mother’s Malibu in a long-abandoned drive-in theater, Bernie was resolved that their bundling should be more than just another mechanical prelude to his own transcendence. They had visited that petrified ruin on the southern edge of town before, a spot still anchored to the 1950s, with owls perched on posts that once sported metal speakers and skunk cabbage overrunning the wavy asphalt like a Sargasso Sea. Lou Ella liked to sit on the hood of the coupe of a starry evening, imagining black-and-white movies projected onto the kudzu-choked screen, its torn fabric illumined to saffron by the car’s high beams. Tonight she envisioned another monster movie of the type she’d seen on late-night TV.
“There’s this kid gets a chameleon at the circus, the kind you fasten to your collar and it turns the color of your shirt. He visits his mama in the hospital where she’s getting radiation treatments and the chameleon is exposed and by morning it’s grown to the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.”
“Is it still attached to his collar?” asked Bernie.
“No, fool. It wadn’t but a dinky plastic chain. But there’s still like a bond that connects the boy to the monster. Anyway, the monster devours whole cities but the army can’t find it ‘cause it blends into whatever landscape it’s in. So—”
“Lemme guess. The army enlists the kid, who’s the only one that can see the monster, and he feeds it an A-bomb concealed in a giant meatball.”
“You saw it too.”
“So what becomes of his mama?” He knew she was fond of sentimental endings.
“Oh, her and every other cancer patient on earth is cured by the green cloud that surrounds the planet after the monster explodes.” She made to dry her eyes with her sleeve. “Your turn.”
Bernie had to think, though not for long. “There’s this kid”—there was always this kid—“who wakes up on a day that’s like an extra calendar day, a day that contains all other days.”
Lou yawned demonstratively. “Here it comes,” she said, because Bernie’s tales always involved some occult concept with no discernible plotline.
“Everything that’s ever happened is happening all at once, and the kid—he’s past puberty—meets a woman who’s Bathsheba but also Queen Esther and Bess Myerson and Penelope Cruz…”
“Another chameleon,” remarked Lou, who despite her feigned boredom had a weakness for Bernie’s peculiar line of guff.
“And she invites him into her tent or boudoir,” he continued, and here began to describe the seduction in graphic terms: “She asks him to suck her nipples like they’re jujubes, and part her thighs—”
“Like the handles on a posthole digger. You didn’t tell me this was a porno.”
It was then that Bernie believed he could see on the tattered screen all the mythical ladies melding into the single image of the girl beside him, the soft whorls of whose ear he had begun to trace with his tongue. She let him, allowing their canoodling to reach an intensity that her companion, despite some lingering frailty from the previous night’s intestinal purge, was single-mindedly advancing. He had initiated, to his way of thinking, actual foreplay leading toward an inevitable consummation. Over time Lou Ella had come to regard their groping as merely a means of launching her “friend” into astral realms; it was more like an exploratory intimacy between schoolkids than lovers. But although she was dressed provocatively as usual, a paste ruby stuck in her navel, the low-riding jeans grazing her pubic bone, she was nonetheless alarmed by Bernie’s ardor.
“Cool your jets, dude,” she cautioned him, having had enough of false hopes. “Put a lid on your id,” shoving him away to arm’s length.
But when Bernie persisted blindly she detected that some new dispensation was afoot.
“What is it you want?”
“Oo,” mumbled into her neck.
“Me or my bones?”
“Phame differumph,” he panted while gnawing her shoulder.
She cocked her head quizzically. “That’s a mouthful coming from alias Mr. Incorporeal.”
Still she asked him to hang on a minute while she transferred the car seat that Sue Lily was quickly outgrowing from the backseat to the front. Having traded places with the lackluster infant, they proceeded to tear at each other’s clothes. In the throes of a carnality that had clearly infected the girl as well, Bernie felt her fingers beginning to invade his fly, taking him in hand with a hopefulness that, for her part, she hardly dared to indulge. But while her touch did not elicit the combustion that routinely catapulted him into Elysian precincts (leaving behind a body in which passion was no more memorable