Fantastic Metropolis

Into that dream again. That deep, dark, dangerous dream.

Matted mulch underfoot, crisping with each barefoot step she tentatively takes, stubs of twigs and empty seed pods prickling her soles. Tinted sunlight welding leaf to stem in the thick slotted living canopy above, brazing corrugated tree trunks, ricocheting off dangling fruits and nuts, tangling in hairy thickets, dripping in amber sparkles off the arcs of lianas. Secret language of insects droning hieratically in her ears, bird calls like cryptic commentary punctuating her passage. Moist air cottoning against her—unclothed? yes, completely unclothed—body.

Step by step the fecund jungle lures her deeper within itself. For an indeterminate time, confidence and pleasure swell within her. Her hands stretch joyously out to either side to caress warm golden boles and waxy jade foliage. She kneels to lap aromatic rainwater from the impossibly clean ciborium of a pitcher plant, pistils tickling her nose. Lugubrious lizards lunge from hot plates of stone to shelter beneath welcoming tented fronds. A parrot with a red-streaked beak jitters along from branch to branch parallel with her chance-dictated course, winking at her with cocked head. Butterflies large as women’s dainty handkerchiefs and stitched as prettily shimmer round her momentarily before dispersing.

Then she chances upon the lone fat bold paw-print, blazoned into a square of bare soil.

The sun pulls a passing cloud before its frightened face. An unseen beast coughs roughly. A banded snake slips across the trail, a squiggle of movement linking two absences. A monkey laughs. The paw-print seems to swell in her sight until it fills her whole field of vision, freezing the day, its negative space conjuring up the instrument that stamped it: four strong clawed toes, rough palm-pad wide as a cup’s saucer, dew-claw that dragged a thin line in the dirt.

Three or six grains of sand crumble from the edge of the print into its receptive depression, restoring time. Suddenly frantic, she begins to run.

Now the jungle does not invite, but hinders. Branches slap her arms, raising welts. Thorns needle her flanks. The concealed mouths of rodent burrows invite broken ankles. Trees slide closer together to bar her passage.

Her breath rasps from her lungs. Sweat stings her eyes. Her tongue captures a trickle of blood meandering lazily over her upper lip like the first drops rilling from an ineffective dike.

She crashes out of a wall of whipping foliage into a broad short-grassed clearing. Exposed, she realizes too late her fatal mistake. She tries to go back, but the withy latticed curtain now defies penetration. Hopeless, she starts to sprint across the clearing toward some theoretical safety.

Halfway across, she risks a compulsive look backwards.

The jaguar has emerged.

Bigger than her, its massive presence dominating the clearing like a fallen chunk of starless space, the kingly cat wears its black fur like a garment woven of pure night. Despite the gap between the woman and the animal, the cat’s features fill her sight to the exclusion of all else: its whiskers, thick and lucid as fiberoptics, stretch a foot to either side of its blunt muzzle; its garnet eyes glitter; its nostrils flare wetly; its throat pulses with the rude vigor of its heartbeat. A tongue like a velvet washcloth strops up, around, and down before disappearing. A tail like the sinuous scribble sketched offhandedly onto canvas by an old master lashes the stolid air.

Nearly paralyzed with anticipatory fear, the cat’s image bonded to her soul, she tries to resume her run, stumbles after only a few yards, and falls to hands and knees.

Instantly the jaguar is upon her, atop her, cloaking her like a heavy cape, its weight immense. She is too terrified even to scream.

She tenses for the bite that will sever her spine at the neck.

The slash of teeth never comes. Slowly, acid sweat burning her armpits and some small sanity returning, she catalogs finer impressions.

The jaguar’s forelimbs compress her ribs below her flooded armpits, furry staves barrelling her torso. The cat’s heavy head lolls on her right shoulder, its left ear cupped to her right one like mated shells; should she turn, she suspects her eyes would lock with its slitted pupils. Warm meaty breath washes her cheek. The jaguar’s muscled back legs clamp hers from the outside, and a dew-claw digs into one calf, causing the only pain.

Then she feels a ponderous, prescient unsheathing between the cheeks of her ass.

The jaguar’s stiffening prick emerges from its furry case, already juiced and thick. A knot as big as twin walnuts swells in the penis, much closer to the root than the tip. The hot length of the cat’s member seems to lay a brand on her sensitive flesh. She feels her traitorous cunt responding with lubrications that make no distinctions between man and beast.

Still gripping her, the jaguar backs up delicately an inch at a step, until its bristly chin rests on her nape. The pointed tip of its prick slides inerringly down her crack, slurring fluid, snagging a millisecond on the ridged rim of her asshole, finally coming to rest between her cunt’s fiery lips.

The jaguar bucks, and its cock slides in up to the knot. She screams, falls forward from the waist. Then the cat pushes all the way in.

The right cheek of her face now cushioned on the grass, her nipples scribing the turf, she and the jaguar fuck.

Each time the knot is pulled out or pushed in, a wordless plosive exclamation escapes her. Her inner cunt lips invert on the inward stroke and evert on the outward.

The jaguar’s thrusts accelerate, and resonant undulations quake her buttocks. One final almost unbearable ramming triggers both the cat’s cum and her own titanic climax.

When the scalding fluid generously geysers up her—every drop contained within her uterine channels due to the knot’s blockage—the slumber-hosted transformation instantly begins. She feels her limbs melt and reconfigure, her torso elongate, her face reshape.

Within seconds, the lovers have collapsed to the verdant grass, two lithe black jaguars, one large, one small, lying entwined, licking each other’s muzzles beneath the sun.

Kerry Hackett awakes. Her dream orgasm quivers out its final fading traces along her bare limbs, ripples in her midriff. A flush spreads like a radiant gorget around her neck and upper bosom. So hot she has to kick the covers off, despite the apartment’s wintry unheated chill. (Electricity rationing again till noon today.) Her autonomous cunt’s made a soppy wet spot on the sheets. Will Tango notice? Doubtful, since the big man continues to sleep so soundly on his own side of the bed, like a semi-gaunt yet still wanly handsome corpse awaiting the tender ministrations of an embalmer.

The bedside clock reads a crimson six-thirty, half an hour away from its appointed shrilling. Kerry shuts off the alarm and slides out of the bed. The wood floor insults her bare feet, so she hastens to the bathroom, where at least a cotton mat interfaces between self and world.

In the lighted chamber, behind shut door, her breath plumes. On the chill toilet, she laves ceramic bowl with steaming piss. No toilet paper again, under dual constraints of meager money and short supply. No matter, since she’ll soon have a hot shower—assuming the city’s natural gas supply hasn’t been interrupted once more.

Before arising from the toilet, she checks for signs of her imminent period. Not yet.

