…which they don’t, any longer.

  Because they don’t seem to see him: he doesn’t exist.

  Dewalene lies beside me and her face is close to mine. It is not quite a formed face, not quite permanent.…in the making, it must be kissed into shape, kneaded carefully and gently into its true shape…and for this I was born, I, and no one else, I, Jules, whether I exist or not or she exists, whether her name was that name or the other name she finally told me, or no name at all, whether it was all a lie, a phantasmagoria, whether everything is a lie or a phantasmagoria, we are the same substance and love each other here, in it, kissing each other’s faces into shape. For this we are born, for the gentle breathing between us, and Dewalene rises above me and kisses me with that strange, inquisitive mouth, the lips tense at first and then softening, softening, I can feel the smile of her lips, the muscular precision of a smile.…Jules, are you dreaming? Again?…she kisses me through the dreaming, through the sweet hypnotic certainty of dreaming, as if pursuing me, she is so sweet, so secret, I can feel the kisses now forming inside her before they are pressed onto my face.…Those kisses are Dewalene herself, the formless forming of her soul, which eases into my soul like an extension of her kiss, her caressing, her love. For this Dewalene was born. Her breath is like mine and my slightly accelerated heartbeat is hers, a beat that goes through us, a powerful inaudible throbbing like the crashing of waves on the beach when we are there to hear it and when we are not there.…You love me, she whispers, and then corrects herself You loved me.

  Abruptly, the photograph and the headline came into focus and Jules stood there shocked more by the girl’s smile and her plump childish face than by the headline in red letters DARLENE TELLS OF HER NIGHTMARE NIGHT and in black letters more modestly beneath that LONE STEWARDESS-SURVIVOR OF SEX MANIAC’S ORGY, 4 BUNGALOW-MATES SLAIN, then the black attendant had driven up and was saying something about the tank being nearly full, and the oil O.K., and it’s good luck the battery isn’t dead, after so long. Jules looked away from the tabloid paper lying there in the booth. The black man’s tone had already surprised him, being so respectful; and now the man was handing him the keys to a car—a low-slung powder-blue car of some foreign manufacture, bizarre in its lines, cruelly angular, obviously very costly—Jules just stared at it, as the attendant chattered of how the garage here had two other Jaguars and they were his first choice of a car, of all the cars though there was a $50,000 car on the premises also, parked more or less permanently on the sixth level, a Rolls-Royce convertible owned by.…

  Thank you, Jules said.

  At the top of the ramp it stalled and the attendant called out, Use the clutch!—the clutch! and Jules sweated and waved back at him, Thank you, and got the car going very slowly, painfully, and out on the street it stalled again, a red light flashed on, and he shut everything off and sat there smelling the leather upholstery and the early-dawn damp and another, fainter, less personal odor than the slept-in clothes he was wearing and hadn’t changed for all he could remember in his recent life. A man in a trench coat, cheerful, clean-shaven, came over to the curb and startled Jules, leaning down to give him advice:…pump the gas pedal three times, yes, very slowly, you must pamper it, yes, like that, now the clutch…now turn on the ignition, but be careful to.…

  Thank you, Jules said.

  When Dewalene came out, carrying her suitcase and a leather purse with a broken strap and her coat slung over one arm, she stared at the car and smiled strangely, and told Jules it didn’t exactly look familiar to her: She had not remembered it being so large.

  It’s the correct car, Jules said. He laughed.

  If the keys fit, well then of course it must be the correct car, Dewalene said. She was putting her things in the back. Her hair brushed against Jules’ arm, outstretched on the back of the passenger’s seat, and he smelled an early-morning cleanness about her, she woke innocent and evidently rested from a night of teeth-grinding whimpering dreams he would never ask her about, and to make conversation he reported the garage attendant’s remarks, Good luck that the battery is still working, and asked her casually, How long has it been since you’ve driven this car?

  Dewalene had trouble closing the door. The catch didn’t seem to take hold.

  I’ve never driven this car, she said.

  You never have?

  No.

  Whose car is it, then?

  It’s in my name, Dewalene said. She seemed to continue, as if to say, It must be my car, then; but she said nothing. She opened the glove compartment. There were several road-maps inside and a pink plastic comb and some wadded-up Kleenex. She couldn’t get the door of the glove compartment to stay shut, then, and Jules had to force it into place. She rubbed her fingers together, complaining of how they stung from trying to twist that damn thing, and how she hated cars anyway. Jules asked her if she was ready?—and he reached past her, around her, to slam the door shut on her side.

