"It's all I've thought of," she said.

She climbed over the back seat once they cleared Queen Street, giggling as her wings, trapped under her jacket, brushed the roof of the big Crown Victoria he'd rented. She prodded at the radio and found a college station, staticky and amateurish, and nodded her head along with the mash-up mixes and concert bootlegs the DJ was spinning.

Alan watched her in the rearview and felt impossibly old and strange. She'd been an incredible and attentive lover, using her hands and mouth, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and wings, her whole body to keep him quivering on the brink of o.r.g.a.s.m for what felt like hours, before finally giving him release, and then had guided him around her body with explicit instructions and firm hands on his shoulders. When she came, she squeezed him between her thighs and screamed into his neck, twitching and shuddering for a long time afterward, holding him tight, murmuring nonsense and hot breath.

In the dark, she'd seemed older. His age, or some indeterminate age. Now, sitting next to him, privately spazzing out to the beat, she seemed, oh, 12 or so. A little girl. He felt dirty.

"Where are we going?" she said, rolling down the window and shouting over the wind as they bombed up the Don Valley Parkway. The traffic had let up at Sheppard, and now they were making good time, heading for the faceless surburbs of Richmond Hill and Thornhill, and beyond.

"North," he said. "Past Kapuskasing."

She whistled. "How long a drive is it?"

"Fifteen hours. Twenty, maybe. Depends on the roads -- you can hit cottage traffic or a bad accident and get hung up for hours. There are good motels between Huntsville and North Bay if we get tired out. Nice neon signs, magic fingers beds. A place I like has 'Swiss Cabins' and makes a nice rosti for dinner."

"G.o.d, that's a long trip," she said.

"Yeah," he said, wondering if she wanted out. "I can pull off here and give you cab fare to the subway station if you wanna stay."

"No!" she said quickly. "No. Want to go."

She fed him as he drove, slicing cheese and putting it on crackers with bits of olive or pepper or salami. It appeared that she'd packed his entire fridge in the picnic bags.

After suppertime, she went to work on an apple, and he took a closer look at the knife she was using. It was a big, black hunting knife, with a compa.s.s built into the handle. The blade was black except right at the edge, where it gleamed sharp in the click-clack of the pa.s.sing highway lights.

He was transfixed by it, and the car drifted a little, sprayed gravel from the shoulder, and he overcorrected and fishtailed a little. She looked up in alarm.

"You brought the knife," he said, in response to her unasked question.

"Couldn't leave it with him," she said. "Besides, a sharp knife is handy."

"Careful you don't slice anything off, okay?"

"I never cut anything *unintentionally*," she said in a silly-dramatic voice, and socked him in the shoulder.

He snorted and went back to the driving, putting the hammer down, eating up the kilometers toward Huntsville and beyond.

She fed him slices of apple and ate some herself, then rolls of ham with little pieces of pear in them, then sips of cherry juice from a gla.s.s bottle.

"Enough," he said at last. "I'm stuffed, woman!"

She laughed. "Skinny little f.u.c.ker -- gotta put some meat on your bones." She tidied the dinner detritus into an empty shopping bag and tossed it over her shoulder into the back seat.

"So," she said. "How long since you've been home?"

He stared at the road for a while. "Fifteen years," he said. "Never been back since I left."

She stared straight forward and worked her hand under his thigh, so he was sitting on it, then wriggled her knuckles.

"I've never been home," she said.

He wrinkled his brow. "What's that mean?" he said.

"It's a long story," she said.

"Well, let's get off the highway and get a room and you can tell me, okay?"

"Sure," she said.

They ended up at the Timberline Wilderness Lodge and Pancake House, and Mimi clapped her hands at the silk-flowers-and-waterbeds ambience of the room, fondled the grisly jackalope head on the wall, and started running a tub while Alan carried in the suitcases.

She dramatically tossed her clothes, one item at a time, out the bathroom door, through the clouds of steam, and he caught a glimpse of her round, full a.s.s, bracketed by her restless wings, as she poured into the tub the bottle of cheap bubble-bath she'd bought in the lobby.

He dug a T-shirt and a fresh pair of boxers to sleep in out of his suitcase, feeling ridiculously modest as he donned them. His feet crunched over cigarette burns and tangles in the brown s.h.a.g carpet and he wished he'd brought along some slippers. He flipped through both snowy TV channels and decided that he couldn't stomach a televangelist or a thirty-year-old sitcom right then and flicked it off, sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to the splashing from the bathroom.

Mimi was in awfully good spirits, considering what she'd been through with Krishna. He tried to think about it, trying to make sense of the day and the girl, but the splashing from the tub kept intruding on his thoughts.

She began to sing, and after a second he recognized the tune. "White Rabbit," by the Jefferson Airplane. Not the kind of thing he'd expect her to be giving voice to; nor she, apparently, for she kept breaking off to giggle. Finally, he poked his head through the door.

She was folded into the tub, knees and t.i.ts above the foamline, wings slick with water and dripping in the tile. Her hands were out of sight beneath the suds. She caught his eye and grinned crazily, then her hands shot out of the pool, clutching the hunting knife.

"*Put on the White Rabbit!*" she howled, cackling fiendishly.

He leapt back and she continued to cackle. "Come back, come back," she choked. "I'm doing the tub scene from *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*. I thought you were into reading?"

He cautiously peeked around the doorjamb, playing it up for comic effect. "Give me the knife," he said.

"Awww," she said, handing it over, b.u.t.t first. He set it down on the dresser, then hurried back to the bathroom.

"Haven't you read all those books?"

Alan grinned. "What's the point of a bunch of books you've already read?" He dropped his boxers and stripped off his T-shirt and climbed into the tub, sloshing gallons of water over the sc.u.mmy tile floor.

When I was two years old,

(she said, later, as she reclined against the headboard and he reclined against her, their a.s.ses deforming the rusted springs of the mattress so that it sloped toward them and the tins of soda they'd opened to replenish their bodily fluids lost in sweat and otherwise threatened to tip over on the slope; she encased him in her wings, shutting out the light and filling their air with the smell of cinnamon and pepper from the downy hair)

When I was two years old,

(she said, speaking into the s.h.a.ggy hair at the back of his neck, as his sore muscles trembled and as the sweat dried to a white salt residue on his skin, as he lay there in the dark of the room and the wings, watching the constellation of reflected clock-radio lights in the black TV screen)