THE GRASS AND TREES

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

Any two spheres A₁ and A₂ (of whatever size, equal or unequal) are equidecomposable.  I.e., they can be divided into a finite number of disjunct portions such that every portion in A₁ has a corresponding portion of equal size in A₂.  --from a theorem of S. Banach and A. Tarski

 

 

oberta was pissed, mucho pissed.  The asshole at The Grass and Trees wouldn't let her in.  As if it wasn’t bad enough chasing Dede's wild geese three thousand miles from home, in Pitston frigging New York, with air like wet sponges night and day!

And how come every city Roberta lived in, if she wasn't in the lockup, she stayed in some two-bit crib over a saloon in the skids?  Toss and sweat on top of the sheets.  Or open the window and let in the flies.

She knew why.  Dede had said, "Stay at the Hilton now and then.  I'll show some class, Roberta.  I owe you," but the asshole porters at those swank dives, all powder puff and pomade, made Roberta smell her own armpits.  She didn't like the way they looked at her.  She'd get into an argument with the desk clerk and stomp out with the pen and a piece of his shirt.  When it came down to it, the only places that looked like a night's sleep to Roberta were over saloons in the skids.

She turned a corner and found herself on another gray street where you didn't know which side of the sewer grate you were on.  Debris everywhere.  Pissed‑on brick and doorways with, instead of stone lions or cigar store Indians, heaving, snoring drunks.  No sky to speak of‑-it was choked with smog.  Heat inversion.

She stopped at Jitsi's 24‑hour diner.  It had been her first stop in Pitston: coffee and a bathroom, plus directions from the Greek.  There were a few strippers and their admirers now, an off-duty policeman, and some cabbies wasting time.  Jitsi eyeballed her as she came in.  "You found it okay, the coffeehouse?"

Roberta took a load off at the counter.  "Yeah.  Thanks, Jits.  They wouldn't let me in, though.  I hadda show the guy my tattoo."  She was too tired to care if Jitsi understood or not.

"Private party, huh?  Moon and Stars, she's a quality person.  Vegetarian.  Everybody like Moon and Stars.  Myself, I love Moon and Stars.  Too young, though.  All kinds of trouble.  And maybe she like girls, you think so?  Besides, I got plenty girlfriends.  What about you?"

Roberta kicked her shoes off and sighed.  Without asking, Jitsi slid a cup of coffee in front of her.  Roberta fished a card out of her pocket and laid it on the counter:

 

*** M O O N  *  A N D  *  S T A R S ***

Spectacles, Phantasmagoria, Puppets

for

Festivals, Conventions, Parties,

Theatrical Events, Promotions

Of Every Conceivable Variety!!!

by

S. VERDUCCI, MASTER SHOWMAN

(Equidecomposablization Services Available

to Select Clientele)

 

She flipped it over and tilted it this way and that until she could see the rainbow‑-laser‑printed, must be.  Under the rainbow Sylvie had rubber‑stamped:

 

Around Pier 39

3 PM to Midnight thru July

Book Now For Gigantic Discounts!!

 

"What about you?" Jitsi said again.

"Boyfriends?  Hey, I got me a husband, Jitsi, and if you give me a hotdog with everything, I'll have a husband and a hotdog.  A husband and a hotdog and a cup of coffee, in fact."

Jitsi nodded and threw a wiener onto the grill.  "You married?"

"Yeah, I got me a biker in Portland, Oregon.  Tattoo artist, Jitsi.  Look here."  Roberta hiked up her shirt to show Jitsi her stomach.  There was Botticelli's Venus, her belly centered precisely at Roberta's navel, and the bottom of the shell along her diaphragm.  "You should see what he put on my tits.  But I think it would cost you more than a dog in a bun and a cup of joe.  Whadda you think?"

Jitsi laughed.  "I seen lotsa tattoos."

"Yeah, I was drunk when I married that bum.  Nario Celeste.  His tattoo parlor was like your place, open all the time.  We slept in the back and got up whenever the bell jiggled at the door.  Nario Celeste.  I'm Roberta Junker Celeste.  I left him as soon as I got sober.  It was about two months later."

"No kids, huh?"

"Who said that?"

Jitsi flipped the wiener and started to grill the bun.  "So how come you looking for Moon and Stars?  You're a long way from Portland, Oregon."

"San Jose.  I'm from San Jose.  Nario's from Portland.  I'm doing a favor for a friend of mine.  Moon and Stars has something of hers that I'm supposed to see if I can get back."

"Hey!  No trouble, huh?"

"No, no!  Nothing like that.  It's just some kind of memento.  Some kind of personal thing.  It's a mix-up, is all.  Don't burn my dog, okay?  I got this friend I did some time with years ago.  I did her a favor or two, she got some dough, and now she wants to pay me back, see?  So she throws a little work my way."

She rested her cheek on her fist and closed her eyes.  “Hey, Jits, here’s a story for you.  Little kid turns to a tiger and nearly claws his sister to death.  She comes to, a bloody broken mess, and all that’s left of the kid is a handful of fur.  After a while she heals up, and then she tries to turn the fur back into her brother.”

“What for?  He gonna claw her up again.”

“He’s a shapeshifter, Jits.  He’s her pot of gold, see?  Then some bitch makes off with it, some carny from three thousand miles away.  So she sends an old pal to track her and get back the fur ball.”

Jitsi spun the plate with the hotdog in front of her.  It oozed green, red, and yellow, and it smelled good.  "I don’t know about stories, honey.  Me, I'm normal.  I just wanna make love to lotsa women.  Nice love.  No rough stuff.  Respectful.  Me respectful she, she respectful me.  Too bad you're not my type, huh?  I show you what I mean."

Roberta rubbed her eyes. "Stuff it.  You're not my type, either."

"Hotdog's on me."

"You're a prince."

The strippers and their gentlemen came to the cash register to pay.  The men split the check.  Jitsi winked at one of the strippers and said, "I like your boa.  You're real beautiful tonight, Suzy."

The woman blushed.  "I can be whatever you want me to be, Jitsi," she said with a wiggle.

"Oh, come on, Sue," the other stripper said.  Then she said to Roberta, "She doesn't mean that.  She's not like that.  We're not like that.  We're just strippers.  We're not whores."

"Of course you're not, honey," one of the men said.  He put his arms around the two strippers.  The other man opened the door, and they left.

"Are they drunk?" Roberta stared after them.

"No."  Jitsi began to wipe down the counter.  "People just say funny things at two o'clock in the morning‑-you wanna bet some numbers?  I got a side line here."

Roberta ate her hotdog and swilled the coffee.  "Naw, I'm going to bed."

"Friend of Moon and Stars win fifty bucks on the numbers here two weeks back, boy name of Milo, fifteen, sixteen years old.  Fifty bucks good money for kid like that."

"Did you say 'Milo?'"

"Yeah.  You know him?"

"Holy shit!  Dede's not crazy after all.  That Moon and Stars chick musta turned the fur back."

"Huh?"

"Nothing, Jitsi, nothing.  I'm just mumbling.  I'm just tired here, see?"  She slid her toes back into her shoes and shoehorned them on with her thumbs, wincing.  "I don't want to place no bet.  I'll see you tomorrow, huh?"  She trudged toward the door.  Halfway there, she sniffed and said, "Something's burning, Jits.  You should get some shuteye too, before you smoke the place out."

"Everything has its portion of smell," said Jitsi.

"What?"  Roberta stopped and looked back at Jitsi.  "Where'd you get that?"

"Milo says it."

"So does my boss."  Suddenly Roberta was afraid that she had left the business card on the counter.  She felt for it in her pocket.  For a split second, sliding her hand down along her hip to feel for it, she thought the rainbow was a lizard in there and might bite her.  She played the odds, like a man checking for a gas leak with a lit match that might explode if it hit the fumes‑-but probably not.  It could be the death of her‑-but probably not.  Then, feeling the card next to her switchblade, right where she'd stuffed it, Roberta became aware of the little drama she'd just been through in her mind.

"I gotta get to bed," she said, and she left.

 

he shapeshifters cleared a space at the back of the coffeehouse, formed a circle, and held hands.  It was Milo's first time with the group, although he was already known to them as a prodigy.  Curly‑headed, with a lemur’s eyes and the wiry body of an acrobat, he kept looking to Sylvie for clues, what to think, how to manage his face.  He was fifteen, she seventeen and an old hand at the Banach‑Tarski.  She smiled through wisps of that long brown naiad hair of hers and shushed him.  Dr. Devore, a dwarf nearly, in patched tweeds, with an Einstein's mop of hair, stood out front by the bay windows.

He switched off the lights.  "My dear shasha family, it's time for our workout."

"Workout?" Milo whispered to Sylvie.

"Just stay awake now, little man‑-really awake.  And shush."  She gave his hand a squeeze.

Their bodies effervesced.  Their skin ceased to be boundaries, then ceased to be skin.  They were a seething liquid.  Milo felt drenched with shashas, soaked to the bone; but then he had no bone.  The shapeshifters were a field of points, countless and vast.

There had been twenty of them, ordinary looking folks; now they were a perfect sphere, eight feet across, then two spheres, each of them eight feet across, then two worm-like cylinders undulating around each other in a double helix.  Then they were a cube, a hundred cubes, like dice rolling on the floor of The Grass and Trees, then colored planes spinning, then things that cannot be seen, dark matter in the interstices of quarks and bones.

They hummed as one, shivered in waves like gooseflesh.  What one felt, all felt, terror and bliss, winking out or blinking awake.  Then they became heavy, as if filling with the weight of the everyday world again.  They began to be separate people.  The mothers among them swore that this return was like giving birth, but painlessly and from every pore, not just the birth canal.

Milo whispered Sylvie's name‑-his mouth and eyes were perfect o's.

Devore interrupted their game of eyes.  "Anybody know someone named Roberta?"  He had had to leave them during the Banach‑Tarski exercise, Devore said, to check on someone banging at the window.  The shashas, in the rapture of their transformations, had noticed nothing.  Girl wouldn't go away, kept banging on the glass, a rude tramp saying lots of things of which Devore could only make out a few obscenities and the name "Roberta."  Finally he'd had to peek around the screen to tell her directly, through the window, to please go away.  She flipped him the bird, mouthed two words to go with it, then walked away.

There had been one thing more, Devore admitted when Sylvie pressed him about the smudge on the window.  The girl had mooned him.  She had started to leave, but then, caught up in a swell of rage, she stepped back to the window.  She turned and pulled down her jeans and underwear, exposing two round pimply cheeks with symmetrical cherubs tattooed at the bulges.  Under the cherubs, in florid cursive, it said: "LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CHE ENTRATE," divided at the anus, in the middle of "SPERANZA."  Abandon all hope, you who enter here.  She pushed her buttocks against the window; they flattened and spread.

Let it pass, was the consensus.  They were shapeshifters, Dr. Devore's flock.  The Grass and Trees, a funky bohemian coffeehouse to outsiders, was the shashas' temple.  How could any mortal harm them?

"Forget the ruckus.  Line up the chairs."  Sylvie stood up on a table.  "Milo and I want to show you a new piece we've worked up.  It's better than my Stone Monkey and Yama . . . "

"Never!"

" . . . Oh, yes.  Introducing: Apollo and Daphne!"  To Milo: "Hop to, little man."

 

ackstage, below the splash of lantern light against the shadow screen, Milo and Sylvie rubbed.  He reached for a puppet across Sylvie's arm and could hardly help sliding his arm just a little lower to graze her side.  Whenever one hand was free, Sylvie rested it on Milo's back or hip or leg.  He did the same.  He looked at Sylvie when he spoke Apollo's lines, "Sweet Nymph, you are my home, as I am yours.  Will you not lie by me?"

And when Sylvie delivered Daphne's rebuke, she teased Milo, brushing seductively against him, almost losing hold of the rod that moved Daphne's hand.  "Oh," she recovered, "my strength fails me!  Protect me, River God, from this amorous foe!"

But no improvisation could save them in the end.  Daphne was transmuted into the laurel tree by a deft substitution of cardboard cutouts.  Apollo departed toward the lantern, growing fainter and larger till he disappeared.  The lantern was supposed to fade to black, but Milo mismanaged the wick.  It flared again unexpectedly in the darkness that was supposed to precede wild applause.  There was laughter instead: Milo and Sylvie were silhouetted on the scrim, two slender youths, Sylvie the taller by a good two inches.  They twined together.  They kissed and kissed.

Milo blushed.  Sylvie laughed, yanked him out in front of the audience and produced a laurel wreath, which she laid on his head.  She kissed him again, this time for the audience.  He was flustered at first, but then he grabbed her arm and kissed her back.  Everyone applauded.

Afterward, over hot cider and cinnamon: "Listen, Milo.  I want you to go away with me for a few days.  I know a great place in Vermont.  We'd be completely alone, just you and me and the woods.  A-frame cabin, nice cabin.  Loft, kitchen, kingsize bed‑-straw mattress, but kingsize, see?  Nobody'd know where we are.  Not even Devore.  Whaddaya say?"

"I don't know, Sylvie."

"I know.  Listen, you got to learn to relax a little.  Stop giving yourself a hard time, see?  Haven’t I been steering you right?  When Devore found you, you were skin and bones‑-what was that, a year ago?  Your eyes were like brass incense bowls, kiddo.  You didn't even know what you were."

He lowered his gaze.  "I killed Dede."

"Guilt sucks."

"She'd just come back from Juvenile Hall.  I was so happy to have her back."

"Get off that, dammit.  It was years ago.  You were a little kid when you did that.  You couldn't help what you turned to or what you did when you were changed.  To your big sister or to anybody.  Besides which, she was using you.  I mean, even if she were alive, Milo, what difference would it make?"

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing."  She looked away.  "A bitch like that, who cares if she's dead or alive?"

"I cared.  She guided me through my change'ums, Sylvie.  She would count for me‑-'ten, nine, eight'‑-and I would shapeshift.  She cared, Sylvie.  Then I did what I did, and I ran away, all the way to the East Coast‑-I don't know how.  She cared."

