03) Moaniquevisitsthedeathshead

Altering the Tomes’ Tone: Our Story Takes a Strange Twist When Moanique Visits Big D at the Death’s Head

Moanique exited the front door of her upscale apartment building and began walking. She had left DB and Boops asleep, twisted together on the bed, once again exhausted. Moanique had trudged the streets for the better part of an hour and now tramped through The Zone in Big City. There she watched her fellow humans, engaged in all sorts of activities whose end result, hopefully, was copulation: dining, movies, theater, drinking, hands touching, groping, petting, concealed coitus, the public sex show. Moanique knew this manic drive to copulate masked a desperation those surrounding her could only dimly sense to be quietly welling up within them. “Amateurs!” Moanique thought to herself. She didn’t mean just sex. She meant life. The time she had spent in the monastery outside Nagasaki had prepared her for life far more than the people in whose midst she passed, usually unnoticed. And with every step she strode towards what she took to be her destination, Moanique near-ritualistically imagined herself magnifying something within her she obliquely understood to be intent, all the while purifying and clearing her thinking. In this state of mindfulness, Moanique employed her keenly attuned faculties to seek The Zone’s core, its rotten center. And she found it when she stepped across the threshold of The Death’s Head, her ultimate destination. The One—in whom she’d learned to trust unquestioningly while in Nagasaki—had decided that the time had come for her to pay the place a visit. Moanique sauntered into The Death’s Head, past the guards, whose eyes widened in recognition. Their mouths went dry, and their guts turned to mush, a result of

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insuppressible fear. She smiled at them with good-natured cruelty, moving past the bar, towards the haunt’s dark recesses. She noticed the home-made Wanted Poster with DB’s picture on it, behind the bar. Moanique didn’t miss much. A shadow of silence surrounded her as she passed through the generally copulatory revelry: the people near her briefly quieted as she walked by them, curiously maintaining their activity, but as soon as soon as she had slipped beyond them, they again began their noisy merriment. Moanique moved to the sole celibate figure seated at a table in the very darkest corner of the establishment, knowing him to be its master. Rather than seating herself across the table from Big D, as if for a confrontation, she pulled out the chair next to him and settled her shapely ass into it. A strangely friendly gesture. “ ‘nique,” Big D addressed her, as if he’d been expecting her to drop in any old time. “Been a while,” replied Moanique. “Few years now, I reckon,” stated Big D. He motioned to his bandaged foot propped on a chair in front of him. It had been nailed to the floor by DB a day earlier. “Gonna be limpin’ round fer a while, looks like.” These two had a history, going back the better part of a decade, off and on.

* * * * * * * * * * * * In early 1946 Moanique was having trouble getting the obligatory paperwork through the requisite bureaucratic hoops, in order for her to make her planned visit to Nagasaki. She had found it necessary to travel from Brighton to Big City to personally make sure that all the government agencies interested in her passport got whatever

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information they believed they needed. Big D was—of all things—a promising and serious scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies who had tailored for himself a cross discipline program in psychoacoustics and statistics. Back then, he went by his birth name, Delbert Pfinstergerber, usually truncated to “Del”. Del was in Big City because he had just got in a beauty of a fight with his two principal advisors at The Institute, and he needed a change of location to cool off. The argument Del had had with his academic mentors was about this: he had expressed to the both of them his serious and substantiated doubts about the ability of either of their life’s work to nurture people in a positive and humanistic manner. Del had convincingly argued to these two worldrenowned personages that their output contained way too much quantitative slicing and dicing, without any regard for the mechanics of perception and feeling. This was serious stuff, which his advisors couldn’t hear with any measure of equanimity, so there were fireworks aplenty in Princeton. The upshot was that Del and Moanique had run across each other quite by chance in a bar and had got to talking. Even though they were both slightly underage so far as the drinking laws were concerned, it was pretty easy for them to be served: VJ Day was still a recent enough memory and the concomitant euphoria still ran strong enough, that most barkeepers and law enforcement officials really didn’t give a shit about bending the age restriction on drinking some. Del had fully explained his dilemma to her, and—to his credit—without any name dropping. The advice Moanique had given to Del was this: chuck it all. “Fella,” she had said, “you’ll never understand it. All you can do is experience it.” Easy for her to say: she herself was chucking it all so that she could fully enjoy the experience of hating those Dirty Jap Bastards (as she called them) for having so senselessly snuffed out the

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promising young life of her lover. Despite their widely divergent backgrounds, Del believed the argument to be a sound one at core, as it resonated so strongly with Hesse’s prefatory remarks in Steppenwolf of which he was quite fond. He never returned to the Institute. He just disappeared, as if The World had swallowed him, which was a pretty good description of what ended up happening to him, after he and Moanique parted in the bar. Del quickly found himself hooking up with a motorcycle gang, more or less as their comic-relief runt-in-residence, and within a few months time found himself acclaimed their undisputed leader, as he had proven himself much more of a successful and crazyass risk-taker than any of them. He had turned out to have been a great organizer, also, which was something the gang had sorely lacked. While Del was working his way up The Death’s Head food chain, eventually to emerge atop it as “Big D”, Moanique had joined the monastery. One of her first novitiate tasks was this: while meditating, locate and watch over a stranger she had met sometime earlier, sort of like a guardian angel. The reason novices were given such an assignment was this: one of the duties of a person on the path to knowledge is to bestow good deeds upon strangers, without the recipients’ knowing it, as this was reflective of the beneficence the universe had bestowed upon the novice. Moanique remembered her oblique meeting with Del, and chose him to look after. It took several weeks of unsuccessful attempts to locate him, but she finally found her man, and was surprised at the turn his life had taken. She was horrified at the prospect that it might have been her offhand advice that had ruined him: one more reason for her to consider the wisdom of not putting anything out there. But, true to the Four Vows she’d taken, she kept track of Del and tried to send such to him such positive emanations as she could summon from

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herself. She even went so far as to locate his perfect soul mate, and Moanique imprinted this woman’s visage upon the visual cortex within Del’s brain, while he was sleeping and receptive to such doings. And here’s what had happened to Del, after his initial meeting with Moanique. The first thing he did was to go on a three day drunk, getting kicked out of one bar after another, primarily because he was belligerently spewing unintelligible gibberish. He worked himself further and further into the center of The Zone, until he finally staggered into The Death’s Head, where—as in the other establishments—he began making it a point to annoy the patrons. In those days, rats the size of possums mingled freely with the humans, and it was hard to tell just which species was tolerating the presence of the other. The place was appallingly filthy. “Lemme tell you,” he said, slurring his speech. “There’s Heraclitus, the weeping floss, flopp, flossoffiller. No stabilititties in the world. Everythink, thing, fire, permanent process. No wonder the sumbitch bawlin’ ‘is eyes out! Then there’s Democritus, the laughing flossfer. World made up a stable shit: well ha, HA! My money, though, fellow name a Pistoforus, the angry philosopher. World’s a bunch a god damn shit no matter how you slice it, ‘n ol’ Pistoforus had th’ only sensible emotive response the lot of ‘em!” The folks at the Death’s head understood the gist of Del’s belly-aching, simply because—unlike the patrons at the other bars—they had the verbal imagination to transliterate “Pistoforus” into “pissed-off-o-rus,” and—unlike the patrons at the other bars—in so doing they could appreciate the joke. So they decided to allow this runt considerably more latitude than he’d been allowed the last few days, at the other bars he’d been thrown out of.

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“Know why Old Beetfield’s sitch a shuttin’ . . . damn! such a sit . . . shit! such a shitten great composer?” he asked the few people perched on stools around him. (“Beetfield” is the word that “Beethoven” means in English, and Del was asking his erstwhile bar-room buddies if they knew why Beethoven was such a great composer.) “No one can tell ya why!” he continued ranting. “Yeah, get some D’Indy-esque, prof-ess, professorial, pontifi’tory blabber ‘bout Imitation, Transition ‘n Reflection, but what’n hell kind a ‘mpirical neurological data we got?” He went on to describe the work he had begun at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which amounted to playing pieces of secondperiod Beethoven to reasonably-adjusted, reasonably-intelligent, but musicallyuneducated volunteers. These volunteers were fitted with both EEG’s, which monitored their brain activity, as well as polygraphs, which monitored blood pressure, respiration, heart rate, and skin conductivity. The idea being that even if the subjects didn’t really understand Beethoven’s music, the study might reveal the statistical beginnings of a neurological basis for assessing artistic merit. Del omitted the specifics of his research and explained it to his bar-room buddies thus: “Anyone ever think ‘bout strappin’ your Average Joe simultaneous into a EEG ‘n a polygraph, force-feed the poor chump the Appassionata, see how baseline readings compared with mean deviance?” “You want mean deviants?” asked the gang member sitting on the stool next to him. “Hell, we the meanest bunch a deviants you ever seen.” “And damn if we don’t understand Pistoforus,” chimed in another gang member, who sat on the other side of Del. “Hell, we got room fer ‘nother pissed-off deviant!” was the general consensus of the riders who had gathered around Del. So they let this undersized, wiry redhead ride

