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  People at the table got up and drifted away or kept on talking in small groups. No one said anything to me. And Michael went on eating steadily, his face half hidden in his bowl.

  The commune people sounded so serious as they talked to each other. I heard incomprehensible snatches of conversation that sounded like “the wholesale price of mung beans at the Co-op,” “the missionary position oppresses women,” and “paramilitary left wing splinter group.”

  I took a drink of water to help ease the lump in my throat.

  “I’ll show you and your boyfriend where to crash,” said the woman who had invited us to stay.

  Boyfriend? Did Michael look like he was my boyfriend? But I just nodded, and we followed her out into a dim and drafty hall. A fake fireplace with blue gas flames showed little warmth or cheer. Michael went first. My mind turned things over in search of comfort, but all I could think of was the red Swiss army knife.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE ROOM WAS SMALL AND DARK, windowless, the size of a large walk-in closet. Its sole claim to not being a closet was a sink, standing alone in one corner. A stained mattress lay on the floor, but there was a pile of folded sheets and a sleeping bag stacked on top.

  Michael and I took a sheet between us and made the bed. He asked me what time it was, but neither of us had a watch. It felt like the middle of the night. The sheets looked gray, but clean. There was a candle by the bed.

  “How many miles to Babylon?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “ ‘How many miles to Babylon?

  Threescore miles and ten

  Can I get there by candlelight?

  Yes, and back again…’”

  “Weird, what is it?”

  “Just a nursery rhyme, Mother Goose or something. The rest goes ‘You can get there by candlelight if…if…’ I’ve forgotten the rest, but it is pretty, isn’t it, and kind of mysterious. I guess the candle made me think of it.”

  “Or that place they were talking about. Babylon.” Michael took a book of matches out of his pocket and lit the candle. Then he switched off the overhead light, now a naked bulb which cast no shadow.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just stood there. Then I saw out of the corner of my eye that Michael was taking his clothes off, and folding them neatly. Immediately, I looked away. When I looked back, he had gotten into bed. I turned my back, took off my clothes, and draped them on my pack. I climbed in under the cold sleeping bag. I sort of turned towards Michael and he sort of turned towards me; we bumped once and my nose ended up near his armpit, but I finally lay my head down on his chest. He was skinny and didn’t have much hair, but his skin felt warm and smooth. I could hear his heart beating under his ribs and feel his breath moving up and down. He put his hand out and cupped my ass and then my left breast as if he couldn’t decide what he wanted to touch most. I squeezed closer until I was practically lying on top of him.

  “I’ve got a condom,” he said.

  “You were expecting this?”

  “It’s important to be careful.”

  “Oh, I know that. It’s just that you must really have made out with a lot of girls. Or done it with them.”

  “Not really.”

  “How many?”

  “Well…”

  “Oh, tell me.”

  “Not many.”

  “Two?”

  “No.”

  “Wow. Three?”

  “Rania, no, I…”

  “Four? You’ve been to bed with…”

  “No, I…”

  “More than four?” I sat up. “This is ridiculous. I’m a virgin and you’ve been to bed with…”

  “No one,” he said.

  “What?”

  “No one. Not yet. I’m still trying.” He laughed.

  “Oh.” I lay back down.

  It was my turn now. I leaned over and kissed him. I could feel what could only be a hard-on against my belly. His hand dove between my legs. I was wet and then dry and then wet like asphalt under an intermittent rain.

  “Michael,” I said.

  “Shh.”

  He slipped inside me. It hurt. I didn’t care. I ran my fingers over his back. He came with a groan and shiver, pulled out quickly, slipping the rubber off. There was nowhere to put it, so he threw it on the floor. My crotch was sticky with blood. But I had never been so glad to get rid of something in my whole life. Michael and I looked at each other and smiled big open greedy smiles.

  “Hey, hey,” he said and slapped me five. “Wow, I can’t believe it. That wasn’t hard at all, no pun intended, hey hey.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “You didn’t come or anything, though, did you?”

