It works both ways.

Star fuckers.

*

Lomita was lying in bed in a state of fear.

Abject fear: she felt she wanted to take her own life although the disease inside her gave her the comfort that was not going to be necessary. That was going to be done for her: she was going to be taken care of.

God was looking after her, and preparing to welcome her. She stopped with the horror that what if he wasn’t. What if he was not going to welcome her. She had committed a murder; a cold-blooded, unpremeditated act, but an impulsive act to save the life of another.

Her sweat was soaking the sheets, she reached to press the bell for some water and to be made dry: the sweat was making her shiver.

She was cold.

She didn’t press the bell.

She fell asleep, then woke and slept and woke. No pleasure in either state, she was always waiting for the knock on the door. How long would it be? How long would she be alive and have to wait?

She was starting to hallucinate in her fever.

A companion, a lover, wearing a white dress, walking down an aisle, with somebody wanting her through love, doing the things she had never done as a woman, as a human being, having a child, carrying it in her arms, breastfeeding. Loving with physical pleasure the body of Ever, enjoying all the things that happened to a man and a woman that she never enjoyed. The physical pleasure that only came to exist for a passing minute in an entire lifetime, once, in a passing minute, in a shower.

Sharing a life free of guilt about her past; just an emotional relaxed freedom. No abuse.

But never was she infused with any ingratitude or regret.

To her it was always the way it had been, the no-alternative never permitted a regret, because like Ever there was nothing to compare the journey of her soul with anything.

These were objective hallucinations: her in positions of life she had never been in.

It was like viewing another person on a screen.

A silver one.

*

This was her state as Ever walked into the room.

The next morning. He had changed into his newly acquired forty-eight pesos T-shirt from La Comer Supermarket in a dark shade of grey, depositing the Toyota F J in the parking lot, carrying a little bunch of red fishhook cactus flowers, picked from the roadside, with a smile creasing his face out of a love that he beamed into the room. Manita was already there; Guillermo was due in one hour. They sat passing the idle time of day with talk of weather and whales but nothing medical, nothing about her condition. No questions were asked: it was an inevitability.

Ever could smell that smell that he had only smelt once before: not her unique smell, but the one he had smelt on himself.