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with them. They even gave him a little motor scooter to tool around on, which someone had discarded, pretty much because they were too embarrassed to be seen on it. The gang thought it would be great fun, having this runt puttering down the road with them, more or less as their jester, spewing his barely-intelligible invective. “Get on your bad motor scooter ‘n ride!” they’d gleefully exhorted, when presenting the machine to him. When he sobered up some, Del wondered where the hell he was and just what had happened to him. For a couple of days he rode with the gang, sober but still very much hung over. The little putt-putt scooter they’d given him was so slow, they had to wait every few miles to catch up. Once he got himself good and sober, with the gang’s permission Del swapped out the engine on his scooter with one from a BMW the gang thought was broken down. Its only problem was that it was adjusted so poorly that it wouldn’t start. Del had no problem keeping up after that; in fact, now he had to slow down for the rest of them. And when Del participated in his first “cavalry rumble”— Death’s Head lingo for a knife fight carried out with the combatant gangs mounted on their choppers—he was able to maneuver so well on his souped-up motor scooter that most of the enemy combatants that he “took out” never even saw him coming. By the way, he never killed anybody in the fights he was in. He just went for a tendon or two, and put the fellow out of commission. Because of Del’s involvement, this was the first cavalry rumble the Death’s Head gang had ever won, and he was no longer considered their jester. He now was the recipient of his fellow-riders’ respect. These cavalry rumbles were very crudely fought: one blob of men on bikes confronting another head-on. In his student days, Del had read some about military strategy and suggested to his new cohorts that since it took about an hour for one side to

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emerge (more or less) victorious by depleting the other’s forces, the Death’s Head gang might try to speed up the matter of their winning. Since this runt had proven to be such a ferocious fighter, and since the gang was all fired up from having just won their first rumble, they was willing to listen. Del suggested to them a classic maneuver, without presenting it to them as such. He’d also stopped talking Ivy League, and had begun mimicking his fellow-riders’ speech patterns: “Let’s us swing a third a our nimblest riders back a the en’my,” he’d said, “while another third—the best a the Death’s Head in chopper hand-ta-hand—hold the front line. Oncet we got them other sumbitches near surrounded, see” he continued, while demonstrating by making a circle with his thumb and fingers, “them poor bastiches can’t help but panic and head out the openin’ we be leavin’ them. Right where the final third be waitin’ fer ‘em. We put the most vicious ‘n merciless our guys that detail. ‘N while them bastards lyin ‘round wonderin’ what the hell hit ‘em, we go raidin’ their Mamas.” “Let’s get their Old Ladies, too!” someone suggested to Del. “Good idea,” Del initially agreed, “ ‘cept fer from what I seen ridin’ with ya’s, we ain’t strong enough fer that. Yet. Give it time. Right now, though: take their Mamas, they realize we’re ta be feared, ‘n they fear us. Take their Old Ladies, too, ‘n they think we’re a bunch a damn barbarians ‘n come at us hard, sev’ral gangs all at once. Mah point bein’ we ain’t big enough or organized enough be carryin’ off ‘nother gang’s Old Ladies. Asides, we’re putting a cart a front a the horse: we gotta lick somebody in another calvary rumble, first.” Del had deliberately mispronounced “cavalry,” just to be One Of The Boys. “Y’all see what I’m sayin’?” he asked them in summation.

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Del’s new friends did indeed see the sense to his proposal, and agreed to try the battle plan he’d suggested. They also agreed that—even though he was a newcomer—his assessment of their strengths within the overall biker community was on target. The upshot of it all was that the next time the Death’s Head Gang engaged in “calvary” combat, they made mincemeat out of the enemy riders. Absolute mincemeat. And they carried off a good number of the Mamas, the women hangers-on who hadn’t the protection of a spouse. But they left the Old Ladies, each of whom was married to one of the male gang members. (Whether the marriage was legally sanctioned or not was moot.) And the stock of the Death’s Head Gang went up in the biker community, as did Del’s stock within the gang itself. The Death’s Head leaders pow-wowed among themselves (there was no single, generally-acknowledged Leader Of The Pack) and appointed Del Chief of Rumble Activity. The gang had never had such a position within their organization before, as their rumbles had never been all that organized. Hell, they had never been all that organized. Without his intending to, at least at first, Del was on the road to changing all the gang’s organizational sloppiness. Oddly, it was Moanique’s looking in on him from the monastery in Nagasaki that was propelling Del’s ascent in the ranks of the Death’s Head Gang, and would continue to provide the momentum for his ascent into the world in general. She was a exerting a much more positive influence in his life, and the lives of the gang’s members, than either she or Del would be able to know for a good long while. (The gang’s tiring of rumbles— later, when DB had stumbled into their midst—was Moanique’s unknowing doing.) In fact, for decades both Moanique and Del would rue the day they had met. Not until they

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were getting up in years would they come to understand that it had all been for the better, for the both of them. The men who rode with Del in the Death’s Head Gang were all secretly worried that he would pose one serious problem: sooner or later, he would want to steal one of their Old Ladies. Del understood, and demonstrated to them that he wouldn’t go raiding the henhouse: he refrained from scratching the itch altogether. But even that caused problems for him, as talk started within the gang that he was a Funny Boy. When Del got wind of it, he made it a point—after the next successful rumble—to appropriate the absolute, best-looking of the subjugated gang’s Mamas for himself, and banged her a couple of times, within hearing of the rest of the Death’s Head. Then he told her to go out and service the rest of the gang as they demanded, but to leave him alone from here on out. And after every successful rumble, he did the same, until one of the other gang members took him aside and complained. The general beef was this: the “chosen Mamas” Del had screwed after the rumbles had all exhibited a demonstrable lack of enthusiasm about having sex with anybody else besides Del. Whatever he’d done with those Mamas (some of whom had begun referring to him as ‘Big D’), Del had sure ruined it for the rest of the men in the gang. Del had no idea this was going on, but was quick to respond so that he kept the upper hand: “Only reason I done begun humpin’ them Mamas on account a layin’ ta rest the rumors I’m a Funny Boy,” he said. “And I’m gone keep humpin’ a Mama after ever rumble until you find me the guy what done started them stories about me bein’ a Funny Boy. In fact, you don’t bring me thet backstabbin’ sumbitch afore the next rumble, I’ll

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ruin the whole next lot a Mamas we make off with! Take that back to the rest a your belly-achin’ friends!” Within half an hour, a delegation representative of the Death’s Head ridership convened at Del’s table, near the back of the bar, and coughed up a rider named Peter Pirate, who was in fact the person who’d begun the rumor. “Sorry, Del,” apologized Peter. “I honest-ta-god thought you was queer, way you never took up with no woman.” “None a anybody’s business why I don’t take up’th no womens!” retorted Del. “Mebbe Ah’m savin’ muhself fer marriage.” As odd as it sounds, that much was true: the vision of his soul-mate, planted in Del’s visual cortex by Moanique, was so overwhelming to him that Del wouldn’t even look at another woman. “Mah point bein’,” continued Del, “you ever pull a dumb-ass stunt like that, ‘n I’ll ruin ever woman you take up with! You got that, Pirate?” Like most of the gang, Del addressed this rider simply as “Pirate.” “Yes, Del,” answered Pirate, cowed. “As fer the rest a ya chickenshit backstabbers,” Del now addressed the gang members who’d perpetuated the rumor, “youse kin show me some respect: from here on out, I’m ‘Big D’, like the Mama’s done been callin’ me! Put that in yer pipe ‘n smoke it! Now git out a here!” snarled Del. “The whole lot a ya’s!” The crowd of bikers milled out from the back table, away from their audience with Del, whom they would henceforth address as “Big D”, as he had just demanded. He was well on his way to being the undisputed leader of The Death’s Head.

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Moanique saw much of this while helping him long distance, sending him her very best thoughts and wishes all the way from Nagasaki. Since Del—Big D, now— spent nearly all of his time at the Death’s Head, which was smack-dab in the center of The Zone in Big City, she began exploring the establishment and its environs, hoping for a clue that might help her extricate him from this Rake’s Progress path he’d fallen into. Here’s what she discovered: there was a big-ass cave, which ran very deep with many chambers, under the Death’s Head, and nobody knew about it. Whole hell of a lot of good that information did. Moanique and Big D both spent four years apart, her watching over him unbeknownst. During those years, it was largely due to her influence that the Death’s Head Crowd had gone straight, or at least less crooked, in its own quirky way. Moanique wasn’t aware that she was exerting a positive influence upon Big D’s charges: when she sought out Big D in her meditating, and by extension his group of misfits, she was only picking up on their outer appearances and shells. She hadn’t a clue how truly transformational her efforts were in their lives, all the way from the outskirts of Nagasaki. So far as this ignorance was concerned, it signaled to the Monastic Head Honchos that Moanique was reaching a juncture. The way junctures worked in the monastery was this: the pupil was either asked to stay, or the pupil was asked to leave and learn what he or she still needed to learn outside of the monastery, then come back later. The monastery’s elders were debating among themselves just what to do with Moanique. One fact that complicated her situation was that she had a gift for meditating, one that eclipsed the abilities of even most Orientals who’d lived their lives steeped in the tradition of inward reflection. From day one at the monastery, she had exhibited an uncanny ability to move

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energy up and down her spine at will, which meant that she could stop off and visit at whatever chakra she wanted, more or less like stepping off an elevator, each of whose floors harbored whole sets of worlds, each one of those chock-full of mind-bending experiences. The elders were very impressed with this particular talent. Then something unexpected was brought to their attention, which halted their deliberations of what to do with Moanique, at least temporarily: the appearance in the monastery of a woman who was capable of experiencing Incredible Squirting Orgasms. A few weeks earlier and unbeknownst to the elders, Moanique had broken protocol by making the mistake of teaching a young woman new to the monastery about clitorises. Because she was such a sucker for stray puppies, Moanique had taken a special liking to this waif, who was more or less a Russian war orphan from the Sakhalin Islands, and she’d instructed the young Russian in the ways of the love nubbin. Upon receiving Moanique’s instruction, this young woman climaxed almost immediately, and she did so with an Incredible Squirting Orgasm, which was something Moanique had never before witnessed. Soon the “Sakhalin Sensation” was much sought after throughout the monastery, by both men and women. There had been only a few other squirters in the institution’s long history, so the appearance of this novice was greeted with a good measure of excitement and speculation throughout the compound. Even though the elders took the appearance of the Russian as an auspicious omen, they soon learned that Moanique had broken one of the institution’s chief rules, and that sealed her fate, so far as her staying at the monastery was concerned. The elders very politely invited her to come back to the monastery later, when she had learned whatever it was she needed from the outside world. Moanique had been a student there going on five

