For a moment, I felt only frustration. Then gradually I began to feel a little sick. Food will come, I thought. Ah, there is food—a canister of bread sticks, or so they appear to be.

I lifted one, smelled it carefully, ascertaining that it was bread, and then I nibbled at it very fast until it was gone. It was like sand to the last tiny bit. Just like the sand of the Gobi Desert which had gotten into my mouth. Sand.

“How do mortals eat this?” I asked.

“More slowly,” said the pretty woman and she let out a little laugh. “You’re not mortal? Which planet are you from?”

“Venus,” I answered, smiling at her again. “The planet of love.”

She was studying me unreservedly, and a little flush came back to her sharp white little cheeks. “Well, stick around until I get off, why don’t you? You can walk me home.”

“I shall definitely do that,” I said. And then the realization of what this could mean settled over me, with the most curious effect. I could bed this woman, perhaps. Ah, yes, that was definitely a possibility as far as she was concerned. My eyes drifted down to the two tiny nipples, protruding so enticingly through the black silk of the dress. Yes, bed her, I thought, and how smooth was the flesh of her neck.

The organ was stirring between my legs. Well, something is working, I mused. But how curiously local was this feeling, this hardening and swelling, and the odd way that it consumed all my thoughts. The need for blood was never local. I stared blankly before me. I did not look down when a plate of Italian spaghetti and meat sauce was set down at my place. The hot fragrance went up my nostrils—moldering cheese, burnt meat, and fat.

Go down, I was saying to the organ. This is not the time yet for that.

Finally I lowered my gaze to the plate. The hunger ground in me as if someone had my intestines in both hands and was wringing them out. Did I remember such a feeling? God knows I had been hungry enough in my mortal life. Hunger was like life itself. But the memory seemed so distant, so unimportant. Slowly I picked up the fork, which I had never used in those times, for we had none—only spoons and knives in our crude world—and I shoved the tines under the mess of wet spaghetti and lifted a heap of it to my mouth.

I knew it was too hot before it touched my tongue, but I didn’t stop quickly enough. I was badly burnt and let the fork drop. Now, this is plain stupidity, I thought, and it was perhaps my fifteenth act of plain stupidity. What must I do to approach things with more intelligence, and patience and calm?

I sat back on the uncomfortable stool, as well as one can do such a thing without tumbling to the floor, and I tried to think.