Kerry cajoles hot water out of the sink tap, untenses muscles braced to receive only cold, and scrubs her face with suds from a sliver of yellowing soap. Dropping the towel from her face, she confronts herself in the mirror: short peltish black hair feathered across a high brow, cornflower-blue eyes, smallish nose, full wide lips, a pugnacious chin. But a portion of her features are swamped in noise: an enormous port-wine birthmark, permanent love-bruise from the gods, damage from a clumsy stork, sprawls across half her visage, a map of some terra incognita occluding an asymmetrical portion of forehead, nose, left eye-socket, cheek and jaw.

In the shower, Kerry soaps thoroughly, scrubbing hard between her legs as if to wash her recurrent dream away. She mashes her cunt as if to squeeze out the semen of the dream jaguar— or perhaps to drive it deeper in. Despite erotic satiation, her own touch is mildly arousing, and her nipples react. She offs the shower and steps out. The fall of water from her high-jutting breasts resembles the drip of light from the lianas in the oneiric jungle.

She brushes her teeth with raw baking soda and hydrogen peroxide, granular paste cupped in her palm. In the steamy mirror, she applies minimal makeup: frosted eyes, iced lips to match her painted nails.

Back in the bedroom, guided only by spill of bathroom light, Kerry dresses quickly. Azure bra and matching panties, black stockings that elastically grip her thighs up high where they narrow and tauten. Her second-best suit, the brown one, seems cleanest. A gold chain once her mother’s fits tightly around her sculpted neck, accessorizing her outfit bravely but without companionship of other jewelry. Old cloth coat with faux fur collar, boots suitable for snowy streets, sensible flats in her carry-bag. She picks up her wallet from the dresser and plumbs its disappointing depths, finally plucking out one of her last two NUfives. She pins the nudie bill under Tango’s six prescription vials on the galley table, where he’s certain to encounter it.

Her lover still sleeps, face pillow-buried. Kerry sighs, plants a perfunctory kiss on the back of his head, then leaves the apartment without breakfast or goodbyes.

Poorly brightened by a yellow bulb, the ground-floor vestibule—full of wind-sifted litter, its smashed-lock outer door ajar an inch—holds a dozing beggar cocooned in a greasy blue U-Haul blanket, nothing much showing except his tubercular bearded face, so grimy as to render his race and age indeterminate. The polyester chrysalis shifts as Kerry attempts to sidestep it, one of the beggar’s rheumy eyes open, and a frost-blackened hand extends.

“Spare change, miss?”

Kerry unpockets a mixed handful of new tin and old silver and dribbles the small offering into the cupped calloused palm.

“The gods bless you, lady.”

Kerry cracks the door wider, until it nearly scrunches the beggar’s blanketed feet, and steps outside.

Dawn’s fighting vicious battalions of gunmetal clouds. Week-old snow, rendered into a semblance of soot-swirled eroded plastic, heaps against basement windows, clings in compressed sidewalk patches seemingly designed as ankle-wrenching pedestrian hazards. Kerry descends ten broken steps carefully, pulls her coat more closely around her, then begins her walk to work.

Half-reassuringly, half-worrisomely, National Guard patrols are omnipresent this morning, camouflaged stalkers in the urban jungle. In pairs and threesomes, featuring the occasional quartet, they warily make their random rounds through the neighborhood, sleek rifles carried lightly like sheaves of grains in the arms of rustic celebrants. (The four-person squads among them also lug the shared components of a crazy-foam riot-buster.) The young Guards, male and female alike, eye Kerry neutrally, and she correspondingly maintains a head-held-high, gaze-straight attitude.

Vehicular traffic is almost nonexistent, save for a lurching methanol-powered bus, a limo, and a few powered trikes.

At an intersection, Kerry flinches as the possible yet improbable sound of sniper fire reaches her, a rattle of low-caliber snaps. But the easy-striding fellow pedestrians further along her intended path do not seem to be scurrying for cover, so she cautiously proceeds. The mock-assault discloses itself: a construction crew is boarding up with plywood sheets a still-steaming building on Shepard Street, the pop of their nail-guns simulating attack.

A block from work, Kerry purchases her breakfast from a vendorless cart: a shrink-wrapped bagel, pre-sliced and -smeared, and a paper cup of herbal tea. After accepting three nudie singles from her, the cart scoots off, obeying programmatic rhythms of consumer enticement.

An innocuous office building marks her destination. A row of discreet bronze signs near the doors detail the tenants. Kerry’s eyes flick to one: DIAVERDE PARABIOLOGICALS. In the small groundfloor atrium, Kerry nods to the building’s receptionist and to several armed private guards, some roaming while two remain sealed away in a defensive booth. Resting hygienic bagel atop hot lidded cup, she thrust her free hand into a wall-mounted scanner’s mouth. Stealing a few flakes of dead skin, the scanner performs an instant verification of her dual-helixed selfhood, and confirms by several additional tests that her hand is still attached to its rightful body. As a consequence, an elevator opens and beckons her in.

Diaverde occupies the tenth through fifteenth floors of the building; Kerry disembarks on the top level, administrative. The elevator discharges directly into a second reception area. Behind a small desk sits one of Kerry’s co-workers, a pretty young black woman with glistening Josephine-Baker-revival hair and large-hooped earrings, dressed with low-budget elegance. The clock inset before the receptionist reads just eight. The black woman glances at the readout, then says, “You’re early.”

“Couldn’t sleep. He in yet, Oreesha?”

“I don’t think so. But who can be sure with the Phantom Boss?”

“Maybe I’ll take a few minutes to eat then. I feel almost faint.”

“Go for it, child. Say, you see that building got burned on Shepard?”

“Sure. What’s the story?”

“Take your pick. Top two rumors are it was either a bomb-factory that had an accident, or a honey hive.”

“If it’d been a honey hive, the Guard would’ve left nothing standing.”

Oreesha shrugs, shoulders bumping hoops. “Maybe they’re slacking off. Maybe they figure dirty honey’s no good to anyone.”

“Whatever. I’ve got too much on my mind to worry about it.”

Kerry’s small office intervenes between Oreesha’s workstation and the quarters of their boss. She sets her breakfast down on her neatly ordered desktop, powers up her computer, shucks her coat, swaps boots for shoes from her carryall, and sits. Within seconds her monitor hosts Diaverde’s Escherian corporate screen-saver: a leaf metamorphosing into a fish, fish into crab, crab into bird, bird into man, man into leaf, forever. Kerry glances over her shoulder at the golden door bearing her boss’s name and title: PETER JARIUS, DIRECTOR. Nothing stirs within. She uncaps her tea, uncondoms her bagel, and breakfasts with tidy bites and sips.

Kerry’s sorting through e-mail from the division heads, dealing with the less important memos, prioritizing and flagging the others for later reading by her boss, when she hears the door behind her open.

“Ms. Hackett, may I see you in my office, please?”