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years and well understood there were to be no hard feelings about the decision, as there was no ill will extended to her in its making: for her own good, it was time for a change of venue. Moanique bid her teachers a genuinely grateful farewell and sailed as a stowaway for California, then hopped a series of freight trains to Big City. Once in Big City, she looked up Big D. He was the only person she knew there, and she went directly to the Death’s Head, knowing full well the risk the average person would take stepping foot into the place. It was much rowdier in 1950 than in late 1953, when DB and Miss Boopadoop chanced into it; in 1950 rumbles were still a commonplace event, to the end that the clientele was much more on edge. As soon as she was through the door, the bartender had a shotgun leveled at her, and several of the toughs Big D had posted as guards had pointed some very serious looking handguns at her. In actuality, this was a wise precaution: lately, rival gangs had taken to sending in someone who looked innocent, hoping that the Death’s Head crowd would let their guard down enough that the warriors hiding outside could swoop in with a surprise attack. That had happened just once; Big D learned from his mistakes. His charges didn’t hold that mistake against him, though. They all agreed: the one time that had happened, it had been one hell of a rumble. The fighting lasted four days and didn’t cease until the National Guard arrived, sent by the governor, and the colonel in charge managed to negotiate a truce between the combatants. Those were the days! Moanique wasn’t particularly rattled at having projectile-firing implements pointed at her. She understood full well that they could cause her serious damage. But she also knew there was damage, then there was damage. She’d seen the latter in Nagasaki and had concluded that one person having holes shot through her didn’t amount

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to much, even if that one person were her. She’d also had this drilled into her in the monastery: Death surrounds us at every moment, stalking us, measuring us, toying with us. Sometimes it comes near just to rattle us; sometimes it has come for real; sometimes it can be persuaded to back off; sometimes not. Although inevitable, death’s capricious. Much of her studying at the monastery focused on how to ward off death. And that training kicked in there, then, with all that ammo pointed her way. Moanique “numbed” the guards: she located her own internal energy in her belly and pulled it up into her throat, out from which she directed it into the sentries’ eyes. They guns remained aimed at Moanique, but the people holding them became immobile. Before she broke contact with each sentry, she made sure she’d scrambled his internal signaling enough that it’d take about an hour for it to recover on its own. All this was a cheap trick, and Moanique regretted having used it, but she didn’t have time for nonsense. She simply wanted to talk with Big D, just for a while. Past the sentries, the place was a den of iniquity: drinking and drug taking, sex on tabletops and floors, whatever you might imagine, it was happening back then in 1950, and not yet relegated to the back rooms. The scene those days was immeasurably raucous. Moanique slipped through the din unnoticed, to Big D, who broodingly presided over this debauchery he’d somehow wrought, his eyes turning from one fornicatory event to another, taking it all in and frowning. He looked at Moanique, who clearly was too wholesome for the place, and said “Don’t want no Girl Scout cookies.” “Del?” she asked. Big D gave a mild start at the sound of Moanique’s voice. He’d heard that voice on only one occasion before, and his life had been changed. “You!” Big D exclaimed.

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“Sorry,” Moanique replied. She had rightly understood Big D to have been accusing her of having turned his life into something awful. “Look at this shit!” said Big D, nodding his head to the nihilistic revelry taking place before him. He held up his right hand and drew his thumb and index finger to an inch of each other, saying “And I was this close to understanding, fer chrissake!” “There is no understanding, Del. Just levels of illusion,” Moanique countered. She wasn’t trying to be evasive, or a wise-ass, or wiggle off a hook even she herself believed she should be on; what she’d just told Big D was the honest-to-god conclusion she’d come to, while at the monastery. “Oh, jeeziz!” cried Big D. “That’s so transparently lame . . .” “Listen, Del, I need a place to stay . . .” began Moanique. She thought he might know of an inexpensive and safe place. Big D’s mouth drew into a sardonic smile. “You kin stay with us, Missy! Sorry, I done fergot yer name . . .” “Really?” asked Moanique. Staying at the Death’s Head was not without its merits, so far as she was concerned: the cave was inviting. “Name’s Moanique,” she answered Big D. “Where’s the restroom?” “Sure!” replied Big D to her remark of incredulity. Then Big D formally welcomed her to the Death’s Head: “Moanique, welcome to Hell,” he declared, looking at her very seriously, right into her eyes. He gestured with his thumb over his shoulder, indicating behind himself. “Ladies’ room’s back thur.” “Thanks,” Moanique replied. She headed towards the porcelain, saying “I won’t be any trouble.”

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“Hmm!” said Big D, propping himself with elbows and forearms upon the table in front of him, surveying the lunacy before him. “Won’t be any trouble,” he thought to himself. Staring ahead, he watched her reflection close the ladies’ room door in a convex mirror he’d designed, so he could keep tabs on what transpired, especially around corners. Moanique locked the bathroom door behind her. She was surprised to find the room remarkably clean. She would find out later that the Death’s Head Gang practiced what amounted to slave labor, and that was how the ladies’ room remained so spotless. Upon one of the bathroom walls was a cast iron grill, which was affixed chest high to the wall with four screws. The grill covered a return air vent. Moanique had discovered while meditating in Nagasaki that the vent’s source of air was the immense cave which lay under the Death’s Head. She opened her purse and dug into it, pulled out some penetrating oil and a set of several screwdrivers. In a couple of minutes she had the grate off the wall. It set into the wall tightly, with a lip that extruded from the grill’s inside perimeter. That was good. Moanique put the screws, penetrating oil, and screwdriver set into her purse, then scattered with her foot the plaster dust that had fallen from the wall when she had removed the grate. She tied two lengths of heavy bailing twine near the grill’s upper corners, making sure the knots were to the inside, and placed the loose ends of the twine into the vent. Moanique dug into her purse and extracted a new, sixty-four box of Binney and Smith Crayola Crayons, found a color that nearly matched that of the grate perfectly, and rubbed the wax cylinder over the place where the head of the screw had been. She put the box of crayons back into her purse, which she looped around her arm, then wriggled herself head first into the sheet metal airway; it was plenty big enough

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for her. It was even plenty big enough for her to have turned herself around, once in it, so she was facing the bathroom. Moanique grabbed the twine and began pulling the grill up, taking care that it not touch the wall. She really didn’t want to leave any traces indicating where she might be found. Once the grill was in front of the vent hole, Moanique drew it towards her and set it into the wall. She untied the knots, coiled the twine, and put it into her purse, from which she pulled out a flashlight with fresh batteries. Moanique was now a spelunker, and she was determined to delve as far into herself as she could, within the tomb-like silence of the deepest recesses of the cave under the Death’s Head. A woman had been banging on the ladies’ room door at the back of the Death’s Head for the better part of a minute, and she was becoming quite annoyed. “Awright goddammit, you had your damn fun, now get outta there! I gotta go!” she hollered at the door. A few more seconds of silence ensued. “God dammit!” the hollering commenced, this time with the door being banged as each word was delivered, “I gotta go!” Big D heard the commotion and went to see what sort of idiocy he had to adjudicate this time. He had lately come to admire Solomon’s stamina much more than his wisdom. “Smatter, Nellie?” he asked the woman who hopped from one foot to another in front of the locked door. Like he didn’t know. He fished in his pocket for the master key while he let her relay to him her problem. “Bitch’s locked herself in the goddamn bathroom, ‘n I’m about to let loose’s what!” replied Nellie. “Go ahead and use the men’s” suggested Big D. “What?! You’re kiddin’!” exclaimed Nellie. “What if there’s somebody in there?!”

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“Beats pissin’ in your own pants! Besides, I can’t ‘magine any a the guys not wantin’ to see you drop trou,” Big D complimented her, rather gracefully. The argument made sense to Nellie. “Oh. Yeah,” she said and headed into the men’s room, which she found deserted, to her disappointment. “Moanique?” Big D asked the ladies’ room door. “Jeeziz Moanique!” Moanique was far enough into the cave now, that she couldn’t hear Big D’s entreaties from the other side of the door. Big D was worried that some evil might have befallen Moanique, and he prepared himself for the worst, which for him was slit wrists and blood. When he opened the door, the shock of seeing absolutely nothing but the immaculately clean bathroom charged through Big D’s body. Where the hell’d she gone? There were no windows. He was stupefied. It would take Big D until tomorrow before he suspected Moanique’s egress to have been the ventilation shaft. By that time, she had explored enough of the cave—her mind working snakelike, mapping it with a wordless knowledge—that she had found a suitable spot to sit cross-legged within its darkness. She turned off the flashlight and searched inside of herself, attempting to draw ever closer to the Nothing from which she believed all to have emanated. Thou art That.

