“It’s not easy, getting good jobs where you can drink,” said Raf. “It’s gotta be so dangerous nobody normal would do it, or a job protected by some ferocious union, or so upper tier that nobody’d dare confront you. Like working in the White House, you could guzzle until your guts ignite. Or transportation. Sign onto a train crew, and goodbye sobriety. Smokin’ shit and snorting. It’s a marvel to me any train goes anywhere considering whose hand is on the switch and on the throttle. All aboard, you know?”

Raf’s America.

I drove over to Pru’s place almost every day, and she never exhausted her rantings. She had more than she could ever spend, really.

Lilith and I would get comfy on the cube chairs and listen to Pru’s monologues and watch her perform her large startling life.

“Food!” she was saying now. “I mean, Americans are raised with a two-taste palate—sweet and salty. The only goddamn tastes they’ll abide. No wonder I’m bulimic. Is it all right to tell you that? So what, I urp up after every meal. It’s practically an act of conscience on my behalf. Cheeseburgers, for instance. They’re sweet and salty. Because no one would eat the vile meat unless it was hidden under candied pickles and put on cakelike rolls.”

“Cheeseburger,” Lilith said to me.

“It’s a political duty to vomit that meat. You know fast- food beef’s all imported from rainforests that they’ve clear-cut for grazing land. And U.S. companies send the Third World all the pesticides that’re too evil for use here. And that’s legal. Then after everything’s poisoned—rivers, top- soil, plants—whatever animals are left lying around dying, their flesh gets shipped back and made into cancer patties. I’d sooner drink a bucket of lead.”

As she talked, Pru did dance moves and stretches, grasping and hanging from the rail bar in the studio section of her apartment.

“This machine, my body,” she told us, “is my only means for getting the hell out of this country.”

Her telephone rang twenty and thirty times a day.

She spoke into the receiver with a shy accommodating voice, and could work real-sounding giggles into her replies.

Twice, after phone calls, she asked me to watch Lilith. “Just while I dart out to see this guy,” she said.

“I can’t, I don’t know how,” I told Pru. “She could fall over, crack her head. She could die.”

“No she’d never, Paige. You wouldn’t hurt Lilith. She never needs anything. She’s housebroken and all.”

“I’ll try it,” I said.

Now Pru stood behind an ironing board pressing a black linen jumpsuit, starching it lightly from a pump-spray bottle.

I lay across two cube chairs and lit a cigarette. “Never ever smoke,” I said to Lilith.