To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be the sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond the maps of language. Opel knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fevers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism.

She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her Me, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget. She went on tour with the band and we lived together in houses, motels and apartments, Bucky and Opel, rarely minus an entourage, the beds piled high with androgynous debris. There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first. But before it could happen, Opel began her travels to timeless lands.

3

I don't know exactly when it was that I became aware of footsteps in the room above mine. They were measured steps, failing lightly but in obvious patterns, suggesting a predatory meditation, as of pygmies rehearsing a ritual kill.

The mornings were cold and dark. Down the street the rounded doors of the firehouse remained closed except for one day at dawn when a truck nosed slowly out, its lights dissolved in low fog, silent men clutched to its sides, apparitional in black slickers. Derelicts were everywhere, often too wasted to beg.