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plunged sickeningly, impacting painfully against an unseen out-cropping with his shoulders and the
back of his neck...he felt his spine crack...and continued falling, and suddenly was submerged in
water...black and viscous...bottomless...closing over him, filling his mouth with foulness, blind,
dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.
Vapors of night. Echoes of never. Niven thrashed in a whirlpool vortex of total unawareness.
Memories--released from their crypt beneath his conscious mind--escaped, gibbering, rushed in a
horde into his skull. He was back in the old soothsayer’s shop. Had it been just a few minutes before
finding himself trapped by the minotaur? Merely a few minutes when he had stood in the
prognosticator’s shop in a Tijuana back alley, a tourist with a girl on one arm and a wisecrack on his
lips? Had it been only that long ago, a matter of seconds, or a sometime long ago, when darkness
had parted and swallowed him--as he was now being swallowed by these Stygian waters?
Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.
Berta stared at him across her Tom Collins. He could not look at her. He toyed with the
straw in his Cuba Libre. He whistled soundlessly, then bit the inside of his lip absently. He looked
off across the Avenida Revolución. Tijuana throbbed with an undercurrent of immorality and
availability. Anything you might want. A ten-year-old virgin-male or female. Authentic French
perfume minus the tariff. Weed. Smack. Peyote caps. Bongo drums, hand-carved Don Quixotes,
sandals, bullfights, jai alai, horse races, toteboard betting or off-track betting, your photograph
wearing a sombrero sitting astride a weary jackass. Jackass on jackass, a study in dung. Strip shows
where the nitty-gritty consists of the pudenda flat-out on the bar-top for convenient dining. Private
shows with big dogs and tiny gentlemen and women with breasts as big as casaba melons. Divorces,
marriages, tuck-and-roll auto seat covers. Or a quick abortion.
It had been lunacy for them to come down here. But they’d had to. Berta had needed the
D&C, and now it was over, and she was feeling just fine thank you, just fine. So they had stopped
for a drink. She should be resting in a motel halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles, but he
knew she wanted to talk. There was so much to talk about. So now they sat in the street cafe and he
could not talk to her. He could not even look at her. He could not explain that he was a man trapped
within himself. He knew she was aware of it, but like all women she needed him to come only far
enough outside himself to let her share his fear. Just far enough that he could not make it. She
needed him to verbalize it, to ask for it--if not help then--companionship through his country of
mental terrors. But he could not give her what she wanted. He could not give her himself.
Their affair had been subject to the traditional rules. A lotta laughs, a lotta passion, and then
she had gotten pregnant.
And in their mutual concern, something deeper had passed between them. There was a
chance, for the first time in Niven’s life, that he might cleave to someone and find not
disillusionment, derangement and disaster, but reality and a little peace.
She had arranged the abortion, he had paid for it, and now they were together here, as she
waited for him to speak. Voiceless, imprisoned in his past and his sense of the reality of the world in
which he had been forced to live, Niven knew he was letting her slip away.
But could not help himself.
“Jerry.” He wanted to pretend she had not spoken, knowing she was trying to help him get
started. But he found himself looking up. She wasn’t beautiful, but he liked the face very much. It
was a face he could live with. She smiled. “Where are we going, Jerry?”
He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “I don’t know what
that means.”
“It means: there’s nothing artificial or unwanted holding us together any more. Or holding us
apart. What do we do now?”
He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “We do whatever we
