Japanese tourists on the floor above and a kobold instructed me on the finerpoints of survival. "The worst thing you can be hunted by," he said, "isyourself."

"Very aphoristic."

"Fuck you. I used to be human, too."

"Sorry."

"Apology accepted. Look, I told you about Salamanders. That's a shitty way togo, but at least it's final. When they're done with you, nothing remains. But aCorpsegrinder is a parasite. It has no true identity of its own, so itconstructs one from bits and pieces of everything that's unpleasant within you.Your basic greeds and lusts. It gives you a particularly nasty sort ofimmortality. Remember that old cartoon? This hideous toad saying, 'Kiss me andlive forever--you'll be a toad, but you'll live forever.'" He grimaced. "If youget the choice, go with the Salamander."

"So what's this business about hunting myself?"

"Sometimes a Corpsegrinder will rip you in two and let half escape. For awhile."

"Why?"

"I dunno. Maybe it likes to play with its food. Ever watch a cat torture amouse? Maybe it thinks it's fun."

From a million miles away, I thought: So now I know what's happened to me. I'dmade quite a run of it, but now it was over. It didn't matter. All that matteredwas the hoard of memories, glorious memories, into which I'd been dumped. Iwallowed in them, picking out here a winter sunset and there the pain of ajellyfish sting when I was nine. So what if I was already beginning to dissolve?I was intoxicated, drunk, stoned with the raw stuff of experience. I was high onlife.

Then the Widow climbed up the gatepost looking for me. "Cobb?"

The Corpsegrinder had moved up the fence to a more comfortable spot in which todigest me. When it saw the Widow, it reflexively parked me in a memory of a graydrizzly day in a FordFiesta outside of 30th Street Station. The engine was goingand the heater and the windshield wiper, too, so I snapped on the radio to mask