"She only did it to get stuff out of you.  Jesus, didn't you say she made you turn into a credit card for her once?  And a loveseat for her and her boyfriend?  Give it up, Milo.  You know I'm right.  Besides, when it comes to that kind of counting, like I told you, there's only one number: one.  One, one, one.  Wake up, you dope.  And stay awake."

"Okay, I know all this, Sylvie, but it's hard . . . "

"That's the whole point, you doofus.  We've got to make things easier for you.  Dump the sister.  Ancient history.  Live it up a little, huh?"

He couldn't help smiling.

Sylvie shook him playfully.  "Huh?"

"Okay, Moon and Stars, let's go live it up."

She pecked Milo good night and gave him a little shove in the direction of the basement room where he slept at Devore's indulgence.  He climbed halfway down the stairs and had to stop.  "Moon and Stars," he whispered to himself.  "Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie."  He touched his lips, pretending that his fingers were Sylvie's lips.  Then he continued down the stairs, smiling the whole way into the dark.

 

ay and night, what's the difference, when the heat doesn't let you sleep?  You douse yourself in rusty water from the shower down the hall, and the drunks downstairs keep you up till you're clammy again.  Then the mosquitoes.  Then the morning light.

That's how Roberta had met Dede, the dink at Juvenile Hall who talked all night, who risked her privilege level to smuggle in magazines without pictures or books that nobody understood‑-Who was 'Banach?'  What was a 'Tarski?'‑-then stayed up reading them in the corner with a flashlight.

When it was morning by the clock, Roberta rolled off the bed and grabbed her clothes up off the floor.  She didn't use the closets in these places.  Closets were too dark.  Things got lost.  What if you got shut inside there?  You could never find what you wanted in there anyway, only things you didn't want.

She cinched herself back into her shirt and pants, rolling up the sleeves, as always, to just below the cigarette burns.  She used to start the day with a drink, but the sight of Dede's babies had knocked the monkey right off her back.  That was two years ago in San Francisco, when Dede brought her up there from San Jose; she hadn't had a drop since.

Those babies!  Those ugly babies!

She went to the sink, splashed water on her face, wiped it off and looked at herself in the mirror.  It's me all right.  Same as always.  Same pig's mug.  Same bristles.  Same bad attitude.

Blade in her pocket, she braved the common toilet down the corridor, then descended the rickety stairs to the hall behind the bar and hit the alleyway.  It was already hot‑-no‑-still hot.  At the end of the alley, around the corner, there was a pay phone.  She took out the phone card Dede had given her, tried it a few times, then gave up and called collect, via the operator.

A man answered.  "What?  Who?"

"Bill, it's Roberta.  Put Dede on."

"Jesus, it's four-thirty.  She's asleep."

Roberta allowed herself to feel like an idiot for five seconds‑-she'd forgotten the time difference‑-then bulled back, "Well, wake her up, William."

She heard him lay down the phone.  Part of her mind was still in bed.  She was replaying Jitsi's goodbye.  Everything has its portion of smell.  She could smell the bar.  She could smell the alley, garbage, urine, a bakery down the street, car exhaust, burnt oil from a restaurant somewhere . . . What about the phone?  The phone didn't have any frigging portion of smell.  Then Dede came on the line, just as Roberta smelled it‑-a faint scent of ozone.

"Hello?  Hello?"

"Damn me, it's true," Roberta said.

"What's true?  Roberta, is that you?"

"Portion of smell.  Even the phone's got it."

"Is that what you woke me up for, you stupid bitch?  You don't even know what that means."

"So tell me."

"What did you call me for, Roberta?"

"I found him," Roberta said.

"What do you mean, him?  You found him?  It's not a him you're supposed to be looking for.  It's . . . Jesus Christ!"

"I found Milo, Dede.  He's right here in Pitston, New York, at a place called The Grass and Trees.  That chick S. Verducci's got him.  I'm talking about Milo, Dede, not the stinkin' fur ball.  That lead from them businessmen come through, them businessmen out of Jersey, the ones with the rods who used Verducci for the equideco back in Frisco.  Then I come across somebody who sent me direct, a restaurant guy.  Turns out, he knows your brother."

"How do you know it's Milo?"

"He called him Milo."

"How do you know it's my Milo?"

"He goes around with S. Verducci.  Besides which, 'Everything has its portion of smell.'"

"Anaxagoras.  What are you telling me that for?"

"The restaurant guy heard this kid Milo say it.  Fifteen-, sixteen‑year‑old kid, he says.  May I rest my friggin' case?"

"I'll be there by tonight.  Don't say nothing to nobody."

"I know‑-"

"Shut up.  I might want you to help me with this S. Verducci chick.  You got a problem with that?"

"Have I ever?"  Anybody with a rainbow on the back of her frigging business card, Roberta figured, could not have much to offer against a switchblade.  Roberta gave Dede her address over the saloon, the address of The Grass and Trees, and a description of where Jitsi's was.  Then she paused.  "Dede . . . "

"Yeah?"

"The handful of fur and all that‑-I thought you was crazy."

"I'm not."  She hung up.

Roberta sniffed the phone again‑-"Damn me!"‑-and headed toward Jitsi's for eggs.  She was trying not to think about the sounds she thought she had heard in the background at Dede's place.  She was trying not to see, in her mind's eye, the closet door thrown open and those ugly babies crawling around, yowling and turning into things.

 

rom a block away, Roberta saw the dwarf who had given her the bum's rush the night before.  He was walking back and forth in front of The Grass and Trees, peeking in through the windows and knocking at the door.  She decided to be nice, for Dede's sake.  She wanted to make sure that Moon and Stars and the kid Milo were where they were supposed to be when Dede arrived.

The little guy wore a beret, inspiring in Roberta instant class hatred.  He had a bloodhound's puss and glasses like ashtrays; Roberta could see the pale flesh of his arms.  They had curly hairs on them, the kind older people get that look like they've been bleached, sticking out the short sleeves of a rumpled silk shirt.  He knocked on the glass.  "Sylvie?  Milo?  Sylvie?"

"Hot enough for you?"

He stared at her for a second.  "Where do I know you from?"

Shit.  He had stopped banging and was looking up at her like a munchkin inspecting Dorothy.  "I get around," she said.

"No, no!  I remember.  'Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate,' right?"  He smiled.

"Look, I was upset, okay?"

"No, don't apologize.  I thought it was quite wonderful, you know?"

"Don't get smart on me."

"No, I mean the Dante.  It's Dante, right?  Incredible idea to tattoo it there."

"Yeah, Nario, my ex, he's a real crack-up . . . What are you, trying to bust in?"

"No, actually, I have a key.  But I don't like to use it if somebody's inside.  I don't want to surprise them."

This was an entirely new concept for Roberta, and it made her look at him differently.  "You own the place or work here or what?"

"It's mine," he said.  "Look, I'm sorry I had to turn you away last night.  I didn't want to be rude, but there was a private affair in progress."

"Don't worry about it.  I don't give a shit.  I'm back anyway, right?"

"Right.  Are you looking for someone?"

"Chick name of Verducci.  Kid name of Milo.  You know them?"

She saw wheels turning.  She knew that look, a dealer's look, figuring out how much you could pay or how much they could get away with paying you.  Or checking the getaway path, getting ready to stiff you.  Or slapping together a passable lie while they put their mouth on cruise control and their lips on smile.

The eyes get a little glassy.  The shoulders tense up.

"Yes," he said, "I do know them.  They take care of The Grass and Trees for me.  Looks like they're gone though.  Want to come in and have a cup of coffee?  Guatemalan Antigua, Hazelnut . . . ?"

"Sure, why not?"  What was he being so nice for?

He took out his key, unlocked the door, and led her in.  "Sylvie?" he called once more.  "Milo?"  No answer.  He shrugged.  He hit a light switch.  The place was a mess, fairyland after a long weekend: masks and puppets, cups, glasses, crumbs, wadded napkins, tablecloths half on the floor, puddles of wine and beer, and half-eaten desserts on plates in the bay windows, on the counter, and on the radiator.  Mice scurried out of sight when the door squeaked.  "Sit anywhere.  I'll make coffee.  How do you know Sylvie and Milo?"

"It's cool in here."  She walked to the shadow scrim and picked up Apollo.  "What is this, a circus?"

He was plugging things in, pouring water, knocking coffee grounds out of screens.  "Sylvie's a showman.  Is that how you know her?"

"Yeah.  When'll she be back?"

"I don't know.  You're from out of town, aren't you?  I'm Louis Devore.  In my other life, I'm a psychiatrist, actually."

"Stay away from me."

"Ha ha!  What's your name?  Where you from?"

"Celeste.  I'm from Idaho."

"Not Roberta?"

"No, where'd you get that?"

"Celeste what?"

"Celeste Celeste.  Whadda you care? . . . I want mine black, okay?"

"Sure thing, Celeste."

"Hey, Louie, they'll be back by tonight, right?  I mean, what do they, sleep here or what?"

"Yes, they do.  Where are you staying?"

"Some dump."

"Why don't you stay at my place?  It's air conditioned."

"Forget it."  She had no idea what he was up to, but this sort of proposition never had any percentage to it.

He brought her the coffee along with his own, hers black, his light brown.  They sat down at a table near the scrim.

"Look, I'm not a dirty old man, if that's what you're afraid of.  It's just that you're a friend of Sylvie's, right?  And any friend of Sylvie's is a friend of mine.  How long are you here for?"

"Not long."

"Well, there you are.  Stay at my place while you're here.  It's just across town.  I've got a feeling about you, Celeste, and I like to go by my feelings."

She slammed down her coffee cup, sloshing some of it over onto the checkered tablecloth.  "Look, why are you being so nice to me?  You ain't gonna get another look at my tattoo.  And what I got with Sylvie is strictly business, okay?  We ain't old girlfriends or nothing."

But Devore wasn't listening.  He was looking at an envelope duct-taped near the doorway to the cellar steps.  He went to the doorway, pulled down the envelope, opened it, and read.  "Oh, dear!"

"What?  Is it from Verducci?  What?"

"She's away.  They're both away.  For a while.  Doesn't say where.  Doesn't say how long."

Roberta held her breath for a moment.  She wanted to think something out very clearly.  Dede and Bill were on their way.  They might have their closet critters along.  Verducci wouldn't be here.  Milo wouldn't be here.  Dede would be pissed.  "Look," she said.  "I changed my mind.  What about putting me up till they get back?"

 

ill spoiled Dede's concentration.  She tried to make everything look perfect, as perfect as it used to be when she'd had her Milo to make things good, but from the day they married he'd wanted out.  He was a Nordic dreamboat, tall and blond, with a chin like an aircraft carrier.  He always carried a comb, and when they traveled he took along a shower cap and a tube of some hair goop that you could only get at a particular store in San Leandro.  Sometimes he would get it in the mail from his mother; Dede would have sent it right back to the bitch, ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN, except that it really did make Bill look good.

Their place was too small, and Bill was restless.  Dede knew he wanted out, and it spoiled her concentration.  It was hard work holding him there, in her life, as a sort of outrigger against her own ugliness.  All she could do was to rely on Bill's fundamental inertia and lack of imagination, and to keep him happy in the bed department.  He would smoke a lot of dope, watch baseball and football on the TV, do construction jobs when he felt like it, service her, service himself, and look out the window.

"What are you looking at, Bill?"

"Nothing."

"Come back to bed."

"In a minute."

Once, lying on the sofa, her face covered with The American Mathematical Monthly, she woke to hear Bill's father and mother talking to him in low voices.  Her eyes opened.  She saw summation signs, equivalencies, congruencies, decompositions, if and only if, and heard them exhorting him to walk out on her.  She didn't move.  She pretended to sleep.  But she decided then and there, under G.T. Sallee's "Are equidecomposable plane convex sets convex equidecomposable?", to chuck Bill's family, move Bill with her to San Francisco, and find an independent source of income.

She hated giving up her Milo studies for the six weeks it took‑-Bill spoiling her concentration again‑-but she devoted herself to the Wall Street Journal day after day, following references and citations back through bound volumes and microfiche at the university library . . .

 

"May I help you?"

"No."

"Are you a student here?"

"No.  Public access, bitch."

 

. . . until the thing clicked that she knew would click inside her head.

She found herself a servile broker and started making money.  It was not enough money to replace her Milo, but it was enough to allow her to concentrate on getting him back without the distraction of Bill's parents.  She would keep Bill no matter what.  Her father shacked up with a social worker in Redding, her mother prowling the dumpsters of Sacramento, and her brother turned to a lousy fur ball, Bill was all the family she had.

Even now, subdued, doped up, childishly delighted to be on an airplane over Colorado, feeling like he was playing hooky on the subcontractor whose pipes he was supposed to sweat together that very afternoon, he was quietly undermining Dede's concentration.  There was a tickle in his brow that made Dede nervous.  It was the kind of tickle that might mean Bill was going to walk out on her at the airport in Newark, New Jersey, and she'd never see him again.  He was sitting beside her, slurping candied peanuts from the foil bag, pushing his nose against the window, and doing that nasty thing with his brow.

"What are you looking at, Bill?"

"Nothing."

She slammed her book shut, Balfour's Magic Snake Shapes.  "You suppose the kids are okay?"

"How would I know?"

The "kids" were in a fiberglass port-a-pet in the baggage bay.  Dede had taped over all the vents to make sure nobody got a glimpse inside.  When the stiff at the check-in remarked on the absence of air holes, Dede told him they were anaerobic.  He gave her a look, but he tagged the thing and threw it onto the belt.

"We never took the kids along on a vacation, Bill.  Don't you think it'll be fun?"  Dede put her arm around him.

He didn't stir.  He kept staring out the window.  "This is no vacation.  You're going to New York to get your handful of fur back from Miss Moon and Stars."

"We can still have fun.  We'll get a room in one of them killer hotels, a honeymoon suite or whatever.  You know what a good time I can give you with the kids, Bill."  She nibbled his ear.

He jerked his head away, irritated.  "Sounds good."

Dede pulled her arm back from around him.  She got out her credit card‑-it wasn't Milo‑-and slipped it into the slot in the telephone mounted on the back of the seat in front of them.  She dialed her own number, then pressed a few buttons to access the messages on her answering machine.  Maybe there'd be a message from her broker.  Anyway, she had to do something to get out from under the tickle in Bill's brow.

