On all fours beneath him, she was stuck as in some doghouse. His right arm crooked just under her neck. Both of them frozen, as in some superstitious form of visual prevention. Stay still perfectly, you’ll disappear. And both, I knew, were still too far into the force of it to quite pull back, to quite snap out just yet.

Though light stayed hard on them, I saw his lower body unstopped, helpless as an animal, getting in a few last good ones.

Okay, this seems to be happening.

Okay.

I always figured that Robert fucking would appear to be some hovering archangel. I’d always pictured him floating in this bed above me, “a human form” made of light like spun fiberglass, no, white cotton candy. But never resembling the beast we all of us are. Not my darling. But Robert, drunk, appeared just another Bacon raptor. He looked made only of the male, only all of beef.

Weight pivoted on one vexed arm, his face hung listless, blood-filled, spongy, ruddy as a cow udder.

“You started playing without me.” They, blinking, still engaged, tried so hard to contort themselves invisible. “—Since when? Since … in the beginning?”

How must my own face look right now?

They both acted as if, being a single two-backed cretinbeast, by remaining deaf, they could make me disappear the fastest. I dearly wanted to. Be dead. I still held my manuscript but it had somehow rolled itself into my single weapon.

I recalled my father’s face, how huge and raw it looked when he’d nearly finished whipping me, when first guilt set in for the jolt my little barebutt dance had given him. Their horror had not yet fully overtaken their desire. It had been blighted at the peak of being sated. The sight of them, all sweated into each other and right down on the floor without a quilt or towel, and his braced arm (the spotted left one) filthy from our city’s grime, and her below and still engaged, still hooked, the sight seemed to roll on at a length unendurable.

I saw their faces, invisible to each other, run through so many separate emotions for me; different explanations, his plain contempt, her honest excuses; a dozen changes pulsed across both sets of liverish features. I moved to reach for the lamp, to put it all out. Was then her voice said to me, regaining a certainty sufficient to the moment, said calmly to me while his whole beautiful birthmarked rose-colored stake was still in up her back.

“Hartley, baby, listen …”

I pointed. And the word that belted out of me was like some glum Old Testament prophet’s: “Baaaaaddddddd!” Instead of rushing out, I ran at, past them, helpless, joined. I grabbed the only water that might douse them right, I hoisted the wobbly weight of an aquarium and sloshed its full wet across them, gasping. The soaked piano sounded as the boat struck keyboard. Titanic bounced against broom closet and promptly failed to shatter. That alone seemed right.