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+"It was a lovely service doncha think?"
+
+Claire felt a little vomit start to migrate up her throat, but she just smiled at her aunt and nodded. Claire hadn't been at the funeral. True, her body had stood between Sil and her Aunt, but she never heard the words and just watched dumbly as everyone dropped a handful of dirt down a whole that contained some shattered remnants of her grandmother that the fire department had managed to salvage from the river a full twnety two miles from the canyon where her car was parked. Claire had spent most of the brief cemermony watching the traffic on N. Oracle speeding along as usual. Afterward everyone retreated back to their cars and as Jimmy drove them toward the foothills for the reception at her Aunt's house Claire watched a group of hotair balloons begin to slowly lift off from the small airfield on the outskirts of town. She did her time making rounds taking in condolances from well-meaning family members she knew would drive home commenting on the tattoo on her wrist, the small diamond stud in her nose, the unkept wildness of her hair, the fact that she had not one, but two men with her, the fact that she hadn't been to church since the eighth grade when James Becker tried to rape her bdhind the chapel and she broke his nose with a brick, the later detail seemingly the ony one anyone cared to remember, she smiled but she sould see the clucking disapproaval in her both of her aunts and the slightly creepy leering grin of their husbands, one of whom had tried to kiss her at his own wedding three years ago.
+
+As always Claire used cigarettes to escape her family. She slipped outside at the earliest possible moment and sat down on the patio table to watch her young cousin. He marched up to her a plfastic fireman's hat wildly cockeyed on his head and strangely out of place with the suit he still had on. "How are you Darren?"
+
+He shrugged and looked at her shyly. "You have a picture on your arm."
+
+"Yes I do Darren. It's called a tattoo, it's ink embedded...
+
+"What's it a picture of?"
+
+Claire pulled up her sleeve so he could see the whole tattoo. "It's all the signs of the Zodiac in a circle... When were you born Darren? March?"
+
+He nodded but kept staring at her arm. "This is your symbol right here." She pointed to Aries, which he leaned in to scrutinize closer. "You're an Aries. That means your symbol is the the Bull. Very strong."
+
+He seemed please by this notion and Claire neglected to add that he would very likely grow up constantly falling in and out of love, with a string of trailor park ex-wives spreading in his wake.
+
+"Which one are you?"
+
+"I'm Sagitarious, this on here, the little hook like symbol."
+
+"Why do you have a tattoo?"
+
+She smiled. I got drunk once and it seemed like a good idea was Claire reasoned, not the appropriate response to give a five year old, but somehow she had never come up with better one. "Why do you have a nose?"
+
+He laughed, "I dunno, everyone has a nose... do I have a tattoo?"
+
+She giggled and raised his shirt and begin to tickle him, "I don't know let's see..."
+
+He squealed and ran away, circling back around, but staying just out of arms reach. "I don't have a tattoo," he said finally.
+
+"No you don't. But you can get one some day if you want." Claire tried to picture her Aunt's face when Darren would relay this bit of information.
+
+"Are you on drugs?"
+
+"What?" Claire snapped around and grabbed him by the arm. "Who told you that?"
+
+"No one. I just heard my mommy say it to daddy this morning."
+
+"Oh she did did she? Claire sat back in the chair and pulled Darren up on her lap and wrapped her arms around him. "And what else did your mommy say this morning?"
+
+"About you? I think she said "You're anxious."
+
+"Do you even know what anxious means?"
+
+"Momma said you're anxious cause you want to know bout the hertiance."
+
+"How old are you Darren?"
+
+"I'll be six soon."
+
+"And your mother told you I was nervous about an inheritance..."
+
+"No she said anxious."
+
+"Right. Anxious. Because..."
+
+"Because you won't be getting any money."
