But out the window . . .
“Mel . . .” Nora said. What is that moment between a man and woman when he starts to see her face as skin, the pores, the sweat, the small swells and hollows that he will fill, swell for hollow with his own? When his eyes become tactile organs? When her breath warms the air between them, and they feel themselves drawing nearer, like buns proofing under a warm, wet towel?
“Nora, do you look like him underneath, like a snake or something?” I said.
“Didn’t Izzy tell you?”
“No.”
“Run!” Gone Joe clamored.
We were leaning together like tin leaves in an electroscope. Our knees touched. “Mel, why don’t you know what you are?” Her nose grazed mine. We rubbed. I groaned.
“Shaman wants to eat me,” I said. “How do I know you won’t eat me too?”
“Why would I eat you? I love you, Mel.” She kissed me. A purple dye seemed to swirl through the room, tinging everything. The walls, tables, paintings, juke boxes, bus and condiment stations, cashier’s desk, melted as they changed hue. Everything shrank and became cylindrical. I felt her kiss in my stomach, in my toes.
She peeled her lips away slowly. I wanted to cry. She was tearing my heart out. She never broke eye contact. We were in some sort of space vessel, it seemed like. I was a hundred million miles from home, I think. There wasn’t a single fact I could rely on. I looked around. As soon as Nora stopped kissing me, the spaceship looked like a rest stop cafй again.
I said, “I was hitchhiking . . .”
She said, “So was the Sphinx.”
15. Your Mother Never Did This with My Belt
Gone Joe was like a man half-buried in the sand. He had grunted himself into the hairline fissure between Izzy’s bung and the lip of Shaman’s puncture. The tip of one fingernail?the ring finger of his right hand?was actually protruding from my mind. It dipped in and out of my field of vision like a phantom scimitar, like a crescent moon, or like a glint off troubled water, half-hypnagogic, half-real. Sometimes, pressing hotly against Nora, my cheek slid against her cheek, and I was lost in the jungle of her wavy hair. I opened my eyes, as if to breathe through them, so breathless did normal air leave me then. I blinked out the window into the daunting black, star-speckled and streamered with burning lights, and I caught Gone Joe’s moon, at home in the cosmos and traveling with me as the moon follows a traveler on Earth. It seemed distant and large; really, it was near and small.
Gone Joe’s nail scratched things. It scratched Nora’s long, perfect flank. She seemed to like that. She uttered a small cry that I could feel vibrating right through my breast bone as we undulated together. I was straddling Nora on her chair, like Ganesha’s shakti. I lapped her and thwucked breast to breast and belly to belly with my shirt pulled off. We were tongue and palate smacking. I tore her T-shirt up over her head; during the seconds of eclipse, when Nora’s face was inside the T-shirt, I was panic-stricken, desperate to see her again. Without her eyes, I was perdu. Embracing her, I tried to swallow her through my whole skin, to engorge her like an amoeba. It enflamed and infuriated me that she was outside me. She groaned and kissed.
Gone Joe kept appropriating parts of Nora. He was superimposed on her, like shower screen lilies on a bather. Once, when she smiled and blinked?I had made hungry babies’ mouths of my palms, pulling at her breasts?the movement of one eyelid was Gone Joe’s mouth: “Run!”
“What?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. “I love you, Nora. I’ve always loved you.”
To Gone Joe, inside, I said, “Stop it! Shut up! Go away.”
“You’re crazy,” he said. “This chick is a geek. You saw her brother. She’s a pit viper inside, and yellow! Not to mention, we’re in outer fucking space. She’s using you.”
“What do you want me to do?” I said inside.
“Is something wrong?” Nora asked me. She started unbuckling my belt.