 

"Shit.  I'm too late.  I knew I'd miss you.  Look, I can't help it; they're not here anymore.  They went someplace.  You're already on your way, right?  Okay.  But look, I'm on it.  I'm right on it.  They'll be back, and I'll be right on them, Dede.  And listen, I'm not where I was.  I'm someplace else; I, uh, I ain't got the address yet, okay?  I'll let you know.  Go back, okay?  I'll let you know.  You don't wanna stay in Pitston.  It's a dump.  Okay?  Go back."

 

Dede rammed the phone back into its cradle, unstrapped her seatbelt, stomped down the aisle to the bathroom‑-OCCUPIED‑-banged and banged and banged on the door‑-"Ma'am, it's occupied, Ma'am.  Ma'am it's occupied,"‑-until it opened and a terrified little girl shivered past her, and Dede fell in, slammed and bolted the door shut, then flushed the toilet to cover the noise she was about to make, leaned into the metal hole, and, as the pungent blue liquid swirled down, screamed.

"Roberta, you stupid pig, you can't hide from me.  You dumb slut, you blew it.  You blew it.  No way in hell you're . . . " She had to flush again.  "No way in hell you're going to stop me coming to Pitston.  I'll find you, pig.  I'll ride your ass and sleep on your face till Verducci shows up with Milo."  Flush.  "And when we take care of her, I'll take care of you, too."

She flushed once more for good measure, then washed her face and went out.  The stewardess, Miss Occupied, was still standing there, looking concerned.  "Are you feeling better, ma'am?"

"Yeah, I'm feeling a lot better.  I love fucking airplanes.  Honest to God.  I wanna live on a fucking airplane some day‑-just like you."  She went back to her seat, picked up Magic Snake Shapes, and tried to concentrate.

 

evore's place was a mess; Roberta took some solace in that.  It was a small Victorian, the eyesore of a middle class neighborhood: peeling paint, porch banister hanging on three screws, bicycle tracks across the patch of mud that once was a lawn.

Down the center divide of Devore's street there were magnolia trees, remarkable in this climate.  The blossoms were brown and mostly fallen now.  Roberta had a good view of them out her window.  She had a funny sensation around the corners of her mouth, and it took her a moment to remember what it was‑-she was smiling.  She had a window.

Crystals hanging from Roberta's window made rainbows in the hallway and on her wall.  She had walls.  Splendid brilliant edges of colored light tickled her as she looked out the window.  The crystals danced.  In the street below, children bicycled, played hide-and-seek, turned into soldiers and demons and superheroes dying and coming to life, fighting, flying, bursting into flame, or going home because their mother called them.  She watched them for a long time with the window closed because of the air conditioning.

There was a shade of violet, as the crystals turned, that thrilled her.  Again and again she spun them and bobbed her head until she caught the violet glint.  It flooded her eyes and made her happy.

Devore had simply let her in and told her to make herself at home; then, after fussing for a few minutes in an upstairs room he said would be hers, he left.  She took a long bath, then a shower, then ate a little of everything in the kitchen that was sweet, especially fruits: purple grapes, a kiwi, part of a mango, and half a pomegranate.  She didn't sweat.  She bolted the front door‑-Devore himself would have to knock‑-and walked around naked for an hour, turning on radios, the TV, the electric can opener, the microwave, the garbage disposal, the garage door remote, everything that could be turned on, and turning them off again, while her clothes washed and dried in Devore's machines.

Then she jumped on the big soft bed that Devore had made for her‑-after his fashion‑-rolled off the other side, stood up, looked at herself in the mirror, spanking clean, shampooed, conditionered, bath‑oiled, and powdered, and she sang the song from West Side Story, as nearly as she could remember it:

"I feel pretty, re-al pretty.

"I look pretty, look pretty, look pretty.

"A committee should be organized to make me Miss America

"Or somethiiiiiing!"

She slitted her eyes, puckered, and blew herself a kiss.  She got dressed.  Then the window, the magnolias, the children, the violet light.  Not bad, she thought.  Maybe she could send for her little girl.

Suddenly, Roberta wanted to celebrate with a drink.  But with the thought of booze came the thought of Dede's closet, and just as suddenly the desire was gone.  Dede's closet.  She decided to kill herself.

 

"LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CHE ENTRATE."

 

"Celeste!  Hey, Celeste!  You up there?"

"Louie?"  She heard him climb the stairs.

"Mmm, what's that‑-bath oils?  Smells good up there.  I never use those."  He was at her door.

"Everything has its portion of smell," she said.

Devore looked at her.  "How do you know that phrase?"

"How the hell did you get in?  I bolted the door."

"Smart thing to do.  But there's a back way, through the garage."

"No, there sure as hell isn't.  Have you been spying on me?"

"No, I told you, I'm not like that."

"You look like that.  You look like a short little, old little, dirty little man."  All he had to do was say one word now, and Roberta would show him what kind of percentage there was in trying to take advantage of her.  She probably wouldn't need the switchblade.

"Do you like the room?" he said.

"What?"

"This room.  You like it?  Enough light in here?"

"You take the cake.  What is this?  Psychology?  You trying to psychology me?"

"No."  Devore took off his beret.

Short people and hats, Roberta thought.  As if it could change them.

"Look," he said, "I'm offering you my house.  There aren't any strings.  I'm interested in you, that's all.  You're a friend of Sylvie's.  I'm curious.  Leave if you want to.  I haven't been spying on you.  I have another way into the house besides the front door.  You're right, there's no garage door; I made that up.  I just want to keep my other entrance to myself, you know?  I think I get to do that, don't I, it being my house and all?"

She had to laugh.  He was so elegant, so exquisitely self‑effacingly courteous.  A munchkin.  "Yeah, it's your place.  What are you, rich?"

"No.  I do comfortably, that's all."

She was sizing him up very carefully, trying to guess what he knew by how he moved and talked, but he was good, he was a shrink, he knew psychology.  "Did you hear me singing?"

"No.  Do you sing?"

"Like an angel."

"May I sit down?"

There was a Lazyboy inside the door.  Roberta sat on the edge of the bed and said, "Suit yourself.  It's your friggin' chair."  He sat.  "What are you curious about?  In me, I mean?  You said you was interested in me."

"Well, for example, that thing you said about smell.  Did you know it came from Anaxagoras?"

"Yeah, I heard that."

"Where?"

"Friend of mine mentioned it.  Anaxagoras, yeah."  She tried to stay on her toes, but she was becoming fascinated by how ugly this guy was, with his face like heavy drapes, and always bunching up his forehead as if to apologize for taking up space.

"Did you hear it from Sylvie?  She says that too, you know?"

"Yeah.  Musta been Sylvie.  Whadda you care, anyway?"

"Do you know what it means?"

"Yeah.  Everything stinks."

Devore laughed.  Then Roberta started to laugh.  She was starting to like this ugly little guy.  He was too much in his brains to make trouble for anybody.  It slows the reactions, she figured, to be that much in your brains.  It takes you out of the competition.

"Hey Louie," she said, "you know what?  No joke: I smelled a goddam telephone this morning, and I figure, it's true: if a goddam telephone has a smell, then everything smells, just like the man says.  Is that what it means?"

Devore became serious very quickly, like a shallow puddle sheeting with ice.  "Were you calling somebody in town?"

"You know, Louie, when you ask me things like that, it makes me think maybe you really are spying on me."  He blushed.  "So tell me.  What does it mean?"

"Listen to me, Celeste.  You are a good person.  I was suspicious of you at first.  I thought you wanted to use us somehow.  But I can see that I was wrong.  I believe you are a good person and that I can trust you."

"Is this gonna be about smell?"

"Yes.  I'm coming to that.  But do you know how I can tell you are a good person?"

"Fill me in, Louie."

"Because you pursued that question, Celeste."

"What question?"

"'What does it mean?'"

Roberta stared at Devore.  She couldn't see his eyes very well, because the sun reflected off those thick glasses of his.  In the hallway behind him, through the open door, she saw a patch of light with a bit of his shadow cut out of its edge.  The rainbow moment had passed.  There was no more of that delicious violet.  But Devore was delicious.  He was doing something good for her that had nothing to do with the fruit or the bath oil or the fancy digs.

"My name's not Celeste.  It's Roberta."

"Do you want me to call you Roberta?"

"Sure.  What do I care?"

"There's a very old story about a king whose land is stricken by a drought because he doesn't ask questions the way you do, Roberta.  He has a vision of a chalice floating before him, and he's tongue-tied.  If it had been you, there never would have been a drought."

"I don't know about that, Louie.  I don't even know what a chalice is.  But I like how you're talking to me.  Keep talking to me, okay?"

Devore nodded.  "Tell me where you really heard about Anaxagoras.  Was it from Sylvie?"

"No."

"Milo?"

"No.  I never met Milo.  As far as I'm concerned, the kid is a handful of fur."  She laughed.

Devore took a deep breath and let it out slowly.  He looked down at the floor and said, "You heard it from Dede."

"Yeah."

"We thought she was dead."

"Not yet."

Devore paused, still looking down.  He wrinkled his forehead, widening and relaxing his eyes‑-a strange private ritual.  Roberta thought, Migraines.  The poor guy gets migraines, must be.  Too much brain.  Not enough sex.  Small ugly chumps got a hard row.

At last he looked up at her.  "Okay.  I'm going to tell you about smell.  Then you tell me something about Dede.  Is it a deal?"

"You don't wanna do nothing bad to Dede, am I right?  I mean, she is a friend of mine, Louie.  I owe her.  You been real nice to me, but Dede I owe, and frankly, if it comes to you versus Dede‑-drop dead."

"I don't want to hurt Dede."

"Okay then.  We'll see.  Spill."

"It doesn't really have to do with smell, Roberta.  It has to do with what things are made of.  That's what Anaxagoras was talking about."

"And what's that, Louie?"

"Well, first of all, each other.  Things are made of each other.  Everything is mixed up together, you know?  You don't have to be a scientist.  You don't have to think about molecules, atoms, or quarks.  You just have to understand that inside everything you see, there's something the same.  When it's small and it flies and sings and eats worms, you call it a bird.  When it's big and dark and far away, and rain comes out of it, well, it's a cloud.  It's all the same though, Roberta."

"Okay," Roberta said.  "Everything is each other.  That's your first-of-all.  That's what things are made of, huh?  What's your second-of-all, Louie?  Where are you taking me?"

"Smell, Roberta.  For example, you've got a brain . . . "

"Thank you for that, Louie."

" . . . and that brain, like all our brains, grows out of something called an olfactory bud.  Take it from me; I'm an MD, you know.  In the animals that came before us, this olfactory bud was what took care of smelling.  Our human brain started out as an organ of smell.  Our mind itself started out as a sense of smell.  That's what Anaxagoras was talking about.  Smell is a metaphor for Mind."

"A what?"

"Anaxagoras was talking about Mind, Roberta.  Everything has its portion of Mind.  Anything can become anything, because it's all Mind."

"Louie, Louie, what does all this have to do with the price of fish?"

"Listen: when Anaxagoras was in jail . . ."

"No shit.  He was in jail?"

"Yes.  I will be too, maybe."  Devore laughed a sad little laugh.  "I've been censured by my professional organization, and the state Attorney General is beginning to show some interest."  Roberta was impressed.  She was starting to feel more comfortable about the beret and the GQ threads.  "Anyway, Anaxagoras spent his time in jail the same way Dede did, if my guess is right: he was trying to square the circle."

"You can't do it, Louie."

"You know that?"  He looked shocked.

"I heard it."

"The truth is, you can't do it the way he was trying to, with a straightedge and a compass, or even with a scissors, Roberta.  You can't cut up a circle and paste it back together as a square of the same size.  But Dede found a way, didn't she, Roberta?  I mean, she found a way to turn things into other things.  She couldn't change herself, but she could make other things change‑-am I right?"

Devore rubbed his hands together slowly.  "She figured out how you can turn something into a golf ball or a baby or a pair of dice or a fog bank or a stone or a tree‑-because they all have their portion of smell, which is to say, of Mind . . . What's wrong?"

Roberta drew away from him.  She slid backward on the bed, then swung herself to her feet and continued to move away until she was standing in the farthest corner, her back against a closet door.  When she felt the hinge against her shoulder blade, she shrieked.  "That's what Dede was doing.  That's exactly what she was doing.  She's got a couple of 'em, Louie, a couple of wads of gook that look kinda like babies, but they're ugly as the bloody mouth of hell, and they change into things, and she can use them to get you to do whatever she wants . . . and she's always thinking up more."

"That's what she wants to do with Milo, Roberta.  She sent you to get him back, didn't she?"

"Yeah.  How does she do that stuff?  Is she a witch?  That's crazy, but it's not as crazy as some other stuff I thought of."

"We call people like Dede operators."

"We?  Who's we?"  She was shouting.  She didn't want to‑-it just came out that way.

"Shapeshifters.  Dede can't shift.  She can only operate somebody who can."

"Are you one?"

"Yes, a little, a shahsha.  I can just do one thing, though; it's nutty with me.  Relax.  Come here.  You're safe here.  Dede doesn't know where you are, does she?"

"No."

"Well, I won't tell her.  Come here.  Sit down where you were.  I'll show you what I am.  I want to be your friend, Roberta."

She wiped her eyes.  She hadn't realized that she'd been crying.  "I don't need no friends.  And just so you know‑-I got a knife."

She returned cautiously to the edge of the bed and sat down.  When she opened her eyes after wiping them‑-it happened that fast‑-Devore was gone.  A rainbow arched across the room, and Roberta was bathed in delicious violet light.

 

et's send for your little girl."  Devore's voice rippled through the violet light.  It took all night to pronounce the words, in shades of violet darkening and soaking in like a watercolor wash.  "You should be here together."  It meant, Don't be afraid.  You can
                   be this happy.

She turned in the light like a sunbather, sighing.  "No,"‑-with a groggy chuckle‑-"no, I can't be.  Don't be silly.  I got nothing for no daughter.  But don't stop, Louie.  Please, don't stop."

