Skinner scrubbed at his face with both hands. My getting angry hadn’t scared him. “Well, for your sake, I hope it’s that easy. Jesus, I’m beat. You from around here?”

He spoke as if the question were friendly, the answer inconsequential. But that line of inquiry is one of my least favorite. “No,” I said. And, “Indiana,” I lied.

“Kee-rist. You came up the river? When?”

“Long time ago. I don’t remember it.”

Skinner shook his head. “Last time I passed that way, you had to be careful somebody didn’t eat you. I didn’t mean that far back, though. D’you live around here?”

Now, what was I supposed to make of that? “Yes and no.”

He worried that in his head; I took pleasure in watching him do it. “Let me put it this way. I need someplace to crash tonight. You know anybody might lend me a corner?”

The Snake is a strange set of chemicals. You think it’s worn off long ago; when it really lets you go, you think someone opened a trapdoor under your feet. Suddenly you see the world with the ghastly accuracy you took it to escape from in the first place. In the middle of Mick Skinner’s speech, I fell off the Snake’s Tail. All distortion, illusion, alteration of mood, emptied out and left me beset with a clear head. With it, I recognized several things: First, that I wanted to go home.

Second, that Mick Skinner did not owe me. I owed him. I didn’t know what the man in gray had wanted; but my wrist still ached where he’d had hold of it. I had been given a drug the night before by someone who was not concerned that I have a good time on it. And tonight I might have ended up in something vile, if this bastard hadn’t carried me off like a bandit stealing a chicken. The obligation might have been forced on me, but I couldn’t deny that I had one to Skinner.

Third, that Mick Skinner had just asked a favor of me.

With a strong sense of martyrdom, I accepted all three revelations. “You have any problems with tall buildings?” I asked.

He looked up, startled, shaken out of a focused expression that looked like an exercise in mind control. “Hell, no.”

“Some people do,” I added, hopeful. But of course, none of them were him. No mercy for me tonight. “Come on. I owe you.” I turned and headed up the street, not waiting to see if he followed.

The possibility had crossed my mind, as I spoke, that I was going to commit suicide after all, that I’d chosen my method in showing a stranger where I lived. I didn’t trust Mick Skinner. But like that wolf, there was something straightforward about him, that was part of his alienness. He would do what was smart, what made sense. I just had to keep watching him for signs of hunger. That, at least, was the rationalization.