  She flinched.

  You look very rested, Jules said to calm her; you look very healthy now and beautiful. Just tell me where to drive.

  North. North of the city, she said. But don’t take any of the freeways. Please.

  Why not?

  I’m afraid of them.

  But—

  Just drive north…out toward the ocean…and when we’re out of the city tell me. And she leaned forward to hide her face against her knees, her hands cupped at the back of her neck.

  Are you sick? Jules asked. What’s wrong?

  Just drive. Drive out of here.

  * * *

  Down the five-hundred-foot drop he could see it, falling forward, the distorted front of the car falling, falling forward and down— But he fixed his attention on the road and kept driving.

  north, north of the city

  and out of here

  Dewalene seemed to be repeating, but silently. Jules had the strange idea—

  No.

  —the idea that one of the oncoming cars or one of the cars propelled so recklessly past him was going to—

  But no, why should he think that, and a few hours later he stopped at a roadside restaurant near Cayucos Beach and the girl hesitated, then said she’d stay in the car, she felt a little shaky. So Jules went to get something to eat and brought it back to her and they sat there, the door on Jules’ side swung open, eating in silence. Dewalene’s hands trembled. He saw covertly the trembling paper cup, the coffee swaying inside, thought that she was maybe just hungry—

  Why so frightened? Jules asked.

  She laughed and said she wasn’t frightened, but excited, she’d driven so often along this highway in the past, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends from college, and it was exciting to see how the route was still the same, the places were still the same, nothing had changed, oh yes there was more traffic but not much had changed along the coast—there, there was a quail!—and she pointed at something Jules couldn’t see, it must have been too quick for him. Dewalene was saying how strange it was that she was here, safe, sitting here in a car in the parking lot of a restaurant, and across the highway was the drop-off and the ocean, and some chaparral along the edge of the road, it was all what she had remembered and very strange.…

  Jules wanted to know why it was strange.

  …everything the same. The same way. The same way it was. He asked her politely did she want anything more to eat, obviously she was starved, and she said at once No, no thank you, but Jules felt her shakiness, her hunger, so he went back into the restaurant and asked the girl for a few more sandwiches, and to wrap them, please, and when he came back out Dewalene was putting on sunglasses, and through the curved windshield of the car she looked as if she were underwater…the color of her skin slightly sallow, because of the windshield’s distortion, the blue-tinted lenses of the glasses queer, deathly, unfriendly. She wrapped the wire earpieces carefully behind her ears.

  Out-of-state cars, campers, trailers…small busses… even a converted mail truck with its doors ajar, diapers and towels visible inside, swaying from a clothesline. A long straggling line of bicyclists pedaling laboriously uphill, the one nearest Jules wobbling, Jesus Christ if he swings that wheel out— Dewalene kept adjusting the sunglasses on her face, on her nose, Jules nervously watched the road and thought of the cliff, the car end-over-end, how someone was driving down from the north to meet them head-on. Are you sick? What’s wrong? until the tension made him say Talk to me, please. Say something.

  How startled she was!—to realize she was being impolite. And she looked at him guiltily, as if really seeing him now, and apologized for being so quiet, she knew it was.…She asked him where he was from, and how did he like it out here? and Jules caught the slight, very slight condescension in her voice, though she was shaky yet and kept staring at him and adjusting the glasses nervously, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. Jules said he was from Detroit, but he didn’t want to talk about himself; she asked why and he said he already knew about himself, and none of it was worth knowing, and with her quick instinctive politeness she laughed and said something about how good he had been to her.…

  Last night, I mean.

  Last night when he had let her alone, sitting slouched in a chair and half-sleeping; guarding her without a gun, listening to her breathe so heavily and whimper in her sleep, his mouth twitching ironically to tell him Jules what the hell is this, but he had been good to her and he didn’t regret it.…She began to talk quickly, her voice only going a little vague when someone tried to pass Jules, inching out and inching back, inching out again painfully recklessly around the curves and up and down the hills, sometimes boys in sports cars that roared angrily and sometimes boys on motorcycles, but Jules kept hitting the brakes and wouldn’t go any faster…My real name is Clare, she said shyly, I mean on my birth-certificate.