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Big D Delivers an Oration Worthy of Pericles Topside, Big D was asking the evening’s guards just how the hell a strange woman had managed to get past them. These guys were his first line of defense, and this sort of breach could doom them all. They dimly remembered something, but couldn’t come out of their fog. “Damn!” thought Big D “these guys’ brains is scrambled!” In about half an hour, their memory would return, but for now they were still pretty numb from what Moanique had done to them. “Okay, fellas,” Big D told them, without his usual sarcasm. He’d been shot and stabbed a few times; that was the sort of thing any Death’s Head soldier was expected to endure uncomplainingly. But this shit Moanique seemed to have done to his sentries: that was of an order that even Big D couldn’t comprehend, and it scared the hell out of him, knowing it had come into their midst. So it was a temporarily kinder, gentler Big D who addressed the sentries and bartender: “You guys remember anything, let me know. Soon’s ya do.” “Okay, Big D,” they’d told him, each straining to remember something, anything. Big D put other sentries out front and asked some people to look after the numbed henchmen, but keep them away from each other. He wanted to hear their reports without their having first conferred with each other. He didn’t have an endless supply of noncontract muscle, and hoped Moanique didn’t walk through the front door again while he went to the back room to think. The way he remembered it, she wanted two things: forgiveness, and a place to stay. The first she wanted from him, and he hadn’t provided it. She might come back and ask for it again. The second—a place to stay—she probably didn’t want from him, but he gave it up himself, out of meanness. Then she took a

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powder and disappeared. “I won’t be any trouble.” Just what the hell had she meant by that? Someone getting past the sentries, then disappearing—that was trouble. Last place she had been seen was closing the women’s room door. Start the search there, if there even was going to be a search. “Better do it,” Big D thought, meaning searching. Better he be looking for her, and have some control over the situation, than for her waltz in here again and do god-knows-what, maybe to the whole lot of them. Big D realized that in order to find her, he needed to examine the last place Moanique was seen, and he headed to the ladies’ room to lock it. He had to head off a young woman nicknamed “Boinker” and tell her to use the man’s room. This time, there was an overweight man in there, name of “Oinker.” Big D heard the couple hit it off splendidly in the men’s room while he locked the ladies’. In order to clarify to everyone that the ladies’ room was secured, and not occupied, Big D did something both sardonic and humorous: he took some yellow crepe paper that been lying around since the gang had taken over the place and wrote this on it over and over, with a Cato Pen: POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS. He borrowed some switchblades from various members of the Death’s Head gang and tacked a few segments of the extemporized crime scene tape across the door frame to the ladies’ room. Everybody thought it was funny, since the police wouldn’t even come to the Death’s Head on a call. Big D turned to the gang to explain the events that had just transpired. He stood on a chair. “Now listen up, all a ya’s! ‘S been some weird shit done happened just now, even fer here! Some woman—not one a us—done snuck past our guards, then she come ‘n talked with me some. I met her oncet, few years age. We’ll git back to that. Then she

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went to the ladies’ room. She never come out—she just plain fuckin’ disappeared!” A murmur passed through the crowd. “Okay!” Big D continued, trying to calm down these excitable charges of his. “All sorts a shit goes on here! We drink so’s to kill a moose. Y’all be takin enough drugs that the hospital pharmacies is callin’ us up for supplies! And the fuckin’ that goes on here is epic! Ya kin all be proud a that, as that’s The Death’s Head way. But what ain’t The Death’s Head way is fer a strange woman to waltz ‘er ass in here past the sentries, then disappear, into thin air! Cain’t be havin’ any a that shit, now kin we?!” Words of assent ensued. “No, Big D,” “That’s bad shit, that is,” “You’re right” and similarly affirmative phrases rose from the assembled revelers. “So we gonna find this lady ‘n iron all this out. We gotta start lookin fer her, afore she starts lookin fer us, again! We ain’t a ones gonna be on the defensive! Sensible place ta start lookin’ for her’s the last place any a us seen her, ‘n that was closin’ a door to the ladies’ room, from the inside. So until this thing gets cleared up, ladies’ you gotta do your business in the men’s room. It ain’t all that bad, now, just ask Boinker. She ‘n Oinker met in the men’s room, ‘n it worked out damn fine for the both of ‘em, as you kin see: they started in there ‘n done moved it on out to the floor over yonder. My point bein’, ladies don’t knock it. “Now, in a way, even though this Miss Houdini might very well be dangerous to us, we owe her. Let me tell you why. Few years ago I run into her, just oncet, fer about a hour, some other bar here in The Zone. I was in a bad way them days, ‘n we spent the greater part of that hour me tellin’ her my woes. Hell, I never even asked her her troubles, which must a been considerable. With just a few words a wisdom, she set me on my

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course to you all. So’s you kin go thinkin’ a her like our Mother Superior, or sumpin’. But as such, y’all owe it to her to find her! Just what the hell we do with her when we do find her—we’ll jus’ have to see ‘bout that when the time comes! ‘Cept for the Praters ‘n the War Council, the rest a ya’s kin all git back to yer drug takin’ ‘n fornicatin’ now.” Everybody understood the ladies’ room was off limits until Big D had inspected it to his satisfaction, and the crowd dispersed. The “Praters” were Big D’s elite squad of soldiers, whom he’d named after the Praetorian Guard, who’d guarded the Emperor in Ancient Rome. The members of the War Council were those people in the gang who’d proven their ability to read other gangs’ intent concerning threats to the Death’s Head group, and suggest countermeasures their own gang might take. Big D knew his sentries would report to him as soon as they remembered anything, so he sat down in his customary chair, surrounded by his elite, to wait for his henchmen’s brains to unscramble, running through it, in his mind: just how could this woman—Moanique was her name, better remember that—how could she have made stupid his sentries, then vanished from the bathroom? One of the doorway henchmen approached Big D. The man was wobbly and needed some assistance walking, but wanted to tell Big D something. “We all had a bead on her, Big D,” he began, “just like we’s s’pozed ta. Then somethin’ got inta mah eyes!” “Mean like a cinder or sump’n?!” asked Big D. “Nothin’ thet real. More like a feelin’, if’n you kin believe it! But, hell, that feelin’, it was more real than gittin’ a cinder in your damn eye, tell you thet much.” “Thanks,” said Big D. “You look like shit. Better down a few boilermakers, gitcher ass back on track.”

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The other sentries told Big D pretty much the same thing, with additional information that was further disconcerting. Some of them remembered that they knew that whatever Moanique had put into them through their eyes, it had come from Moanique’s throat, without first having passed out her mouth. A couple of them believed that they were fortunate that Moanique had allowed them to realize, as it was happening, that the brain scrambling they had undergone was coming from her. She could just as easily have withheld that knowledge from them. Big D wondered what order of creature he was dealing with. He turned to his War Council and asked them “You hearin’ this?” “Yep, Big D,” “Uh-huh,” “I’m hearin’ it,” the Council Members replied. “This ain’t no ordinary gang shit, dontcha think? Likelihood a this Mama bein sent from another gang to rattle us?” Big D asked his confidantes. One of the senior War Council spoke up. “All due respect, Big D, they done got the rattlin’ part done, and damn good, too!” “Bad feeling, pit of the stomach?” asked Big D. Murmurs of “Uh-huh,” “Yeah,” passed through the War Council. One broke out of the pack and said “But ain’t the animal fear you get when bad gang shit’s brewin’, so much as a feelin’ this’s shitten spooky!” “Me, too,” assented Big D. “Rest a ya’s?” he asked his council, all of whom indicated they felt the same way. “Any a ya’s heard ‘bout anything like this, even remotely?” None had. “Okay, then. Next few days, use your contacts ‘n put out some quiet feelers, to the other gangs. Don’t let ‘em know what’s happened here; that’d make us look weak. Just keep your antennae up for talk a unusual shit. I like a good-hearted

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rumble much as the next fella, but no need to go to full scale war over on account a some insult never even happened. You all good with that?” It made sense to the War Council, and they were dismissed. Big D turned to his Praters. “Boys,” he told them, “we goan be Sherlock Holmeses. Let’s tiptoe into the ladies room, real careful-like, ‘n take us a real good look see. But first let me ask youse guys a personal question. Long term, ‘round here, last few years—who’s the favorite Mama? I don’t mean right now because she’s the youngest and freshest. I mean the one the guys likes doin’ on account a she been payin’ ‘tention to business ‘n knows ‘er business?” The Senior Prater was stunned that Big D would take time out from a state crisis to scratch the itch. “Shit, Big D,” he said, “this’s a hell of a time you to go getting’ horny on us all of a sudden . . .” “Just answer the damn question!” Big D demanded. The Praters conferred about fifteen seconds before coming up with an answer. “Boinker,” they all agreed. She was still riding Oinker on the floor, about thirty feet away. “Go pull her off Oinker,” Big D ordered the Praters. “He ain’t gonna like it, Big D” advised the Senior Prater. “Probly squeal like a pig,” replied Big D. “Just tel ‘im it’s for the common good.” Oinker did much less squealing than Boinker, when the Praters pulled her off. When the Praetorian Guard presented her to Big D, she was pissed as hell. She was naked, too.

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“Goddammit Big D!” she cursed her leader. She held up her right thumb and index finger to him, an inch apart. “I was this close!” Big D aped her gesture, telling her “Never do this to a guy! You help me out and you can ride Oinker as much as you want. Just give me the help I need, and don’t be so pissed that I’m askin’ you that you don’t do what I ask.” “Just how kinky you gonna get?” inquired Boinker, apprehensively. She was secretly hoping that she was being summoned to have sex with Big D. That would have raised her status in the gang significantly. Boinker had heard rumors from some of the older Mamas that when Big D was first rising within the gang ranks, he had been known to be a great fuck. But so far as anyone knew, he had been celibate since a few weeks before he had been proclaimed the Death’s Head Supreme Leader. Big D figured celibacy allowed him to rule with an iron hand. For him, it was part of the leadership mantle. Besides, he was saving himself for his soul mate. “No sex,” Big D explained to Boinker. “I need your eyes. Way I figure it, you bein’ the hands-down favorite Mama around here, means you’re probly the most observant. I want you to walk through the ladies’ room with me and a couple a Praters ’n tell me what’s differ’nt ‘bout it. What’s there that shouldn’t be, what ain’t there that should be. You do that?” “Well, yeah. Sure.” “Let’s go,” said Big D who headed to the door and broke the Police Tape he’d fabricated as a joke. “Step on in, but careful, so’s not to disturb anything,” Big D told Boinker, as he held the tape back for her.