+
+Darren's mother was looking out at Claire from behind the sliding glass door, she waved from behind the glass, comfortable in her air conditioned cocoon; Claire smiled and waved back stifling the urge to mouth bitch at her. Her aunt openned the door and beckoned Darren inside. He climbed off of Claire and wandered toward the door. Claire took another sip of the cheap boxed chardonney she had poured earlier, it tasted a bit like peach juice, but it was slowly having the desired effect. She stood up and wandered through the yard and out into the river gully running just beyond the back fence. There was a trail leading down in the general direction of the river and Claire followed it walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes and scorpions. A breeze had begun almost as soon as the sun sunk behind the Catalina Mountains, not strong enough to bend the stiff twiggy branches of desert trees, it moved though in whispers, puffs of air brushing against her cheek.  She thought of airports, hospitals, departure points, the shuffling of human feet moving in and out of rooms like last quiet sighs of breath. Claire watched the river and wondered vaguely what its name actually meant. It seemed odd to her that she had lived next to or around the Rialto River for so many years without ever wondering what the word meant. She felt as if she were herself a desert only recently become aware that someone had flung a river down on her. Or with desert ambivalence she had always had a river running around her but had simply never noticed it. What then does the desert make of the river? As she studied the scene that was cascading down the slope and away from the organization of the manicured patio and yard, she decided that the desert seemed to ignore the river entirely. The river was starting to flood again, somewhere far upstream three days rain had been feeding until it swelled like a Christmas ham, but ten yards on either side and it was sand again. Stagnant pink sand interspersed with prickly plants and clumps of sagebrush and Mesquite trees, ironwood her grandfather called it. The sand didn't care for the water, didn't hold onto it, didn't even try, just let the water flow right on over it, puddle and collect, run off and feed into the river. Farther in the distance there were the mountains ringing the desert, keeping watch over it, making sure it behaved in some general way. 
+
+She could see a figure emerge from the house and begin to slowly pick its way through the cacti and palo verde up the sloop toward the rock where Claire sit. It wasn't until he was halfway to her that she recognized Jimmy. He climbed up on the rock, but didn't say anything. 
+
+She leaved her head on his shoulder. "Can I ask you a question Jimmy? It's a stupid question, but I read it in a magazine yesterday and I can't stop thinking about."
+
+"Shoot."
+
+"If you were going to do something for the sole purpose of getting in the Guiness book of world records what would it be?"
+
+Jimmy laughed. "That's easy. Land speed record. currently held by my uncle who drove a rocket powered car at 457 mph across a dry lake in Nevada."
+
+"Seriously? I mean your uncle is really in the Guiness Book of world records?"
+
+"Seriously."
+
+"Huh."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I would skydive from the stratosphere like that guy did a couple years ago, only, obviously, I'd have to start higher."
+
+"Yes you would. Did you go through an astronaut phase when you were younger?"
+
+"Not really. Maybe. I don't remember." She took out another cigarette and lit it. Jimmy snagged it from her lips and took a drag. She watched him awkwardly puff out the smoke. "You know what I read once? The first thing an astronaut said the first time he orbited the moon... He said 'well, it's pretty gray.' It's pretty gray, Jimmy. It's pretty fucking gray. This asshole is the first fucking human to see the moon close up, to orbit around it in it's own gravity and he says it's pretty fucking gray. Fuck him." 
+
+"He had an impoverished imagination."
+
+Her head snapped up from where it had been resting on her knee. "Life is a collision of imagination and observation, Jimmy, and he fucking failed."
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"No Jimmy. He failed. He was one of about thirty people that have seen the moon up close and all he got out of it was that it's gray. He fucking failed."
+
+"You're assuming that gray meant nothing to him, but what if his mother had gray eyes and that was the one memory that came back to him when he was overwhelmed by being that close to the moon?"
+
+She rested her cheek on her knee again and rocked back and forth for a minute before speaking. "You're sweet Jimmy. You always defend people and want to think the best about them. I love you for that. In spite of the fact that deep down you're cynical too. But you try and that's what I love about you." 
+
+Neither of them said anything for a while. The watched the balloons drift slowly across the sky. 
+
+"Are you okay?" he asked finally.
+
+"I think so. I mean she basically told me she was going to do it. I did my crying a few days ago, now..." She stopped. "I can't cry around them for some reason."
