Nina’s talk with the old Japanese man is quick, quiet and furious, but when they’re done they both look happy.
“Essence of what?” asks Jax, back on the street.
“Kitsch,” Nina giggles, and sprinkles a few drops from the bottle on her shirt. It blooms an iron-on St. Pauli Girl.
Jax is awed. “Let me try!” He sprinkles his arms, sprouting dozens of bangle bracelets. He tries his shirt and gets Mister Rogers with a gun.
“You don’t need much–” Nina says, but Jax is splashing himself now. Shoes with wheels. Pink bows up his jean seams. Doc Holliday moustache.
Seviche insists on going to the bathroom alone, and promptly gets lost in it. After twenty minutes Tracy sighs and goes in.
“Coming, Mom?”
Seviche is washing her hands, which are shaking. “I’m just waiting for the water to warm up,” she says. “I don’t know why it takes so long.”
“You didn’t turn the hot water knob,” says Tracy. “The movie’s going to start.”
“Well,” sniffs Seviche, and tries to turn off the water but turns both knobs on instead. “After you, Babette.”
“Tracy, Mom.” Seviche’s hands are still dripping. Tracy opens the door, holding eye contact. Eye contact helps.
“They’re dancing Wick today,” murmurs Brello over his gruel, as Coin sets his tray on the table.
“Impossible,” Coin says. “Wick’s got secrets, nobody would be stupid enough to turn him–”
“I heard different,” says Labret, leaning over them. “I heard somebody decided to call all those bluffs.” He grins. The iris of his left eye is yellow.
“What?” he asks, as they stare. The Wardens drag Wick, on parade, into the dining hall.
Coin stands and drives his thumb into Labret’s eye. He looks at Wick, and everything’s yellow. He closes his fist. Wick falls, flailing, his throat sealed shut.
Comet and the posse ride under a zep shadow for most of the day, keeping cool, until the dry riverbed turns east. It’s warmer now, but at least the sun’s going down.
“Remind me again why we gotta find this feller, boss?” asks Dough Flats, sweating.
“I ain’t no source of exposition,” snaps Comet. Comet’s wise, and bitter for it. “Posses ride. We’re a posse! You put the rest together your own self.”
They follow the dry bed through small towns, two-family towns, the kind of places that are named after the horse that died and made them stop there.
Cathy remembers being able to assign emotions to the changes she sees in eyebrows, mouths and nostrils–she just can’t remember the trick of it.
There must be a trick.
“Try it,” soothes Dr. Baum. She puts the pencil gently into Cathy’s hand. “Draw me a happy face. Good! Now a face that’s angry. That’s broken. That’s brilliant.”
Cathy looks at the paper, but all she sees is dots and lines.
On her way out she notices her chart, halfway out of its slot in the wall. She laughs, involuntarily, to see a diagnosis and half of her name:
ASPERGER’S?
CAT
Bonnie cranks back on the band throttle and the highway torrents out, snapping up old side roads and railroad tracks. Her vision ommatidizes: she flickers through a vast composite of Tennessee soft shoulders and medians. She races south.
It’s not until she’s collected in Mobile, trying to read fuel prices, that she notices her blind spot.
“Dropped a packet, huh?” says the quantum mechanic.
Bonnie, grumpy about it, just hands over her checksum. This shop smells like compressed air and beryllium, not the burnt oil of the old days, but for some reason he still wipes his hands on a rag.
It’s easy to make an episode a marathon, when they’re there to watch. Elaine and Sterling get up on Saturday and the VCR’s still on, so why not see what happens next? They pull up blankets. “I’m gonna shower,” says Elaine, “you want a pizza?”
Sterling sorts her brother’s fansub tapes, stacks of them, yellowing meticulous labels. “Nobody does anything in anime,” he laughs, “without doing it,” and Elaine thinks maybe they’re the same. Face forward, hands splayed, action lines through the TV forever! There will always be Bubblegum. There will always be pizza. Grace, grace, and the lie of summer.
The chimpfall in Puebla is like dew, not rain: around four a.m. they start to accrete on awnings and car roofs, anything flat that stays cool. But they don’t evaporate in the sun.
“They just sit in the street,” grumbles the chief, “not like we need streets in the morning, and eventually they move off some random way. To make room for the next ones! I’d blow their monkey brains out–”
“But they’re endangered,” Chili John nods.
“I’m ’bout to endanger ’em. I don’t know what you’re planning, stranger, but…”
“Can’t fight spontaneous generation, Chief,” grins Chili John, “without a degenerate.”
“Duffy?” The rabbi touches his shoulder. “It’s getting late.”
Duffy’s kneeling. His lips are moving.
“We don’t really do vigils?” says the rabbi. “I know you need to grieve for Saul in your own way, but it’s…” Duffy hasn’t looked up. The rabbi sighs. “Hit the lights when you leave, okay?”
And Duffy is fighting the demons of orthodoxy, of their refusal to believe. His prayers are bursts of light and force against them; he is burning, burning. The time to save his lover’s soul is so short.
This aye night, he whispers, this aye night, fire and fleet and candlelight.