Dorr lights another cigarette, and Mike sees his reflection again . . .I went with the tribe. Everyone was stoned. Fuck the rice, just smoke all day. And there was a girl, thirteen, fourteen, barely a woman. And I loved her, told her that she could leave the tribe, the People’s Army, ha, if she wanted to. And I fucked her, and I stayed for months, working, writing a story. And of course she became pregnant and got herself married while she still could, which was good and lucky. And I fucked her again and again outside in the fields . . .

Dorr is picking and ripping the leather from the ragged chair with his fingernails . . .What about that, yes? And the child was born just close enough for everyone to believe it was the husband’s baby, and yellow enough so it wasn’t obviously mine. Harrison was with me by then, for the story, and we had become everyone’s friend with cigarettes and bubble gum and had smoked dope with them in the very dew of that morning. And as soon as the baby was born and they saw it was a girl, my girl, they took her and her mother was delirious with pain, even through the opium, sitting on a woven chair with her legs spread wide and the midwife holding her down, because she knew. And I knew and she is screaming at me to stop them. But there was no place for a girl, and so they took her and we followed the man who thought he was the father and his own father into the very field where I had fucked that baby into existence, and I watched my baby girl kicking out as they dug a hole in the brown dirt and covered her up.

“I hope you didn’t come expecting to get high,” Dorr says now.

Mike just shakes his head.

“I wasn’t offering. So don’t go presuming. Unless you’ve got something to trade.”

The dog barks short and loud at her litter. She has birthed the last. Puppies squirm on the floor, in their sacs, like disconnected segments of a centipede. The mother stands away, eyeing them suspiciously, tongue out, panting. Dorr is transfixed, watching to see what she will do. Whether she will chew any of the pups out into life, or let them die, or eat one of them as new mothers do sometimes. Or what.

“I have to be going,” says Mike, rising carefully.

“And you know, the girl got out,” he says almost laughing, “lives here now, up the road.” Dorr doesn’t take his eyes off the dog. “What are you going to tell Elliot?”

Mike’s throat sticks, and Dorr speaks again before Mike can say anything.

“Will you give me your pack of cigarettes?”