Where are we? Where are we? Where are we? Where are we? Where are we? Where are we? Where are we? Trying not to listen, he got the corkscrew into the cork, enjoying the feel of it as it jabbed in, the point easing into the softness. It’s the speed, he thought, but he wasn’t sure because she’d blindly groped a couple of the little numbers out of the Ziploc bag in the dark and then downed them dry, hacking away. When the cork broke off, he said fuck, and jammed it down into the bottle, raised the neck, and slugged down several deep gulps—bitter and briny—and then spat the flecks of cork out the window into the night. Paw Paw, Michigan, wine. Bitter and briny.

I said where are we?

It seems we’re at the fish hatchery, he said.

They were.

You sick, Godless fuck, the frail voice spoke from someplace, most likely in his brain. (His standard-issue hallucinatory voice: a tight, Middlewestern twang combined with the intonations of Franklin Roosevelt.)

Shut up, he commanded his voice.

What? she said, squirming in her brown suede jacket with fringe, a white T-shirt stained with sweat. She claimed to have some Indian blood—or he thinks she said something about it when they met on the porch at the clinic, but he’s not sure. Might as well have some blood. Long, dark hair like one, skin like one.

You shut up, he said, jerking to the backseat in a manner that indicated he was hearing his standard-issue voices again.

You’re hearing it again, she said.

Standard issue, he said.

When you kill someone you’re left with a jellylike residue spread across your soul, he remembers some guy telling him at the clinic; they were in a circle, shifting on their haunches, trying to avoid hemorrhoid flare-up from the folding chairs, talking, topping each other, trying like hell to put on a good show before Howard the shrink came in and they’d have to taper off; nothing they said was supposed to be held against them in any court of law, but you never knew because the world was shifty and you could get shafted by anyone in the universe; the guy talking about the jelly had killed several kids, or claimed he had, and buried them in an old dry well, or a cistern, or some such place in a farmstead out in Kansas, or maybe one of the Dakotas, North or South. He told his story with deliberate nonchalance. When you kill someone this jelly stuff coats you and you have to wash it off like skunk smell with a solution of vinegar and salt. If that doesn’t work it has to be burned off with a film of rubbing alcohol. Something like that. Then some frail little skinny twerp arsonist interrupted and launched into his long fantastic voyage of burning and that was all Jimmy had a chance to remember because Janet opened the door and went outside the car, walking along the cement sluiceways of the hatchery, sucked up by the darkness. He took another long guzzle from the wine, opened the door, and stepped out to go find her. Along the huge basins loaded with fish were machines that sold food pellets. At one he stopped, took a quarter out, put it in the slot, and gave a hard twist, churning up a fistful of small pellets into his open palm. He’d walk down the sluiceway with the fish food warm in his hand, find a spot with some light to illuminate the rising fish. They’d come up like a bunch of pigs, a wild writhing show of brute hunger, all those little fish mouths sucking for the pellets, and only so many pellets to go around. He liked that, liked the stupidity of groping. A few got food. The rest could go starve for all he cared. But of course they wouldn’t starve, because being a fish was a good, clean, wholesome life. Some guy came out with a basket of fresh worms, or whatever, and flung them in every afternoon. Feeding time. As far as he could see there weren’t any flood lamps or even any streetlamps to speak of; just the clammy damp stench of fish mingled with the sound of the curling lip of water making its way over the gates. He liked how the glossy top, coated with algae and pollen dust, moved at a leisurely pace until it got to that little razor-blade spot where it roared over the edge. That spot. That’s where he lived all the time. Right fuckin’ there. Where the hell was she? The anger he’d felt earlier—snuffing out the old man—was rising again.