Crouched on rock, he pulled his hands up his thighs.
His hands were hideous.
She passed another, nearer tree. The moon flung gold coins at her breasts. Her brown aureoles were wide, her nipples small. “You…?” She said that, softly, three feet away, looking down; and he still could not make out her expression for the leaf dappling; but her cheek bones were Orientally high. She was Oriental, he realized and waited for another word, tuned for accent. (He could sort Chinese from Japanese.) “You’ve come!” It was a musical Midwestern Standard. “I didn’t know if you’d come!” Her voicing (a clear soprano, whispering…) said that some of what he’d thought was shadow-movement might have been fear: “You’re here!” She dropped to her knees in a roar of foliage. Her thighs, hard in front, softer (he could tell) on the sides—a column of darkness between them—were inches from his raveled knees.
She reached, two fingers extended, pushed back plaid wool, and touched his chest; ran her fingers down. He could hear his own crisp hair.
Laughter raised her face to the moon. He leaned forward; the odor of lemons filled the breezeless gap. Her round face was compelling, her eyebrows un-Orientally heavy. He judged her over thirty, but the only lines were two small ones about her mouth.
He turned his mouth, open, to hers, and raised his hands to the sides of her head till her hair covered them. The cartilages of her ears were hot curves on his palms. Her knees slipped in leaves; that made her blink and laugh again. Her breath was like noon and smelled of lemons…
He kissed her; she caught his wrists. The joined meat of their mouths came alive. The shape of her breasts, her hand half on his chest and half on wool, was lost with her weight against him.
Their fingers met and meshed at his belt; a gasp bubbled in their kiss (his heart was stuttering loudly), was blown away; then air on his thigh.
They lay down.
With her fingertips she moved his cock head roughly in her rough hair while a muscle in her leg shook under his. Suddenly he slid into her heat. He held her tightly around the shoulders when her movements were violent. One of her fists stayed like a small rock over her breast. And there was a roaring, roaring: at the long, surprising come, leaves hailed his side.
Later, on their sides, they made a warm place with their mingled breath. She whispered, “You’re beautiful, I think.” He laughed, without opening his lips. Closely, she looked at one of his eyes, looked at the other (he blinked), looked at his chin (behind his lips he closed his teeth so that his jaw moved), then at his forehead. (He liked her lemon smell.) “…beautiful!” she repeated.
Wondering was it true, he smiled.
She raised her hand into the warmth, with small white nails, moved one finger beside his nose, growled against his cheek.
He reached to take her wrist.
She asked, “Your hand…?”
So he put it behind her shoulder to pull her nearer.
She twisted. “Is there something wrong with your…?”
He shook his head against her hair, damp, cool, licked it.
Behind him, the wind was cool. Below hair, her skin was hotter than his tongue. He brought his hands around into the heated cave between them.
She pulled back. “Your hands—!”
Veins like earthworms wriggled in the hair. The skin was cement dry; his knuckles were thick with scabbed callous. Blunt thumbs lay on the place between her breasts like toads.
She frowned, raised her knuckles toward his, stopped.
Under the moon on the sea of her, his fingers were knobbed peninsulas. Sunk on the promontory of each was a stripped-off, gnawed-back, chitinous wreck.
“You…?” he began.
No, they were not deformed. But they were…ugly! She looked up. Blinking, her eyes glistened.
“…do you know my…?” His voice hoarsened. “Who I…am?”
Her face was not subtle; but her smile, regretful and mostly in the place between her brow and her folded lids, confused.
“You,” she said, full voice and formal (but the wind still blurred some overtone), “have a father.” Her hip was warm against his belly. The air which he had thought mild till now was a blade to pry back his loins. “You have a mummer—!” That was his cheek against her mouth. But she turned her face away. “You are—” she placed her pale hand over his great one (Such big hands for a little ape of a guy, someone had kindly said. He remembered that) on her ribs—“beautiful. You’ve come from somewhere. You’re going somewhere.” She sighed.
“But…” He swallowed the things in his throat (he wasn’t that little). “I’ve lost…something.”
“Things have made you what you are,” she recited. “What you are will make you what you will become.”
“I want something back!”
She reached behind her to pull him closer. The cold well between his belly and the small of her back collapsed. “What don’t you have?” She looked over her shoulder at him: “How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You have the face of someone much younger.” She giggled. “I thought you were…sixteen! You have the hands of someone much older—”
“And meaner?”
“—crueler than I think you are. Where were you born?”
“Upstate New York. You wouldn’t know the town. I didn’t stay there long.”
“I probably wouldn’t. You’re a long way away.”
“I’ve been to Japan. And Australia.”
“You’re educated?”
He laughed. His chest shook her shoulder. “One year at Columbia. Almost another at a community college in Delaware. No degree.”
“What year were you born?”
“Nineteen forty-eight. I’ve been in Central America too. Mexico. I just came from Mexico and I—”
“What do you want to change in the world?” she continued her recitation, looking away. “What do you want to preserve? What is the thing you’re searching for? What are you running away from?”
“Nothing,” he said. “And nothing. And nothing. And…nothing, at least that I know.”
“You have no purpose?”
“I want to get to Bellona and—” He chuckled. “Mine’s the same as everybody else’s; in real life, anyway: to get through the next second, consciousness intact.”
The next second passed.
“Really?” she asked, real enough to make him realize the artificiality of what he’d said (thinking: It is in danger with the passing of each one). “Then be glad you’re not just a character scrawled in the margins of somebody else’s lost notebook: you’d be deadly dull. Don’t you have any reason for going there?”
“To get to Bellona and…”
When he said no more, she said, “You don’t have to tell me. So, you don’t know who you are? Finding that out would be much too simple to bring you all the way from upper New York State, by way of Japan, here. Ahhh…” and she stopped.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Well, if you were born in nineteen forty-eight, you’ve got to be older than twenty-seven.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, hell,” she said. “It isn’t important.”
He began to shake her arm, slowly.
She said: “I was born in nineteen forty-seven. And I’m a good deal older then twenty-eight.” She blinked at him again. “But that really isn’t im—”
He rolled back in the loud leaves. “Do you know who I am?” Night was some color between clear and cloud. “You came here, to find me. Can’t you tell me what my name is?”