I woke of my own volition, more or less, at nine in the morning. From the feel of it, someone was tearing my brain tissue down the middle like a piece of paper, and my mouth tasted like an old felt hat. I decided that I must have been drinking, but I couldn’t remember having any fun. I lowered my feet carefully to the floor and sat up. I’d once put the stub of a candle in a jacket pocket and forgotten it was there; when I found it a month later, it was covered with lint and hair and all the unidentifiable stuff that makes its way to the bottom of a pocket. According to my stomach, I had swallowed something remarkably like that candle. I lay back down.

The sight of Sunny Rico’s flask on the bedside table jump-started my memory. Oh boy, oh boy. And we were to start all over again at noon. I had three hours in which to do something about the state I was in.

This time I managed to get all the way to my feet and across the room to the kitchen, where I worked the pump and stuck my head under it. Then I drank a lot of water, stumbled down the hall to the second floor toilet, and returned feeling, if not better, at least different. And hungry, in spite of the candle wax in my stomach. Well, of course; Rico had spoiled my appetite for dinner at the Hard Luck, and after that things had been a little busy. I knew what I’d find, but I looked anyway. In the bread box, one heel of whole-grain, rigid as ceramic tile. In the cupboard, a half-tin of cocoa, a box of peppercorns, and the dregs of a bottle of soy sauce. In the icebox, the last three bottles of homebrew out of the dozen Hawk had given me for finding him a copy of Pinkwater’s Fat Men from Space. For a moment, I thought about one of those—carbohydrates, after all—but only for a moment.

Well, I had told Tick-Tick I’d stop by today. I hadn’t meant it to be quite so short a distance into today, but if she wasn’t up yet, I knew I could trust her to tell me to go away. I pulled on a T-shirt and cutoffs, combed my hair with my fingers, grabbed my sunglasses, and headed downstairs to the street.