Kerry stiffens involuntarily, her hand coming up instinctively to splay across her facial maculation, slim white fingers striping purple epidermis. Heat scalds her palm. She forces herself to relax, to lower her hand. Without turning, she answers, “Yes, Mr. Jarius.” She logs off—policy when leaving one’s desk, even if only momentarily, even if under ostensibly secure conditions—picks up her PDA, and enters Jarius’s office through the unlatched door.

Jarius has already resumed his seat behind an expensively modest desk, backed by a vast expanse of smoky glass offering a panorama of the raddled neighborhood. Today his tailored, collarless suit is a fashionable burgundy so dark as to appear nearly crow-black. Jarius’s goatee, sideburns and quiff of thick hair are rusty roan streaked with grey. His complexion is swarthy and pocked with minute old acne scars. Teeth white as limestone in gums pink as grapefruit flesh stand forth when Jarius unleashes a smile on his secretary. His voice holds a rain-barrel resonance. Jarius’s eyes traverse Kerry’s whole form like inquisitive insect feelers before settling on her face—on her blemish?

“Ms. Hackett, you look particularly graceful today in that tasteful outfit.”

Kerry’s unmarked moiety of face colors a fraction of a step closer to matching the mottled portion. “It’s certainly nothing I haven’t worn before.”

“Well, today it’s a particularly effective business costume. You see, we have some unexpected visitors due here soon—several Senators on an inspection tour—and since you’ll be helping me conduct the tour, as well as accompanying us all to dinner tonight, your looks are vital. Not, of course, that you ever appear less than professional and demure.”

“Dinner? Tonight? But I had plans—”

Jarius negates her trivial plans with a negligent wave. “You’ll simply have to cancel them. I can’t be expected to manage these inquisitive federal boors all on my own. What if they ask me for statistics, costs, figures? Those are your metier, Ms. Hackett, part of your ultra-competent provenance.” Jarius smiles again. “Face it, Ms. Hackett, as my personal secretary, you’re indispensable to me.”

“I’ll have to call home.”

Jarius frowns, a balked demiurge. “If you don’t mind a slight personal inquisition, may I ask if you’re still sharing a residence with that fellow you brought to the Christmas party last month? A Mr. Santangelo, I believe his name was…”

“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”

Jarius mimes a faint distaste. “Just that you and he seem so dissonant together. He’s rather—well, ragged and rough for a woman of your refinement.”

“Things have gone hard for him lately. Tango’s a good man.”

“’Tango.’ A rather childish nickname.”

Kerry remains silent. Jarius says, “Is he still suffering like so many other unfortunates from his, ah, affliction?”

“Yes.”

“And still taking his various medicines, those semipotent panaceas by which our rivals hold pitiful patients hostage? We wouldn’t want you to succumb to your boyfriend’s unrestrained bugs, should he desist from his protocol.”

“I make sure he takes everything he’s supposed to.”

“Those pills are rather expensive, aren’t they? Even with partial insurance coverage, they take a good chunk out of your pay, I estimate….”

“We get by.”

“Well, perhaps I might engineer a slight raise for you, Ms. Hackett, considering how you always devote one hundred and ten percent to Diaverde. You’re a fine employee. And I feel we understand each other magnificently well.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jarius.”

Jarius checks his watch, emergent from beneath link-clasped cuff. “Well, the Senators will be here in slightly over an hour. I expect you’ll want to load your handy little pocket machine with all sorts of impressive data. Ms. Presser will alert us both when they arrive.”

Jarius spins his chair to gaze out the window, effectively dismissing Kerry.

Back at her desk, Kerry sits silently for a minute, hands folded in her lap, before she uses her Diaverde-issued cellphone to call home. Her machine, not Tango, answers, spiels, and beeps. “Hello, Tango, it’s me. Are you there? Pick up, please.” No human intervention forestalls the machine’s serene vacancy. She records a brief explanation for her unanticipated and unavoidable lateness home that night. She mates her PDA to her desk computer and uploads data on a range of current projects. By the time she finishes that chore and a few others, Oreesha is ushering in the Senators, and Jarius has emerged from his office. Hearty introductions all around, among the Diaverde people and the four Senators, three men and a woman. The latter share a generic bulkiness, due to lightweight yet effective armor hidden under their official grey legislative robes.

Jarius familiarly grips the senior Senator, the woman, by her elbow and steers her and her comrades toward the elevator. Kerry trails the pack.

“We have marvels aplenty to show you, Senator Ferryway” Jarius trumpets. “Exciting parabiological developments that will reward taxpayer investment a thousandfold.”

Ferryway looks around suspiciously, as if checking for eavesdroppers. “We’re particularly interested in Project Benthos.”

Jarius positively glows. “Some astounding implications there. But not for general release to the public, of course.”

“Of course.”

Kerry scrolls up a directory of files on her PDA. There is no entry for any Project Benthos.

With Jarius frequently turning to Kerry for support, the next few hours are filled with demonstrations, interviews with staff scientists, computer simulations, performances by surly lab animals, soporific slide shows, lectures, and a lunch break in the company cafeteria. Over coffee, the Senators exhibit a suitable factoid-generated numbness, save for Ferryway, who bores in on her first concern.

“You’ve saved Project Benthos until last, I see.”

“Quite true, Senator. The last shall be first. Ha, ha, if I may be so religiously cryptic! Shall we go?”

One wing of the tenth floor is sealed off, entry determined by a hand-scanner. Before Jarius can trigger their entrance, Senator Ferryway casts a cold eye on Kerry. “Is your secretary cleared for this?”

In the fervency of his answer, Jarius seems almost more intent on impressing Kerry than on reassuring the Senator. “Why, of course she is. In fact, she has complete access to this wing. Ms. Hackett, if you would—”

Jarius is gesturing to the security device. Haltingly, Kerry mates her hand to the surface of a detector she has never before utilized.

Solenoids in the door retract with solid thunks.

Jarius bows the Senators in first. As they enter the Project Benthos area, he bestows behind their backs a sly smile on bewildered Kerry.

“I’ll explain later, my dear,” Jarius whispers to her.

Beyond the thick steel door, a sprinkling of technicians and scientists occupy themselves at intricate workstations resembling individualized factories, or perhaps the stacked reef habitats of reclusive sea-creatures. Kerry recognizes large-scale titration devices, Helios gene-guns, cyrogenic Dewars, ultrasonic autoclaves, DNA-sequencers and protein-linkers, but a host of more obscure machinery fails to correspond to any label she possesses. The skilled workers look up briefly, acknowledging the visitors, then return to their alchemical labors, save for one man, a burly dark-haired fellow with the mien of a shambling circus bear. He advances toward Jarius with a tentative smile.

“Dr. Teague, our friends would like to view the fruits of your ingenious labors.”

