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When he awoke, the world had become an erotic film, the rug soft, the corridor warm, sweat accumulating inside his underwear like sweet balm, and there she was, freshly showered and dressed in silk pajamas emblazoned with the anchor insignia of the United States Navy, displaying herself in a provocative low-angle shot, offering a wet hand. He jumped to his feet and followed her down the corridor, glorying in the fragrance of her soggy hair, his erection moving before him like a bowsprit. He shivered with the hair-trigger sexuality of adolescence. Outside the executive officer’s cabin she kissed him with awkward desire.

‘I’m sweaty,’ he said.

‘I don’t care,’ she replied, leading him over the threshold.

The cabin was ablaze. How many candles? A hundred? A thousand? Candles lovingly arranged on the nightstand, the bureau, the floor, candles stuck in gin bottles and teacups, candles lined up along the headboard like the Constellation Midgard Serpent.

‘Are we having a séance?’ he asked.

She gasped and lost her smile. George bit his lower lip mercilessly, wincing at the pain.

‘I’m sorry. I—’

‘I thought you would like them,’ she said. Her eyes grew moist. ‘They’re supposed to be… romantic.’

‘I like them,’ he said hastily. ‘They’re fine.’

‘Look, George, I simply don’t know about these things.’

‘They’re very romantic.’

‘I’ve never done this before,’ she said.

‘Follow my lead.’

He placed his arms around her, massaged her shoulder blades. She did the same to him. He undid her top, working the wonderfully pliant buttons, tossed it onto the bed, the only place in the room where it would not catch fire. She mimicked him; his undershirt flew away. Though not large, her breasts still partook unmistakably of that inscrutable genre of sensuality, that religion of round altars, source of obsessions so intense that the males of his extinct species had been mystified and powerless, the females mystified and annoyed, and so he gawked, feeling that he owed the indulgence not only to himself but also to his dead gender, and then he kissed her nipples, which pushed out like brown shoots from soil, and within seconds she had picked up the cue and was kissing his.

He finished unclothing her. She reciprocated. They stood together in the flaming room.

‘You see, I have to put this in you.’ Ready to burst, he lowered her onto the bed.

‘So I’ve read.’ She laughed. ‘Do I put something in you? I forget.’

He entered her, sawed, released his eager sperm. He withdrew instantly.

‘Was that it?’ she asked.

‘The first time you drank coffee – you were probably nine or something – you didn’t like it, right?’

‘I was never nine.’

He pivoted, put his legs over the bed. A candle flame nipped at his ankle. ‘What we really need, I think’ – he stood up – ‘is for me to wash.’

He went to the adjoining shower, feeling like a general who had lost a battle but still retained high hopes for the war. Morning followed faithfully. They bathed each other, kissed wetly. She was so solid, so gloriously bone-filled – not at all what he expected of her race. He had heard of the psychology experiment in which a male rat is kept endlessly potent through a steady supply of new mates, and when he saw how the water changed her, rolling in glittery pebbles down her impossibly desirable sides, and then, a few moments later, when he saw how the sheets gathered around her thighs changed her yet again, he knew that he had found in Morning Valcourt an infinite source of arousal.

This time it was a screw of which both their sexes would have been proud. She began to grasp the crux of the matter, liquifying, trembling, reveling in the unfamiliar feelings. Memories of her canceled love life flooded back. He touched her with the same appreciative passion he had brought to creviced granite. Her orgasm was florid and long, driving him to analogous spasms. They napped, awoke, met again amid the little flames, Morning improvising now, initiating novelties, using her leased body to deny her unadmittance, and he realized that, when all was said and done, she had a greater aptitude for this than he. His pleasure was fuller than he had ever known it. Around the clock they subsisted on sex – napping, eating, breathing for its sake. They discovered uncharted orifices, claimed them; they invented lewd jokes, some verbal, some enacted with fingers and mouths; they drank each other, rutted, tried to make it dirty, then cosmic, so that on some occasions they fucked, on others they made love, ever mindful of the potential in new locations – the gaming tables, the chapel, the swimming pools, the main mess hall, her office. She got her period. They screwed on sheets soaked with black blood. His cock darkened. Their mutual maneuvers, their thrusts and archings, became gestures of defiance, acts that mocked the bad ideas, and as George’s seeds lashed their excellent tails and struggled through Morning’s eggless womb, the couple found themselves mentally cheering, thinking: try anyway, you wretched little bastards, be fruitful and multiply, for unto us a child will be born, you can do it, try.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

In Which Information Is Conveyed Suggesting that Nostradamus Saw the Truth and Leonardo da Vinci Painted It

April is the crudest month, never stopping, intent on causing May. George’s wife grew weak. A cough raged through her. The warm, ebony blood drained from her face, leaving it chalky and dry. Her hair became brittle. Odd noises rose from deep within her, wheezes and scrapings, sounds like burning cellophane.

Sometimes George would find her in the periscope room, hugging one of the machines, pressing it into the shank of her body until her vibrations stopped. She began staying in bed all day, breathing soggily, spitting up ink.

‘I want to talk,’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘My life.’

‘Won’t that make you sad?’ Slipping a second pillow under her heavy head, he could not help but notice the stale vapors coming from her mouth.

‘Yes.’ Black veins pulsed in her eyes.

He kissed his wife. ‘Let’s talk.’

‘Leaves keep occurring to me, autumn leaves, every type, red, yellow. I think I spent some time in Vermont. I would have liked primitive art – this is quite clear – and going into libraries and reading the book spines, so many of them, famous and obscure all jumbled together. Also, I never outgrew stuffed animals.’

Dispassionately she recalled her parents, murdered in their preschool years during the Battle of Corpus Christi. Helen would have been a bowling alley attendant, a cold woman, unhappy, mired in quasi-poverty and a pathological marriage. Hugh would have been a mechanic and also a self-pitying lout who wanted a son, someone he could shoot things with.

Happier thoughts now. Morning, the thoughtful, gushy school-girl, writing meaningful poems about dead birds, creating a craw-daddy farm in Parson’s Creek, scholarships piling up, the Jacob Bronowski Award for the Junior Displaying the Most Interest in Science, and other prizes with equally peculiar names, and they were hers – hers! – Hugh couldn’t take them away. She flourished in graduate school, taking the clinical psychology department by storm, then converted her Ph.D. into a lucrative practice. Guilt was her speciality.

She told George of her cases – wins, draws, losses. Phillip Cassidy, inhabited till death by seven personalities. Marcie Cremo, debrained by her own revolver. And the triumphs? asked George. Quite a few, answered Morning. (The trick, you see, was to be their friend, though they didn’t teach that at the University of Chicago.) Janet Hodges, fat and self-hating, but when they were finished she was a Rubens model, sensually plump, able to have unhappy love affairs just like anyone else. Willie Howard, age six, who didn’t talk, not a word, was thought to be brain-damaged, but then Morning got out the puppet with the three eyes, and it taught Willie how to speak Neptunian, and so Willie taught it English.