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As soon as she was inside the threshold, Boinker stopped and surveyed the small lavatory. “Floor’s different,” she announced. “Differ’nt how?” asked Big D. He thought maybe she meant something as drastic as a new tile pattern, but that wasn’t it: the white, hexagonal tiles were set in the floor as they had been for several decades now, and the stress cracks that had formed in the grout and tiles as the building had slowly settled remained unchanged. Boinker stood tilting her head this way and that, catching the light in her eyes at different angles. Balancing her weight on her right leg, she lifted her bare left foot off the floor and examined its sole. She saw nothing, but she knew she’d felt something tactile when she’d stepped into the room. She drew the ball of her right thumb across the sole of her foot, then rubbed the thumb against her right index and middle fingers. She returned to her head tilting. “Thin film of dust scattered across the floor. Thickest over there,” she said, pointing “under the sink.” One of the Praters, known for his sarcasm, spoke up. “Maybe it’s fairy dust,” he said. “That’d explain the bitch flyin’ out a here.” “Goddammit, Pirate!” snapped Big D at the Prater, annoyed. “Lay off with the cynical shit for once!” Big D had called this Prater by his shortened gang name, Pirate. His full name, so far as the gang cared, was Peter Pirate. He was the same gang member who had started the rumor about Big D being gay. He had first come to the Death’s Head, knowing full well the risks he ran stepping through the door, itching for a fight, just having been fired from the crew of Peter Pan, an extremely popular theatrical show in The Zone. After hours, when the audience was long gone from the theater, he and others of the crew,

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along with members the pit orchestra, would get drunk, harness themselves to the flying wires and cavort about the stage, airborne. It was great fun. The management turned a blind eye to it. But Peter, who knew all sorts of things about electricity and carpentry, possessed what he called “entrepre-manure-ial” instincts: he began charging strangers for rides, and he had quite an underground side business going, for a short while. When management found out about it, they canned his ass, and even the stage-hand union refused to stand up for him. That hurt. So he had come into the Death’s Head, hoping to get beaten to death. But instead, they recognized him immediately as a Fellow Crazy and welcomed him with open arms. Once he had told him how it was he’d sought them out, they dubbed him Peter Pirate. It seemed to them a fitting name for somebody who was sort of pilfering from the show Peter Pan. Prater Peter Pirate replied to his leader: “You know I cain’t not be cynical ‘n sarcastic-like, now Big D. Born that way.” “Oh fer chrissake!” retorted Big D, “just zip it! And git over there ‘n look at that dust! Jeeziz!” Big D could become quite exasperated with the lack of initiative demonstrated by his subordinates. Pirate walked to the sink and knelt. He drew his fingertips across the floor under the sink. Boinker was right—a thin film of fine, particulate dust lay there. He touched the tips of his fingers to his tongue and raised his eyebrows. He loved drawing out these kinds of scenes: he knew the suspense would really irritate Big D. “What is it?!” asked Big D, who—so far as Pirate was concerned—was an impatient, irritably inquisitive little shit who always wanted to know. “Cocaine? Heroin? ‘N don’t tell me it’s no goddamn fairy dust!”

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Pirate smiled. “Dust,” he said. “Goddammit, stop with your onery shit now, Pirate!” Big D was getting himself way too worked up. “Plaster dust,” Pirate announced smugly. He was right, and he knew it. He’d tasted mouthsful of plaster dust, performing odd carpentry and electrical jobs here and there. “Hmm!” mused Big D. “Didn’t hear no sawin’ or drillin’ last night. Boinker,” Big D addressed the naked woman in the bathroom with him and Pirate. Big D moved to the toilet and put its lid down. “I want chew ta sit here ‘n be comfortable. But look at the walls ‘n see what’s differ’nt, that’d cause plaster on a floor.” Boinker did as she had been instructed: she looked at the walls while seated. This caused a delay in her reporting to Big D where the difference lay. Big D had been trying to be kind, when he had directed Boinker to sit. If he’d just told her to inspect the walls, she would have noticed the screws missing from the grate in a matter of minutes. As it was, Boinker sat for forty minutes, carefully inspecting the walls, to no avail. “Listen, Big D,” Boinker finally said, “I need to get up and look, okay?” “Sure!” said Big D. “Hell, yes! Do what you need to, to burp this baby!” As Boinker walked past the grate, something caught her attention, she wasn’t sure what. She stood back from it and gazed at it, again tilting her head. She noticed the light reflected off it differently, near the corners. She looked more closely. “There’s no screws on the grate!” she exclaimed while noticing it. “That’s new?” Big D asked her. “Pretty sure,” asserted Boinker.

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“Hmm,” grunted Big D. “Pirate, you ‘n another Prater, see if you kin pull this grate out the wall.” “ ‘N git me a flashlight!” Big D hollered to the crowd of rubberneckers outside the door. Peter Pirate waved another Prater inside the ladies’ room. The Praters had been standing guard outside the lavatory since Big D had broken the Police Tape, making sure the gawkers didn’t get in. Big D turned to Boinker as the grate was being taken off the wall. “Good work,” he praised her. “You kin git cher ass back to Oinker now.” Big D could smell her arousal, as she hurriedly left his presence. Big D turned his attention to the hole in the wall. “Where’s ma damn flashlight?!” he demanded. One of the Praters handed him what he’d asked for. It had been supplied by one of the crowd. Big D shone the light into the ductwork. The sheet metal went back about ten feet, then seemed to stop a few feet short of a solid rock wall. “Look at this, Pirate. Man could git hisself in there, couldn’t he?” “No problem,” answered Pirate. “Think the bitch got out this way?” “Don’t see no other way out,” stated Big D. “You?” he asked Pirate. “Nope,” Pirate replied. “Want me to check it out?” Big D was about to send Pirate into the vent when Boinker showed up again, crying. The source of her distress was Oinker’s unfaithfulness. When she’d been pulled off him, he had lain on the floor, on his back and aroused for about a minute, wondering what had just happened. Drugs will do that to you. Another woman had noticed and had moved atop him. Boinker was back, demanding the prod Big D had assured her would be forthcoming. It was the sort of adjudicating that Big D had learned came with being leader of the Death’s Heads.

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“Boink,” said Big D. He used the affectionate diminutive form of her name, to show his empathy. He really just wanted to get her out of the way, for now. “How ‘bout you hookin’ up with Pirate, here? You two okay with that?” he asked Boinker and Pirate. He knew Pirate would be okay with it—that sumbitch’d screw anything, and Boinker was the best. “Okay,” they both said, and commenced to fornicating there in the ladies’ room, with Boinker seated on the sink. Big D turned to the Prater who’d handed him the flashlight. So far as Big D had observed, this Prater’s bulb didn’t burn any too bright, but Big D had noticed that he liked to work the maze puzzles that were in the booklets at the tables at Johnson Howard’s Restaurants. In fact, he was renowned for it, and went by the name Puzzle. It passed through Big D’s mind that this Prater was probably the man for this job. “Was gonna send Pirate, but somethin’s come up fer him,” Big D remarked to Puzzle, nodding his head to the nearby activity on the ladies’ room sink. “Looks like you’re elected. Git in there, ‘n find that woman. She couldn’t a got far, as thur cain’t be that far to go, in thur.” It would turn out Big D was very wrong about that. He continued giving the Prater his marching orders. “Bring her out! You gotta knock ‘er out, ‘s okay by me! I want her live, though! Got that?!” “Got it, Big D!” replied the Prater, all serious. “Poor sumbitch,” thought Big D to himself, of Puzzle, “got no ‘magination.” Big D sort of felt sorry for unimaginative people. He’d begun to realize they were missing out on a lot of fun, inside the old noggin.

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The Prater wiggled into the vent, with the flashlight. Big D watched him reach the end of the sheet metal vent and search beyond with the flashlight. “There’s a little room here, like a cave. I’m gonna turn around and drop into it, feet first” the Prater relayed to Big D. “You goan be okay?” asked Big D. “You be able to get back into the vent?” “Hell, yes,” said the Prater. “Piece a cake.” Big D watched him turn and drop. He saw the flashlight move about, exploring the room. “There’s a tunnel, leads down. I’m gonna take it,” Big D heard the Prater say, his voice taking on an echo, which caused Big D’s spine to tingle. “You be damn keerful!” Big D instructed the Maze-Puzzle Prater. “No problem!” replied the Prater. His voice echoed back to Big D, ever fainter. “No problem. No problem.” “Know problem,” muttered Big D to himself. He could only wait for Puzzle to return, hopefully with Moanique, who—he prayed—would explain to his satisfaction just what the hell was going on. The waiting was bad enough, all six hours of it. But the state of Puzzle, when he finally reappeared, was even more unsettling. After four and a half hours of silence, Big D began to hear faint, incoherent screams, which became louder as Puzzle came closer to the vent, as he returned. Big D finally saw the flashlight illuminate the room at the vent’s end, and Puzzle dove into the vent, whimpering. Puzzle frantically scrambled the last ten feet through the vent, and crawled out the opening into the ladies’ room head first, falling onto the floor and babbling, still making the crawling motions, although they were no longer necessary. The poor man was home free and didn’t know it.