Teague radiates authentic pleasure, plainly relishing this unwonted attention from important laypeople. “Ah, you’ve come to see the benthic. Very good, very good. Follow me.”

On the far side of the lab, an interior window grants a view into a small sealed room. A pair of remote-manipulator gloves extrude into the airtight enclosure. A joystick and several simple buttons flank the glove cuffs on the humans’ side of the partition. Stickers depicting the familiar wheel-like labrys of the biohazard trefoil are pasted at several points.

Teague positions himself at the controls, quickly jabs two buttons and wambles the joystick. Beyond the window, a robot trolley begins to move toward a rising hatch similar to a dumbwaiter door.

“The benthic,” explains Teague, “is a literally unique creature, the only entity composed of one hundred percent realtime totipotent cells. It lives in a scrupulously controlled environment that replicates many human physiological parameters. We can decant it into its observation container for only a short time.”

Something very like a small lidded aquarium studded with monitoring devices is sliding out of the hatch on a metal tongue and thence onto the trolley. Teague next maneuvers the trolley with its cargo before the window. The contents of the liquid-filled observation vessel become apparent.

Velvet golden-magenta convolutions, a welter of amorphous limbs, rugosely flocked, writhe with fluid grace, alternately shyly hiding and boldly revealing finer hairlike, hooklike or papillary structures. Coiling and uncoiling with languid strength, teasingly half-illuminating more recondite assemblages, casting fairy-delicate pseudopods and tendrils out only to reel them in, the strange asymmetrical uncentered creature conceals its true form in its extravagant display, a dancer clad with diaphanous yet impenetrable veils. The benthic seems to mass only as much as a housecat, but judging by its variable sinuousity, might very well be capable of spreading and flattening to cover the floor of a good-sized room.

Kerry can’t remove her gaze from the fractally hypnotic creature. Its beauty nearly disables her lungs’ autonomic functioning. Like a matador’s empty supple suit of lights come alive, the benthic sparkles in her vision. How could she have been sharing a building with this uncanny living artifact without sensing its pulsing aliveness even through several concrete floors?

The Senators appear equally taken aback by the alien presence. Ferryway finds her tongue first.

“It—it can do everything you claim for it?”

Jarius answers. “You’ve seen the videos, Senator. Did you suspect we were faking them?”

“No. But it was all so incredible to me.”

Jarius’s teeth gleam. “Diaverde specializes in producing precisely that reaction, Madame Senator.”

Without ever having used the manipulator gloves to reach inside the aquarium and fondle the swirling captive—an action Kerry had been half anticipating, half dreading—Teague interrupts. “I have to return the benthic to its homeostatic tank now.”

“I think we’ve all seen enough,” ventures Jarius, and, meeting with no demurral, conducts the party out of the high-security area.

The rest of the day passes hazily for Kerry. She surfaces from her ruminative fugue several times to find herself working as assiduously as usual. During three such instances she tries to reach Tango, but meets with no success. At last, quitting time trundles round; Oreesha sticks her brilliantined head into Kerry’s office.

“The company limo’s pulling up now for you and Mr. Jarius.” The receptionist winks. “Do me a favor and order the most expensive item on the menu. The likes of you and me don’t step out with the bigshots all that often.”

“What if the most expensive thing is something I don’t like?”

“Shit, girl, you learn to like it!”

Peter Jarius’s limo always rolls down into a securely armored basement garage: street pickups invite terrorism. Kerry, coated and booted, waits nervously near the chauffered vehicle, its anonymous stone-visaged driver attentive behind the wheel, but not obsequious. Nearly half an hour after most of the Diaverde staff has cleared the building, Jarius steps off the elevator. Spotting Kerry, he smiles with his usual precise degree of expressiveness and quickly crosses to her.

“Terribly sorry to keep you penned in this chilly cement cloister, Ms. Hackett. The demands of upper management make me long for my humble days in the lab. Well, you know my importunate schedule as well as I do, so surely you’ll excuse me.”

“Of course.”

Jarius takes one of her hands and pats it. “How does The Greedy Parrot sound to you?”

“I’ve only heard of it—”

“It’s everything that the foolishly wagging tongues of those with more money than brains can tattle of—and more. Shall we?”

Jarius opens the door for her, she climbs onboard, and he moves to slip in the same door, forcing her to slide over and slightly ruck up her skirt. Jarius eyes her exposed legs without leering, as if to convey a kind of dispassionate worldly appreciation. She makes no awkward move to adjust her skirt, but only looks away, out the window.

The darkening streets of the city are already emptying, arcades where games of cynical disillusionment attract few customers. Patrols range the dusk. Kerry spots one brace of bandoliered bravos bullying a beggar: as they spin him about for frisking, Kerry notes a folded blue blanket twine-bound to his back like a makeshift pack.

The front entry to The Greedy Parrot offers a walled portico manned by armed guards to shield discharging cars. After exiting, Jarius crooks an arm to escort Kerry inside. The tophatted doorman, jovial black Caribbean face matching his cocoa-rich voice, tugs open the heavy glass door, saying, “Mighty bitter out here, friends. Hurry inside.”

Lemon-celery lighting, faux palm trees, animatronic wildlife, digitized jungle soundtrack, piped-in scents, and delicate random sprays of aromatic mist from the ceiling, enough to sheen faces lightly and dampen the expensive coiffures. The staff of servers is all-female, each sporting a duster of feathers from her rump and a cranial ruff, their bosomy low-cut, cheekily high-cut costumes hummingbird-bright.

Kerry and her boss are delivered to a small table with only two chairs.

“Where are the Senators going to sit?”

An innocent smile divides Jarius’s past-poxed face. “Our illustrious legislators were summoned unexpectedly back to Ottawa. Their regretful call was what kept me so late in the office. But when I came down and saw you waiting so earnestly, I simply couldn’t bear to cancel our much-anticipated outing.”

Kerry does not take her seat. “I—I should leave now. This isn’t right.”

Jarius sighs dramatically. “Ms. Hackett, is it possible that you would deny me, one of your most familiar co-workers, the innocent pleasure of your afterhours company? Have you never previously enjoyed a drink with, say, Ms. Presser, at the end of a long hard day? Surely you’ll grant me the same friendly privilege.”

“I just don’t know….”

Stagily, Jarius presses a fingertip to the hinge of his jaw, as if pondering a possibility. “Is Mr. Santangelo perhaps waiting loyally for your return, with your homecooked supper steaming upon the table?”

Kerry frowns, and hesitates before answering. “I haven’t been able to reach him all day.”

Jarius claps his hands together triumphantly. “It’s settled then. Please, rest your weary limbs upon this admirably cushioned chair, and let our solicitously hovering sommelier describe the wonders of his cellar. He appears ready to burst with pride.”

