, a smokescreen covering something else that I glimpsed and then lost sight of. When I was inside you, somehow – God only knows how – I felt you pull the disease out of me. But more than that – it felt like everything that I was or that I am – my history, individuality, my thought patterns and personality, everything I’ve always thought makes me me – that all fell away and there was still something else left. And what was left, that felt like the real Nicholas, the true Nicholas underneath all the fabrication. It felt like there was something underlying everything else, something besides me, or what I used to think of as me, and I touched that for a second. All I’m asking is that you help me find that again.”

“You can’t,” Myriam said softly, and this time there was real sadness in her eyes. “You must be still and let It find you.”

Sonny Valdez leaned against the door, arms folded. Bloody scratches ran diagonally along his cheek. He stared at Beth, whose lip was bloody and starting to swell.

“You really thought that if you took the bait and came here, I’d let you have your say and then just waltz out the door?”

“This is a mistake, Sonny. Let me leave.”

“Oh, I’ll let you leave, all right. Just not yet. And maybe not in quite the same condition as you come in.”

In her mind, Beth had prepared herself for this moment a hundred times, just as she’d also tried to think out what she’d do if she awoke to find the house on fire or found herself caught in undertow or on a plane whose engines suddenly stalled. The trouble was, you couldn’t really predict the specifics of such events – least of all whether it was better to try reasoning with a man like Sonny or fighting back or playing dead and letting whatever happened happen.

“I always wondered what kind of woman Nicky-boy would be shacked up with,” he said. “Some sexed-up little slut with boobs out to here, I figured. I mean, that boy could fuck – anyone, any time, any place, any kind of kink you could imagine. But you – you’re a little more genteel-looking than what I’d conjured up in my masturbatory fantasies.”

“Looks can be deceiving, Sonny. You think I’m not a match for Nicholas in bed? You think that’s not partly why I came looking for him? I can find a man anywhere. I can find a great fuck, if I’m lucky. But a great fuck who also happens to be the person I love – that only comes along once, Sonny. For a lot of people, it never comes at all.”

“So you’re a match for Nicky-boy in bed, huh? Well, you’re gonna have to convince me of that, honey. Fortunately, I got plenty of time to be convinced.”

He came towards her, and she retreated, bumping into the coffee table, upending it with a crash and a shattering of glass. She picked up a shard to ward off Sonny, but before he could come at her, the phone on top of the TV set bleated, halting them both.

The answering machine clicked on, and a woman’s voice, fluttery and nervous, said, “Sonny, it’s Elise. I need to talk to you. Sonny, will you please pick up? I just saw Nicholas.”

Sonny rushed for the phone, but Beth was a step ahead and got there first. “Who is this?” she shouted. “Where are you?”

“Give me that!” Sonny grabbed the phone out of her hand and pushed her away. So engrossed was he in what the caller was saying that she could have easily escaped, but she couldn’t, wouldn’t leave now.

“You stupid bitch, you told him what?” roared Sonny and slammed down the phone. He whirled on Beth. “You want to find your husband? Well, I know where he is. More important, I know where she is, too.” He reached for her, and she brought the shard of jagged glass down in an arc, narrowly missing his face. He grimaced and jumped back. “You gonna try and carve me up with that or you gonna come with me to find your husband? C’mon, what’ll it be, Beth? You scared of me or what?”

She was shaking, but she wasn’t scared – not yet. The fear came a moment later, when Sonny was buttoning his coat, and she saw the pistol tucked inside the waistband of his pants.

“You’re an unusual man, Nicholas,” said Myriam. “After I cure them, a lot of people never want to see me again. They’re grateful, but the experience they have with me is too frightening, too disturbing, to ever want to undergo again. Some of them decide I’m some kind of witch or demon. I’ve had men claim I stole their souls.”

“Or their names,” said Nicholas.

“For people sufficiently entrenched in ego, it’s the same thing. They’re so caught up in their mortal identity, that even a few moments outside their own ego feels terrifying and annihilating. Some of them go insane.”

“So what does happen, Myriam? How do you cure people?”

“As far as how I cure them, I’m not sure myself – only that when the ego dissolves, even briefly, so dissolves the disease. As for the experience you had, all I can tell you is you aren’t the first to search for it. In the nineteenth century, there was a group of occultists who worshipped what they called the ‘holy wisdom fire’, a fire they believed to be embodied in all women. Certain women had the power to help bring about a soul’s spiritual integration through intercourse and awaken in their partner the highest spiritual powers from deep within. These occultists called themselves the Cult of Myriam, which still exists. I studied with the group and took that name for myself.”

“So what happened? You initiated me into some kind of cosmic consciousness?”

“I didn’t do anything, Nicholas, except offer you a glimpse of what mystics and holy people have been preaching for centuries. You don’t have to be Nicholas, you know. You chose to be that person, but that isn’t the real you and, deep inside, you know that. That’s why you feel compelled to search for that experience again.”

“Not just because I’m a crazy bastard obsessed with fucking you?”

