The story—and the way she told it to me, early in the morning, just before dawn—as both of us slid down from our highs, our bodies tingling and half asleep, turned me on in a grotesque way. To get a hard-on based on a story of abuse seemed wrong, but it happened, and we made love to each other again for the second time, and we both came wildly and lay there for a while until she made her confession.—I made that up, completely. I never knew a drifter named Charlene from Canada, and I certainly wouldn’t sleep with a fuckface reject like that. No way. I just felt like telling a story. I felt like making one up for you. I thought it would be interesting and maybe shed some light on the world. The idea—the angelic girl, the perfect girl, the one with perfect beauty getting all mashed up like that. That’s something I think about a lot. She sat up, smoking a cigarette, stretching her legs out. Dawn was breaking outside. I imagined the light plunging through the trees, and the log trucks roaring past. For a minute I felt like knocking her on the head. I imagined pinning her down and giving her face a go with a meat hammer. But I found it easy to forgive her because the story she made up had sparked wild and fanciful sex. I kissed her and looked into her eyes and noticed that they were sad and didn’t move away from mine (but that’s not what I noticed). What did I notice? I can’t put words to it except to say she had an elegiac sadness there, and an unearned calm, and that something had been stolen from her pupils.—You weren’t making that up, I said.—You couldn’t make that shit up, she responded, holding her voice flat and cold.—So it was all true.—I didn’t say that. I just said you couldn’t make that shit up.