+
+"Yeah."
+
+"You know I once cried so hard I swallowed a moth." She giggled. "I was supposed to go out with this guy. This was junior high. Maybe high school. No junior high. Anyway we were supposed to ride our bikes to the park in the evening and he never showed up and I waited and waited. I was so in love with this guy. So at about 10 o'clock I'm out on the porch-sobbing... You know those huffing snorting kind of sobs that women make when they're really upset? Hyperventilating sobs... anyway, I was chewing gum. I always used to chew gum. So I'm in the rocking chair sobbing, arms around my knees... this is so pathetic... I inhaled a moth somehow and before I realized it I chewed him right into my gum. It was crackly at first, but then more like chewing feathers. I remember running in to tell my grandmoter I had eaten a moth... I can't believe she didn't laugh at me." Claire smiled and looked a Jimmy's brown eyes shielded from the sun by a red socks hat. "I had a lot of disturbing, uh, incidents in childhood. I used to kidnap cats when I was little."
+
+"Kidnap cats?"
+
+"Gamma wouldn't let me have a cat. She actually told me years later that she she didn't want the cat because she didn't want to become an old lady with cats. I mean after the plane went down... I dunno. She could occasionaly be quite vain. I think she felt awkward raising me at her age." Claire stopped. Jimmy could feel her body shudder against his. He pictured her face distorting, trying to swallow back tears like she had the night before.
+
+"Anyway," She sniffed and drew herself up laughing softly. "I would go out and steal them from neighbors... At first I just petted them you know. Then I got one to follow me home. I felt like he loved me more than his owners and I cried when Gamma took him home. I was probably seven or eight when this happened. After that I went farther from home, several blocks away where I knew Gamma wouldn't know whose cat it was and I would have to post signs, found: cat. That sort of thing so, you know, I would have the cat for longer."
+
+"Right."
+
+"But these cats wouldn't follow me home. Too far I guess. So I would save my lunch money and on the way home from school I'd stop at Circle K and buy myself a slushy and Moon Pie and can of cat food. Then I'd ride my bike past my house, way back into the subdivision and lure cats home by dragging the cat food on a string behind my bike. One time I pulled into my driveway with three cats running behind me."
+
+"You were a cat rustler." This drew a laugh.
+
+"Yeah. I guess I was. One time, after I posted a bunch of found cat signs and stuff this old lady came to our house to pick up her cat and she was so excited that I had found her cat she gave me twenty dollars -- which was a lot of money at that age -- and bells went off in my head. So then I started kidnapping the cats for profit. I mean, when I could. I tried to pick cats that looked pampered or that were sitting in front of old lady houses. You know lots of papers collecting on the porch. Beat up seventies sedans. Maybe that was me subconsciously realizing my grandmother's fears or something. Anyway I was pretty good at casing a block and finding the old lady cats. When they would come over I'd put on a cute little dress and smile and play dumb and they would give me a reward. One month I made $200. That's when my Gamma caught on."
+
+"What'd she do?"
+
+"Bought me a cat."
+
+"Smart."
+
+"Yeah, but by then I didn't want one." They sat in silence again. The balloons were higher now. AT some length Claire collapsed onto Jimmy's shoulder and sighed deeply sliding down so that her head was on his chest. "My family thinks I'm on drugs."
+
+"Of course you're on drugs, you have a tattoo." Jimmy smiled at her and she through her arms around him suddenly punching him softly in the back. "What? your aunt already grilled Sil and I about it. Plus Claire, you do take drugs twice a week."
+
+"That's different. And besides my aunt's been popping Somas since her car accident, that was two fucking years ago and she still acts like it's no big deal, but get a tattoo... Jesus. You know her own mother couldn't stand her?" 
+
+"I'm sure that's not true..."
+
+"Wait until the executor reads the will... Oh and that's another thing, they're all gonna hate me... Gamma gave me everything, I asked her not to, I even threated to give it all to my aunt if she did, but she said it was for me."