  Yes?

  Dewalene is a…a gift. A gifted-name.

  For a while Jules said nothing, knowing that if he asked who had gifted her with it she’d turn away, then he said How long have you had that name? and she explained that it was very new to her, only a year or eight months ago, she wasn’t exactly sure…because time was strange to her.… because the summers here are very long and she was accustomed to more change.

  I liked Clare. But.

  Dewalene came as a gift, a gift. Afterward, she said, she tried to go back to Clare because she was through with that particular society…that membership….But.…

  Jules asked her if the person who’d given her the name was the same one who’d given her the car and she laughed and said no, not exactly, no it wasn’t, exactly. But they’re all connected. They even answer to the same name, sometimes.

  He glanced over at her and saw her watching him.

  Which name was it?

  She said nothing for a while. Along the road were hitchhikers in two’s and three’s and Dewalene ducked her head slightly, instinctively, without noticing, then put her hand out suddenly onto Jules’ arm and said Up ahead—up ahead there’s a turn-off— She squeezed his arm. Can you turn off there?—right there—yes, here—

  * * *

  They spent the afternoon there, until the daylight was gone.

  * * *

  Dewalene in a state of euphoria, clutching at him. It was like rage, lifting and falling and lifting again, her face pale, strained, set. He saw her eyes go blind. All intake of breath, all yearning—she kept murmuring I love you, I love you—then saying his name as if it were an incantation, Jules Jules Jules. The sound of the ocean came distantly but from all sides. Jules. Jules. A long sullen heavy crashing, a rhythmic crashing, two violent substances crashing together, mysteriously, driving him into a frenzy as Dewalene ran her hands slowly over his body, saying You know you love me, you love me, you know it, until they lay together stunned with all the noises of the day and the rocking motion of the earth and the incredible, whip-like, stinging need of their bodies to come together.

  Then Dewalene shuddered and said, When I saw you out on the street…the first day…I knew who you were but I was afraid, I was afraid of you already…Because I knew this would happen, I couldn’t stop it from happening.

  Jules embraced her and comforted her, wanting to love her again but weak still from the agony of their soft-fleshed shell-less bodies and those minutes of struggle, the near-weeping, that explosive pleasure.…For a while she had been almost uncontrollable. Her face contorted, her breath ragged, her body hot and straining as if with rage.…but he wanted to go back to it, to her, to see if it had really happened You love me, you know it, how they had struggled in their love, in a beat more violent than any heartbeat.…

  Something ached in his face, his cheek. He laughed and kissed her. She sat up, let her forehead droop to her knees, her long hair glinting in the sun, and Jules caressed it, caressed her, talking to her.…She began to respond to him. She said I knew this would happen, I knew, I went crazy for you just now…I couldn’t help it…I can’t help it.

  Death in small electric leaps, spasms, explosion-by-explosion of brain cells: Jules stroked her and kissed her and smiled into her strained face.

  …for the night?

  O I don’t care, she whispered, Wherever you want to.

  Will you stay with me?

  Yes.

  I mean instead of….?

  …of going up there to meet them? She looked at him. She reached for the sunglasses, lying on the ground a few feet away. No, I can’t do that. But I can meet you sometime again. Sometime later.

  Where do you have to be tomorrow?—why is it so urgent?

  Even now she was in a kind of delirium, though quiet beside him, adjusting the sunglasses again…he felt her mind sway, sway from him and back again…

  Jules, she said I have to be somewhere tomorrow; I can’t alter those plans. All this is to protect me…or it was to protect me, because I don’t really think I’m in danger. Somehow I think it’s gone now. I think…I think it’s gone now.

