Assamans are aware of it; Hashim isn’t the only dog-eater in town. Nobody gives much of a damn about the contents of a fricassee; Assamans are essentially secular, with few if any dietary prohibitions, and Islam’s habits and customs are rich and varied. Cultures thrive within cultures, with subcultures bubbling beneath every sect and deviation.

I wondered how long the dog with the sly grin, happily pissing away, would press his luck. Long enough to get laid: another yellow dog walks prowlingly down the mucky pike, and, ignoring all the best manuals about foreplay, my friend with the sly grin mounts her.

I watch.

Now what, you might ask, am I doing, an intricately calibrated man like me, watching a pair of decrepit beasts fuck in broad daylight? And what, I counter, what else is there to do? Coproliabad lacks even the homely slob diversions afforded by the most destitute of towns, like watching the streetlights go on (there are no streetlights) or listening to the plumbing (there is no plumbing) or peering at a sitcom (no TV).

And so I watch, a little enviously, the dogs with their eyes of molten wax, the yellow arch of lust, the throbbing, thrusting, connecting rod, red-flaked and marbled white and veiny blue. The colors of the mammal race. I yearn, I yearn for one more day, one more hour of love and lazy exertion in that slow, unstately dance, ancient, eternal, that primal nepenthe beyond drink and drugs.

That’s what pleasured me in Coproliabad, why I had come here in the first place, why I remained, and, ironic joke, why I would die. I look out at her now, eyes damp, throat dry. She stands there, pedestalized in the square, more of an idealization than a woman, extravagantly remote, faintly smiling. Oh, the prodigies we performed, in essence nothing more or less than what those yellow dogs were doing, dancing beast to beast, but with certain nuances, certain eerie refinements, breathtaking explorations.

There is about her a curious quality: no matter what she wears she appears to be undressed. It is the kind of nakedness from which the beholder cannot unglue his eyes. Her face in a ring of shining hair, the freckled button of a nose, the upswept breasts with the chiseled nipples pointing at you, tracking you like the eyes of a Rembrandt. The legs so long they look skinny, the perfect scut. There! Now maybe you have some idea of what Valerie is to me.

And she is somehow greater than the sum of her parts. Indeed, each part has its own summation, and this I find disturbing. The oval eyes are blue-green and deep as a sunless sea, but the total effect is of an oceanic vacancy. The brows so smooth and pale are unwary; what seems to emerge is a kind of unobtrusive numb inertia, as though she were beyond all worldly contest, or ran a subnormal temperature, or didn’t give a damn about anything.