He was joking, of course – more or less – but she didn’t smile. Instead, she took his hand and they sat together on the mattress. Sitting turned into reclining, which melted into embracing. Nicholas felt such a surge of longing and desire that it was all he could do not to rip off Myriam’s clothing and take her then and there, to hell with her consent. “You’re thinking you could rape me if you wanted to,” said Myriam, “and you’re right, but it wouldn’t be the experience you’re looking for. It would leave you much further from your destination than you are now.”

“Then make love with me,” said Nicholas, pulling her against him. “You cured me of my disease: now cure me of my ignorance.”

Her arms wound around his neck. Her legs parted. “I think you have a lot of good in you, Nicholas,” she said. “More good than you realize. I think your soul longs for a kind of wisdom few people ever find, let alone experience.”

“I think you’re wrong,” said Nicholas. “I’m not a good man. Thirty seconds ago, I was debating whether or not to rape you if you didn’t want to have sex. And I’m a lot nicer guy now than I used to be, if that puts it in perspective. I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been a thief and a drug-dealer and, when I was younger, a prostitute. I don’t long for any holiness or wisdom. The only thing I long for is to slide my cock inside your body and fuck you forever and never, ever leave.”

Her eyes lit up. She laughed gently. “Have you ever considered, Nicholas, that my body might not be the only place you might find what you’re searching for? That if you allowed yourself to love someone, really love someone enough to transcend your own self-centeredness, that might make all the difference?”

But before Nicholas could answer, they both heard the footsteps approaching. Then the door that opened onto the stairwell was kicked open with a crash that reverberated throughout the room. Nicholas leaped to his feet, galvanized by an appalling and incongruous vision – Sonny Valdez, his wife, and the gun that Sonny was now pointing at him and Myriam.

Someone screamed. Maybe it was Beth or Myriam or even Nicholas himself – maybe all three of them were screaming at once – but he hurled himself in front of Myriam, who was still on the floor, and the gun went off and suddenly the room was filled with a terrible red rain.

In the instant it took Sonny to recock the trigger, Beth grabbed his wrist and twisted it with all the strength in both her arms. The gun fired again – this time into the ceiling – as Sonny shoved her away and aimed at Myriam again, firing into her as she lay in a spreading pool of blood on the mattress. With a cry, Nicholas charged Sonny, wrestled the gun away from him, and then slammed the grip into the man’s skull, again and again, like a gong striking the side of a bell, and he didn’t stop, but kept on bashing the caved-in head, even when Beth grabbed him and shouted, “It’s all right, Nicholas, it’s all right! He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!”

After the police got through investigating, when they were convinced Nicholas had been justified in taking Sonny Valdez’s life, after Myriam was cremated and her ashes scattered in the churchyard of St Benedict’s, Nicholas and Beth went back to Detroit and pretended to be making an effort to resume their lives. A grim joke, thought Nicholas, given everything that had taken place. He’d told Beth the truth about his past, about Elise, and about how Myriam had somehow cleansed his infected blood: everything except the experience he’d had while he and Myriam were making love. That he couldn’t put into words and he was afraid she’d misunderstand, think he was describing sexual passion and, while that was a component of what he’d undergone, the experience was really so much more.

Nor could he explain why, week after week, he avoided having sex with Beth – that the encounters he’d had following Myriam had been so frustrating in their departure from what he sought that he didn’t want to risk adding Beth to his list of bitter disappointments or, worse, using her as a momentary distraction from what he perceived as an unutterable and never-ending grief.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked her when they lay in bed one night.

“Is that what you want to do?”

He thought about that, really let the idea sink into him. If he ever wanted to walk out on his marriage, this was the time. If he had lost Myriam and all she represented, he could still go back to the solace of addictive sex and drugs, immerse himself in the quest for debaucheries that would bring only deeper and darker oblivion.

But what he said was, “No, I don’t want to leave. Unless you’d rather I did.”

She was silent a few moments. Then: “I want you to stay. But at the same time, I love you. And if what you found with that woman Myriam, what you tried to tell me about on the phone that day when I wouldn’t listen, if you need to go and look for that, then I’d be wrong to try to stop you. It would be more than wrong, I think it would be evil.”

A great swelling of relief passed through Nicholas. Relief and gratitude that seemed to thaw his loins and melt some of the ice from his heart. He was free to leave her if he wanted to, to look for what he’d lost. That meant that he was also free to stay. Desire, faint but hopeful, stirred in him.

He wrapped Beth in his arms and pulled her to him. She felt warm and welcoming and her body shaped itself to his in the old familiar ways, yet even with some trepidation, there was nothing timid or hesitant about his lovemaking. He forced her legs apart and mounted her. She arched her hips and guided him inside.

You’re free to go, if that’s what you need to do.

He loved her more then than he ever had loved anyone. A sense of lightness and freedom washed over him, a lifting of bonds. He thrust into her and she moaned his name. “Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas.”

But for the briefest, most ecstatic of instants, he had forgotten who that was.