+
+"So you have a house now and everything?"
+
+"I guess so, yeah. I don't want it though, I can't live there without her. It would be weird. Wrong. Why do I need it? I already have everything from my parents..." She turned on her back and let her head rest in his lap. She looked up at him; his eyes were shadowed by a Red Sox hat that Sil had given him. His lips were red and seemed suddenly incredably close. She drew in a breathe, closed her eyes and slowly lifting her head until her own lips pressed against his softly. 
+
+When they returned to the house Sil was in the backyard engaged in some sort of complex war-like game of super soaker mayhem with Darren. Sil stood in the middle of the yard with a super soaker in each hand looking not unlike the cover of Rambo firing dual streams of water at Darren who also had two super soakers, but was crouched behind a cactus biding his time. When Sil's streams fell short darren was up in a nearly identical fashion, hosing Sil down. Sil made no effort to dodge out of the way instead he resolutely pumped the super soakers building the pressure back up. Claire noted from the look of Sil's suit this had been going on for some time. She and Jimmy stepped through the gate just as Sil rose up, super soakers recharged. He half turned and faced both barrels toward them, a wicked grin crosed his face. She and jimmy both froze. "Don't even think about Sil," Claire warned. "I will not be laighing."
+
+"This is Armani man," Jimmy added.
+
+"Okay. Darren, the war is over, you win." Sil walked over to the table and laid down the guns. Darren tore about the yard in circles, "I win! I win I win I win!"
+
+Sil stripped off his jacket and wrung it dry. "Not Armani," he said drily. He fished a pack of cigarette out of the coat pocket and lit one. "So Claire... Do you know a friend of your grandmother's named Ambrose?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Hmmph. Neither does anybody else here. Well. When we were leaving the cemetery, this man came up to me, greeted me by name and asked me to give you this." Sil produced a slightly soggy business card and handed it to Claire.
+
+She looked down at the tattered peice of paper. "There was a finely drawn image of two fingers about to grasp the tail of a dragonfly. To the left of the drawing was a partially smeared scrawl of handwriting that read: "Call me." Claire turned the card over and read a local number. "Did he say what this was about?"
+
+Sil took a drag and eyed her suspiciously, she blushed slightly under his gaze. "No. He just said he was an old friend of your grandmother's and that he wanted you to get in touch with him as soon as possible." Sil sat down in a patio chair. "At the time I didn't think much of it, but then when I was inside talking to your aunt about it... the fat one, what's her name again?"
+
+"Debbi."
+
+"Right, Debbi. Anyway I was asking her if she knew if your grandmother had any friends by that name and it suddenly occurred to me that he had greeted me by name. Granted a lot of people know my name from the bar, but I didn't recognize this guy and all the sudden it creeped me out. I dunno, maybe he just overheard someone else say my name or something... he was at the funeral. He stood in the back opposite us. I vaguely remember him. Probably he just heard you call my name... Anyway, I relayed the message. My work here is done."
+
+"Yeah. Thanks." Claire stuffed the card in her pocket and went inside. Jimmy sat down next to Sil and bummed a drag.
+
+"So."
+
+"So."
+
+"Oh fuck off man. I was out here chasing that little monster with super soakers for the last half hour. That hill might seem like it's far away, but it isn't."
+
+"What do you want me to say?"
+
+"That it wasn't what it looked like."
+
+"What if it was?"
+
+"Then you need to pay your tab."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Your tab at the bar. Pay it."
+
+"Fuck you Sil. It wasn't me."
+
+"Funny. It sure looked like you."
+
+"Whatever man. It could just as easily have been you if you'd wandered up there."
+
+"Mmhmm. But I didn't."
+
+"And so what? no one else can either?"
+
+"What happened to objectivity?"
+
+"Is that what this is about?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well."
+
+"All right. Sorry. It's none of my business."
+
+"Then why..."
+
+"Forget it."
+
+"She'll go home with you anyway."
+
+Sil sniffed sarcastically.
+
+The glass door slid open and Claire emerged with another drink in hand. "What are you talking about?"