All night he didn't stop.  In the morning, when she woke, he was sitting beside her, drinking a demitasse.  She opened her eyes and felt happy.  She sat up.  "Louie, I had this dream.  I wanna bring my daughter here.  Could I borrow a few bucks?  Could she stay here with me?  She's only four.  My mother's got her in San friggin' Jose.  She's cute as a son-of-a-bitch.  I could get some kind of work and pay you back, I mean rent and all.  Or whaddaya say, could I be your housekeeper?  I done that once.  Like cooking and that . . . "

"Yes . . . yes . . . certainly . . . of course.  Roberta, it's an excellent idea.  What's your little girl's name?"  Innocently, he picked up the knife that had fallen out of her pocket when she sat up, and he placed it on the bed beside her.

"Lydia."  She looked at the knife.

"Pretty name."

She weighed the knife in her hand before slipping it back into her pocket next to S. VERDUCCI, MASTER SHOWMAN's card, the card Dede had given her like a scrap of clothing to a bloodhound.  Roberta blinked, and she saw herself butt-up on the pavement, smashed among the rotten magnolia blossoms and kids' bicycles.  "I left some stuff in my room that I was staying in.  I think I should go and get it."

Devore said, "Do you think so?"  How did he do that?  How did he swell the space around her mind so much that the life was sucked out of her bad thoughts?  In his gaze, her dirty little thoughts seemed like bugs, transients, alien guests.

"Yeah.  I gotta get my things."

"I'll walk you."

It was cooler.  Cold front coming in from the west.  Cirrus clouds, ice crystal ghosts miles high, promised rain in a day or two.  A faint moon, gibbous, waning, followed them downtown.

"You had me going, Louie.  For a while, I thought you was a rainbow."

"Incredible."  She watched him stretch his legs and concentrate to match her stride.

"All that Anaxagus . . . "

" . . . Anaxagoras, dear . . . "

" . . . and the smell and the Mind and the whaddayacallits‑-shashas.  All that stuff.  You really had me going."

"It's a strange world, isn't it?"

"Yeah.  I could see you telling stories like that to Lydia, you know?  I bet she'd go for it.  Would you go for it?  You like kids?"

"Sure I do."

"I'd like to meet your friends, too.  Can I?  Your shasha pals?  What a riot.  Louie, you take the cake."

"I think they'd all fall in love with you, Roberta."

"You really take the cake, Louie."  She slapped him on the back.  He coughed, then blew his nose.

They walked together as far as The Grass and Trees.  "I'm going in for a while," Devore said.  "I want to see if I can figure out where Sylvie and Milo went."

"Whaddaya say I get my stuff and meet you back here in an hour or two?  You know Jitsi?  I wanna drop in on Jitsi too.  I wanna say hello.  Will you still be here?"

"Depends."

"On if you turn into a rainbow, right?  Ha ha!  Lydia's gonna call you daddy.  She calls all the guys daddy, did you know that?  Hey, either I meet you here or else at your place, okay?"

"You have the key."  He rapped on the door‑-just in case.  "Sylvie?  Milo?"

Roberta strode downtown.  A few dust-heap souls snored in doorways, waiting for the sun to rouse them.  Wrappers scudded by.  Window-coffered wedges of buildings, shadow and glint, nosed like rats into the low sprinkle of sunlight.  Ruined storefronts, with their small smudged windows, receded.  Urine stench gave place to the smell of coffee and deisel fumes.  Around the next corner, a few men and women read folded newspapers and sipped from styrofoam cups, waiting for the bus.

At Jitsi's, she never let go the door, just peeked in and said, "Hey, Greek, save me a couple eggs.  I'll see you in five, on my way back.  Guess what?  My frigging four-year-old Lydia is coming to live with me here."

Jitsi was shaking fries in a wire basket over a vat of hot oil.  "Hey, Roberta, someone was looking . . . "  He started to say something, but as he turned toward the door, hot oil scalded his hand; he dropped the basket and stuck his fingers into his mouth to ease the burn.

"Later."  Roberta laughed and headed toward the room over the saloon.  Passing the pay phone outside, she thought of calling her mother in San Jose to set things up for Lydia, but she remembered about the time zones.  Lydia would be asleep.  Roberta's mother would be asleep.  She could call from Jitsi's later.  That would be more fun.  Jitsi, the sweet jerk, would cheerlead.

She walked around to the alley and entered through the saloon's kitchen door, hoping to bump into somebody.  She felt like talking.  The floor was wet, and a mop stood in a bucket against the corner.  "Anybody here?"  No answer.

She banged the pots hanging from hooks over the butcher table as she passed them: Shave and a haircut: two bits!  That was her mother's song.  Roberta used to tap it out on Lydia's tummy, before she moved up to San Francisco.

"Hey!  Anybody here?"  She ran her finger along the dishes stacked in a drying rack on the steel sink: Who ya gonna marry?  Tom Mix!  She sang out loud, "Park by a fire plug: ten bones!" then wondered what in hell a bone meant.  The dishwasher, a fat young man in a white apron, was asleep on a table in the saloon, softly snoring through his mustache.

She tiptoed past him across the saloon and into the hallway.  She danced up the stairs, tapping out the rhythm with her steps‑-Who ya gonna marry . . . ?  She reached the door of her rented room and turned the key in the lock.

Only it didn't click.  It swallowed the key and began to suck at Roberta's hand.  When she tried to pull her hand away, it hurt, as if she had punched through a window and her hand were trapped by jutting splinters.  She heard high tinny laughter.  It had her up to the wrist.  She wedged her feet against the door and leaned back, but that made her hand hurt more.

She banged on the door, and it collapsed around her fist like a sheet of chewing gum, trapping her other arm in fibrous goo that smelled like dead fish.  It spread down onto her hips and legs.  Behind the melting, puddling door Roberta saw the room.  There was someone in it, sitting at the window sill, backlit by daylight through the smeared and crackled glass.

"Hey, Roberta, remember me?  I'm the one who bought your fucking plane ticket."

"Dede!"  From the direction of the light something flew at Roberta, slapped her, then slid down and tightened around her neck.  It was laughing.  Part of it sprouted wings and yanked her into the room, like a vulture with a tow rope.  Roberta blinked goo out of her eyes, but when she tried to open them, they burned.  She hit the floor hard.

"Close the door."

The thing around Roberta's neck let go, and her eyes cleared; the thing on her legs, in her lap, and under her, the thing that had seemed to be a door, pooled and trembled away.  She watched the creatures undulate to the doorway.  The door had been open all the time, in against the wall.  They slimed behind the actual door and swelled like a ball being pumped up, to slam it shut.

Dede stood up.  She opened the closet, reached in, and unlatched the port-a-pet.  "Bed, kids."  Now they were gray babies, bluish along the ribs and digits.  One had its blood flowing on the outside, like thick jelly oozing against its skin.

"Awwww!"  They toddled toward Dede.  En route, one of them turned and snapped at Roberta, showing teeth like ice picks in blood-red gums.  She flinched, and it laughed.  They moped into the port-a-pet; Dede clapped it shut, latched it, and closed the closet door.  "Aren't they cute?"

Roberta sat on the floor, trying to keep her heart below her collar bone.  Her skin felt cold.  Dede sat before her, framed in fuzzy light.  Roberta had to squint to see her clearly, and then little rainbows formed in her eyelashes, tiny slivers of color that broke like bubbles when her lashes moved, good-for-nothing little rainbows.

"Cat got your tongue?"  Dede reached into the fringe of light surrounding her and extracted from it a pack of cigarettes.  She hit it against her knuckles to make the cigarettes pop out, then lifted the package to her teeth.  When she pulled it away, there was a cigarette in her mouth.  She looked around.  "Shit.  The matches are over by you, Roberta, on top of my suitcase by the door."  The cigarette wagged in her mouth when she spoke.  "Could you bring them to me, honey?"

Roberta couldn't speak yet; she was barely keeping her panties dry.  She reached around her until she felt Dede's suitcase with the book of matches on top.  She crawled to Dede and offered them.  Dede didn't move.  Roberta opened the book of matches, tore one out, and lit it.  Dede waited.  Roberta reached up and lit Dede's cigarette, then sat down again and cried.

Smoke curled into the sunlight, passing abruptly into and out of existence with the shadows of the window frame, of Dede, of the smears and crack lines on the glass.  "Thanks."  The smell didn't depend on light though; that was everywhere.  "I ain't seen you like this for a long time, Roberta.  Perk up.  The kids like you.  You know that, don't you?  They just about go crazy every time you visit us."

"Jesus, Dede, what's your beef?"

Dede smoked.  "Where's Milo?"

"Didn't you get my message?  Him and Verducci went away somewheres, but they'll be back.  You shouldn'ta come, Dede."

"You got him, don't you?"

"No.  Jesus.  What for?"

"Don't play dumb with me, Roberta, or I'll kick your ass into the closet."

"I don't got Milo.  I never even seen him.  I don't know what he looks like.  All I know is a stupid fur ball, and I ain't seen that since you showed me back in sunny Cal, and I thought you was nuts."

"I'm not nuts."

"I know it, Dede.  If Verducci could turn a fur ball into your brother, then you ain't nuts."

Dede reached back through swirling smoke, eclipsing the window.  She tugged at the shade.

"It doesn't work," Roberta said.

Dede yanked it hard, and it stayed down.  Then she sat down in the ratty armchair by the bed, in her crumpled navy blue outfit with the leg-of-mutton sleeves, a catalogue item.  "I'm jet lagged.  This place is a hole.  Me and Bill are gonna check into some swank place.  Why the hell do you stay in these dives, Roberta?  I give you my credit card and all that."

"I just don't go for all that stuff, Dede."

"It stinks here."  She reached over and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray by the bed.

Roberta smiled a little.  "Everything has its portion of Mind."

"Of what?"

"I said, everything has its portion of smell.  I got it from you, Dede.  It's a joke.  Can I stand up now?"

"Stay put.  You didn't say that.  You said, 'Mind.'  You said, 'portion of Mind.'  Where did you get that?"

Roberta thought, Jesus, I spent the night in a rainbow.  It came back to her all at once.  Anaxagoras.  Squaring the circle.  Operators and shapeshifters‑-all true.  It was as if a part of her brain suddenly had a quarantine lifted.  If Dede found out about Louie, she'd probably kill him or put him in a box like the kids.  "Slip of the tongue, Dede.  I didn't mean nothing.  'Portion of smell,' I meant.  'Smell,' like you always say.  'Mind' don't make no sense."

"Sit down on the bed.  Sometimes I wonder about you, girl.  You sure you ain't been talking to Verducci?"

"No, I told you, she's out of town.  I ain't seen her yet." Roberta sat on the bed.

"Where you staying now?  What's the new place?"

"I couldn't find no new place after all," Roberta said.  Dede was giving her the fish eye.  "I spent the night by The Grass and Trees, staking it out.  The new place was right near there, see, only it fell through.  I thought maybe Verducci would get back before you got here, and it'd save everybody some headaches for me to be right there.  I'm tired as hell.  I just came back to sack out."

"Sack out, then."

Roberta slid across the bed and kicked her shoes off.  She rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow.  She wanted to scream, but she only wept, discreetly, noiselessly, dampening the pillow.  She thought . . . Lydia.  She let the tears go one by one; they relieved her one by one, but not much.  She heard Dede light up another cigarette.

After a while, Bill barged in.  "They're back," he said.  "Can we stay a few days anyway?  I got us a killer of a room.  No magic fingers, but it's got a whirlpool and in-room movies and all that stuff.  Hiya, Roberta.  Stumbled up here, huh?"

Roberta sat up and wiped her eyes as if it were only sleep in them.  She looked up at Bill.  He was wearing a new designer shirt and stiff tight jeans.  He carried a magenta shopping bag with dignified calligraphy, but he smelled funny.

Dede said, "Where did you see them?  You saw both of them?  Milo too?"

"At that place, at The Grass and Trees, through the window.  I didn't go in.  Jeez, that's a lousy neighborhood."  He put down the bag and started taking out packages of clothes, handkerchiefs, underwear.  "I only saw Milo, no Verducci.  Little guy for fifteen.  Was he always little?"  He tossed a small package to Dede.  "That's for you, honey."  Then he said to Roberta, "Hey, the Greek in the hotdog place really likes your ass, Roberta.  He stood me a coffee just for knowing you."

"Shut up, dammit."  Dede threw down the package.  "How do you know it was Milo?"

"Did he have a beret on?" Roberta said, then regretted it at once.  Don't help them.

"Yeah, that's right," Bill said.  "Say, Roberta, do you know where you can get French hats like that around here?"  The meaning was for Dede‑-that he was ignoring her insult.

"Is that him?" Dede asked Roberta.  "In a beret?"

"No,” she said, “it's somebody else.  He owns the place, that's all."

"That's all, huh?" Dede picked up the package Bill had tossed her and walked up to him.  "Sorry I got mad, Billy.  I'm beat.  I'm tense."  She turned to Roberta for a moment: "The stupid airline put the kids on a different connection, can you believe it?  We hadda wait there.  I was going nuts.  But Billy talked to a supervisor for me, didn't you Billy?  And we got the kids back in half an hour.  But it was tense."

Dede grabbed his belt with her free hand and slid three fingers in.  "This has gotta be one of the big moments of my life here, see?  I'm gonna be reunited with my little brother . . . "  She paused.  She looked at Bill.  He looked back at her coldly.  "What's that smell?"

"I did a little shopping.  It was a fancy store."

"It was a cheap store, Bill.  It was a cheap stinking store.  I didn't know they were even open for business this goddam early.  That Greek's must be some goddam place, all right.  He got some rooms upstairs or what?"

She took her fingers out of Bill's pants and tore open the present.  It was a bottle of perfume.  "Oh, that's sweet.  That's real sweet, Bill."  She opened it and dabbed some behind his ears, while he pulled his head back and grimaced.

"Lemme go.  I gotta go to the bathroom."

"I bet you do."

"Hey, why don't you send the kids out to find your brother?  They can follow a scent pretty good.  Just like you."  Bill left the room.