  “That’s just in books.”

  “No. Women come.”

  “Maybe,” I said dubiously.

  “A woman’s sexual peak is when she’s thirty-five,” Michael informed me.

  “That’s in about twenty years.”

  “We could practice.”

  “Okay.”

  He sucked my nipples. I took his cock in my hands. His balls seemed too vulnerable to touch. Just in the middle of things we fell asleep. It was too much for us. When we woke up we did it again, this time in about five different positions. Michael seemed to have given sex a lot of thought, even if he’d actually never done it before.

  I was happy. My feet were hot and my hands tingled. I was happy because I had discovered the secret. I had discovered sex, that Morse code, that mystery, that cipher. Sex contained all the information I would ever need about being a grown up. I felt as smart as if I had a driver’s license and a college diploma.

  When we woke up again it felt like morning, even though there was no light in that windowless room. I peed in the sink, which wasn’t easy, and washed up as best I could.

  “I’m starving,” said Michael. He was still lying in bed, looking at me like a boyfriend in a movie.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “You’re cute.”

  “I’m dirty,” I said.

  “No. Cute.”

  “You just noticed?”

  “I wasn’t really sure before.”

  “How come you didn’t notice right away?”

  “You had your clothes on.”

  “My clothes aren’t cute?”

  “Not as cute as you are.”

  “You’re not bad yourself,” I told him.

  Michael got dressed. He shared his toothpaste with me. The corridor was filled with late morning light. The house seemed deserted. Michael said he had to have breakfast before he could think. We walked along the avenue until we came back into a real neighborhood at the edge of the East Village. We held hands. We promised each other we would just eat breakfast, and then we would find our way to Babylon.

  CHAPTER 19

  Mary Rose

  MARY ROSE DID NOT SPEAK FOR FIVE YEARS. But after a few months in the hospital, she opened her eyes. During the period of her most severe autism, only two people had spoken to her: a kindly attendant who babbled as if to a baby as she cleaned and fed Mary Rose, and a fellow patient, a very old woman named Petra Rae. Petra would come and sit by Mary Rose’s bed by the hour, singing songs in both Spanish and English: love songs, lullabies, counting-out rhymes, country-western ballads, Indio chants, and a bit of Elvis Presley.

  Eventually Mary Rose began to walk again, shakier than a baby. Her bones felt like the bones of birds, hollow, light with grief. But she did walk, shuffling in her gray slippers, her hospital gown open at the back. Petra made her put on an old red bathrobe, frayed but soft. It made a difference, and Mary Rose took an interest in feeding herself. She was allowed a spoon, but no knife.

  The first time Mary Rose spoke, she was at lunch with the other women. It was an ordinary winter’s day, sunny and cold. Las Vegas, New Mexico, sat between the mountains and the plains. It had houses of adobe and brick, a train station, a deserted grand hotel full of chandeliers and ghosts. The oil money and the opera were long gone, and
the little plaza had a gay, forlorn air even when it was hung with Christmas lights.

  “Pass the salt,” said the woman on Mary Rose’s right.

  “Here,” said Mary Rose.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Mary Rose.

  After that, she did not talk much, but she did respond. She worked at occupational therapy, making pillowcases and aprons on an old Singer. Soon, she was allowed out into what passed for a garden. She and Petra Rae would quietly share a stone bench and soak up the sun like two tired sparrows.

  “So,” said Mary Rose.

  “So,” said Petra Rae.

  “Did you ever want children?”

  “Nope.” Petra had been in one institution or another most of her long life. Some of the women said she was retarded, but Mary Rose didn’t think so. Petra just seemed quiet.

  “I wanted children,” said Mary Rose.

  “That’s right,” said Petra.

  “It is.”

  “What do you figure to do if you get out?”

  Mary Rose shrugged. Her mother was dead. Bud had gone to Vietnam and lived to go on to St. Louis to become an air traffic controller. Even from within the walls of the hospital, Mary Rose could smell that the world was changing.

