“They all will,” Mirabella said. “This is Vegas.”

Las Vegas was her Sherwood Forest, it seemed to his hopped-up head, and it was just as well he forgot to ask her what computer company she worked for. Or if he had, he had forgotten her answer. But she was right: they rented cars right off the main lobby of the hotel—was it the Dunes?—and in his confused, extremely happy state he chose tangerine when it was offered because he figured it wouldn’t get lost in a parking lot. He drove east into the sun, and the cars coming toward him with what seemed electronic speed were black silhouettes, shapes without people, dangerous imperfections in the great clean pane of the morning. After they stopped for coffee and eggs, with the inevitable hash browns, at a place she seemed to know, Mirabella, fed and sleepy and playful, went down into his lap and undid his fly and pulled up his shirt and started to suck him off. He was sensitive enough there it felt like a bite; he asked her to stop but she giggled and didn’t, and it occurred to him that some women did sex because it was what they could do, just as he could write programs for payrolls and pension plans. It was what they were programmed to do, there was no mystery. Why had he ever thought there was a mystery? The sun was getting higher, burning down through her spun-sugar curls, so her scalp felt warm where his free hand lightly massaged it, and the backlit mountains in the distance were giving up more and more of their shadows, and her lips and fingers were doing this sweet tugging number on him, and he came, came upward into the cozy pink darkness beneath all those bobbing shellacked curls as a long side-slatted truck roared by in the opposite direction, and she gagged. He loved her gagging. He would drown her in his jism.