Dede stared at the floor.  Her dress looked to Roberta like a cardboard prop that Dede stood behind; even disheveled, it was too bright and stiff for the stale pudding of a girl that filled it.

"You never seen Verducci, huh?" Dede said.  "She's pretty, Roberta.  She was in Frisco with Bill and me.  Bill seen her.  He woulda made the moves on her too, but he was too drunk.  I didn't have the kids all educated then the way they are now, to watch him.  Maybe he even done her while I was drunk asleep, I don't really know.  That bitch.  Sometimes I think the kids are the only ones who love me, you know that?  Nobody else gives a crap about a hag like me."

Dede sighed, then pulled herself erect.  "No, Bill loves me.  But he can't run his own life, Roberta.  Some people are like that.  They need guidance, you know what I mean?"

"I know what you mean, Dede."

"Tell me about the beret guy.  You're holding out on me, aren't you?  Does he have kids?"

"Kids?"

"You know what I mean.  Aw, never mind.  You're a fucking liar, but I don't give a damn.  Everybody's a fucking liar.  We'll take care of him when we take care of Verducci."  She laid her hands on her thin chest and yawned.  "It stinks here, but we might as well stay till Verducci shows with my goods.  It'll be just like Frisco.  You, me, Bill, and the kids.  Family."  Dede sat down by the window and closed her eyes.

Roberta stared past her at the smoke-stained shade that scabbed the window.  The sun had gone elsewhere.  The rainbow hour was past.  There was no crystal anyway.

"Yeah, family."

 

ew sparkled upward in rosy light.  Crystallizing on the air, still night-cool, it hovered, streaked, vanished.  Sylvie was slow getting up.  She stared up through the skylight at the clouds, steel gray puffs moving swiftly, not long for this sky of deepening blue.  Milo had left the door open; a breeze whispered through.  Far away, dogs barked.

"Milo?"  Sylvie closed her eyes and stretched from fingertips to painted toes.  The straw inside the mattress crunched under her hips.  "Milo?  Where'd you go, big man?"  She giggled at her own joke.  She stroked her belly with the palm of her hand, then moved up the torso to her small breasts, following the curve, finger by finger, like a feather moving up her chest, her neck, and under her chin.  At last she touched her lips, and she yawned.  "Milo?"

She pulled on a pair of pants and climbed down a ladder to the tiny kitchen.  "Milo?"  There was half a glass of wine left on the table from last night.  She drank it and stepped outside into the sunlight that played peek‑a‑boo through dissolving clouds and the branches of cedars.  She walked between the trees, stroking each trunk as she passed it.  She looked out into the clearing.

No Milo.

Bare-chested in the cool morning, she crossed her arms and hiked up her shoulders to keep the warmth in.  She walked a few yards across soft green grass and tried the path up a gentle slope into the hills.  "Milo?"  Bird songs.  The dogs, far away.  Smells of mint, alfalfa, pennyroyal.  She wandered up the path, through bracken and old fallen branches, until a boulder blocked her way.  Water trickled over it into a tiny pool in the face of a rock below.  There the path ended.  The way around was too dense to pass through.

"Milo?"

A low growl‑-and her heart hammered.  On top of the boulder a cougar crouched low, its shoulders and the muscles of its forelegs tense.  Hips high, it shifted its rear legs by little, by little, flexing slowly, poised to leap, eyes glued on Sylvie.

She was too frightened to move.  She was remotely aware of the loveliness of the morning, the bird songs, the slight breeze, the long shafts of sunlight dappling the path and glinting off the pool with each trickle of falling water.  It was as if she were someone else, somewhere far away.  And she felt stupid.  Stupid to have wandered off alone half‑dressed in a strange wood.  She wondered if Milo would find her there, gnawed and bloody.

The cougar struck first at her chest and face.  It pushed her to the ground and pinned her down with its forepaws.  It was smaller than Sylvie, but much stronger.  Musk and damp warmth.  She closed her eyes.  She felt the rasp of its breath as it pushed its muzzle against her face‑-but never the teeth.

She opened her eyes and saw Milo's.  He rubbed against her, skin to skin.  He kissed her.

"You bastard."  She pulled back.

His fur melted into skin.  The fangs retracted.  He lengthened downward, like a sleeper pushing into a collapsed sleeping bag, until he was his full human length, caressing all of her with all of him.  "I want to eat you up, Sylvie, but not that way."

Only, it wasn't Sylvie he was holding.  It was something gray, rough, and leathery.  Milo lifted his head away and spat.  Then the thing curled up between his legs.  He jumped sideways, and it pinioned him.  Tusks sprouted on either side.  Below him, an ear‑splitting roar.  He was lifted high.

"Down, Simba!" Milo dug his fingers in.  It roared again, a glissando from an octave above migraine to two octaves below indigestion.  Milo shut his eyes and pressed down on something inside himself as if he were defecating.

He was gone.  The elephant curled its trunk around‑-nothing.  Then, startled, it plodded backward: a field mouse darted, squealing, between its legs.  The elephant tumbled onto its great posterior.  Its features began to melt.  It trembled for a moment like a huge jello mold, then became translucent.  A column of cloudy water, it thundered down over the mouse.

"Sylvie!  Sylvie!  Stop it."  The mouse burst into flame, repelling the water into an orb of steam, itself at center, white hot.  The steam whinnied and became a horse.  It galloped down the hillside.  The fire whinnied and galloped after.

"Catch me, Milo."  The steam horse sprouted wings and leapt into the sky.

The fire was a sixteen year old boy standing naked in a wide valley.  He looked up in amazement at the winged horse.  "Can you do that?  I never thought you could do that.  It doesn't exist, does it?"

"Doesn't matter," the horse said.  "Everything has its portion of smell, Milo.  Nothing's without it.  Doesn't matter if it's a Fig Newton or a figment.  Catch me."

He telescoped his spine down below his coccyx.  It was like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube.  This time Milo paused, as Devore had taught him, to see the field of bright points that comprised his shasha body.  Like wiggling one's ears; like finding, wrists crossed, fingers laced, the finger someone points to; like learning how to make one's navel go round in circles; and like learning how to let a thought go (one . . . one . . . one . . .) Milo hovered in the field of points.  He wielded the Banach‑Tarski like a scimitar of infinite sharpness sweeping zenith, nadir, and horizon in a single cut.  The points coalesced into an infinity of squirming, amoeboid clumps, and each clump gave birth to another.  He could hear the birth yelps echo.

He lifted a green scaled head, opened the gigantic maw, blood-red and glistening in brilliant sunlight, and he breathed fire over the mountains.  Milo's wing tips grazed the tops of the far hills as he arched back and spread what had once been his arms.  The spines jutting from his vertebrae rippled from neck to tip of tail, miles below.

"Too big!" Sylvie whinnied, a mite in the dragon's eye.  He blinked, and she was gone.

Milo beat his wings slowly, circling the valley.  Nothing looked the same.  The lines between objects were utterly new ones.  The mountain together with all visible clouds and a certain sensation in the dragon's jaw were one creature.  A chimney and the barks of two dogs scrabbling down a hillside were another.

Milo descended.  As he drifted down he performed the Banach‑Tarski again.  The world exploded into a Seurat canvas and then into galaxies of shining points.

He was running on human legs across the open field beyond the A-frame.  "Sylvie?"  The winged horse was gone.  He sifted small things between blades of grass.  He scanned the hills, the sky, squinted at the sun.  "Sylvie?  Hey, Sylvie!"  Too big, she'd said.  Maybe he'd been too big.  "Are you okay?"

"You just stay awake, little man."

A warm breeze tickled Milo.  It swirled around him, stirring up a whirlpool of flower petals.  "Sylvie!"  He smiled.  She embraced him.  They kissed.  She was a beautiful girl, the saltimbanque in the bowler hat who had brought him into Devore's magic circle and taught him what he was.  She was Moon and Stars.  She shook her head, and her long brown hair covered both their bare shoulders.  Still embracing, still kissing, they kneeled on the grass, then lay down together below the cedars by the A‑frame.

"Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie . . . !"

 

hey were loafing in the A-frame when Victor knocked, a shapeshifter from The Grass and Trees.  He didn't wait for them to answer but pushed open the door.  "That dragon‑-higher dimensions, right?"  He was a buoyant curly-headed young man in a T-shirt with a necktie printed on the front.  Milo recognized it at once and recalled what was on the back: a table of numbers from Cantor's proof that the infinity of decimals is greater than the infinity of fractions‑-as Victor was all‑too‑eager to explain.

Victor craned his neck toward Milo and Sylvie as if he were examining an unfamiliar piece of machinery.  "How could you be that‑-whatever it was?  And how so quick?  A Banach‑Tarski on higher dimensions?  S⁴?  S⁵?  According to the math, it should work on any dimension higher than two.  Don’t tell me that that was just S³, our regular three dimensions . . . “

Sylvie rolled her eyes.  "Victor, for heaven's sake."  She grabbed some clothes from a pile on the floor.  "What are you doing here?"

"Devore‑-wait a minute.  What about it?"

Sylvie laughed.  "Milo's the king of the shashas, is all."

Milo shook his head.  "Shucks, I'm just an ordinary guy with Silly Putty bones."

Victor clucked his tongue.  "Mine won't bend into dragons."

Sylvie threw her jeans in Victor's face.  "You’ve got a lot of damn nerve barging in on us, you know that?"

"Calm down, Sylvie.  Devore sent me."

"Dr. Devore?"  Milo climbed to the loft, threw Sylvie's other clothes down to her and started dressing himself.  "What for?"

"Somebody's looking for you, Milo."  Victor handed the pants back to Sylvie.  This time she pulled them on.  "It's Roberta, the one who came to The Grass and Trees.  She came again.  You better climb down off that loft before I tell you the rest."

Milo leapt down and stood behind Sylvie, his arms crossed around her chest.  She closed her eyes, smiled, and leaned her head back against his cheek, then remembered to scowl at Victor.

"Milo, Dede is alive."

Milo paled.  His arms fell to his sides.  "How . . . "

"I think maybe Sylvie has something to tell you, Milo."

Sylvie shoved Victor against the wall.  "Damn you."

He shook his head.  "You're not mad at me, Sylvie."

She sighed.  "No, it's me I'm mad at.  Devore found out about me and Dede, huh?"

Victor nodded.  "Roberta told him.  The woman who banged on the window at The Grass and Trees."

Sylvie took Milo's hand.  It was cold.  "I'm sorry, Milo.  I knew she wasn't dead, and I didn't tell you.  I didn't tell Devore.  I didn't tell anyone.  I ran into her in Frisco a couple years back.  I was doing street shows with my puppets, and also pitching equideco--you know, hiring myself out to do things for people, mostly illegal.  She got hold of one of my business cards and gave me a call.  She had this handful of fur she thought I could equideco back into her little brother.  I boosted it, I don't know why; I used to just steal things‑-before Devore.  She thought that that fur ball was you, Milo, but it wasn't anything."

"She traced you through that card, Sylvie," Victor said.  "Roberta was working for her."

Milo said nothing, did nothing, stared at his feet.

"Milo, honey, I know it was hell thinking you murdered her, but I just didn't see any percentage in getting you all worked up about Dede being alive.  She's one scary bitch.  Either way, nothing was your fault.  Maybe it was stupid, but I never figured she'd follow me all the damn way out here.  I mean‑-it was a lousy fur ball."

"I don't blame you, Sylvie."  Milo squeezed her hand but never looked up.  "I know you love me.  And you know I love you, Sylvie.  Only, what are we going to do now?  Dede's alive.  Dear God in heaven, my sister is alive, and she wants me back."

"Don't worry, Milo," Victor said, "Devore's got Roberta living at his house.  You have to hand it to that guy.  Our fearless leader is a one man recycling center, shit into flowers.  Consider yourself, kiddo . . . "

"How did the doc know where we were?" Sylvie asked him.

"He found a letter."

"He went through my stuff?"

"It was a kind of emergency, Sylvie.  Devore called me.  We were worried about you and Milo.  This Dede‑-she's an operator.  She knows a lot of the same formulas we use.  And get this‑-she's got things."

"Things?" Milo said.

"She's not a shasha, but she's got these things.  She calls them kids, Devore says, or that's what this Roberta told him.  Sounds like she found some kind of sub-human shashas.  That's what Devore got from this Roberta.  And Dede runs them.  They can't do all that much, I suppose, since they're not humans, but Dede can hurt people with them.  Looks like that's how she kept Roberta in line."

"But she doesn't know where we are, right?"  Milo untwined himself from Sylvie.  He paced to a hexagonal window of stained glass and pretended to look out.

"This is the hard part, Milo.  We need you to fight her.  She's not a threat just to you anymore, but to all of us.  Otherwise we'd keep you here, safe, away from her."

Sylvie stormed, "Why Milo, dammit?  Why stick him in her way?  He's her target.  We can deal with any goddam operator without . . . "

Milo jumped in.  "You know that's not true.  I'm the heavy artillery around here now."

"He's right, Sylvie."

"It's my fault," she said.

Milo touched her cheek.  "Guilt sucks."

She knit her brows and seemed about to cry, but merely sighed.  "I'll pack our stuff."

 

ill sulked.  "Dammit, Dede, why don't we just go to that swank place right now?  I mean, they got in‑room movies, Dede.  They got jacuzzi in your own tub.  We could nab your kid brother after we get a little R&R."

Dede ignored him and stared into the port‑a‑pet.  She straightened her back and made her mind very calm.  She knew how to: by flushing away every thought as it arose, beating it down by force of will, like shoving gophers back into the earth.  She could do that.  She did it every time she read a book.  Fundamenta Mathematica was no bed of roses.  Anaxagoras, in English or Greek, required attentive reading.  Dede had steeled this part of her mind.

In half a minute Dede's mind was a three-dimensional grid made of empty space, lines‑-and will.  She focused her mind on one of her ugly babies.  Two little eyes sparkled at the air holes.  Their pupils twitched when Dede tweaked her grid.  This part was always a thrill, like that moment, learning to ride a bicycle, when its power becomes your power.

Dede looked just at them; it had taken her years to understand that looking.  She  had devoured equations, wolfed down proofs, definitions, axiomatic systems, and mathematical spaces so weird that they used to cross her eyes and turn her stomach upside‑down.  They had become her world.