  “What should I do?” Mary Rose asked.

  “You need to get healed,” said Petra. “I’d do it myself, but I’m getting on.”

  “Oh, Petra, why don’t you come with me? We’d get an apartment. I’ll get a job typing or something.”

  Petra laughed, her old-fashioned laugh full of vowels. “Been in here too long to go,” she said.

  “So where should I go?”

  Petra looked off into space, the middle distance of air. “You want the Chama,” she said. “Time later for the Rio. Keep west at first, out of Abiquiu. They’ll tell you at the ranch. Go to a place without babies, where men don’t want women and women don’t want men. Go where they drink wine.” Petra gently stroked her hand.

  “Okay,” said Mary Rose.

  The next spring, an examining board released Mary Rose. She was no longer deemed a danger to society, or to herself. Truth was, her original file had been lost, and no one in charge really knew anything about her case. The hospital was remote and disorganized, and the victim’s family was long gone and uninterested in pressing further charges. To the hospital attendants, Mary Rose seemed capable of functioning, even normal.

  Her mother had left her a nice sum, collecting interest in an Albuquerque bank. Mary Rose put on a pale green dress with a short skirt that she had made herself by looking at magazines. She bought a bus ticket. The bus left her where she asked to be left, on the shoulder of the road. Her hands looked smaller by the free light of day.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE COFFEE SHOP HAD BLACK WALLS, black tables, and a black floor covered with a Jackson Pollack type splatter of red paint. A sign in the window said: Breakfast Served All Day. We went inside and sat down in a booth with a dirty chrome table. The waitress was a hippie girl who came and wiped it clean. Her hair was long and lank, and she wore no make-up except for a red spot of lipstick in the middle of her forehead. Her fingernails were painted green. Her dress was a backless Indian print and she wore sandals, even in the dead of winter. She took our order. I asked for coffee with cream and sugar. The coffee came immediately, black. It was strong and hot. When I asked for cream she smiled and brought Michael his double order of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and a side of two fried eggs. He had also ordered a glass of tomato juice and a bowl of vanilla ice cream. I had the special: two eggs over easy, bacon, hash browns. I ordered a large orange juice as an after-thought, and asked again for cream. The cream still did not appear and so I finally drank the coffee, feeling it warm me to the tips of my ears.

  “Do you think we should go back to that commune house to ask about Monique?” I asked Michael.

  “Well, they were kind of weird.”

  “Maybe they didn’t really know where she is.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But they did tell us about Babylon.”

  “Big deal. We have no idea what it is, or where it is, or why Monique would be there. In fact, we don’t really know if it exists at all.”

  He sounded logical, but it scared me. That was our only clue.

  “Babylon,” I said thoughtfully. It sounded unreal in the daylight; its magic faded when the candles burnt down.

  “Babylon?” It was our waitress. She had brought cream in a little silver pitcher and was refilling my cup from the coffee pot. “Sorry about that,” she said as she set the pitcher by my cup.

  But I didn’t care about the cream now. She’d said Babylon. “Yeah, a friend of ours, of mine, is supposed to be there. She kind of disappeared, and I’m looking for her. I thought she might be at this one place but when I went there they said that she’d gone to Babylon.”

  “Babylon,” said the waitress again.

  “Do you know something about it? What kind of a place is it? Where is it? Is it around here?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know about Babylon.”

  “Can you tell us where it is?”

  “It’s only open at night,” she said. “It’s sort of like it doesn’t exist during the daytime. The only way you can find it is in the dark.”

  “Wow,” said Michael. “Sort of like an after-hours club?”

  “Sort of,” said the waitress.

  “Do you think my friend is all right?” I asked. “I mean, is it the kind of place you could live? Or is it dangerous and weird. Or is it like an apartment building or something?”

  “Not really. Well, maybe…not live exactly.”

  “But can we get in?”

  “It opens around midnight, usually. You can get in then, most of the time. Try after twelve o’clock at night.”

  “Are there bands?” asked Michael

  “Well, sometimes. Sure. Bands and other things, too.”