Within minutes, Kerry is sipping a wine more redolent and flavorful than any she has ever before tasted, berry-tart, oak-sharp. Jarius is regaling her with witty anecdotes about the high and mighty, people known to her only from headlines. The invisible net of stress held visibly in her shoulders begins to unknot, the worry lines marring her birth-blotched pretty face dissolve into looser configurations. By her third glass she is laughing frequently at Jarius’s mordant observations. The arrival of an appetizer of oysters brings a precarious halt to their conversation. Kerry casts a wary gaze on the shell-cradled lozenges of opalescent marine flesh, but upon hearty urging from Jarius, she samples the first one tentatively, then proceeds to enjoy her share heartily.

“Bravo, my dear! Always go forward bravely to encounter that which frightens you.”

“I wish I could, Mr. Jarius.”

“Please, Kerry—Peter.”

“Peter, then.”

As large, decoratively sauce-drizzled plates incommensurate with their scanty cargoes arrive, Jarius dabs at his lips with his crimson linen napkin, pinning Kerry with a keen scrutiny. Finally he inquires, “Tell me, my dear. What do you wish for during this short life we all share? What are your dreams?”

Kerry sits back from the table, plainly considering the question seriously. She crosses her legs, dandling one foot outside the tablecloth’s curtain. “Gee, Peter, I don’t know. A lot of the same things everyone wishes for. Enough money, a classier place to live, a better job—”

Jarius clutches his chest. “Aha! I’m a wicked troll, then, and Diaverde is a dank, dark, brutal mine!”

Kerry laughed. “No, not at all. But you have to admit my job is not the most creative one imaginable.”

“Nor is mine. But without our hard work, chaos! However, those are all material things, more or less, even your imaginary perfect job. What are your spiritual dreams, your emotional desires? What secret ambitions dwell in the chambers of your heart? I’m truly interested.”

“Well, I’d like to live in a less complicated, peaceful world—”

Jarius holds up one palm, his expression miming further hurt. “Don’t tell me next that you want to help old people. Even though you’re undeniably as glamorous as any Miss World candidate, I’m afraid I’ll have to take offense.”

“Oh, you’re not old, Peter, so don’t pretend you are just to get my sympathy.”

“Caught dead to rights. I do desire your sympathy, Kerry. As well as other fond indulgences. That’s why I granted you admittance to Project Benthos. As a token of my esteem. But please, continue.”

“Oh, I don’t know how to really explain what I sometimes feel. I long for a world that’s—that’s almost primitive. Someplace half-wild, green and tropical, where feelings and issues, needs and solutions are clear and uncomplicated. A place of real freedom, where I can feel things deeply and richly.”

“Feel such things as love, perhaps?”

“Yes.”

“And lust?”

Kerry picks up her fork and toys with the remnants of her food for a moment before answering more or less into her plate, “Of course.”

A dessert trolley rolls up under the impulse of a parrot-woman. The half-familiar oscillations of a quivering molded pudding catch Kerry’s eye, and she pulls back involuntarily but undeniably from the cart of offerings. Composing herself, she chooses an earth-dark slice of chocolate cake. Jarius, meanwhile, has ordered liqueur-spiked coffees for them both.

When they rise to leave, Kerry performs an impromptu awkward fandango with her chair before regaining control of her feet. Instantly, Jarius is by her side, steadying her with an arm around her waist.

“Allow me, Kerry sweetling. Alcohol runs colder in these old veins than in your youthful arteries. My heart learned satiation long ago, while yours still imbibes too wildly.”

“Oh, Mr. Jarius—sorry, Peter, sorry—you really can turn a phrase.”

“Always better to turn a phrase than an ankle, my dear.”

Kerry giggles, and they depart the artificial grotto of The Greedy Parrot.

Night, cold, the stacked cyclopean eyes of traffic lights, the blat of carhorns, and then the chauffeur is opening the limo’s door at their destination, another underground garage. Kerry rides an elevator up several floors, each chiming sweetly in passing, leaning on the elegant slim form of Peter Jarius, whose arm continues to enfold her waist. The mummy-colored rug inside his twilit apartment seems ankle-deep.

“Feel free to discard those cumbersome galoshes, Kerry. This woolly sea longs to lap at your trim ankles.”

Kerry crosses in stockinged feet to a buttery leather couch, spins giddily and drops melodramatically down. “What a wonderful evening! Such a pleasant change of pace.”

Jarius tends bar in a clinking of glassware, his back to her. “I feel we both waited much too long to reward ourselves with such a simple tryst. But let us not dwell on our foolish past sins of omission.”

Jarius’s by her side on the couch, drinks in hand. Kerry accepts hers, sips, then sighs.

“Peter, you’ve been so considerate toward me.”

“What you’ve experienced so far is but a token of my intense affections, dear.”

Kerry draws a deep draught of her peaty drink, lowers glass to lap, rests her head backwards against warm cushions, then closes her eyes for a moment. Opening them, she finds Jarius unbuttoning her thin brown suitjacket.

“I want you to relax more fully, my dear. And of course I want a view of your splendid young breasts, so often admired from across the distance of authority that cruelly separates us.”

Kerry neither cooperates nor resists. The scalloped blue lace of her bra against her pale skin resembles a line of surf on white sands, the man’s fingers like inquisitive crabs. Jarius discovers a front hook and disables it. Cups slide away to either side with an almost imperceptible soft susurrus, disclosing proudly mounded prominences. Jarius’s whiskered lips surround one gorging nipple, while his pinch cossets its sister.

Kerry’s left hand scoops its partnered breast upward for its share of attention. She lifts drink from lap, blindly seeks a shelf, sidetable or sofa-arm, then lowers the glass onto air. The tumbler tumbles through space, landing with a splash of ice and liquid, feeding the thirsty carpet. Freed, her right hand cups the back of Jarius’s neck

Her breasts accept minutes of languid suckling and stroking before she gapes her legs. Jarius quickly responds, sliding a slow hand up and down her nyloned flanks, moving higher with each zenith, pausing at the bare band below her loins. Kerry lifts her ass to free her skirt for the completion of the hoisting—then accidental, now intentional—begun when she first slid into the limo. Jarius cups her mounded cunt through the periwinkle fabric, and Kerry emits a soft mewl. Her hand traces the bulge of his cock through the cloth of his trousers.

Then, cessation of sensation. Kerry opens her eyes. Jarius stands some distance off, a desk drawer opening now to his fickle touch.

“Peter, what—”

Jarius’s eyes seem to concentrate whatever dim light informs the room, twin furnace points. “Before we go any further, dearest, I’d like you to do something that would enhance my pleasure immeasurably. An easy thing, but rather titillating for both of us, I hope. Would you wear this?”

From the drawer, Jarius removes what seems at first a large floppy scrap of white leather. Then he displays it fully, like a proud salesman.

