***

On his first day outside, with Ben gently helping him walk on wobbly legs, the thing he felt most was the clarity and cleanness of the outside air. It was a spring morning, with small leaves on the trees by the door of the building; on the grass near the door a thick robin stood attentive, its ear cocked toward the ground. A small white dog scampered as such dogs always had toward a hill and then disappeared from view. There was a warm breeze, riffling his kinky hair.

Arthur walked a few yards, then turned to look at the building he had just left for the first time. It seemed to be made of green stone, with a slightly peaked green roof, and large windows. Except for the green color it could have been a large bank from downtown St. Louis or Denver. There were five other buildings, more or less like it, making a complex, with gray rubbery walkways between them. At a distance two long-haired men walked hand in hand in quiet conversation from one building to another, one of them smoking a cigarette. Arthur’s heart was light, his stomach fluttery with the warmth of the day and the sense of the new. They walked around the building and Arthur stood and looked toward the dark green line of woods in the distance and then they went back inside; he was still too weak to walk anymore. But he could tell that the body he inhabited was healthy and youthful and would soon be strong. There were firm muscles under the brown skin; his arms and legs were straight, well formed; and there were good, springy arches in his feet. His hands were capacious and wise; he could sense the power, the aptitude and heft, of them.

The next day he and Annabel went for a walk, going about a third of the way down the gray path toward the woods before he became too tired to go further.

They said little. For a few moments he took her hand, but he sensed something in her that stiffened when he did so. Somehow, he felt no desire for her, even though she was clearly a lovely woman, and he could not understand why. There was nothing wrong with his sexuality in this new and young body; even in his old, haggard and soft one there had been no problems there. He had always been a strong lover; that alone had kept him going for years against the tide of his old life that had pulled so strongly in other ways toward death. Toward drink, and guilt, and alienation and despair.

But Annabel with her fine breasts and firm round ass did not turn him on. He could not understand it.

Later, in his room, when she was in a chrome-and-leather chair and he was lying against the pillows in bed, he tried talking about it. “If this were a movie,” he said, “we would be falling in love by now.”