Her breasts swung free of her unhooked bra. “No, you fucking idiot. I sawed them off. Four times a year. They just grow back. If I don’t cut them, they grow down to my ankles.”

Mimi was curiously and incomprehensibly affectionate after she had buttoned up her dress and resumed walking toward the strip of clubs along Richmond Street. She put her hand on his forearm and murmured funny commentary about the outlandishly attired club kids in their plastic cowboy hats, Sailor Moon outfits, and plastic tuxedoes. She plucked a cigarette from his lips, dragged on it, and put it back into his mouth, still damp with her saliva, an act that sent a shiver down Alan’s neck and made the hair on the backs of his hands stand up.

She seemed to think that the wings were self-explanatory and needed no further discussion, and Alan was content to let them stay in his mind’s eye, bat-shaped, powerful, restless, surrounded by their gridwork of angry scars.

Once they got to the club, Shasta Disaster, a renovated brick bank with robotic halogen spots that swept the sidewalk out front with a throbbing penis logomark, she let go of his arm and her body stiffened. She said something in the doorman’s ear, and he let her pass. When Alan tried to follow her, the bouncer stopped him with a meaty hand on his chest.

“Can I help you sir,” he said flatly. He was basically a block of fat and muscle with a head on top, arms as thick as Alan’s thighs barely contained in a silver button-down short-sleeve shirt that bound at his armpits.

“Do I pay the cover to you?” Alan asked, reaching for his wallet.

“No, you don’t get to pay a cover. You’re not coming in.”

“But I’m with her,” Alan said, gesturing in the direction Mimi had gone. “I’m Krishna’s and her neighbor.”

“She didn’t mention it,” the bouncer said. He was smirking now.

“Look,” Alan said. “I haven’t been to a club in twenty years. Do you guys still take bribes?”

The bouncer rolled his eyes. “Some might. I don’t. Why don’t you head home, sir.”

“That’s it, huh?” Alan said. “Nothing I can say or do?”

“Don’t be a smart guy,” the bouncer said.

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