The calf-supple zippered bondage hood would look utterly familiar from a thousand common pornographic illusions, save for one odd feature: a stitch-edged irregular sinistral opening exactly contours Kerry’s aubergine birthmark. Should she don this cowl, it would focus her silent, sometimes buried, never truly forgotten shame as if under an actinic spotlight.

Kerry gawps at the unexpected fetish garb, then nervously tugs her skirt down. “I won’t. I don’t feel right about it.”

Jarius slopes insinuatingly beside her on the couch, still offering the hood like some dark pope seeking to miter a new bishop. “Would you deny one of your own most salient charms, my dear? This innocent appurtenance merely serves to direct your lover’s desire onto your uniquely erotic blemish. How often I’ve dreamed of caressing and kissing your maculate countenance, so ripe with nature’s stain. You’re like a bruised fruit demanding to be plucked. But hopefully you’ll notice that even now, on the verge of our intimacy, I refrain until I receive your permission. Our first encounter must be perfect—”

Kerry’s breasts are swaddled in blue lace again, and she’s buttoning her jacket. “Mr. Jarius, I really have to leave now. Thank you for the dinner, and I’m sorry I let you get the wrong idea about us.”

Jarius contemplates the virginal hood draping his deflating, still trousered erection. “I had this made just for you, Kerry.”

Left boot won’t accomodate her right foot. Kerry swaps stances, dons one waterproof shoe, then the other. “Can I get a ride home, Mr. Jarius? It’s late, and the streets aren’t safe.”

Slumping, Jarius strokes the leather quietly for a few seconds, then bravely straightens and puts the cowl aside. “Our relationship is not at an end, Ms. Hackett. We’ll discuss this further another day.” The man rises to his feet and crosses to an intercom panel inset next to the door. He speaks orders quietly into the grille, then turns back to Kerry.

“Anselmo will be waiting with the car by the time you get downstairs.”

Clutching her coat, Kerry darts out into the corridor.

With night’s full descent, the echoing basement garage, its cement walls sweating gelidly, has become even chillier than earlier. Kerry hastens to enter the idling limo and declare her destination. For all the individual attention she receives from blank-faced Anselmo, she might as well be a cardboard box he’s charged with delivering. Kerry stares blindly out the window until the short drive is over, as if mindlessly cataloging the city’s manifold dispassionate obscenities. The purring limo pulls away from the curb in a cloud of frigid exhaust before she’s even fully pushed past the unlatched outer door to her building. (The tiny lobby hosts no beggars.)

The small shadowy apartment at first appears empty of life, a crab’s tenantless shell. A darkness-triggered nightlight in the galley kitchen valiantly spills an otiose radiance onto the vacant table. Expectedly missing is the NUfive bill Kerry pinned down almost twenty hours ago; but also gone are the six pill vials than anchored the cash.

“I sold the prescriptions on the street.”

Tango’s surly drunken voice emanates from a corner of the living-room containing his favorite chair, a lumpish flowery Goodwill piece, more hummock than furniture. Kerry crosses the familiar barely illuminated domestic terrain and sits on the broad chair arm. She lays a hand on Tango’s coarse hair, brushing it off his forehead.

“You’re already hot,” she says quietly. “Why did you do it?”

Tango snorts. “Like you care? Coming in at this hour? Fuck, why not? I’ll never be cured, not me or anyone else. They’re just an expensive goddamn finger in the dike, those pills. Might as well start doing without them right now.”

“You can’t.” Kerry’s earnestly plaintive voice seems ready to break. “You have to go out right now and get them back from whoever you sold them to. You have to.”

Tango thunders his reply. “I don’t have to do anything you say, bitch!” Without warning, he shoves a thick hand up her skirt. “Didn’t you even bring a change of panties, you little slut? He’s dripping out of you.”

“No, Tango, that’s not true—”

Her waist is nearly encircled by Tango’s disease-attenuated yet still strong paws. He immobilizes her while he erupts up from his seat. “I may be on the way out, but I can still remind you who you ought to be fucking!”

“Tango, don’t—” Kerry tries to twist out of his pinioning, but can’t. He lifts her struggling off her feet and carries her into the bedroom. Window blinds filter the streetlight into bars that slash the floor and furniture. He tosses her down onto the rumple-sheeted mattress, and quickly unzips himself.

Kerry’s voice strive for reasonableness, but quavers uncontrollably. “We can make love, Tango, but you have to wear some protection, especially if you’ve gone a day without your medicine—”

“Fuck that. And I’m not dicking around where loverboy’s already been.”

Kerry frantically tries to lever herself up off the mattress. “No, Tango—”

He pushes her around and back down, onto her stomach. With one hand he wickets her neck, while with the other he strains aside the fabric of her underpants revealed by skirt’s disarray. Kerry sobs wordlessly. He kneels astride her, bringing his hard cock into a bar of cold light: nubby welts like ceremonial scarring wrap his pellagric penis. He spits on his hand, transfers the saliva to his cicatriced cock, and brings its head to Kerry’s asshole.

The man’s wide glans pops through the tight muscled ring where earlier her dream jaguar’s pointed cocktip only delicately snagged.

Tango’s brutal strokes culminate after a blessedly brief set. He pulls out and retreats across the room. Kerry’s quiet crying counterpoints the sound of his retoothing zipper.

“All right, now get out.”

Kerry stifles her sobs. “What? You can’t mean it—”

“Get out now, or I’ll kick your ass out.”

“Where will I go?”

“Back to loverboy.”

“I can’t. He’s not—”

Tango swipes his arm across the top of her dresser, sending perfume phials and framed photos flying. “I said get lost! Or do you want to hang around until I can get it up again?”

Kerry regards the hunched, panting, disheveled figure for a long moment, her expression of disbelief segueing to one of grim acceptance. Then, with slow pained motions, she slides off the bed. One stocking clumps loosely around her calf. She makes no move to rummage in closet or bureau, but simply retrieves purse and coat, and sidles out the apartment without further imploring or lamentations, like a prisoner jailed for decades and now facing the long-imagined but unreally materialized end of her incarceration and the prospect of greeting an alien, unwelcoming world.

During her staircase descent, she pauses on a landing to fix her stockings. Adjusting them at her upper thigh, she pulls her hand back wetly rust-smeared. “Oh, Christ, not now.” She rummages in her purse, finds a scuff-cased sanitary pad, unwraps it and clumsily layers it into place at her crotch, heedless of her semi-public exposure.

Again, no friendly beggar graces the ground-floor vestibule. Kerry steps out onto the empty sidewalk. Pulling her thin coat more tightly about her, she walks away from her violated lost home.

Halfway toward her only possible destination, she spies a lone soldier at the same moment he catches sight of her. She stops and stands in an unthreatening posture, hands well away from her pockets. The soldier advances quickly, rifle held at the ready.

