The thrumming vibrated throughout his own body now, his skin like that of a drum being pounded in an ancient ceremony. The bed was twirling a bit and his neck and thorax were bucking with need and repulsion. He went away for a little while, mentally. Like the amnesia of great sex, only, when he came back, it was to a woman’s squealing. He had the girl’s neck in his hands and was sucking on it with an intensity that went beyond the realm of the teenage hickey. He was drawing her blood to the surface of her skin, and she was screaming and the other two half-naked girls were trying to pull her away from him.

Bolivar straightened, first chastened by the sight of the florid bruising along her throat—then, remembering his stature as the maypole of this foursome, he asserted his authority.

“Get out!” he railed, and they did, clothes clutched to their bodies, the blond Mindy whimpering and sniffling all the way down the stairs.

Bolivar staggered off the bed and back into his bathroom and his makeup case. He sat down on the leather stool and went through his nightly ministrations. The makeup came off—he knew this because he saw it on the tissues—and yet his flesh looked much the same in the mirror. He rubbed harder, scraping at his cheeks with his fingernail, but nothing more came off. Had the makeup adhered to his skin? Or was he this sick, this gaunt?

He ripped off his shirt and examined himself: white as marble and crisscrossed with greenish veins and purplish blotches of settled blood.

He went to his contact lenses, carefully pinching out the cosmetic gels and depositing them in the fluid baths of their holding cases. He blinked a few times in relief, swiping at his eyes with his fingers, then feeling something weird. He leaned closer to the glass, blinking, examining his own eyes.

The pupils were dead black. Almost as though he still had the lenses in, only more textured now—more real. And—when he blinked, he noticed further activity within the eye. He got right up against the mirror, eyes wide now, almost afraid to close them.

A nictitating membrane had formed underneath his eyelid, a translucent second eyelid closing beneath the outer eyelid, gliding horizontally across the eyeball. Like a filmy cataract eclipsing his black pupil, closing upon his wild and horrified stare.