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Big D was good and rattled to see a fellow human in such a state, but as leader he kept his cool. He stepped to the threshold of the ladies’ room and hollered out to the gang in general: “Somebody shoot this man with morphine!” To himself Big D grumbled “Poor bastard needs some sleep.” A medic from the War Council came into the room with a syringe. “There’s shit down there, Big D!” the Puzzle kept saying as the syringe emptied into his vein. “Bad shit!” said Puzzle, before he went to sleep. Big D was troubled. Despite outward appearances, he was a child of the Rationalist/Enlightenment tradition; what was happening right under his nose didn’t set any too well with all of that. When Puzzle awoke in the back room, Big D was by his side, waiting. “You look like shit,” Big D told him. “Better git a few boilermakers in ya, setcha straight!” “Don’t want no boilermakers,” replied the Prater. “Jeeziz!” exclaimed Big D, very surprised to hear that bit of news. “You’re ma damn Boilermaker Drinkin’ King, three years runnin’ our Annual Upchuck Festival! You must be really rattled!” “Betcher ass I’m rattled!” averred the Prater. “First of all, we’re sittin’ top a bigass cave! ‘N there’s shit down there, in that cave! It’s bad, that shit is!!” Even though the fact that the Death’s Head sat atop a cave was news to Big D, he resumed badgering Puzzle without missing a beat. “Course there’s shit down there! It’s a cave fer chrissake! Gonna let a few goddam rats ‘n bats scare yore ass?!” “Big D, it ain’t the rats is a-scarin’ me!” protested Puzzle. “Bats, neither!” “Well what, then, goddammit?!” Big D demanded. “The thangs!” offered the Prater.

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“ ‘The thangs’?!” asked Big D, incredulously. “The thangs,” the Prater reiterated, insistently. “Oh jeeziz!” exclaimed Big D. “Yer seein’ shit ‘n getting’ a-skeered a it!” Big D turned from Puzzle and addressed his gang in general, who had gathered around Puzzle once he’d awoken, to see for themselves how he was doing. “Kin I have another a you fearless Death’s Head Warriors volunteer to go into the big, goddamn, skeery cave ‘n look for our mother superior?” “I’ll go, Big D!” offered Pirate, who was taking a breather from fornicating with Boinker. “Shit, you know how brave I am” he asserted while heading for the ladies’ room, the entrance of which was still guarded by a few Praters. “Not so damn soon!” Big D hollered to Pirate “I ain’t a-skeered!” declared Pirate. “We’ll see ‘bout thet come tomorrow,” asserted Big D. “But jeeziz god, if they is somethin’ down thar—mind ja, Ah’m not sayin’ thar is, leastwise not chet—but if’n thar is, we cain’t jest go a-sendin’ my finest warriors into the fray willy-nilly, now kin we?” Big D’s question was answered with assenting comments such as “Thet’s good thinkin’” and “Uh-uh, thet’d be bad” and “Good stratergy thur, Big D.” Big D began mapping out the particulars, first addressing Pirate, who had just volunteered to be spelunker number two. “You ‘n mister Knocking Knees here,” Big D said, meaning the Puzzle, “sit down with Slicer here ‘n talk through some strategy. Slicer—you gonna be our spelunker cartographer” “Huh?” asked Slicer, who was a good man to have on your side in a knife fight. He could also draw very well.

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Big D explained to Slicer. “You goan draw a map a the cave from what Puzzle tells you. Listen to him while he debriefs Pirate. Sketch out while he’s talking, then draw up as good a map as you can afterwards. Two maps. One fer Pirate ta take in a cave with ‘im, ‘n another fer us’ns to keep up here topside. Case he don’t come back! Do that?!” “Piece a pie,” answered Slicer. “Expression’s ‘piece a cake.’ Or ‘easy as pie’,” offered Big D. “Which one you want what I should say?” asked Slicer. “Can you just fuckin’ get me two goddamn maps!” demanded Big D, his voice rising. “Uh, yeah,” answered Slicer, who was too stoned to understand why Big D was so irritable. “Easy as cake.” Big D turned and walked away, disgusted. “Oh jeeziz,” me muttered to himself sotto voce. Slicer and Pirate and Puzzle worked on the map most of the rest of the day. The best the three of them could figure out, the cave was a series of good size chambers— eight to ten of them, Puzzle had lost count—which were connected to each other in a straight line. There were passageways, maybe to other chambers, that Puzzle had not yet explored. What had scared Puzzle was his sense of being followed and watched; he’d hear something stalking him and turn to confront it with the flashlight, then it would vanish. The one time he turned and forgot to aim the flashlight, he thought he saw an immense blob coming towards him. When he shone the light on it to get a better look, it disappeared. When they told Big D about this later, his sardonic comment was “Beware of the blob,” which was a line of the title song of a popular movie, back then.

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The map was finished and the three met in final consultation with Big D. It was decided that Pirate would be sent into the cave with two flashlights, each with fresh batteries, pencils and razor-blade pencil sharpener, and his map. His mission was reconnaissance: he was to pace out the map drawn by Slicer, note any minor directional turns Puzzle might have missed. If he had time, and if his nerve held out, he could explore further, but with the sole aim of mapping the cave out. Forget finding Moanique, for now. Big D figured that without a working knowledge of the cave’s shape, there was no chance of them finding her. He also figured that even with an accurate map of the cave, their chances of finding her were very slim, indeed. He hoped she was through with them and would never return. Big D was becoming increasingly convinced Moanique was bad news. Pirate did as he was told and mapped the cave out. He’d returned pretty much in the same state as had Puzzle—frantically scrambling through the vent towards safety. He wasn’t in nearly as bad shape as Puzzle had been, though. Pirate stopped his scrambling once he was in the ladies’ room, and he didn’t need to be knocked out with morphine to regain his composure, but still he was clearly rattled. Big D pushed his way through the crowd that had assembled at the ladies’ room door after Pirate had plopped out the vent and onto the floor. “Thangs?” Big D asked Pirate sardonically, once he’d calmed down. “Thangs,” echoed Pirate, thinking Big D would understand the fear that unseen things can visit upon a person. The crowd laughed, which hurt Pirate’s feelings. Pirate didn’t know what to make of the fact that Big D stood all stony faced, “I kin be pretty terrifyin’! Y’all know that!” Pirate pleaded to the onlookers.

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“Oh, yeah! ‘Ceptin when it comes to thar not bein nothing thur!” retorted Big D. “Then ya’s go ‘n tarn into a goddamn pussy!” “Bein’ in the dark like thet, just does somethin’ to a body!” explained Pirate. “Ah swear, Big D, ya start a-wrestlin’ with your own mind after a few hours down thar! Hell, you yourself told us once the worst demons thay is, is the ones ya carry around inside a yourself. I think it’s like that Frankie Roosevelt said ‘bout nothin’ ta fear ‘cept fear itself.” “And you all’re doing a damn god job of bein a-skeered a yore own fear! Jeeziz! Want somethin’ done right . . .” Big D knew full well that Pirate felt he should be the leader of the Death’s Head crew, not Big D. Big D himself was sick of the job, but believed Pirate was way too political, without any of the requisite substance behind it, to be an effective leader. Big D also knew that if Pirate were leader, he would destroy himself and the gang: Pirate would have women throwing themselves at him even more than they did now, and he’d behave like a kid in a candy store. A good leader saw the pitfalls of that on his way up. So Big D had taken this opportunity to body slam Pirate in front of the group. But Big D was astute enough to know that an angry lieutenant was a dangerous one, so after a few seconds of silence Big D continued, making sure the whole gang heard. “Pirate ya done good. Ya wrestled yore own damn demons down thur in a cave, ‘n ya done prevailed. I think. Significance’s in the wrestlin’. Lemme see yore map.” Pirate offered Big D the map, not sure whether he should be ashamed or proud. The crowd dispersed while Big D, Pirate, Slicer, and Puzzle conferred. Pirate had managed to add some significant details to Puzzle’s original map. Pirate had come across

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thirteen chambers, before realizing the first one was identical to the thirteenth. Looking now at his marginalia and the notes he had written over the first map, it was clear to Big D that the chambers made a circle. Many of the chambers had an additional passageway which seemed to open to the circle’s inside. A few had passageways leading to the circle’s outside. Big D looked at the map and asked out loud: “Maybe there’s a central hub, whaddya think?” “Hmm,” mused Pirate. “Like to find that out myself.” Big D’s eyes took on a far away look. “If she’s in thar,” he said, “that hub’s where she’ll be. ‘N she’s mine!” Big D turned away from the strategy table, to the general revelry which continually occurred at the place and hollered “Nellie!!” Within about thirty seconds the crowd had coughed up Nellie, who stood disheveled in front of Big D. She’d been having sex with someone or other. No surprise there. “Nellie,” Big D said, “I know a few a the boys like it when you go a-dressin’ up like some naughty nurse and gives ‘em special ‘xaminations. Here’s what I want you to do.” Like many of the women whom Big D would summon for a mission, Nellie first thought Big D was asking her for sex, and she was happy for the status that would confer. But as always Big D was strictly business, when it came to Death’s Head women. “I want you to dress up in your nurse clothes, ‘n go to the hospital. Lift me a box a some adult diapers. Gonna need ‘em.” “Why?” asked Nellie. Big mistake. “Goddammit Nellie,” growled Big D. “You’re on a need-to-know basis. And you don’t need to know!”

