“Dress codes are coming back strong in Texas schools. So’s hair length,” Pru was saying. “Now, having too-long hair can get you suspended from first grade.”

“Probably Lilith won’t be doing her schooling in Houston,” I said. “Just a guess.”

“It’s the home of textbook adulteration. This is where they censor textbooks for the whole U.S.; the new home of book burning. People want Creationism taught in schools. The mugginess and stinking heat here ruined their brains a long time ago; parboiled these people’s brains to shit. You can’t think in places where there’s no winter. I mean, consider California.”

We lingered in the studio section at the front of the apartment. Here, ceiling-to-floor windows let everything be bathed by sun.

“You definitely make out at that job,” I said.

“This place? Hell no. I fuck a married guy who owns the property so he charges me just utilities. Nothing for the layout.”

“Well, right there, Pru . . .”

“Contempt!” she said.

“O.K., but how much self-contempt is involved?”

“Not one fuckin’ drop.”

She glided into the kitchen area, to a vast refrigerator with stainless-steel doors.

Her shorts—cut high and floppy—enhanced the shape and length of her legs. With the shorts, she wore a blue leotard.

“You want coffee, tea, or some kinda alcoholic drink? I got all politically correct beverage products. And I make my coffee and tea with bottled water, not that radon urine that runs from the tap.”

Everywhere, unframed canvases were mounted on Pru’s walls. They were big as Sunfish sails and featured males in Klan costumes. The Klansmen toted branding irons, dildos, flaming crosses. The eyeholes in their sheets smoldered a fluorescent red. Parts of flayed female carcasses—gray slashed-off limbs and trunks—littered the tar-black foregrounds of the paintings.

“My friend does those,” Pru said. “She’s talentless, of course, but, you know . . .”

Pru uncapped a jug of Polish water. “You realize you can no longer drink the tap water in most of the continental U.S.? Radon’s been in the fuckin’ ground but now they’re admitting it’s in the air and water supply. It’s the cause of most internal cancers.”

“Read the papers much?” I asked.

I had dropped onto a cube of couch in the living-room area.

Lilith wandered.

Pru arrived eventually, serving glasses of dark coffee that swam with chemical-free ice.

She folded up next to me, close on another piece of couch. She said, “The number one best school in Texas is a place where they teach girls to be contestants in beauty pageants. Guyrex it’s called because it’s run by two men.”

“Whose names are Guy and Rex,” I said.

“You fuckin’ bet they are. The worst school, of course, is that fascist-front institution, Texas A and M.”

I asked Lilith what she did with her days.

“Nothing,” Lilith said.