 

"The world is made of numbers,"

 

Pythagoras had said.

The object of all her manic work‑-a handful of fur.  The fur stayed the same, but one day she was working through a proof by Hausdorf when everything changed.  She had been eating, sleeping, and breathing equations about things with parts as big as the whole.  That was like Milo, Dede was thinking, melting from this to that.  Then her eye roved to a corner of the room where a dust ball spun up and down the wall.  Funny little critter, it spat out doubles of itself, then sucked them in again, seemed like.  Was it a draft?  A shadow?  Maybe she had been working too hard?  That’s what anybody else would think—and forget it.

But when Dede's mind moved, the dust balls moved.  She got up to get a closer look.  The nearer she came the more they seemed to be a part of her own mind, changing as her thoughts changed.  But they were real.

They became ugly babies . . . and other things.  And they still did.  What was this stuff?  If it was there for Dede, it must be lots of places, she figured, but nobody had ever looked at it before, not the way Dede could.  It must be like gold or like oil, waiting for the right person to find it.  Now it was all hers‑-just as Milo used to be.  Just as he would be again.

Dede opened the port‑a‑pet.  The kids were an amorphous jelly with teeth, claws, and hair.  One of them oozed over the edge of the case.

In the grid was Dede's intention: "Get me back my Milo."  She shoved open the window, and the thing oozed across the floor, up the wall, over the sill, and out.  It flew like black plastic on the wind, then a bat, then a bullet, then gone.

"You okay, Dede?" Roberta asked her, hoping that she was not.  "You look like you're a gazillion miles away."

"That's my babies.  A piece of me is inside 'em.  I always know where they are.  Whaddaya say, Bill?  Do you feel the same?"

"Leave me out of it, Dede.  They're your kids, not mine."

She winced as if slapped, then smiled.  "We gotta hang out here at Roberta's for a while, Bill."

"No!"  Bill kicked the mopboard.

"Because you know why?  I think the little guy, Roberta's friend, is gonna come looking for her here.  And I wanna get him, Bill.  I wanna get his ass and find out all about what Milo's been up to and what Roberta's been up to.  I wanna hear it from the horse's mouth.

"I don't want no trouble getting Milo back, see?  Because he's mine.  And when I got him again, boy, it'll be a brand new day, believe me.  The kids can't do nothing compared to my Milo.  Bill, you're gonna be so happy, you'll bust a gut."

She looped her arms around Bill's neck and rubbed her hips against him.  "And wait'll you see me when I got my Milo back.  I can ride him.  I can wear him.  The things he can be for me.  A credit card.  A diamond tiara.  A fucking Porsche, Bill.  That Moon and Stars chick won't look so hot next to me then.  And you won't give a second look at Jitsi's whores, Bill.  We're gonna be so rich and set up, you're gonna never leave home, boy.  You'll just wanna kick back and make love to me all day long.  Whaddaya say to that?"

"Aw, come on, Dede.  They got cable at that hotel."

 

ure enough, Devore walked in, just like Roberta but through the actual door, such as it was, cracked hollow core with rusted hinge pins half out of their sockets.  Maybe Jitsi had been mistaken about the address, he was thinking.  Out of breath after the long staircase on short legs, he knocked.  Shave and a haircut . . .

The door swung completely open, he saw a few fuzzy gray silhouettes against a bright window.  Then Devore's chest spasmed as if a fist had squeezed his aorta.  The colors in the room turned black for white.  He crumbled.  Blood flooded and swelled his lips and eyes until he felt like a dazed netted fish.

Roberta was there, echoey, blurred.  Her face looked bruised, but Devore had lost his glasses‑-maybe that was it.  "I'm sorry, Louie.  I couldn't do nothing.  Honest, I didn't set you up . . . "  A man twisted her elbow.  She shrieked.  She stopped talking.  The man smiled and made her shriek again.

"Hey!  You're a thing."  Another woman walked up to Devore and stood over him, looking down with an amused grin.  She gave him a series of little kicks in the ribs, the back, the head.  He squirmed away.  "I just wanna close the door . . . Louie."  She pushed it shut, grazing his back, and locked it.  "I thought we was gonna hafta strong‑arm you, Louie.  I thought you was just an operator like me.  Roberta didn't tell us the whole story, did she?  You're a thing, too, like Milo and the kids.  A shasha.  Is that your word for it?  Shasha?"

"Shasha."  Devore said it without breath, as deaf folks do, just sound and the mouth moving; he was half-delirious.  He felt his body disintegrate into an array of bright points.

"Nobody ever done you, huh?  Nobody ever run you."  She scrunched up her face like a weight lifter.  "You're different, you know that?  I can't make you do nothing but one thing, feels like."

"It's because you got the kids on your mind, Dede," the man said.

"Shut up, Bill.  It isn't that.  My kid'll find my Milo and bring him to me, one, two, three.  This guy, it's that he just goes one way, is all, like a left shoe.  I'm gonna wrap him round my little finger, though‑-you watch."

Devore saw, as if through a grainy video projection, the back of Dede's hand loom larger until it touched what used to be his face.  The ring on her little finger had a small diamond set in it, but it looked like a mystical mountain range to Devore.  His body steamed away.  It tingled and pulsed.  It hummed with electricity.  The theorem she used was unknown to Devore.  An interesting decomposition, was his last purposeful thought before he lost his mind.  I'll have to mention it to Victor.

Then there was only the cool bright shining, red at the top, violet at the bottom, words pouring in, words pouring out, a cloudburst of questions and answers, as Dede learned everything Devore had ever known.

 

e woke to the sound of Dede's voice.  He was slumped in a chair beside Roberta's bed, a hotel bed, standard issue: rusting iron frame scaly with repaintings.  One of Dede's "kids" teethed on his hands and wrists; every time Devore so much as twitched, it bit him.  Another was wrapped around Roberta's neck; it looked like a black silk choker.

"Just mind your p's and q's, Doc, and my darling won't pinch a bit.  It's only till Milo gets here."  She turned to Bill and pasted on a smile.  "You left the note, right, Bill?  Like I said to?  At that Grass and Hoozis?"

"I sure did, Dede honey."

"Insurance.  I wouldn't want to be waiting around for nothing, just in case my kid comes up goose eggs."  She started to pace.  "I'll call too."  She smiled fiercely, nearly drooling.  "I'll leave a phone message on the grass place machine‑-you got a machine there, don't you, Devore?  My Milo will get here one way or the other."  She paced back and forth across the room.  Small as it was, she turned nearly as often as she stepped, but she seemed to notice nothing.

"I did what you said, Deeds."  Bill took a comb from his pocket and pulled it through his hair.  "I always do what you say, don't I?  Who loves you, Dede?"

"You do, Bill.  You do."

Devore rasped, "You've wasted your life, Dede.  You won't get what you want from Milo.  You want the wrong things."

"Don't try to hustle me.  I know you backwards and forwards, Devore.  I read you from inside."

"And I know you."  Devore tried to edge closer, but his hands started to hurt.  "Did you think it only went one way?  I'm not your kids, Dede.  I know you can't go on like this.  You've got too much of a heart, Dede."

Dede stopped pacing.  She shut her eyes and clenched her fists: Roberta grabbed at the black silk choker and screamed.  Devore fell silent.

"But enough about me," Dede said to Devore.  "Let's talk about my Milo, okay?"

Bill laughed.  "Dede, you gotta let me borrow that collar sometimes.  I got guys I'd like to put it on."

"Leave Roberta alone," Devore said.  "When you want me to shut up, tell me."

Dede pushed her face in Devore's.  "Shut up," she said.  Bill laughed.  Dede smiled, flounced up to him, and kissed him.

He peeled her off him.  "I gotta stretch my legs."

"Don't say hello to nobody," Dede called after him.  She seemed about to cry‑-then she became aware of Roberta and Devore's eyes on her.  She glanced murder at them and fell into a blue study.

Half an hour later, he still hadn't come back.  Dede looked out the window.  "Talk to me, Roberta.  You're my best friend, did you know that?"  Roberta didn't say a word.  "Come on, Roberta girl.  This ain't no thang.  You and me are gonna be tight again, like before."  Roberta was silent.

"You know what really pisses me off?"  Dede swung round to face Devore.  "All that time I was messing with the stinking fur ball, and it wasn't even Milo.  I found that out from you, in your indigo band, sucker.  If I'd have known that before, I would have had my brother back years and years ago.  I'd be all set up by now."

Dede opened her purse, took out a gun, and held it loosely in front of Devore.  "Insurance.  I’m all over goddam insurance.  Louie Devore, meet Mr. Beretta.  Mr. Beretta: Louie Devore.  Mr. Beretta here is a .38 Special, and you should see what he can do to a pumpkin, let alone Cinderella.  Milo might not remember me and all I've done for him.  It might take a while to remind him, see?  It might take everybody a while.  Mr. Beretta will speed that up.  He’ll remind everybody how happy a family can be‑-I mean, until they re‑experience it for themselves."

Devore said, "Dede . . . ," and Roberta gagged.  Devore lowered his gaze.

"Dede, you can't . . . "

"I only want you to talk about what I want you to talk about, understand?"

 

hey drove in shifts down the Interstate from the Green Mountains to Pitston.  Sylvie drove first.  Victor and Milo sat on a foam pad in the back of Victor’s ancient VW bus.  Victor jabbered.  “You never answered me about the dragon thing.  Higher dimensions, hm?”

“I don’t know a thing about that stuff.”

"Listen to me, Milo.  There's a Banach‑Tarski for every higher dimension.  So, theoretically, we could shift through, like, the fourth dimension—or higher.  That what you did?”

“I don’t think that was it . . . ”

Miles and miles later Victor was still holding forth, when Sylvie pulled over and climbed back through the Paisley hanging.  “Shut up and do some driving, will you?”

Curtained from Victor, Sylvie and Milo twined together.  Love passed between them like blood pulsing between chambers of the heart.

"You shashas can't shapeshift the way I can," Milo whispered.  He couldn't sleep at all.  "It's up to me, Sylvie.  It's really up to me."

"Don't do anything crazy.  We've got to all work together.  Do the math, like Devore taught us: discipline, little man.  Stay on top of it.  Sometimes it's okay to be foursquare, Milo.  One . . . one . . . one . . ."

"I'm just going to do what we all decided.  I'm going to stop her.  I'm going to make her listen, really listen.  She's my sister.  She’s alive.  She's got to bend, if I can just make her listen."

The bus slowed, pulled over, and stopped.  Victor peeked through.  "Your turn, Milo."

"What were you, Victor?" Sylvie whispered.  "You were something, weren't you, you dope?"

"Fog," he said.  "Just low fog curling everywhere.  If anyone came near I'd feel the currents quick . . . I'm not a dope."

From the mat, Sylvie held Milo's hand as he passed through the curtain.  When she had to, she let him go.  Victor crawled into the back and sat beside her, already nodding off.  She stared into the darkness. 

One . . . one . . . one . . .

Devore had taught her to breathe and count that way.  He'd met her in the park doing Echo and Narcissus, her old puppet show.  The old man liked the show; halfway through, he wandered close and peeked inside the puppet booth to see her at work.

In those days, occasionally, there being so many props to remember and to manipulate, and Sylvie being so lazy in the Memory and List Department, she would fudge.  She would shasha her hand into Narcissus or shasha one shoulder into a missing backdrop.

Relax, sleep, you may need it, one . . . one . . . one . . .

Sylvie used to do things like that when nobody was looking.  The way she grew up, ignored by her own parents, charming her way into other kids' families‑-kinder, richer, more cultivated families‑-she was always essentially a showman, an outsider.  She didn't know her shasha-ing was odd until one day, at seven years old, someone saw her playing with a puppy whose tail was Sylvie's arm‑-and screamed.  Sylvie had thought that everybody shasha‑ed, but on the sly, like playing between one's legs.

Devore spied Sylvie shasha her right hand into Narcissus, but he didn't let on right away.  He invited her to do a show at The Grass and Trees at a suspiciously high fee and for a very select audience.  Far from home, she'd been sleeping in the park, in junked cars at the public market, and in hotels when she could afford it and if the owners didn't get too curious about her exact age.  Sure, she told Devore, why not?

Maybe if you turned over onto your other side‑-shashas have so many sides to sleep on . . .

But the shashas at The Grass and Trees put on a show for her‑-the Banach-Tarski.  Devore tutored her in shasha mathematics.  The numbers didn't do him much good; his rainbow hiccups were uncontrollable.  But shasha math increased Sylvie's repertoire, and Devore gave her a sort of family.  He taught her what she was.

She was like a daughter to the man, but she wouldn't move into his house for love or money.  No, the floor at The Grass and Trees would do.  Sylvie would be her own boss, come hell or high water.

One . . . one . . . one . . .

Better to have been a little yielding.  Devore was a lonely man.  Why hadn't she let him take care of her a little, let him be to her in earnest what he'd always been to her secretly, in her heart: a father?

The thought of Dede piggybacked on that bad thought: why hadn’t she told anyone that Dede was alive?  She had kept it secret in a corner of her mind, in the habitual place of childhood secrets, gathering power in the dark‑-at everyone’s expense.  Selfish.  Blind.  All the while Sylvie had told herself stories about how it was all for Milo’s good . . .

She woke up and realized that the bus wasn't moving.  Victor slumped against a window, snoring.  At odd intervals he winked into phantasms; where his body had been, a green mist would appear, or a houri, a dodecahedron, an amoeboid clump, a knot, or a hamburger.  Almost at once, he would be Victor again.  He slept the sleep of shashas.

Sylvie peeked through the Paisley curtain.  "Milo?"  The front seat was empty.  She crawled forward, then eased open the passenger side door‑-not to wake Victor‑-and crept out into the dark.  They had left the Interstate and were on a farm-lined road just outside Pitston.  "Milo?"  Warm rain drizzled.  Leaves rustled everywhere, as if the air were made of leaves and of pattering drops that runneled and hissed when a breeze puffed.  "Milo?"  She could not tell if the deep sound she heard was distant rolling thunder or an earthquake.  She could not tell if she heard it with her ears or through her feet.

