Sex doesn’t interest Irene. The sharp end of a needle, the cool glass tube of a pipe. That’s all she wants to take in.

She doesn’t want me to go without, though. She does what she can. She sets up dates. It’s hard for me to get anyone on my own. My hygiene is casual and I have very little money, and I’m a little on the heavy side. These are not pluses with a lot of women.

So Irene picks up this or that woman—on the street, or outside one of the shelters. One time at the library. She promises drugs and a little party, and brings my date to the hotel above the Indian buffet and I meet them there. We don’t bring a date home afterward. She shouldn’t really know where we live.

The dates are all kinds of women. Once in a while they are even young and sort of pretty or you can see they were once pretty, but mostly not. It doesn’t really matter. They all come with the same basic equipment and soon the three of us are high and in bed. Sometimes my date has even nodded off. Irene does this or that, she knows what it takes to make me hard and then she helps me in. This is not easy for me on my own. I am too big that way for most women, but Irene helps them manage it, and then I’m in for as long as it takes. If my date doesn’t like this or that, whatever, Irene slaps her around a little to shut her up. That’s as rough as it gets.

These outings are a nice part of our relationship. Something we can do together. It gets us out of the house.

puebla

Outside, the heat is brutal, doing a transparent shimmy above the highway asphalt. Inside the car, a new silver-blue Passat, Cate and her father are privileged in air that is dry and chilled, as though they are transporting something valuable and unstable. Infant lemurs. A replacement heart.

Alan, Cate’s father, plays a jazzy game with the stick shift; the car is always in the perfect gear. When she was twelve and he was teaching her to drive, he showed her how to shift without using the clutch, that if you really pay attention, like a safecracker, you can feel when one gear is perfectly aligned with the next and just slip from third to fourth, then back down to third.

“Want to give it a try?” he says, pulling off, onto the sandy shoulder.