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“Get right on it, Big D,” Nellie apologized. She hurried away to dig through her effects and find the right nurses outfit. The one that was designed so that her bush and nipples were visible probably wouldn’t do. She would have to settle for the one from which her breasts nearly spilled, with the short skirt and garters. After Nellie had left, Big D told Slicer to go elsewhere and make two new maps. Then he explained his plan of action to Puzzle and Pirate, the two Praters who had preceded him into the cave below the Death’s Head. He figured he owed them that. But first, he swore them to secrecy, knowing full well they’d likely blab to anyone, first chance they got. “Fellas,” Big D told them, “big difference between you ‘n me in this spelunking venture ain’t bravery. You two is the bravest sumbitches I ever rode with. Whatever it is you done ‘xperienced down thur, had to’ve been damn skeery, to’ve rattled you two so damn much! Only difference ‘twixt you two ‘n me is I’m goin’ down thur full well knowin’ I’m probly gonna shit ma pants. That’s how come the diapers. If I’m gonna find this Moanique, I gotta be prepared a be skeered shitless. I gotta accept that condition. I’m gonna rest up. Wake me when Nellie gets back. I want one a them new maps Slicer’s workin’ on, ‘n two flashlights with fresh batteries.” Big D lay down on a cot to snooze, while Puzzle and Pirate did as they were told. They kept their mouths shut about the diapers. They figured they could wait until Big D had gone into the cave, before they let out that information. When Nellie came back, she had the diapers, and she wore a big smile on her face. She’d been able to find the less suggestive nurse outfit, but had still been approached by some male doctors while in the elevators, as it left little to the imagination. “Those guys sure knew their way around a girl!” she thought. “Must be all

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that anatomy they studied.” Turns out the doctors were similarly impressed with the way she’d donated her body to medicine, and spent the next several months making fruitless inquiries as to just who that hot nurse was and where she might be found. Big D closed the door to the ladies’ room and put on the diapers in private. He opened the door and called in Slicer and the two Praters. “If’n I don’t git back here in three days, one of ya’s strap on a goddamn diaper ‘n look fer that center chamber. ‘Nother three days, the next one a ya does the same. After that, if none a us returns, Slicer, you have somebody brick this goddamn hell hole up, at the end of the vent. Y’all got thet?!” “Yes, chief,” they all said, as Big D wriggled his skinny ass into the vent. The three men in the ladies’ room peered into the vent and watched the flashlight’s illumination grow dimmer. The two Praters asked Slicer to leave. When they were alone, they began to discuss the situation and their options. “That’s one crazy-ass son of a bitch!” declared Pirate. “We got our orders,” replied Puzzle, who rightly surmised that Pirate was setting himself up to be the heir-apparent. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want it to be said that the last thing I did was shit in my own damn pants, out of fright!” argued Pirate. “Not out of fright,” replied Puzzle, whose bulb burned brighter than Big D suspected. “He’s accepting his fright, and he’s going beyond it, two things we couldn’t do, first time we were down there. If he fails, he’s giving us the chance to redeem ourselves.”

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“What the hell’s the point a all this? Redemption, shittin’ in your pants and all?” asked Pirate. “Seems sort a senseless, bein’ dead ‘n all, afterward.” “Big D wants to know,” answered Puzzle. “He wants to know what’s down there. It could be fatal to us, and he’s willing to risk a lot—dignity, maybe even his own life— to find out about it. That’s why he’s our leader.” “And why I couldn’t be,” continued Pirate. He was quite irritated that Puzzle was so right in assessing his and Big D’s relative leadership abilities. “Hell, I’m going down next, then you,” insisted Pirate. “Good idea,” answered Puzzle, meaning it. He knew full well that if he were to go first, Pirate would simply brick the vent up after a couple of hours, usurp the throne and lead the gang to their ruin. When you got right down to it, Puzzle was more astute than most people were able to acknowledge, and damn decent, besides. In the cave, Big D reached the first chamber whose map showed a passageway leading to the circle’s inside. Puzzle and Pirate had been right: this place was spooky as hell, and it wasn’t on account of the bats. Big D could hear that he was being followed, but when he turned the light to the sound, his eyes showed nothing there. When he first squeezed himself inside the passageway, Big D had become inexplicably frightened. After about a quarter hour of wedging himself towards the central chamber he believed on faith to exist, Big D’s terror became such that he couldn’t control his wind or water. There sure as hell was something following him, and it must have been immense: the ground shook with every step it took, inexorably chasing him. And the thing was close— Big D could hear it wheezing faintly, right behind his head. As best he could, Big D quickly turned to shine his flashlight on it, and found nothing there. “Jeeziz,” Big D

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wondered to himself, “how could something that massive just vanish?” There was no place in the narrow passageway such an enormity could have hidden. Then Big D heard the breathing behind him. The creature—whatever it was—now lay between Big D and the central chamber. This made no sense: Big D was a runt who could barely squeeze his own skinny hide through the passageway; how could a creature of such vastness have got past him? Very deliberately, Big D turned to see what stood in his way, without shining the flashlight directly upon it. He saw a black blob, whose shape changed slowly. Big D involuntarily screamed from the spike in his fright, and the blob either enlarged or moved towards Big D—it was hard for him to tell which. But from the blob’s reaction to his fear, Big D instinctively understood that whatever the thing was, it fed off his panic. Big D needed to control his fright, and he let go of it as his bowels loosened. The blob turned from Big D and made its way through the passage, ushering Big D toward the central chamber. Big D followed, himself having wrestled and prevailed. When Big D reached the central chamber, he noticed a number of things didn’t add up, chief among which was its circumference, which was surely larger than the diameter of the ring of chambers whose passageways led to it. The height of the chamber made no sense either—it seemed to reach way, way higher that he could possibly have descended, and appeared to him to have the breadth of the domed sky one presumed to see in the Midwest. Big D tried to get a better look with his flashlights, but he noticed that neither of them worked any more. It registered in his mind that that might cause problems on his return journey, but he considered that the return journey may never take place, so he put his flashlight troubles out of his mind for the time being.

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As his eyes adjusted more to his surroundings, he saw that the chamber was suffused with light emanating from phosphorescent fish that swam in the many streams and ponds that melodiously gurgled, their soft susurrations faintly echoing throughout the cave. These ponds and streams sat upon many levels of the cave, interconnected by waterfalls which calmly tumbled in quiet hush from level to level. The light from the fish was bright enough that the water shone with it, and any stalagmites that rose from any water were illuminated from within, the light of the fish passing from them, through the water, to the stalagmites, where it became trapped within the mineral deposits so slowly grown. Big D noticed a small island at the chamber’s center, connected to other islands by a maze of glowing mineral bridges, carved by the water. Moanique sat cross-legged on the center island, and Big D wondered how he would ever navigate the maze to her. He realized that intent was the key: if he intended to, he could walk there laboriously, one misstep after another, until he was worn out from trying. Or he could just intend himself to be there, on the island, with Moanique. Given the alternatives, as he had parsed them, just intending himself over to the island seemed the sensible course of action. He heard a whoosh of air as he transported himself through the ether, to Moanique. “Jeeziz!” Big D thought to himself, now standing in front of Moanique, whose eyes were closed. For the first time, Big D realized she wasn’t simply sitting crosslegged. A big-ass snake, its tail emanating from the earth behind her, coiled around Moanique a few times. The last coil passed under her right armpit, and the snake’s hooded head rose from behind Moanique’s neck and stretched out over the top of

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Moanique’s own head, protecting her. Moanique patted the ground in front of her with the palms of her hands, inviting Big D to sit. Big D was apprehensive, his diaper being full and all, but much to his amazement, when he sat he found himself to be quite clean. Whiter than snow, his diaper was. Sitting there, himself cross-legged with Moanique, he knew she was no threat, either to him or the Death’s Head crowd. He also knew that she was a different order of human creature than any he had ever encountered: she was way, way beyond his ken. So far as his dealings with her were concerned, he was in way too deep. Big D understood that she was wanting him to leave her alone—she would find her own way out of the morass she’d created for herself. Moanique summoned the blob to escort Big D through the maze of island bridges into the passageway from which he’d come. When he was again topside, Big D explained to the good people in the Death’s Head that they would deal with Moanique much as the police dealt with them: they would leave her alone. So far as they were concerned, she was that risky a critter. For her own part, Moanique spent a good part of her time in the cave trying to find a young war orphan she’d become friendly with in Nagasaki, using pretty much the same techniques she’d employed to find Big D. But all to no avail: this girl had dropped off even Moanique’s radar. It bothered Moanique quite a bit, but she continued working on her energy body, as the process of perfecting it allowed her to catch fleeting glimpses of The One. When Moanique woke from her meditating, she knew that The One had told her this: she was to work as a courtesan for DB. Just why, even she couldn’t say, but she’d learned that trust in The One was her only sensible course of action. There were two other ways out of the cave that she knew of. She’d found out about them while she

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had meditated in the monastery near Nagasaki. One led to the sewer under DB’s apartment building. The other led to the Federal Reserve Bank in Big City, the basement of which housed more gold than Fort Knox. And that is no literary metaphor—there is more gold there than in Fort Knox. At the end of each business day, bars of gold are rolled on carts from one room to another, reflecting the balance of each country’s monetary transactions with all the other countries in the world that day. Moanique stopped in on her way to DB’s and lifted a few bars of gold, causing a minor international monetary crisis. It would blow over in a few weeks, after some creative accounting, once the treasury secretaries of most of the affected countries privately owned up to the fact that “we’re all Keyenesians, now.”