+
+"Jimmy's love life," Sil chuckled.
+
+"Oh." Claire turned crimson and sat down next to Sil. 
+
+"So he told you?"
+
+"Told me what?" Sil asked cautiously.
+
+Claire looked back and forth at them suspiciously. She sighed. "Jimmy's heart belongs to an online porn star." Claire collapsed in giggles which she tried to contain in the harsh glare of Jimmy's scowl.
+
+"She is not a porn star. And she has a name." It was Jimmy's turn to blush.
+
+"Oh yes, her name Sil, is Haley Wilde -- wild with an e mind you," Chloe giggled again momentarily. "So tell us Jimmy," Claire straightened her back with an audible popping noise, "does she or does she not earn a living by video taping herself having sex and then posting those videos on web?"
+
+"She does, but she only has sex with her boyfriend..."
+
+"Whom she claims to be much in love with..."
+
+'...and other girls."
+
+"And other girls"
+
+Sil's eyebrows shot up his forehead accenting the fact that a good half inch of the left one was missing, "wait, you're in love with a lesbian who loves her boyfriend?" 
+
+"Yeah."
+
+"Shit."
+
+"Shit is right." Chloe drained her glass and looked at Jimmy cockeyed. "Jimmy you're an idiot and I mean that in the best way possible." She reached over and grabbed Sil's drink. "Oh and the best part is she has a tattoo of dolphin where her pubes should be."
+
+"Lasers. Problem solved." Jimmy waved his hand.
+
+"You're better off learning to love it." Sil snatched his glass back from Claire and in spite of it's obvious emptiness, tipped it toward his mouth.
+
+"I kind of already have," Jimmy smiled sheepishly.
+
+Night drew up like the pony express, expected on time. Claire's relatives slowly trickled out the sliding glass door to reiterate their condolances and drive back to their lives, clucking along the way. As Jimmy predicted, Claire got out of the car at Sil's house. Sil stood in the drive watching the Falcon disappear in a cloud of dust down River road. Claire had already gone inside. Sil walked up to the porch and sat down in the dilapidated rocking chair left  behind by the previous tenant. After a while Claire's head poked out the door and she informed him that she was taking a shower and going to bed. He nodded. The bats were darting across the glowing, city-lit horizen. He heard the water running. Sil stood and walked in to the kitchen to retreive a bottle of Stags Leap Petite Syrah he had been saving for some time. He returned to the parch and sat down with the corkscrew. He popped the cork and took a draw from the bottle.
+
+After a while Claire came outside wrapped in Sil's robe. She sat down on his lap and picked up the bottle. She tilted her head back and let the wine run freely down her throat. Sil watched her face. She set the bottle back down on the porch.
+
+"Was Jimmy serious about that girl?"
+
+"What? The porn star? Yeah pretty serious. He made me watch a few videos and asked what I thought. It was weird, like when you meet someone's new girlfriend only this was just a girl on a screen talking dirty, but not really dirty, more like cutsy dirty. And touching herself. It faded out as she was licking her fingers."
+
+"Hmm." Sil shrugged. "Does she seem like a good person?"
+
+"Well... I must admit there is something about her... I mean I haven't seen a lot of pornography, but she doesn't strike me as someone cut out for it, which probably means she's a decent person. And she's goregous. But I mean, she's trying to internet sex star  and she already has a boyfriend -- can you really be in love with someone that unattainable?"
+
+"Love doesn't seem to abide hopelessness." Sil reached down and started to take a pull from the bottle of wine, but Claire stopped him and pulled the bottle from his hands. She cupped bother her hands around Sil's stubble covered cheeks. She held his face like that for a moment and then shifted her wieght on his legs and let go of his face. He reached down and picked up the bottle again. She sighed. "I'm sorry Sil. I don't know why I kissed him..."
+
+"How did..."
