"I don't think I'm ready to sleep just yet."
"I never took to dope for some strange finicky whatever reason."
"It gives me heart-attack dreams."
"Scott uses it mainly to settle him down when he works late on manuscripts or files."
"The operational direction right now is up, not down."
She bounced a little, making him groan, then sat back on her haunches.
"He says you are familiar with a number of substances that alter the biochemistry."
"These are regulated medications. A doctor writes a prescription. All perfectly statutory."
"I definitely feel a stirring under the covers."
"Did I ever tell you what my first wife?"
"Don't think so. What?"
"She used to say I was all dick. I spent so much time locked up and was so tight-lipped about my work and eventually about everything else that there was nothing left but raw sex. And we didn't talk about that either."
"Just did it."
"She didn't like writers. I realized this, stupidly, way too late."
"If you were stupid, what was she? Marrying a writer."
"She expected us to adapt to each other. Women have faith in the mechanics of adjustment. A woman knows how to want something. She'll take chances to secure the future."
"I never think about the future."
"You come from the future," he said quietly.
She took his cigarette and stubbed it out and then put the ashtray on the floor, sliding it toward the foot of the bed.
"What's a heart-attack dream?"
"Panic. Rapid heartbeat. Then I wake up and I'm not sure if the heartbeat was dreamed or real. Not that dreamed isn't real."
"Everything is real."
She shook easily out of the T-shirt, arms unfolding full-length above her head, and Bill almost turned away. Every time she did this, breasts and hair swinging, he felt the shock of seeing something full-measure, almost lost in the force of it. He advanced the action in time to give it stillness and coherence, make it a memory of shape and grace caught unaware. She wouldn't ever know how deep-reaching that painted moment was when her elbows scissored out and she slipped free of the furled shirt and stretched to a figured yawn, making him forget where he was.
"I know it's bad form to ask."
"But what?" she said.
"Does Scott know you come up here?"
They were working him out of his pajama top, one arm at a time, then had to stop while he had a coughing fit.
"Is there anything in this house Scott doesn't know?"
"That's what I thought," he said.
"The mice are his friends. He knows which window gets the best moonlight on any given night on the lunar calendar."
She changed position to lower the bedcovers and undo the drawstring on his pants.
"And it's okay with him," Bill said.
"I don't see what choice. I mean he hasn't shot us yet."
"No, he hasn't."
"And he wouldn't."
"No, he wouldn't, would he?"
"And anyway and anyway and anyway. Didn't he bring me here for you?"
Bill could find no cheery features in this thought. He wanted to believe she'd just found the words tumbling on her tongue, which was how she hit upon much of what she said. But maybe she thought it was true and maybe it was and how interesting for Bill to imagine that he was betraying Scott all along by the other man's design.
His cock was dancing in her hand.
"I think we ought to have our intercourse now."
"Yes, dear," said Bill.
She went to the chest across the room and took a small package out of the middle drawer. She removed a condom and came back to the bed, straddling Bill's thighs, and began to outfit him with the device.
"Who are you protecting, you or me?"
"It's just the norm today."
He saw how absorbed she was in the task, dainty-fingered and determined to be expert, like a solemn child dressing a doll.
Scott stood looking around the loft apartment. Columns extended the length of the room. There was a broad plastic sheet slung under the leaky skylight. Brita walked around switching on lights. A small kitchen and dining area and a half-hidden recess of files and shelves. He followed along behind her, turning two lights off. A sofa and some chairs in a cluster. Then a darkroom and printing room with black curtains over the doors. Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word "loomed" in all its prolonged and impending force.
"I will make tea for the travelers."
"Now I finally feel I've seen New York inside and out, just standing here in this space and looking through the window."
"When it rains out, it also rains in."
"Brita, despite whatever inconvenience."
"It's small as these places go. But I can't afford it anymore. And I have to look at the million-storey towers."
"One has an antenna."
"The male."
"Tea is perfect, thank you."
In the kitchen she took things out of cabinets and drawers, an object at a time, feeling as though she'd been away for a month, six weeks, a sense of home folding over her now. These cups and spoons made her feel intact again, reclaimed her from the jet trails, the physics of being in transit. She was so weary she could hear it, a ringing in the bones, and she had to keep reminding herself she'd been gone for less than two days. Scott stood at a table across the room looking at strewn magazines and commenting more or less uncontrollably.
The elevator clanked through the building, the old green iron gate smashing and rattling in the night.
They drank their tea.
"What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes."
"You like to overstate."
"I overstate things to stay alive. This is the point of New York. I completely love and trust this city but I know the moment I stop being angry I'm finished forever."
Scott said, "I used to eat alone. It made me ashamed, having no one to eat with. But not only alone-standing up. This is one of the haunting secrets of our time, that we are willing to eat standing up. I used to stand because it's more anonymous, it suited the way I felt about being in the city. Hundreds of thousands of people eating alone. They eat alone, they walk alone, they talk to themselves in the street in profound and troubled monologues like saints in the depths of temptation."
"I'm getting very sleepy," Brita said.
"I don't want to get back in the car right now."
"You're the driver, Scott."
"I don't think I can drive another fifteen feet."
He got up and turned off another light.
Sirens sounding to the east.
Then he sat near her on the sofa. He leaned toward her and touched the back of his hand to her cheek. She watched a mouse run up the face of a window and disappear. She had a theory the sirens drove them mad.
She said, "In some places where you eat standing up you are forced to look directly into a mirror. This is total control of the person's responses, like a consumer prison. And the mirror is literally inches away so you can hardly put the food in your mouth without hitting into it."
"The mirror is for safety, for protection. You use it to hide. You're totally alone in the foreground but you're also part of the swarm, the shifting jelly of heads looming over your little face. Bill doesn't understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger. The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage. The conversion of the white-skinned by the dark. Every revolutionary idea involves danger and reversal. I know all the drawbacks of the Moon system but in theory it is brave and visionary. Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad. We can't survive by needing more, wanting more, standing out, grabbing all we can."