Dark Rivers of the Heart

can adore me-"
        "I adore you."
        "-who can surrender to me-"
        "I'm yours."
        "-without soiling the beauty of it."
        "No fluids. No pawing."
        "Suddenly," she said, "I'm as shy as a virgin."
        "I could stare at you for hours, fully clothed."
        She tore off her blouse so violently that buttons popped and the fabric ripped. In a minute she was completely nude, and more of what had been hidden proved to be perfect than imperfect.
        Reveling in his gasp of pleased disbelief, she said, "You see why I don't like to make love in the usual way? When I have me, what do I need with anyone else?"
        Thereafter, she turned from him and proceeded as she would have done if he'd not been there. Clearly, she took intense satisfaction from knowing that she could hold him totally in her power without ever having to touch him.
        She stood before the mirror, examining herself from every angle, caressing herself tenderly, wonderingly, and her rapture at what she saw was so exciting to Roy that he could draw only shallow breaths.
        When she finally went to the bed, with Bruce Springsteen singing about whiskey and cars, she cast off the silver-fox throw. For just a moment, Roy was disappointed, for he had wanted to see her writhing upon those lustrous pelts, whether faux or real. But she pulled back the top sheet and the lower sheet as well, revealing a black rubber mattress cover that instantly intrigued him.
        From a shelf in one of the open cabinets, she removed a bottle of jewelpure amber oil, unscrewed the cap, and poured a small pool of it in the center of the bed. A subtle and appealing fragrance, as light and fresh as a spring breeze, drifted to Roy: not a floral scent, but spices-cinnamon, ginger, and other, more exotic ingredients.
        While James Brown sang about urgent desire, Eve rolled onto the big bed, straddling the puddle of oil. She anointed her hands and began working the amber essence into her flawless skin. For fifteen minutes, her hands moved knowingly over every curve and plane of her body, lingerin at each level and roundness and at each shadowed mysterious cleft. More often than not, what Eve touched was perfect.
        But when she touched a part that was beneath Roy's standards and dismaying to him, he focused on her hands, for they themselves were without flaw-at least below the too-bony radii and ulnae.
        The sight of Eve upon the glistening black rubber, her lush body all gold and pink, slick with a fluid that was satisfyingly pure and not of human origin, had elevated Roy Miro to a spiritual plane that he had never before attained, not even by the use of secret Eastern techniques of meditation, not even when a channeler had once brought forth the spirit of his dead mother at a seance in Pacific Heights, not even with peyote or vibrating crystals or high-colonic therapy administered by an innocentlooking twenty-year-old technician dressed accommodatingly as a Girl Scout. And judging by the lazy pace that she had set, Eve expected to spend hours in the exploration of her magnificent self.
        Consequently, Roy did something that he had never done before. He took his pager from his pocket, and because there was no way to switch off the beeper on this particular model, he popped open the plastic plate on the back and removed the batteries.
        For one night, his country would have to get along without him, and suffering humanity would have to make do without its champion.
        Pain brought Spencer out of a black-and-white dream featuring surreal architecture and mutant biology, all the more disturbing for the lack of color. His entire body was a mass of chronic aches, dull and relentlessly throbbing, but a sharp pain in the top of his head was what broke the chains of his unnatural sleep.
        It was still night. Or night again. He didn't know which.
        He was lying on his back, on an air mattress, under a blanket.
        His shoulders and head were elevated by a pillow and by something under the pillow.
        The soft hissing sound and characteristic eerie glow of a Coleman lantern identified the light source somewhere behind him.
        The lambent light revealed weather-smoothed rock formations to the left and right. Directly ahead of him lay a slab of what he supposed was the Mojave with an icing of night, which the beams of the lantern couldn't melt. Overhead, stretched from