She padded across the slippery wet grass along the road.  "Milo?  Milo?"  She blinked the rain from her lashes.  A long curving phoenix feather caught a bit of moonlight in the trees a hundred feet away.  Stupid Monkey.  "Milo, stop playing around."  The eyes glowed out at her, fire-red, flat and frontal, a monkey's eyes under the phoenix feather cap.  The trees shivered, and Monkey was gone.

Sylvie ran and slid.  She ducked among the trees after Monkey.  She scrambled after his sound as branches snapped and water sprayed.  "Dammit.  Stop, Milo.  It isn't funny.  You tired?  You want me to drive?"

In a small clearing near a dry creek bed the Monkey King leaned against his cudgel as if it were a walking stick.  He folded his simian hands on its top and rested his chin on his knuckles.  He tilted his head at Sylvie this way and that.

"Honestly, little man!"  Sylvie's hair was pasted against her face.  Her soaked shirt clung to her breasts and belly.  Her calves were spattered with mud.  "I don't know why I love you."

Monkey lifted the cudgel, swung hard, and knocked her square in the forehead.  An explosion of light‑-then everything went black.

 

ed streaked like blood, green like bile, swirling down walls of mind.  A painful drumming sensation resolved into the sound of rain.  Before she remembered who she was, Sylvie heard Devore's voice, weak and rambling.

She shook herself.  The pain became her head, and then her hand materialized, pressing against it, then her mouth, tongue, lungs, larynx: "Unnnh!"  Sylvie opened her eyes‑-she had eyes.  There was light, fuzzy at first.  Just to squint dizzied her with pain.  She was in Milo's lap.  He was all around her, holding her, looking down at her, still half monkey.  His eyes were big with compassion.

The fur pulled back into Milo's skin.  His arms and torso shifted to human proportions.  Sylvie sighed.  "Milo, sweet Milo, what happened . . . ?"  He became Milo‑-but then he was still changing, shrinking, shifting beyond Milo into something else.  Sylvie rolled out of Milo's lap onto a wooden floor.  His bones squealed and popped out of his skin where the skin shrank more quickly than his skeleton.  Slowest of all was Milo's face, or, rather, the membrane stretched over the front of his skull; the rest of him imploded and settled, but the face followed it down like the skin of a shrinking balloon.  It folded hideously as it sank.

On the chair above her an ugly baby wheezed.  Its flesh, ropes of coagulated blood, coiled and pulsed.  For a moment, Sylvie could see nothing else.  Deep within her, as if down a dry well, a voice whispered, Stay awake.

Dede lay on the bed with one leg slung over the side.  She was gazing at her pinky ring.  It sparkled in the tawdry hotel room light.  She turned her hand, and rainbows spread from it like feathers, staining the walls red to violet.  Out of the rainbows came the sound of Devore moaning.

Another woman was there, sitting on the floor with a silent trepidation that made Sylvie glance back at Dede for the source of it.  In Dede's other hand was a small pistol.

"Shut up, Devore."  Dede thrust her ringed hand into her pocket.  "It gives me the creeps‑-and I've seen everything.  Rainbows aren't supposed to sound so pathetic, are they?"

Seeing Sylvie stir, Dede turned to her.  "So she's awake.  Hiya, Moon and Stars.  Long time, no see.  I wanted my Milo, not you, but I guess you'll do.  Honey to a bee, aren't you, beautiful?  My Milo's going to come buzzing round any time now‑-literally, maybe."

Dede swung her other leg over the edge of the bed and stood up.  "God, my legs ache.  I shoulda ridden my kid here."  She offered Sylvie a hand up.  Sylvie, still dazed, took it and stood.  "This is the chick who stole my fur ball, Roberta."

"It was just a fur ball," Sylvie drawled.

"Yeah.  Now I know that.  Funny how things work, ain't it?  I guess I paid you back for boosting it though, didn't I?"

Sylvie set her jaw and tried to answer, but Dede took her hand out of her pocket and slapped her across the face.  "I don't really give a shit.  I can find him.  He's my goddam brother.  I can feel him.  I can feel you too, shasha.  Can you feel me feeling you?"

She could.  Sylvie felt like a netted butterfly beating its wings against the cheesecloth, rubbing away its precious fine powder.  Dede was operating her just as she operated Devore and the ugly baby.  A part of her own rational mind had become unavailable to Sylvie.  She could no longer formulate certain sequences of thoughts; they stopped mid‑cadence, mid‑premise, like a door opening to reveal a wall.  The Banach‑Tarski was ungetatable.  It was as if the flow of experience had been throttled to a capillary bleed with Dede at the valve.  Dede was straining to bend her further, but Sylvie, waking, resisted.

"You're not so tough," Dede said.  "You're not so goddam pretty either.  You got my brother in love with you, don't you?  You're operating him, aren't you?  Aren't you?"  It was as if Dede, without touching Sylvie, had twisted her arm behind her back.  She fell to her knees.

"Dede, f'rcrissakes," Roberta piped up, "why don'tcha leave the girl alone?"

"You, you watch what you say to me, Roberta.  You shouldn't talk to me that way.  You're my only fucking friend, Roberta.  You gotta be nice to me or I swear I'll shoot your brains out."

"Okay, Dede.  Okay, like you said.  I'm your friend.  I'll keep my mouth shut.  You don't have to do no shooting."

"You weren't doing nothing with Bill before he lammed out on me, were you?  I mean, you didn't have no plans, right?  Because if I find out you have some plans, then when I find that sucker, I'll blow both your brains out, and I'll feed 'em to my kids."

"You got nothing to worry about, Dede.  I'm your friend.  I don't care nothing about no Bill."

"He loves me, y'know."

"I know."

"Anyways, it's not gonna be two days before I have everything anybody ever wanted.  I already got little Moon and Stars here.  That other bozo Milo's got with him'll shit in his pants at the sight of me, and Milo'll walk on home to Big Sister . . . Ouch!"

Dede’s right hand, the hand with the pinky ring, jerked.  “Ouch!”  Violet light flashed, and Devore lay on the ground near Sylvie.  The baby screamed; it leapt away trailing spittle and ichor.

"As long as I live, I will never get used to crap like this."  Roberta looked away, twitching as if to vomit.

"Doc!  What'd she do to you?"  Sylvie scooted next to Devore.  She reached under his shoulders and held his head up.  Dede watched tight-faced.

He seemed shriveled, ancient, a hermit crab in something else's shell.  Sylvie looked to Roberta, to Dede.  "You've got to get a doctor.  He's sick."  Dede didn't move.  Roberta, watching her, held still.

"I love you, Sylvie," Devore whispered, "I've loved all my shashas, but you've been a daughter to me, you know?"

"I know.  I love you, doc."

"Take care of Milo.  Don't be afraid.  If anybody knows not to be afraid of death, Sylvie, we do, you know?"  Devore smiled, and his head went limp in Sylvie's arms.

"Doc?  Doc?  Oh God, please . . . Doc?"

Dawn was near.  Gray shapes materialized in the dirty window.  It had rained, it had stopped, it had rained again.  Now rain stuttered at the eaves.  One loud robin could be heard over the rumble of street cleaners and the constant hiss of traffic breathing through the canyons of the city.  Far away: a woodpecker.

"He dying?  Jesus, I didn't do this."  Dede glared at Sylvie, then at Roberta, daring them to accuse her.  "He was old, is all.  That's not my fault.  Anybody regular, they would have taken it okay."  She scooped an ugly baby into her arms and over her shoulder, as if to burp it‑-while she pinioned Sylvie with her eyes.  Watching her cry.

 

ylvie was here.  I feel it."  Milo blinked rain from his eyes.  Covered with mud and twigs, he parsed shadows in the gathering light.

"It's not your fault, Milo."  Victor pushed through a thicket of wet whipping branches to join him.

"I just stopped to take a leak.  I heard her call my name.  I came back, and she was gone.  I'll lay odds Dede has her now.  It's a lure.  She only wants me, Victor.  Then she'll let Sylvie go."

"Let's move, then, kiddo."

It's up to me, Milo kept thinking.  He strode back to the bus and climbed into the driver's seat.

Victor climbed in beside him.  "Just stay awake, little man."

All the way to Pitston, not one word: the click of the wipers and the backbeat of the rain.

Under the door and on the message machine at The Grass and Trees, the same words: "Your big sister loves you, Milo honey," and an address.

Milo and Victor threaded the alleys to Roberta's hotel.  The rain bowed them, made them bunch their bones and watch the puddles.  It was slow and invisible rain, cold needles on a gray smoky day.

"Plan?" Milo touched Victor's shoulder as they passed Jitsi's steamy windows.

"What plan?  She's an operator.  She's got Sylvie, maybe Devore.  We just shasha her out of business, Milo.  If she swims like a fish, we turn to a fish-hawk.  If she slithers like a snake, we turn to a crane."

"Scissors, paper, stone."

"We stay awake."

"She beat Sylvie, Victor."

"There are two of us, Milo‑-and you're the king of the shashas, remember?"

"Right."

They came in sight of the hotel, blistered clapboard slick with rain, window shades the color of iodine.  They approached it from behind, along the fence of a parking lot half reclaimed by crabgrass and dandelion.  Milo stopped.  Victor started to ask why, but the same feeling soon stopped him.

"Is that your sister?"

"It must be."  Milo's arm lifted as if drawn, like a compass needle.  He pointed to a window on the third floor at one end of a long fire escape landing.  The shade was pulled down, but a ray leaked at the edge, lighting skins of drizzle.

Victor nodded.  "She's strong.  Feels like ptomaine and brain fever."  He took a deep breath and huffed it out.  "I may be sick‑-don't let it bother you."

"I won't.  I'm going to reconnoiter.  The window."

"Stay awake."

He had thought to shapeshift into a bird, a fly, or steaming rain, and press to Dede's casement, but suddenly it was like climbing against an avalanche.  A strange aphasia.  Milo merely walked on his two legs across the lot and up the fire escape to Dede's window.  He leaned beside it in the chill rain and peeked and listened.  He told himself, "I could change to anything, but I'm tired and I don't really need to, that's all."

Victor had to sit down on the wet bottom step of the fire escape and mind his breathing.  "I'll be okay in a minute."

Flush to the clapboard, Milo peeked sidelong through Dede's window.  If he pressed his cheek to the casement, he could see enough between the frame and the ragged edge of the shade to piece together everything else.  Devore was there, slumped on the floor, baggier than ever, like a baked apple.  Sylvie lay near him, her back to the window.  She quivered as if weak with fever.  Milo wanted only one thing: to break through the window and go to them, but he held still: one . . . one . . . one . . .

There was another young woman sitting near Devore‑-must be Roberta, a large‑boned woman with oily black hair wearing a black silk choker‑‑no, it was a thing.  It had a field like a shasha's, but simpler, lower, all spit and claws.

"You okay, Louie?" Roberta was saying.

"No, I feel weak.  I'm dizzy.  I can't make one thought follow another, you know?"

"I'm sorry, Louie."

Then he recognized Dede, and he nearly fell in love.  She was fretting over another of the things, a squid‑like baby spitting up in her lap.  She wiped its mouth.  She hugged and hugged it.  Eyes open, Milo dreamed that he was that baby, that Dede was tilting her head and saying sweet things to him, wiping Milo's mouth, kissing Milo.  Dede's face was as deep in his memory as the womb he'd pushed out of.  It was so deep that he could hardly see it; he felt it, rather.  Through the pancake, the eyeliner, and the lip rouge, he felt Dede's skin as if it were his heart.  He felt dizzy then, slipped back against a metal railing, and nearly fell‑-that woke him up.

Inside the room Dede narrowed her eyes and concentrated, turning her field of vision into a pointillist painting.  She atomized her other senses, changing them all into something like taste, a field of prickling flavors.  She scanned and licked the sensory field surrounding the room as a baby licks a new toy, mouthing it, gumming, turning and inspecting it against the inside of its lip.  She stood.  "Milo!"  The thing rolled from her lap and puddled on the floor like corn starch clay.

Milo felt that he had turned to blood.  His body was a gel oozing at the window casement.  I'm all worked up, he thought, just as he had the day they took his big sister Dede away to Juvenile Hall.  I don't know what's gonna happen to me if you're gone.  I could die, Dede.  My mind could wander some time, and then I'd be gone for good.

Dede stared blankly.  She couldn't tell where he was or even what he was just now, but he was near.  "That's right, Milo.  Nobody can take care of you but me . . . Just calm down."  Then, as if in a trance: "Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . "

It was like wetting his bed, Milo thought.  You hold on and you hold on, but then, when you give up, it feels so warm and sweet.  You just flow out into the dark, into the warm, and then you can breathe again, the pressure all gone.

 

"Stay awake, you dope."

 

oberta stroked Devore's curly white hair.  He seemed so old.  His skin was loose, as if it would peel from his bones like a winding sheet.

Dede counted, " . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . "

Milo didn't want to stay awake.  He wanted his Dede.  He hadn't meant to claw her that once.  How sorry he felt for that.  He owed Dede everything.  Dede's my coach.  I'm her star.  He felt her counting for him just as she always used to.  Three, two, one: it was like swirling down a plug hole into something warm and right, into Dede, in fact.  Dede was warm and right.

 

"Stay awake, little man."

 

Dede's heart raced.  She bit her lip‑-a thin stream of blood trickled down her chin, but she barely noticed.  She was electric with glee, welcoming Milo into her psychic embrace, Milo, Milo, panacea, and now absolutely everything was going to be wonderful, Milo, honey, just this single synapse further into your big sister's warmth, come on, come on . . .

Milo felt the wind ripple his liquid surface.  He could drip through the window glass and pour into Dede's arms.

Devore rasped, "Stay awake."

The words struck him like a cold blast.  Stay awake, Sylvie and Victor echoed, and others too, a chorus of shashas, as many as the stars you see when you see stars, Milo, Victor sang in his mind, and just as ubiquitous.

Milo was there.  He was awake.  He was Milo.  He scrabbled down the fire escape as Victor scrabbled up.  They met below the second floor landing and hurried down together.  Victor wrapped an arm around Milo, and they huddled at the bottom of the fire escape, two mortals in the relentless rain.

