I boiled water in the big pot and poured it over tea in two corrugated coffee cans. I rummaged in the refrigerator and found a bowl of cold rice. I salted it and brought it back with the tea.

“Does she like him at all?” I asked.

“Clancy? She says she always sleeps better after a fuck.”

“She’s hung up on you, ya know.” I set the tea in front of him on the floor. The cans were hot.

“Yeah. There are twenty-one capsules for each of us.”

We gulped the pills by the handful, washed them down with scorching tea. I ate some of the rice. We discussed the feasibility of assuming the classical lotus position while wearing six-guns. After a while we practiced, then fell asleep.

When I knocked on Sam’s door the next morning, Clancy opened it.

“He’s still asleep,” she said.

“What are you doing up here?” I asked. Sniffing his underpants, collecting belly button lint for a love philter. Something disgusting, I was sure.

“He invited me.”

Clancy was smug. Her hair was loose from its bun, kinky. I could smell the horse piss sweating out of her. Behind her, Sam lay on the mattress. An old army blanket was pulled up to his hips so his big square hairy feet stuck out. There was no hair on his pale chest, just dirt. Clancy curled up on the chair, watched him. I noticed she was wearing his old blue-and-gray-striped pajamas, the ones his mother sent from New York.

“Is this what it looks like, Clancy?”

The story at any price. She looked dreamily at me, almost shyly. Her big horsey teeth stuck out of her bony face. Her piggy little eyes gleamed behind the thick lenses of her glasses.

“You knew how I felt about him, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Did it just happen last night?” I asked. “I was here pretty late.”

“It was the most amazing thing. I’d been sleeping for a while. Then I had a dream. I got up to write it down so I could tell Dr. Leiter. I felt so strange, lonely, and yet beautiful. I played the violin for a while. A little Mozart that my father always liked. And I really played so well … but you were making a lot of noise up here. Great thumps like you were falling down, and yelling a lot. Whatever were you doing?”

She was so prim, like Bo-Peep. What had we been doing?

“Kung fu, maybe,” I said.