  They were sitting in a kind of ravine, a dry gulch, a few hundred yards from the highway. The sky was very blue. From somewhere behind them came two soft, guttural notes, and Dewalene turned to look…her hair brushing against Jules’ face.…I love birds, I love animals, she whispered, when I was a girl and… She talked for a while about a house her family had had, somewhere north of here, and the birds she had been able to watch from the window of her room: sparrow hawks, jays, quails, red-winged blackbirds, gulls, geese of all kinds, and her eyes behind the cool blue-tinted lenses avoided his while she talked and he caressed her arm, slowly, caressing her to make her more like himself, more physical, more subdued. He helped her to her feet and brushed at her clothing, smiling, trying to joke with her a little, but already he was shy with her—this tall, handsome girl with the bizarre hair, wild as a bird’s outlandish crown, her delicate ribs moving beneath the surface of her skin as he touched her, held her, a pulse in her neck moving beneath his lips, warmly and stubbornly as her mind swayed this way, that way.…

  Suddenly a thought crossed Jules’ mind: he seemed to see again the photograph of that stewardess, “Darlene,” her pouty smile and the three-inch red headlines, almost dizzily he seemed to see it again, while this girl was telling him, still, in a maddening-slow vague voice, about her childhood and how she had disliked it, how she had been so lonely, and only the birds and the animals and the hope of having friends when the summer was over…only these kept her going…she’d been so lonely, hidden away because her parents were at war, detectives had spied on her, she’d been the center of a custody case and.…Jules interrupted her: That trial back in Los Angeles—does it have anything to do with that?

  Does what? What? What do you mean? she stammered.

  Being in danger, being driven up here by me—all this— hiding out the way you were— Are you connected with any of them, the girls who were murdered?

  Dewalene said angrily that those girls were airline stewardesses!

  He killed other girls too, Jules said. Didn’t he?

  I didn’t follow the case, Dewalene said.

  I didn’t either, said Jules. But are you related to any of them?—or to him?—or is there any connection?

  As far as I know some man killed some airline stewardesses! he was a maniac, Dewalene said. She spoke without looking at Jules. She stepped carefully back down into a level, flattened-out area, where some debris had been strewn and cars had been parked, and Jules followed her, slipping on a loose rock but not falling, staring at her back and the tangled mane of hair, his body still blood-sodden with love, heavy, pleased, perplexed, saying to the girl’s stiff back, You might be mistaken about me, Dewalene, saying calmly though she did not look around or even hesitate, but continued along the faint trail where the car was parked and the door on Jules’ side was swung open into the high grass, How do you know who I am, exactly?—who I’m working for?

  Dewalene went back to the car and slid in.

  Jules’ heart was pounding: frustration, anger, disappointment, alarm. The girl had taken something out of her purse, was wiping her face with it carefully, her forehead and then her cheeks, dabbing up beneath the sunglasses to get her eyes, as if wiping him off her, rubbing herself clean of him. He stood for a while looking down toward the highway, at the string of cars rising and falling, both lanes crowded, and beyond the highway the ocean—a deep, white-capped blue, the white-caps crashing and disappearing and cracking open again as he stared.

  Yes Jules, yes, yes I love you, she had moaned, grinding her helpless face against his, but he wondered who Jules was and how many other names he had.

  …She leaned over to call him, saying he shouldn’t be angry—why be angry?—now smiling, her lips smiling, stretching, and Jules saw with surprise that she had put on lipstick—her face rosy with color, not the face he had loved half an hour before, but very friendly to him, very nice. He came back, they ate the rest of the sandwiches, she sighed and spoke to him again of her childhood and a complicated divorce case and the custody case— “I was famous for having been spied on, constantly, by my own father!” she laughed—and Jules listened to this thinking that it had nothing to do with her, with him, with the two of them or why she was here, that it may have been true— certainly was true—but told him nothing, really. Yet he said nothing; he couldn’t accuse her of lying. She leaned her head against his, and then against his shoulder. She put her hand over his, his hand rigidly gripping the steering wheel, and asked him how old he was?—a little surprised that he was ten years older than she was, she would have guessed, oh, he was twenty-eight, no more, then her mind seemed to roam a bit and she asked what religion he was?—and Jules had to laugh at that, it sounded so queer, but he said he’d been Catholic but had drifted out of it, and what about her?—O nothing, nothing at all, she said flatly, but the last year I was at college—I dropped out, my senior year—to go to Veracruz with some people—there was a religious event in my life, and it changed my life— Jules felt now that she was circling near to what must be said between them, but he showed no curiosity, saying that they should get on the road again and find a motel, he was exhausted, starved, he would like to sleep that night and she should sleep also—and Dewalene kissed him and pressed her face against his, saying, I think God came to me and it terrified me, I think that caused me to make some errors…I couldn’t comprehend it…I ran away from it, from being the person I was, and into other things…into strange things.…And.…And so I’m here with you. Don’t ask me about my life.