"Shit."  Dede slammed the window sash.  He had been there.

She grabbed her Beretta, hit the catch, and inspected the magazine.  Seven shots.  Plenty.  "You're pretty, Moon and Stars, aren't you?  Well, you won't be so pretty in a couple hours."

 

ictor wretched.  A first floor window opened, and a thick‑necked man in a white T‑shirt peered out, cursed in a foreign language, then slammed his window shut.  Far away: heat lightning, then thunder.

"Your Dede's a powerhouse."  Victor pulled himself to his feet.

"She's got Sylvie.  And Dr. Devore.  He's sick.  I don't know what she did to him.  There's another girl too, must be Roberta.  She's tied up.  And Dede has a gun‑-has anybody you know ever been shot?  What happens when a shasha dies, Victor?"

"I don't think we can die.  I don't think that can happen to a shasha.  We're everything anyway.  How could something like us ever stop being alive?"

"So where are all the shashas from the beginning of time?  The hundred-year-olds, the thousand-year-olds, the hundred-thousand-year-olds?"

"We're standing among them.  The grass and trees.  There must be some way to solve this, Milo.  We can't call in the cops‑-they'd put us all in the monkey house.  I feel like Anaxagoras in his jail cell, trying to square the circle."

"This is really my problem," Milo said.  "Dede's after me.  I'm the one who has to work it out with her.  She doesn't want to kill me, exactly.  She wants me to kind of complete her.  You should have felt her up there, like somebody with a big wound begging you to heal them."  He looked down.  "It's wrong, it's crazy, but, I mean, she's my sister."

"Dammit, Milo, we won't let her make you her band‑aid."

"Dede's crazy, really crazy, but I think I could talk to her."

"All the shashas are with you, Milo.  We're all inside one another, all of us who did the Banach-Tarski together.  We're shasha brethren.  There isn't a single bit of you, however small, that doesn't have a bit of me inside it."

"I'm going to make her hear me, Victor.  I don't belong to anybody but me.  I'm going in there.  I'm going to walk right in through the front door, Victor, and I'm going to leave with Sylvie and the doctor."

"You really think you can?"

"Yes."

"You're the king of the shashas, Milo.  I'll come with you."

They walked around to the front and entered through a once‑ornate lobby fallen to dust and mildew, past an empty front desk and a slightly astonished woman on her knees with a bucket of ammonia water.  They began to climb the stairs, but halfway to the first landing, Milo paused.

"What is it?"

"It's about the Banach-Tarski.  I want to know about what you said before, about higher dimensions."

"You have to know this now?"

“She’s strong, Victor.  Anything I might be able to use, I want to know about it.”

“It’s just a theory.”

“Tell me . . . “

"I’ll tell you while we go upstairs, Milo.  Let’s not stop moving.  I’m afraid I won’t be able to start again."

They climbed.

"Does it have to do with time, Victor?  Is the fourth dimension time?"

“Yes, it is.  The fourth dimension is time.  Minkowski showed it.  And Einstein.  All those guys."

Pulling himself upward against a crushing gravity, Milo pronounced each word as if it were a spell.  “What does that mean?  It must mean something‑-for us shashas.  I feel like it's something important for us.  I just can't think what.  Help me, Victor."

Victor shook his head.  “Milo, for heaven’s sake . . . “

They had reached the second floor when Dede pushed through the third floor fire door into the stairwell.  Sylvie and Roberta draggled behind, secured by her ugly babies.  Dede looked down at Victor and Milo.  She smiled.  The Beretta hung from one finger by the trigger guard.  It could have been an apple she’d been munching.

Milo froze.  He could look nowhere but at her.

"The little guy's dead," Dede shouted.  "Your guru is dead.  I didn't do it, but I can't say I'm all choked up over it.  I got Moon and Stars in here.  She ain't in too good of a shape; I take credit for the split lip and one black eye."

Devore dead.  It hit Milo and Victor like a nightstick across the chest.  They reeled, and Dede advanced, not her body but her mind.  She cast her net over them.

"You slipped her once, Milo."  Victor, fallen onto all fours a step below Milo, panted.  "Stay awake."

Milo felt his sister strain.  It cost her dear, netting them while trying to keep her kid gnashing its teeth at Roberta; Sylvie was netted too, Milo felt, and that was work for Dede to maintain.  Her resources as an operator were stretched to the limit.  Wouldn’t that weaken her things?

Victor struggled to his feet.  “Stay awake.  Stay awake.”

"I'll stay awake, Victor, don't worry.  And so will you.  I feel her things melting."

Dede trained the gun on Victor.  "You bozo, you stay put.  I just want my brother.  Hi, Milo.  Come on up here to Dede, Milo.  God, I missed you, honey.  I love you, Milo.  Do you love me?"

"Tell me about time, Victor," Milo pressed him.  Don’t let her get to you.

"It's got a negative coefficient."  He rasped the words as if they were his last.  "It's not exactly the same as the other dimensions, but yes, it functions, the whole thing, spacetime, just like S⁴.  There's a Banach‑Tarski on it.  Milo . . . "

Dede lashed out again.  She puched Milo's mind halfway back to infancy.  "Dede!  Dede!" he shouted.  "I'm all worked up, Dede."  After all these years it was all he could say to her.  He was back in the nursery again with the cop ladies at the door taking his Dede away.  Come back to yourself.  Stay awake.

"I know you are, baby."  She waved to him, holding the gun as lightly as if it were a rattle.  "Leave that asshole behind and come to Dede, Milo."

It's up to me.  "I just want you to hear me, Dede.  I'm my own person, Dede."  He moved toward her.

"I hear you, Milo.  Of course, you're your own person, Milo honey."  Then to Victor as he tried to pull himself up again: "Stay put, you shit.  You think this thing is a squirt gun?  I'll kill you dead."

Sylvie screamed, "Milo, get away."

Without taking her eyes off Milo and Victor, Dede grabbed Sylvie's arm.  But something distracted her.  Something was sliming into Dede's hair.  It oozed down.  She reached up to poke at it with her gun hand, but Roberta grabbed her wrist.

"Here's your kid, Dede."  It was Roberta who had put the slime there; it dripped down from her hand.  With a thwuck, she pulled her hand out of the goo that was all that remained of Dede's ugly baby, and then she pushed it down into Dede's eyes.  "Like you and the doc, sweetums‑-I didn't do this, but I can't say I'm all choked up over it."

Dede twisted her hand free and fired off two shots.  Roberta fell first.  She slumped against Dede.  Her switchblade tumbled from her hand.  She slid down Dede's side to her knees, then fell flat.  Sylvie wobbled uncertainly for a moment before she collapsed.

"Stay awake.  Stay awake, Milo."  Victor's voice trembled with terror.  But Milo was no longer beside him.  "Milo?"  His eyes fluttered, knees like rubber.  "Milo . . . "

 

ne . . . one . . . one . . .

The doctor dead.  Moon and Stars crying, crawling, then falling, shot.

Stay awake, little man.

Dede says, I love you, Milo.  Do you love me?  And then: I'll kill you dead.

Concentrate, Milo.  Concentrate harder than you have ever concentrated before.  Shashas are dying.  I've got to save them.  But to do that, you need to shift deeper than even Devore could imagine, to a place that Victor could calculate but never see.

Remember Sylvie's old puppet show?  Didn't Stone Monkey jump down into Hell once to erase his name from Yama's register, the register of Death?  That's what you have to do, only not into Hell‑-into S⁴, four‑dimensional space.  There's a Banach‑Tarski on it; Victor said so, and that means that a shasha can shift there. 

But not just any shasha‑-only me . . .

In S⁴, you'd see time, the fourth dimension, right along with the regular three.  Every moment would be like a bug in amber.  You'd see a thing's history all at once: where it came from and where it's going, just the way folks in S³ can see its height, length, and width.

Peer into S⁴, Milo, into the ticking works of the world.  It's the shift of all shifts.  Feel yourself vanish.  Victor is calling, "Milo . . . !"  He looks so funny standing there unsteadily, staring at a spot where you, Milo, no longer are.

Because you are everywhere, Milo.  You shift into S⁴; it's startling how easy it is.  You almost smile.  It's like a polliwog shaking off the last bits of a tail, then crawling onto land and, for the first time, breathing air.

Suddenly there isn't a thing to worry about.  All your terrors are like little frames on a movie reel: Devore dies, Sylvie is shot, Dede says, "I love you, Milo.  Do you love me?"  You see it all, frame by frame, past and future, as if all of time were already finished.  Here in S⁴ all of time is already finished.

But there must be dimensions greater than the fourth.  There must be, for how else could you be shifting deeper still?  You are diving, diving.  Your whole life as Milo is a bubble, one of a trillion bubbles tickling your shasha skin.

Your ears are thunder, your eyes are lightning, and on your tongue are all the words that ever have been spoken or ever will be spoken.  Space and time explode in a searing flash‑-and you find yourself in S⁵, five dimensions.  From here old S⁴ looks like a game of checkers.  You can play with the moments themselves, push them about, lift them through the fifth dimension and plunk them down on another square.  There is Devore's death.  There is Dede slapping Sylvie.  And there are the deaths of your whole shasha family, each death in its moment, like checkers, red and black. 

Now you see it: S⁵, the five-dimensional beast.  The shashas are quivers in its five‑dimensional skin.  Look, Milo.  Try to shift.  Maybe from here in the deeper world you can perform a Banach-Tarski over all of space and time.  Maybe you can reshape something and save your friends' lives.

Stay awake.

Like a puppet who has discovered that he is really the hand inside, you feel yourself to be the vast thing whose quivers turn to shashas.  Can you do one small thing, move one small checker?  Can you give Devore, Roberta, and Sylvie their lives back?  Recede into the earth, Milo.  There.  It takes a Herculean effort.  You've never felt a pain like this one, a pain bigger than your whole world put together could feel, a pain in more dimensions than anybody but you could see.  Hold on.  Stay awake.

I will.

Pull the poisonous fingers back into the earth.

Look: it's happening.  Down in S³ something changes.  Each swallowed soul, gasping and blinking, is disgorged.  Stone Monkey has erased three names from Death's register.

Now you linger over the serpent's tail of Dede's life.  Whatever bend you tweak will deform a dozen others.  Something told you this would be so‑-that's why you left it for last.  Love is simple, whatever people say.  Kindness is simple.  Selflessness is simple‑-the common measure of earth and sky.  But Dede‑-perhaps you could pull straight her convolutions, temper her hardness, prune her like a gnarled tree, but she resists.  A life like Dede's has its own gravity.  Its solution lies deeper than you can shift.

Spent, you can do no more.  You drift back through S⁵, S⁴, S³, toward the everyday world.

Dede still scrapes goo from her forehead and squeezes off two shots.  Roberta falls.  Sylvie wobbles, then slumps down.  Blood streams down Dede's chest.  She stares in horror at Roberta's switchblade, wet with blood, lying at her feet.  She drops the Beretta and touches her neck, then looks at her fingers, all bloody.  The goo becomes a dustball‑-what it used to be‑-soaks up blood, and sticks between Dede's fingers.

Victor turns toward you, but you are gone.  Then, out of nowhere, you are running up the stairs shouting, "Sylvie!  Sylvie!"

 

orry about yourself, little man."  Sylvie winced.  A bullet had grazed her right biceps.  "I'm indestructible, didn't you know?  I'm in the show business."

Roberta lifted herself to her feet hand over hand along the banister.  The cloth on her stomach was stained red.  "Mummy's coming, Lydia.  Mummy's fine.  We're gonna be a goddam family again."

"You'd better sit down."  Victor grasped her forearm and guided her down again; she didn't resist.

Milo kneeled over Sylvie as she propped herself up on one arm.  "I'm okay," she said.

There was a body slumped behind Milo.  Don't turn around.  Don't look.  Don't even think of it‑-what is Dede now?  A molting lizard's tail, broken draggling scales, dead memories?  Don't think of Dede.  Don't turn around.  Don't look.

"Milo, Milo . . . "  Victor stared at him with a vague perplexity.

Milo nodded.  "It was me.  You were right.  I did a Banach-Tarski on S⁴.  Only, I couldn't save Dede."

Victor locked eyes with him.  "Milo, I'm sorry."

At last Milo looked at Dede, at the inert lump of her.  For an instant his ears were thunder and his eyes were lightning again.  He saw through Dede, not to the floor but to all the moments before and after, the checkerboard of S⁴, back to the girl, to the baby, to the seed, and forward to the grass and trees.

Up and down the stairwell, doors opened and echoed.  Footfalls sounded in hallways above and below.  Faces flashed over the banister‑-Roberta gave them all a finger and the evil eye.  "The cops'll be here pretty soon, but don't worry: it's Dede's own bullet in her, and I know how to handle cops.  Hey‑-you think there'll be room for a tattooed lady and her little girl in your grass and trees?"

"Room and to spare," Sylvie said.

A faraway look crossed Milo's face.  "You have no idea."

"You're Milo, huh?" Roberta said.  "You'll be my Lydia's Uncle Milo.  She'll call you daddy, though, at first.  She calls all the guys daddy, big and small.  She don't care what shape."

Sylvie touched Milo's cheek, and he had to hug her.  Victor kneeled close.

"Ah, you take the cake."  Roberta shook her head.  She almost thought they were glowing.  "You grass and trees.  You really take the cake."  She closed her eyes and could hardly help smiling.  A hint of violet light had spilled through her lashes and made her happy.  "Hey, but what about the doc, Milo?  Did Dede's net really kill him?  Or is he off the hook too?  Is he alive?"

Violet, then indigo, spilling around the third floor fire door, coalesced‑-and Louis Devore shambled into the stairwell.  Sylvie stood to embrace him.  "Doc, thank God.  We thought you were finished."

Devore shook himself.  "Not yet."  He narrowed his eyes at Milo.  "You've seen something, haven't you?  Later on, you'll have to tell me all about it, yes?"

His eyes fell on Dede then, and he paused.  "Dead?"

"Dead," said Milo.  "Dead, alive, and everything else.  Like the grass and trees."