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That was the history of what had transpired between Big D and Moanique, years before DB and Miss Boopadoop had stumbled into the Death’s Head. “So here she is, three years later,” Big D thought to himself, “asking for asylum.” Or something like asylum. On the positive side, Big D knew she was very low maintenance. Hell, just stuff her down the proper vent, and she could take care of herself for extended periods of time, just fine. The two of them continued their conversation. “I need a favor,” Moanique told Big D. “And I suppose you won’t be any damn trouble, neither!” retorted Big D. “You know I won’t,” insisted Moanique. “You have any idea how much trouble . . .” Big D began.

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“I left you every indication that you were supposed to have permitted me to disappear. Instead, you decided to spend serious effort detecting how it was I vanished from the bathroom. You then chose to squander your resources by sending two of your best Praters after me, both of whom returned scared shitless. You nursed the first back to health, and mounted a crude but clever reconnaissance campaign . . .” “Awright, awright, fer chrissake, you know! And I get your point that I fuckin’ chose to do all that crap! But there’s a coupla things I don’t get.!” “The cave was real,” announced Moanique. That was one of the things Big D wanted to know. “Figgered you’d say that,” mumbled Big D. “What the hell was that damn black blob?” “Oh, that,” answered Moanique. “That’s how you saw it, huh? Those things are around all the time. They assume different forms, provided you see them. They’re beings, awarenesses from other realities that get trapped in this one, and feed off our emotions. We don’t see them most of the time because our attention is directed elsewhere. If we’re in the dark, though, and there’s not as much to hang our everyday attention onto, we become aware of them.” “And that snake?” asked Big D, his head reeling. “Spozin’ you’re tellin’ me thet’s real, too? Ain’t never seen no diamond-back, cobra, constrictor snake before. All kinds a snake types, mashed together. Ain’t at all likely, given evolutionary mechanics.” “Striped giraffes, like,” answered Moanique. “Go back far enough on the evolutionary tree, you get all the possibilities that never came about. The snake comes from there.”

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Big D was silent a few seconds while he worked all this over in his head. “Jeeziz, what are you?” he demanded of her. “I’m becoming awake,” Moanique replied. That much was true. Ever since she’d read Descartes, Moanique had been on a serious journey of proof. “Hmmph,” Big D snorted. “Whaddya want? Not that I kin help.” Big D wondered what the likes of her could possibly want from the likes of him. They were from such disparate tribes, he didn’t see any chance of commonality. “Just a few things,” answered Moanique. “First, there’s a good chance I might need to go back down the hole. You can come to visit every two weeks, if you’d like. But only you. You earned it, three years ago.” “Ain’t sayin’ yes. What else . . .” Big D prompted her. “I want to hide something. You don’t need to know what.” “Don’t want to even know you’re hidin’ it—that is, if’n I say Yes . . .” “Call the dogs off young Bumstiff . . .” Moanique’s last request got Big D’s ire up. His foot was still smarting from having been pinned to the floor by DB, and his pride was still smarting from that having been done to him in front of his gang, especially with his own favorite spring-action switchblade. Big D began objecting vehemently. “Now look here, Missy, we done swore Death’s Head Vengeance . . .” Moanique met Big D’s protest with delighted yet eerie laughter. “We can work on that one. I’m sure you’ll see the sense to it, in time.” She herself hadn’t intended to ask that, until she saw the improvised Wanted Poster as she walked past the bar. When she’d been hiking to the Death’s Head, Moanique had no idea that DB had a bounty on his

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head. She’d seen the makeshift poster, figured it out, and was now negotiating a way out for DB, who would never know how much interference she had run for him, around the time of his wedding. And Moanique would never know how much she’d screwed up his and Boops’ lives, binding them together. But it all evened out, her helping, his not knowing, her having screwed up. When Big D heard the eerie sound of delight escape Moanique’s throat, he remembered Hesse’s line about the icy laugh of the immortals. He also suspected that Moanique knew full well that there was no such thing as Death’s Head Vengeance, so he began back pedaling. “Ain’t said yes yet, but if’n I do, what’s in all this fer me?” Big D was ready to dicker. He would have used that word and enjoyed it, bargaining with her, had he known she’d been working as a well-paid prostitute these last few years. “Your people are getting restless,” declared Moanique. “They need a new challenge.” Big D began to wonder if maybe Moanique might be a mind reader, as well. “Drop the disaffected, alienated routine and go for a real rumble, something you could damn near lose everything at: get into business!” “Jeeziz, Moanique!” protested Big D. “Ask my guys ta man a taco stand, they’d slice me up ‘n stuff me in a burrito or somethin’! These ain’t regular guys I’m leadin’, here . . . . .” “Nothing regular about business, least at the start-up level,” argued Moanique. “That’s where the danger is. Irregular hours. Big D, you already got your gang disciplined. Broken down into a War Council, Praters, foot soldiers. The women are already status conscious. You’ve built a fine organization. Capitalize on that—find a few things you can sell, for Pete’s sake.”

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“Like what?” asked Big D. He had yet to hone his entrepreneurial skills. “Bet you got a mechanic running with you,” suggested Moanique. “Those guys make loads, even the ones nobody trusts.” “Hmmp,” responded Big D, his eyes in a squint. “Probably got a few weapons people, know how to maintain firearms and cutlery. Appeal to the hunting lodge crowd, big game hunters with large chunks of disposable income,” Moanique suggested. “Some of that income might as well be diverted to you guys.” “But my guys just cain’t do the regular hours stuff!” objected Big D. “I kin hear ‘em a-squawkin’ already!” “They don’t’ have to be particularly regular—they’re owners, not employees! That’s the difference,” Moanique countered. “So’s you’re sayin’ we all diversify ourselves into as many operations as we kin, as sort of a family a companies . . .” “Yes! Exactly! You and your crowd are the guiding spirits, the parent company of a whole tribe of diversified companies,” Moanique persuaded him. “That mirror you use to keep tabs on the place—you invented it, right?” “Weren’t no real brainstorm, Moanique,” admitted Big D. “Simple optics. Elegant as hell, that stuff is,” Big D mused. “Doesn’t matter how simple it is! What does matter is this: your figuring out who else might want to use it. Airports? Hospitals? Bet you got a born salesman running with you. Get him on it. Same with that Police Line tape.”

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“Shit, Moanique, that was just a damn joke,” laughed Big D, “ ‘n everbody knew it. Ain’t no p’lice be comin’ in here. They’s too skeered!” “Just think for a second—wouldn’t the police be interested in that sort of thing? And don’t go selling the tape to each individual police department—sell to the police equipment supply catalogs.” “They got those things?” asked Big D, incredulously. He barely knew about the JC Penney catalog. “Oh, yeah,” replied Moanique. Moanique outlined a business plan for the Death’s Head Empire. “It’s a matter of having expansion capital. First, get your mechanic to make some money and squirrel it away. That’ll be easy. Then invest it.” “Sure,” retorted Big D, with the sarcasm that kept him on top at the Death’s Head. “Like I know shit about that.” “I’ll help,” offered Moanique. “Listen. You ever hear of Deming?” “Statistician fella. He came to talk at The Institute first year I was there. Made perfectly fine sense. Never could understand why American business give ‘im the cold shoulder.” “Quick profits, that’s why,” declared Moanique. “American business has that to lose. He’s in Japan, now. They’re listening. They got nothing to lose.” “Now even they go listenin’ to Deming,” reasoned Big D, “just how the hell they gonna build th’ infrastructure to rival our industrial base?” “That’s not where they’ll go first,” countered Moanique. “Where then?” asked Big D.

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“Part of the electronics market nobody’s cornered—transistors,” replied Moanique. “Bet that’s where they’ll start out. They know they can’t rival the US’s heavy industrial output. So they’ll compete where nobody’s got much manufacturing capacity. Watch out for a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. They mean business.” “What they make?” inquired Big D. “Transistor radios.” “Them damn toys?!” Big D laughed “Those toys, Deming, and Japanese persistence will take Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo to the top,” insisted Moanique. She was right. The company would later morph into Sony. “Okay, so we get some money and invest in that Tokyo Sushi Coke-e-oh. How long before we got us a bundle?” asked Big D. “No telling,” replied Moanique. “Look. You have to be persistent, and you have to keep an eye out for opportunities as they present themselves. I may not have to go to the cave for a few years yet. I may never have to. Or I might need to hole up there tomorrow. A lot of that’s out of my control. Irregardless of how that plays out, I’ll help steer you and your charges into this next phase of your lives, if you’ll let me. What do you say?” Big D brooded a few seconds. This woman had caused him nothing but trouble: each time he’d encountered her, his life would spiral even further downward and out of control than it already had. It made no sense to him that she was able to offer him redemption, sort of. Lord knows the gang needed another direction, and his fate had become inextricably bound up with theirs. Besides, he could tell Moanique was truly trying to make such amends as she could for they way things had turned out for him.

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“Awright,” Big D said. “Probly the best we kin do, given the circumstances, I reckon. Kin even call a dogs off that Bumstiff joker.” “You won’t regret this, Del,” Moanique promised him. “See ‘bout that,” said Big D. “Won’t we?” The poor bastard was throwing in the towel, so far as his dealings with Moanique were concerned. For some time now, he had been able to sense the subtly beneficent pressure she’d been directing his way, and he’d been misinterpreting it as a suffocatingly inexorable destiny bearing down on him. As a result—and despite the tenor of the Copenhagen Boys that’d permeated the IAS when he was there—Big D had become quite fatalistic, and he had come to believe that the Timeshape of the Irregularity that had caused the Dreaded Singularity to burst forth into The Big Bang had fore-ordained the procession of everything. Absolutely everything: from the formation of galaxies to the unlikely emergence of multi-cellular life to him sitting there agreeing to Moanique’s plan, very much against his better judgment. Rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before the ocean rolled.

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