She had left her damp socks on the radiator by the window, and by then she had been truly dizzy, the room warped and turned sideways, the building tipping on an axis that wasn’t there. Jude remembered the man had removed her underwear without her help, and without asking if she minded, after she sat down, or collapsed, in a leather armchair. He had pulled the pale pink boy shorts over her thighs and down with care, not ripping them as she expected but handling them as if they were a captured butterfly he was reluctant to crush. She thought it inaccurate to call that moment a memory because she had seen it happen from a faraway overhead view, as if she had briefly vacated her body and climbed to higher, safer ground. She had no idea what he had done with her shorts after that, whether he had stuffed them into his pocket for luck, or calmly eaten them.
Jude had seen but not touched her white shirt on her way to the bathroom, crushed at the base of a wall like rejected flowers, splashed with blood and one sleeve torn from the body. The blood had puzzled her, because she didn’t remember spilling it. But now she saw another wide-angle bird’s eye shot of herself on top of him, rising and falling in slow motion and underwater light, and remotely she was aware that he was inside her and she saw that her nose was bleeding, not because he hit her but because some critical piece of wiring had come unmoored in her head. The disconnected wiring and foreign, splintered memories that came with it were the result of an unknown drug in a cup of hot chocolate that she had lifted to her own lips. These broken memories and disturbing out-of-body images of herself were never intended for her, because the hot chocolate had not been hers. She had taken the cup in place of another, and as she drank she heard her father’s voice telling her to be unafraid.
Jude had spent the day shopping, or hunting, in the Castro. The easiest pockets to pick were those belonging to tourists, and the easiest of these were the gay men in their fifties who came to San Francisco on vacation from Atlanta or Denver or anywhere that the same-sex culture was kept hidden from view. These men tended to be soft and unaware, with pink faces and eyes milky behind rose lenses. They were either very thin or shaped like pears and wore khakis or jeans that were too tight with new sneakers, and their T-shirts were always tucked in. They traveled in couples, one of them carrying a city guide, the other an umbrella, and sometimes they wore those Velcro travel wallets around their necks. They walked around the Castro with eyes so wide they might have been exploring the far side of the moon, and they were such easy targets that Jude generally made a game of it, following them for a block or two after she hit them and then slipping up to put their wallet or sunglasses back into their pockets. It had been raining today, but warm, and the streets smelled of urine.
And even though animal and human prey alike tended to huddle together and become more wary of others in adverse weather, and their pockets that much harder to reach, Jude had grown bored of her shadow practice and resolved to work the financial district the next day, where the men deserved to have their pockets emptied and where it was infinitely more difficult for her to be a shadow, especially wearing the uniform. And she had by now come to understand that her father had not taught her to lift wallets as a means of supplementing her allowance. The object had been to learn stealth.
Jude saw the man as she entered a coffeehouse called Last Drop, a long narrow place that had a cheerful plastic art deco-meets-The Jetsons feel, with Japanese nudes on the walls and funky details like barbers’ chairs. He was in a booth with two white girls. Jude scanned them as she crossed the room. The man had blond hair that just fell in his eyes. Long nose and a crescent scar on one cheek, narrow red mouth. He was thin and looked British, but that might have been a false echo of his clothes, a mint-green teddy boy suit and boots with pointed toes. His hands flashed silver as he made a point and Jude saw he wore rings on both thumbs. He sat in the corner with his back against the wall. He kept his hands and mouth at a safe distance that posed no threat, then lunged forward as he said something that made the girls laugh, and Jude saw his thin lips pull back for a heartbeat to show his teeth, sharp and white, as he palmed and disappeared the plastic envelope and flicked the crystals into the blond girl’s coffee cup while she laughed and wiped tears from her eyes.
The girls didn’t seem to notice.
Jude marked them in the space of one breath as nineteen or twenty, second-year students at the art institute or New College, who lived in a flat with three other people in the Haight. They had come to California after boarding schools in New Hampshire, where they had gone into the city on weekends and listened to Velvet Underground in their rooms and done a lot of ecstasy and experimented with being bisexual, though both were straight. The one with the tainted cup was pale and blond with fragile cheekbones and black eye shadow, Sylvia Plath gone to heroin. The other was rich-girl punk with a pierced nose and shocked blue hair, and they were both perfect targets for the man because they thought of themselves as streetwise but were not. They were rabbits in dark woods, and one or both of them would be hanging upside down with her skin removed before morning.
Animal urges, she thought. She would be the thrush.
Jude made her decision with little deliberation. The man offended and fascinated her to equal degrees. That the college girls might be spared a blood-soaked washcloth was an afterthought. Jude was bored, and she thought she stood a better chance against him than they did. And she thought it would be interesting to try.
She went to the bar and ordered a cappuccino, walking with the shadow of a limp. He wouldn’t bite if she was too obvious. It was only a sore ankle, and not even wrapped. She twisted it playing soccer, she fell off her skateboard. She paid for her drink and dropped a dollar in the tip jar for luck, watching the table out of the corner of her eye to be sure Sylvia didn’t drink from her tainted cup. Jude hummed, waiting for her drink. When it arrived, she turned and limped across the café, her eyes skating left and right as if looking for just the right table. She held the cup to her face and blew on it with her lips curved into a bow, circling close to the table. Her one fear was that he had already made his choice, and would be reluctant to deviate.
But she could give him a push.
Jude stopped a dozen feet from their table, and winced. She crouched on one knee, her cup balanced precariously, and while she examined the sore ankle, her skirt slipped up her thigh just enough to flash the pink boy shorts.
Two heartbeats and he called her over to the table, insisting she join them. The college girls regarded her warily, then the one with shocked blue hair shrugged and slid over, and Jude sat down among them. She looked across the table at Sylvia and gave her a shy, nervous nod of hello, then turned her attention to the man. Jude looked first into the crosshairs of his eyes, and she had to admit the man had something, a hypnotic pull. The eyes were a shattering blue, the ghost of a smile in the crow’s feet on either side, and now she saw his left eye was graced with a splash of brown and he was staring at her without blinking, staring into her as if he could stop her breath. Jude realized what he was doing, and she made a note of it. He was staring at her as if he loved her, as if he had lost her in the wilderness and found her again, and she imagined he had left a few bodies behind him in shreds with that look. Jude blushed and smiled, and sent Sylvia a telepathic smoke signal saying that if she ever laid eyes on her again, her soul would belong not to her, but to Jude.