+
+"Sil. You don't exactly have a poker face. Well, actually your face is pretty good, but your eyes give you away." She lay back against him and nuzzled her head under his chin. "It doesn't matter... his lips were just there... I needed to feel them, to feel something..." Her voice trailed off into the stoic stillness of the desert night. They watched a small lightning storm on the horizen, thin little bolts zig-zaged down into the sodium glow of the city. Sil thought about something his uncle had once said about lightning being six times hotter than the surface of the sun and yet generally less than three-eights of an inch thick. 
+
+Later Claire stood up and lightly kissed his cheek, lingering for a moment to feel the roughness of his beard against her own skin. And then she stood and disappeared inside. After a while Sil rose drunkenly from the chair and stretched his back. He leaned down to grab the bottle of wine and stumbled toward the grassy desert unzipping his fly as he walked. Leaning his head back to swig from the bottle he paused to stare at the particles of starlight sneaking through the bruised clouds. He began to piss on the grassy desert sand, thinking that you adjust your breath to the one who breathes beside you. You lie very close, still and alone.
+
+Sil was up with the sun fumbling in the half dark kitchen trying to find a grinder to go with the coffee beans already measured out in a cup sitting on the counter. He recalled with some amusement the apartment in Boston that he and Waiben had shared for four years, something his girlfriend as the time has considered exceedingly strange, "he's like what, sixty?" she used to say and then nothing more until Sil would correct her, "sixty-two actually." Sil used to wake up to Waiben singing "you got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" while he hunted around the kitchen for coffee beans. At that time they still had the old icebox that Waiben had found on the side of the road and patched up. Since it did the job neither of them  thought to replace it for the better part of a year. When Waiben drank too much and passed out before sundown, he'd forget to restock the ice. The melted remnants of the previous day's block of ice would eventually force open the door and the contents of the icebox, including the bag of coffee would go crashing to the kitchen floor, skittering about on the icy water until they found their way into all kinds of strange places. "You got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" Waiben would sing while he slowly gathered everything up and restocked the icebox. When he invariably found the coffee lying in the farthest crack, he would squat down and scoot it along the floor over to the table, laughing and singing "...every morning and plow...every morning and plow..." Once Sil had crept up quietly to watch and he witnessed Waiben do a little dance, all crooked and insane owing to a bad knee that made his dancing hover between pathetic and comical. He would start gyrating at the waist, flopping his arms about while he sang. That first morning when Sil saw him do it, he momentarily thought Waiben was having a seizure the way he convulsed wildly about. Later Sil found out the line was a Tom Waits' lyric.
+
+Sil shivered as the grinder spun and he lit a cigarette waiting for the kettle to boil. He stepped gingerly across the freezing floor to stand by the open flame of the the stove. He glanced back toward the bedroom where he could see Claire sleeping. A ray of sunlight shot through the uncovered window to the right of the bed and the light slowly expanded, covering first the table and then worked it's way toward the white sheets where Claire lay. Her face was obscured in a swirl of coppery hair that spread out over her back and onto the pillow next to her, but her back was exposed and revealed her ivory skin marked here and there by the lines of pale brown, evidence of a spaghetti strap top worn in the sun, perhaps a bathing suit worn by the pool, the cholrine smell of summer suddenly washed over him and he was lost contemplating the linguistic transition from bathing costume to bathing suit until she stirred slightly in the bed and sheet moved to reveal the preternatually bright ink of the tattoo on Claire's lower back. The color of water and Lotus leaped up out of the white sheet as if heliotropically seeking the nearby patch of sun. Claire shifted again arching over and the tattoo moved into the sunlight. Sil momentarily closed his eyes and bit down on his already tightly clenched fist until it hurt far more than he had intended and the desire to leap on the bed and somehow dissolve himself over her somehow like a liquid banket of skin until he sunk into her, obliterating himself in the process like a stream ducking into the mouth of a cave bound for underground and never to return, had passed. Eventually he retreated back to the kitchen lest he act on impulse, though he was dimly aware that he wasn't so much restraining himself as merely postponing the inevitable with the vague promise of the indefinite. 