  “Can you give us the address? We’ll go right away. Tonight. I’m really worried about my friend. I want to see her.”

  The waitress hesitated. “It’s practically in the East River.”

  “Maybe draw a map then,” said Michael, and he unfolded a paper napkin for her.

  She took the paper and started drawing on it with a lipstick. “I wouldn’t just walk into that neighborhood late at night,” she advised. “It’s kind of deserted and dangerous.”

  “Will a cab take us?” Michael was practical about his city.

  “Probably not. It’s hard to get a cabbie to go that far east. They’re afraid of getting mugged, and they certainly won’t get a fare back. But there is a subway stop.” She drew a squiggle indicating the IRT. “Just be careful.”

  “No problem,” said Michael.

  “Just so you know what you’re doing.”

  “I do,” he said. “And thanks.”

  We left the waitress a big tip on the table, piled on top of the check. We had a day and most of a night before we could do anything about finding Monique. Outside the sky was gray, but it wasn’t snowing.

  “Let’s go shopping. It’s the East Village. Come on, let’s explore,” said Michael.

  “Have you got money?” I wasn’t about to reveal the stash in my boot, not even to Michael.

  “No problem,” he grinned and flashed a wad of twenties.

  “God,” I said. “Did you manage to steal all that from your parents? Won’t they notice?”

  “No.” Michael flushed self-righteously. “I don’t have to steal. I have a job.”

  “You do?”

  “I work as a lab assistant on the weekends and after school, when I don’t have track.”

  “You must be smart.”

  “I am.” He didn’t so much as change color this time.

  “I can read Latin,” I said.

  “Say something.”

  “In Latin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Amor vincit omnia.”

  “What do
es it mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing much. Just something about love.”

  We crossed the street together, continuing to drift vaguely west until we came into a more identifiable neighborhood with blocks of head shops, thrift stores, storefronts covered in psychedelic posters, and little arcades selling love beads and Four Roses incense.

  “Wow,” said Michael. I could sense the palpable wad of cash in his pocket. He was staring happily at a large used record store with sidewalk bins. “I’ve heard about this place. You can get anything here, bootlegs, stuff that’s only been released in Japan.”

  Next door was a used clothing store with a beaded curtain. “I’ll meet you,” I said and went in pursuit of a pile of crushed velvets.

  The store smelled mustily of damp wool and watered silk. I picked up a forest green velvet skirt and let my thumb run over the luscious material. That gesture, which my hands knew without me, was the gesture of a high dry plain where my ancestors traded in rugs and amber and spice. The velvet felt thick as moss. It kept its softness as I crumpled it. I held it up to my waist where it looked as if it would fit perfectly. It even fell to mid-calf.

  “How much?” I said aloud, then looked around and saw that there was no one at the counter. Then my eye caught a little sign posted above an alcove: MADAME FORTUNA. THE FUTURE REVEALED. THE PAST EXPLAINED. KARMA AND REBIRTH.

  A thick curtain of beads and crystals hung over the entrance to a back room. The strands swayed and parted at my touch, and as I slipped through, I could feel their cool hardness against my face. The back room was dim. I could make out a couch covered in a plastic slipcover and a vase full of peacock feathers and silk roses. A little dinner bell sat on an imitation wood coffee table. A hand-lettered sign suggested I ring for service. A good shake let out an elegant peal.

  Almost immediately, a middle-aged lady emerged from the kitchenette. But unlike the fortune teller at the Jersey shore, this lady looked convincing. Her skin was a leathery brown and she wore her black hair streaked with gray to the waist. Even in a red sweater and a pair of jeans, she managed to imbue her clothes with some exotic flair. Both her wrists were heavy with bangles: gold, silver, brass, glass, inlaid turquoise, and the kind of bracelet that doesn’t make a full circle but ends with the two small heads of dragons or lions snarling at each other. A gauzy scarf was wrapped around her head. The ends trailed down her back like a crumpled rainbow.