Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

fooled."
    "See."
    He reached down and unwrapped the sheet from his foot, then he lay back and stared at the ceiling. Jody began to twist the sweaty locks of his hair into horns.
    "Jody," Tommy said tentatively.
    "Hmmm?"
    "When I get old, I mean, if we're still together…"
    She yanked on his hair.
    "Ouch. Okay, we'll still be together. Have you ever heard of satyriasis?"
    "No."
    "Well, it happens to real old guys. They run around with a perpetual hard-on, chasing teenage girls and humping anything that moves until they have to be put in restraints."
    "Wow, interesting disease."
    "Yeah, well, when I get old, if I start to show the symptoms…"
    "Yeah?"
    "Just let it run its course, okay?"
    "I'll look forward to it."
    Rivera held a plastic cup of orange juice for the mass of plaster and tubes that was LaOtis Small. LaOtis sipped from the straw, then pushed it away with his tongue. The body cast ran from below his knees to the top of his head, with holes for his face and outgoing tubes. Cavuto stood by the hospital bed taking notes.
    "So you and your friends were doing laundry when an unarmed, redheaded woman attacked you and put all three of you in the hospital? Right?"
    "She was a ninja, man. I know. I get the kick-boxing channel on cable."
    Cavuto chomped an unlit cigar. "Your friend James says that she was six-four and weighed two hundred pounds."
    "No, man, she was five-five, five-six."
    "Your other buddy" – Cavuto checked his notepad for the name – "Kid Jay, said that it was a gang of Mexicans."
    "No, man, he dreamin'; it was one ninja bitch."
    "A five-and-a-half-foot woman put the three of you big strong guys in the hospital?"
    "Yeah. We was just mindin' our own bidness. She come in and axed for some change. James tell her no, he got to put a load in the dryer, and she go fifty-one-fifty on him. She a ninja."
    "Thank you, LaOtis, you've been very helpful." Cavuto shot Rivera a look and they left the hospital room.
    In the hallway Rivera said, "So we're looking for a gang of redheaded, ninja Mexicans."
    Cavuto said, "You think there's a molecule of truth in any of that?"
    "They were all unconscious when they were brought in, and obviously they haven't tried to match up their stories. So if you throw out everything that doesn't match, you end up with a woman with long red hair."
    "You think a woman could do that to them and manage to snap the neck of two other people without a struggle?"
    "Not a chance," Rivera said. His beeper went off and he checked the number. "I'll call in."
    Cavuto pulled up. "Go ahead, I'm going back in to talk to LaOtis. Meet me outside emergency."
    "Take it easy, Nick, the guy's in a body cast."
    Cavuto grinned. "Kind'a erotic, ain't it?" He turned and lumbered back toward LaOtis Small's room.
    Jody walked Tommy up to Market Street, watched him eat a burger and fries, and put him on the 42 bus to work. Killing the time while Tommy worked was becoming tedious. She tried to stay in the loft, watched the late-night talk shows and old movies on cable, read magazines, and did a little cleaning, but by two in the morning the caged-cat feeling came over her and she went out to wander the streets.
    Sometimes she walked Market among the street people and the convention crowds, other times she took a bus to North Beach and hung out on Broadway watching the sailors and the punks stagger, drunk and stoned, or the hookers and the hustlers running their games. It was on these crowded streets that she felt most lonely. Time and again she wanted to turn to someone and point out a unique heat pattern or the dark aura she sensed around the sick; like a child sharing the cloud animals flying through a summer sky. But no one else could see what she saw, no one heard the whispered propositions, the pointed refusals, or the rustle of money exchanging hands in alleys and doorways.
    Other times she crept through the back streets and listened to the symphony of noises that no one else heard, smelled the spectrum of odors that had long ago exhausted her vocabulary. Each night there were more nameless sights and smells and sounds, and they came so fast and subtle that she eventually gave up trying to name them.
    She thought, This is what it is to be an animal. Just experience – direct, instant, and wordless; memory and recognition, but no words. A poet with my senses could spend a lifetime trying to describe what it is to hear a building breathe and smell the aging of concrete. And for what? Why write a song