+
+Coffee in hand he swung open the front door and stepped gingerly out onto what had once been the porch, but now served mainly as a means to inject splinters in his cold bare feet. The truth was Sil wasn't impervious to pain, he simply ignored it. He stepped slowly over the brittle gray wood and out into the sandy yard. He lit another cigarette and stretched his back in the sunlight. He turned and looked back at the house. The roof was rotten from termites and an extended family of rats lived in the ceiling panels. The walls were paper-thin, insulated with spider webs and the only heat came from the anceint pot bellied stove that spit sparks on his living room floor every time he opened it. He sat down in the middle of the desert driveway and watched a plume of dust forming in the distance, near the highway. That would be Jimmy he decided. The only thing that brought anyone out to this godforsaken stretch of land was necessity or occasionally the desire for something that could not be eaily obtained elsewhere. Sil sipped his coffee and waited. Eventually Claire emerged from the house behind him, coffee in hand and speaking in a slightly higher than normal pitched morning voice that drove Sil to parodoxical spasms of lust and tenderness. Before he could achieve the sort of niranic state he felt the voice would one day lead him to, the phone rang. Sil continued to sip his coffee but stepped inside to listen to the machine when it picked up. A crackling voice hestitated and then begin to ask for Claire. Curious Sil walked in and picked up. The man from the cemetery greeted him once more by name and asked for Claire. Sil hesitated but leaned out the front door and handed her the phone. He wandered off to the kitchen and began making breakfast. Claire came in just as Sil slid the eggs out of the pan onto the black beans and tortilla's already piled on two plates. "Everything okay?"
+
+"That man. The man you met yesterday... he wanted to know about Gamma's things..." She stared out the kitchen window at the clouds, thinking about the man's voice, something in it seemed to ooze and flow like sap or the sludge at the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee, lavish with timbre and an opacity that reminded her curiously of the way her own voice sometimes sounded when she first made the leap into the hyperreality of DMT, as if he were speaking not with his toungue and lips, not even with his throught or diaphram but from someplace much further down, someplace anchored in rock and mode of words, as if he were caling them up. Aware suddenly of how long she had fallen silent she watched Sil carry the plate over to the table where she sat and tried to make her voice sound commonplace, "and then I dunno, he wanted to know if it would be alright to come by my grandmother's house and look for some book." 
+
+"How does he know your grandmother again?" Sil sat down and began eating.
+
+"He said he knew her when she was a girl, but he didn't really elaborate."
+
+"So did you say he could come by?"
+
+"Yeah, but I didn't say when. He said he'd call next week. He's quite nice. I can't place his accent though."
+
+"Did he have an accent? I didn't notice."
+
+They ate and then Sil turned on the stereo and busied himself cleaning up the dishes. Claire lit a cigarette and stared out the sliding glass door at the desert. The clatter of dishes mixed with the music, violins and spoons, bass lines and sautee pans, snare drum and water mingling like sand paintings held together in precise stillness. The songs of time passing, the rattle of dishes wiped dry on the counter and laid up in mahagony cupboards, the green paint on the walls and French cafe poster over the shelf where Sil stacked his herbs. Claire had always admired Sil's house, which, in spite of being nearly abandoned in outward appearance, or perhaps because of its outward appearance seemed to her somehow ceremonial in its inner fasticidousness, which is not say that Sil was organized or neat by any means, but rather that everything felt as if it were exactly where it was supposed to be, regardless of where that might be, the dust on the bookshelves, the towel curled round the back of the sink to stop a leaky faucet, she tried and failed to imagine any of it changing. *Your grandmother had something that belongs to me, something I gave her a long time ago, but which I would like to have back.* The voice seemed to be in her own head she realized suddenly, that was what reminded her... it had the same quality of the voices that spoke inside her own head but which she was fully away where not "her," the only way she had ever been able to explain it to Jimmy was to compare it with an echo, your voice, but no longer in your possession, as if it were merely using you as a canyon in which to bound about like a child bouncing a ball off the walls of a corridor. 
+
+Around noon Sil dropped Claire off at her grandmother's house.