A lithe young black man, he wears his fatigues and equipment awkwardly, as if newly conscripted. Beneath the brim of his helmet, his features summon the image of a chiseled pagan icon, somatic planes of burnished tropical lumbers. A patch across his breast proclaims him PVT. SHANGOLD.

Unmoving, Kerry shivers against the encroaching chill. “I have my ID in my purse—”

“Shut up. Come with me.”

“Why? Wait a minute—where’s your partner?”

The soldier hooks her arm. “I said shut up!” He yanks her forward, and Kerry is forced to stumble ahead of him. Only a few dozen steps separate them from the maw of a dark alley. Propelled within that dank, fetid channel, Kerry pitches boomingly against a big metal dumpster. Strap snapping, her purse tumbles away. When she turns, the soldier has slung his weapon across his back.

“Kneel down.”

“No, don’t—”

The soldier clamps hands atop her shoulders and forces her to her knees. Grit bites her nyloned knees, and the toes of her shoes scrape twin troughs in the alley’s debris. Transferring a clawlike grip to the short hair feathering her nape, the rogue soldier cants Kerry’s face to within a few inches of his trousers. He unsnaps his waistband fastening and drags down his zipper. He wears no briefs, and his hair-nested unclipped cock sags atop plummy wrinkled balls. A blunt thumb lofts his meat toward her mouth, while two fingers of the same hand pry between her lips, nails scraping teeth.

Kerry reluctantly allows her mouth to be pried open, and the soldier’s cock communions her tongue. Her mouth’s hot moisture catalyzes the growth of his dick, and it burgeons swiftly between her lips. Puppetting her head while he rocks his hips back and forth, the black man fucks her mouth with growing intensity.

Kerry’s eyes are closed, and she perforce supports herself against the soldier’s hairy thighs. Gutteral groans escape him, and an accelerating tempo betrays his impending climax.

At the last instant, he pulls entirely out. Kerry partially averts her face, and he pumps his fragrant jism across the gap between them to splash athwart her birthmark: silver lakes clump that wine-dark continent, mercury flecks the forest of her lashes.

As Kerry raises a hand to her smirched face, something cuts the air above her head. There sounds a concussive thump, inanimate material connecting with flesh and bone, and then the soldier is crumpled across the alley floor.

Kerry clumsily gathers her feet beneath her, stands and faces the dumpster.

Half-revealed in the open vertical trash door, like Punch in a pantomime, stands the beggar who haunts her building. Leering gap-toothedly, he clutches a bent length of pipe, its threaded business end blackened with blood.

“Better run, lady. Better run.”

Her hand is still trembling when she places it on the security scanner in the atrium of the Diaverde building. Ensconced in their impregnable synthetic transparent turret, the brace of clean-cut night guards watch her suspiciously; even recognizing her, they are plainly distrustful of her dirty, disarrayed, purseless state. When the elevator acknowledges her and invites her onboard, the sentinels minimally relax.

Empty at this hour of even the most dedicated researcher, the tenth floor casts back the noise of her footsteps as if her spectral double walks beside her. The second scanner at the entrance to Project Benthos responds with alacrity to her tentative palm-caress.

Lights brighten automatically as the door swings shut behind her. At the control panel visited earlier, Kerry fingers the sequence of commands Dr. Teague used to summon the benthic from its homeostatic environment. Within a minute, the trolley-borne aquarium rests on the far side of the glass partition within reach of the manipulator gloves.

The limber acrobatic benthic adheres to some non-diurnal schedule, as active nocturnally as during the day. Perhaps it never needs to rest, engineered reservoirs of barely contained energy continuously propelling its silky furlings and beckoning flagellations, its coy curlings and enticing involutions around the clock.

Kerry tears her eyes away from the exogamically desirable creature, totipotent sovereign in its small realm, and steps to a workbench. Neatly racked tools yield a sharp blade. Knife pinched between thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she inserts her weapon into one metal-cuffed work glove. The blade sinks easily into the index fingertip of the glove, catches in the dense rubber, responds to Kerry’s increased pressure, emerges questingly into the segregated air beyond the glass. A warning light reddens the control board. She torques the blade, enlarging the hole, then withdraws the instrument and tosses it to the floor. She thrusts her hand into the damaged glove, which comes assistingly alive. She lifts the hinged lid of the container, and dips her gashed finger into the waters of the tank.

Instantly alert and eager as any lover, the ultraresponsive benthic compresses itself to threadlike dimensions and flows into the mutilated glovetip like a finely knitted lace shawl slipped through a wedding ring.

Before Kerry can even withdraw her hand from within its partial rubber casing, the benthic has propulsively coursed the thruway of her arm, mucigenously alive against her flesh beneath her clothing. She stumbles back several paces, leaving the servomotors of the now-empty glove to whine down to silence.

A broad glistening coral-tinged pseudopod of the benthic pops up from beneath her shirtcollar, rearing back like a hooded snake calculatedly considering where to strike. At the same instant Kerry involuntarily opens her mouth, gasps, and clamps a hand to her invaded crotch.

A portion of the upper hovering element of the benthic darts down her throat, reversing the magician’s common trick of pulling silken scarf from gullet. Extrusions splay across her alarmed countenance, infiltrating eyes, ears and nostrils like needles of wind.

Kerry collapses to the floor, dorsal side down, her face suddenly eerily composed beneath the benthic’s gaudy film.

Now begins Kerry Hackett’s transubstantiation, a conversion of flesh to more than flesh, a seachange of self.

Kerry’s clothing commences slowly to dissolve, as if eaten by an esurient acid from beneath. But the liquefied raw materials of her garments do not pool away to the floor or sublimate into the air; instead, they are greedily absorbed directly into her newly hyperporous skin. Rejected metal fittings fall away, clinking to the tiles. Her mother’s thin gold chain bursts from expansive pressures and slips off her neck, puddling on the floor like a patch of jungle sunlight.

Naked now, Kerry’s supine body exhibits no activity for a short eternity. Then, convulsive tremors surge across her from toes to scalp. Her body flattens and spreads unnaturally, like an air bag simultaneously melting and deflating; imploding, her facial features vanish inward, as do her breasts. Her short black hair is reeled inside her. Arms merge into torso, legs fuse, as the forked stick of her humanity backward eggs. Livid waves of organically hued colors race each other across this ovoid corporeal landscape.

The lab clock parcels out an hour as the Kerry-larva merely intelligently pullulates. Waves of metabolic heat rising off the autocatalyzing protoplasmic mound trigger the lab’s air-conditioning to new activity.

