One-night stands had their underside of sorrow, but had he ever been more crazily happy, more triumphantly himself, than when Mirabella was blowing him while he sped at ninety miles an hour into the flat Nevada desert, straight into the rising morning sun? There was just space, in the rented tangerine Camaro, for her head to fit between the steering wheel and his sucked-in abdomen. The honeyed sensations in his prick, hard-used the night before, were mixed up with what he imagined her sensations were in that confined space, as the westward-bound cars materialized in the morning glare and flashed past at a combined speed that made the Camaro shudder and suck toward the middle of the highway. The highway was a thin ribbon beginning to show trembling puddles of mirage as the sun settled to baking the miles of lilac-gray vegetation on either side; distant cattle lowered their heads to graze. He knew a twitch of the wheel would annihilate them both and Mirabella knew it too but kept giving him exceedingly welcome sensations, including, with a twist of her head of bleached and teased hair, warm kisses on his naked abdomen, his button-down shirt rumpled and pulled up. Under his caressing fingers her shell of curls felt stiff and sticky, from too much spray. When he glanced down, he saw slant sunlight piercing her hair so the chalky pink of her skull showed through, the defenseless epidermis of it, skin on bone, and he had to fight losing his erection in the suppressed shock of the sight.

This conference was in Las Vegas, in one of the enormous luxury hotels—was it the Sands? or the Stardust?—that have since been pulled down to make way for yet larger ones. Her hair was dyed to a platinum pallor except for a half-inch of hometown-brown roots. Her ears had been double-pierced for two sets of little earrings, in those days an advanced self-mutilation. He took her, in her chamois-colored hotpants and green net stockings, for one of the hookers of the place, but she surprised him by knowing his name and saying, “You invented DigitEyes. My father was a structural engineer in Fresno and when I’d go to his office he used to let me play with the things on the screen. How they turned in space and still stayed together, the volumes described by these, like, wires, all with a few commands on the keys—it was magical.”

“An ingenious artifact of the past, I fear,” Owen told her. “Like the apple corer and the treadle-operated sewing machine.” He must have had a few drinks already; he had been on a panel, and when there was a reception afterwards girls from the hotel circulated among them with plastic glasses of champagne.

“The future builds on the past, and you can too,” she reassured him, Mirabella with her two-tone hair and green fishnets on her legs like a shrunken piece of costume from Sherwood Forest.