The next stage of totipotent-directed evolution manifests first as fractally distributed ripples, as if a complex net beneath the grub’s epidermis were being shaken from multiple points. Then, reprogramming and redefinition: from distal loci, perfect digits emerge, tender pink toes and fingers with nails already tinted a unique scarab green. Limbs separate away, resuming their identity, tendons and muscles flexing. At crux of legs, mons and cunt resurface, complete with a slow trickle of menstrual blood filtering through the labia. Ribs recage themselves, a navel invaginates, breasts bud and swell, crowning themselves with nipples. Hair rethatches skull, ears appear, and the Kerry-physiognamy, that unique assemblage of cartilage, jelly, muscle and bone, pushes out from inside like an image formed from behind in a toy composed of a million floating microscopic pins.

Perfect from toenails to teeth, breathing deeply, the nude Kerry Hackett lies on the cold tiles. Only one visible difference distinguishes her reinvigorated body from her former shell:

Her birthmark is missing from her immaculate face, sluiced off like so much maquillage.

Kerry’s eyes snap open without warning flutter. Brimming with novel internal and external perceptions, they convey a kind of alien humor abetted by her serene sly smile. Effortlessly, disdaining use of her hands, she vaults to her feet with only a subtle twitch of her leg musculature.

A wallhook surrenders its short lab coat. Wrapped in virginal white, unshod, bare-legged, Kerry reaches the lab door and slides through.

Two guards sit relaxed in their groundfloor booth, talking.

“Who’re our replacements today?”

“Maureen and Isaiah.”

“They should be here any minute.”

Kerry’s appearance startles the bored watchers: barefoot, barely clad, radiating a kind of abnormal, seductive vitality. One guard triggers their intercom.

“Can we help you, ma’am?”

Kerry opens her coat, revealing her shining allure, the pitcher-plant perfection of her reworked body. She flattens herself against their booth, breasts mashing distortedly, and squirms as if in heat.

“She’s high on something. We should stop her before she hurts herself.”

The flick of a switch unseals the unbreachable booth. One man emerges. Kerry hurls herself amorously into his arms. Unprepared, the guard reacts with a slow defensiveness. Kerry has time to plaster her lips against his. His eyes widen, he gags, and his legs buckle.

The fallen guard’s partner has a hand on his holstered gun. Kerry steps into the booth with him.

“Hold it right there, lady—”

Kerry smiles, and protrudes the tip of her tongue as if lasciviously to lick her lips. But her drupleted strawberry tongue fails to continue its betokened motion, instead muscling itself forward, hauling its own animated substance easily onto the ledge of Kerry’s lower jaw, the gobbet of stropping, vocable muscle plainly autonomous and impossibly severed from its roots, poising there like a miniscule predator, toad or lizard, before launching itself across the gap and splatting against the guard’s face. The tongue swims down his scream, and he instantly loses consciousness.

Her motions economic and swift, Kerry strips the shoes and uniform from one of the guards. Lower legs into the narrow pants, she finds them difficult to pull up over her hips. With a small kind of shrug or wriggle, redistributing her mass, her hips instantly accomodate themselves to the requisite dimensions. Dressed in her plausible disguise, Kerry leaves the building before the new guards arrive.

A few early workers move through the dawn-rumored streets. Kerry strides boldly, looking about her with evident fresh-eyed pleasure. Some blocks away from the Diaverde buildings, she stops before the window of a travel agency.

A poster depicts a tropical scene: golden beach with sunbathers, palms shading a drinkbar, sailboats asurf. (In fringing jungle, does a feline face hide?) The poster bears a legend, and, her replacement tongue langourously traversing palate and tapping teeth, Kerry pronounces the invitation aloud:

“Come to Bahia.”

The guard’s wallet offers a Metro card with plenty of stripe credit to buy her a ticket on the hourly shuttle to the airport.

In the main terminal, threading among the rifle-bearing soldiers, Kerry heads directly to the nearest woman’s toilet. This early, the lavatory features few users. Minutes pass before a petite red-haired Hispanic woman clad in a floral-print dress enters, trundling a suitcase on wheels. Kerry smiles, and the woman returns the friendly security guard’s expression.

“Would you watch this for me?”

“Sure.”

The woman opens a stall door, is startled to find Kerry right behind her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Kerry pushes the woman inside the stall, and seals her cries with a thick kiss. Swallowing Kerry’s third tongue, the woman drops. Kerry arranges her on the toilet, and begins to undress her victim. At the same time, she is dissolving the guard’s uniform, this time allowing the degenerate materials to slip down the stall’s floor drain. But Kerry continues to shed quarts of cloudy liquid mass beyond the weight of the clothing, shrinking and morphing in rippling cascades until she wears the exact appearance of the unconscious woman.

Dressed in new clothes, in charge of her victim’s purse and luggage, Kerry proceeds to a Web kiosk and purchases her ticket to Bahia online, using the small woman’s credit card.

Boarding time arrives. The exit official hands Kerry’s adopted passport back to her. “Have a safe flight, Ms. Yemana.”

“I’m sure I will.”

Aloft, Kerry relaxes in her comfortable first-class seat. The plane’s circulatory system murmurs. Stewards circulate with food and refreshing beverages. Out the window, clouds part to reveal acres of indivisible ocean, beneath which incredible creatures swim, their rich lives a communal secret. Kerry rubs the fabric cushion of her seat, smiles, raises her glass of ice-soothed liquor, and allows the tip of her fourth tongue—for the moment, firmly rooted—to curl droplets of the drink into her mouth like a cat’s. She closes her eyes, and the fabric of her cushion coarsens beneath her touch. She is seated on a piece of burlap folded across the wooden bench of a lumbering rattling bus. A hot urban wind enters the open frame at her elbow. Outside the window, shacks fester under a brilliant sun. Her fellow passengers are tropic-bred and poverty-clad, chattering in a foreign language. Kerry closes her eyes again, stroking the burlap. The mule’s rough hair divides beneath her touch, tickling. Her legs barrel its ribbed solidity. Kerry holds reins, but her mule is being led by another rider, down a rutted unpaved road hemmed in by dense foliage. A cool breeze carries exotic scents from the jungle. Buildings thrust up around her, and she alights from a small carriage. She strides confidently across cobbles, onto a granite-slabbed sidewalk and through the hotel door. A console radio big as a Web server (Web server?) is playing rollicking carnival tunes.

Kerry steps to the front desk, where a clerk says something unintelligible. A robust, middle-aged man, his black mustache thick as a broom, he bears one empty striped sleeve, folded and pinned to itself. Smiling, he offers her what is obviously his name—“Senhor Arlindo Quincas”—and plainly asks for hers. Smiling brightly, remaining unspeaking, Kerry touches the man’s sweaty arm, sucking beads of his perspiration through her fingertips. Pleased by the touch of this small dark sexy woman, he returns her smile, and continues to speak. In a minute, his words come into focus for her:

“—welcome, Senhorita. Welcome to Bahia.”

---

“Bahia” is the opening section of A Mouthful of Tongues, due in April 2002 from Cosmos Books.