And for this (final?) installment in this series, my friend Tracy (who initially recommended Tom Robbins and later wonder about my point here) remains mute like the cute hitchhiker who got more duct tape and a better look at the inside of my trunk than she could ever have asked for.

• The naked parrot looked like a human fetus spliced onto a kosher chicken.

• Butterflies were delicate and gossamer, but this moth possessed strength and weight. Its heavy wings were powdered like the face of an old actress.

• Even the sheep and goats seemed merry, lighter of hoof, although individual beasts paused from time to time to shake rainwater from their coats, vigorously, stiffly, causing them to look like self-conscious burlesque queens.

• “But, sir,” said the eldest son, wringing his hands and screwing up his forehead until it looked like the rolled-back lid of a sardine can, “the horse. We have only these four, you see, and we—”

• Her eyes simultaneously narrowed and brightened until they looked like the apertures through which Tabasco droplets enter the world, and the zing zing zing of synaptic archery was very nearly audible.

• On this drizzly day, the captain wouldn’t have seen very much. The sky and the water looked like separate panels of the same chalk-fogged blackboard. Nature had erased the diagrammed sentences and multiplication tables, leaving a view that was all pan and no orama.

• The pupils of his aforementioned fierce, hypnotic green eyes were so dilated they looked like the burners on a dollhouse stove.

• As he requested such dishes as tom kah pug and pak tud tak, names that routinely sounded like a harelip pleading for a package of thumbtacks, the tricky tonalities of Thai didn’t faze him.

• When he opened the trunk, the parrot, now fully revived, flew out in his face, wings flapping furiously, and squawking like the mad conductor on the night train to Hell.

• The sun dropped into the horizon line like a coin dropping into a slot. The ocean bit it to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit.

• Saucy and petite, Gloria wore her short hair in bangs, similar, in fact, to Hector; and her eyes were like chocolate-dipped cherry bombs with their fuses lit.

• Briefly, he entertained a vision of himself lying on a bearskin rug before the Snoqualmie cabin’s stone fireplace, the Matisse oil—now his own—pulsating like a blue chromosphere of massive meaty nudity above the mantel.

• There are times when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob.

• Obviously, he knew he had innards, he was not an imbecile, but so repulsive did he find the idea that his handsome body might be stuffed like a holiday stocking with slippery, snaky coils of steaming guts; undulating meat tubes choked with vile green and yellow biles, vast colonies of bacteria, fetid gases, and gobs of partially digested foodstuffs, that he blocked the fact from his cognizance, preferring to pretend that his corporeal cavity—and that of any woman to whom he was romantically attracted—was powered not by throbbing hunks of slimy, blood-bathed tissue but by a sort of ball of mystic white light.

• It wasn’t a tarantula. Switters was familiar with tarantulas. No, this living emblem of evolutionary perversity wasn’t merely hairy, it was sprinkled with purple spots—an armpit with a rash—and its pupilless white eyes rolled about the brow of its cephalothorax like mothballs in a lapidary.

• A rank of ample black clouds had been double-parked along the western horizon like limousines at a mobster’s funeral. Rather suddenly now, they wheeled away from the long green curb and congregated overhead, where, like overweight yet still athletic Harlem Globetrotters, they bobbed and weaved, passing lightning bolts trickily among themselves while the wind whistled “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

• The stars were as big and bright as brass doorknobs, and so numerous they jostled one another for twinkle space. Because the mosquito population was equally dense, Switters spent the night rolled up in his netting like a pharaonic burrito, a crash-test mummy who couldn’t see the stars for his wrapping.

• Indeed, if he could believe his teacher, ideal meditation had no practical application whatsoever. Sure, there were Westerners who practiced it as a relaxation technique, as a device for calming and centering themselves so that they might sell more stuff or fare better in office politics, but that was like using the Hope diamond to scratch grocery lists onto a bathroom mirror.

• On benches of gravel, heavy-lidded caimans did Robert Mitchum imitations, seeming at once slow and sinister and stoned. Cabbage-green turtles that must have each weighed as much as a wheelbarrow load of cabbages slid off of and onto mud banks and rocks, while frogs of various hues and sizes plopped on every side like fugitives from mutant haiku.

• The air was like a flexed muscle, the bicep, perhaps, of some macho swamp thing showing off for a female swamp thing, green in both cases.

• Smithe expelled a globe of smoke, and it bobbed just above them for a while like an air-feeding jellyfish or a rickety umbrella, slow to disperse in the cloying humidity.

• This precipitated a dueling barrage of rapid-fire Campa-Spanish that sounded like stormy-night static on Radio Babel.

• Indeed, though it was not yet midmorning, the sun was looking down on them like the bad eye of a billy goat, jaundiced and shot with blood; and beneath its baleful glare, every living cell in every living thing seemed to slump like a Dalí watch. Switters felt his protoplasm turning into dry-cleaning fluid, and his suit, which soon enough would need a good cleaning, was glued to his body like a poster to a wall.

• His jowls glistened in the heat and humidity like burst melons.

• A weariness moved into his smooth, shiny face like a retired midwestern farmer moving into a flamingo beach hotel.

• Like James Brown, spent, limp, reeling to the microphone for just one more whoop, Switters momentarily revived himself.

• Head bowed, nose pointed at the toes that, like fans of pink pickles, spread over the tips of his flip-flops, neck knotted, meaty hands clasped behind his broad back, he paced.

• Smithe halted in mid-stride. His chin withdrew from his chest like a city slicker’s hand from a branding iron.

• Just as he squeezed his eyes shut, the better to picture these anti-aphrodisiacs, R. Potney Smithe extended a forefinger and jabbed Switters’s half-erect member the way a shy but righteously purposeful Jehovah’s Witness might press an agnostic’s doorbell.

• The aspiring witchman glided noiselessly across the room, like one of the creatures for whom he seemed to have such affinity, and looking, in snakeskin cape and Ray-Ban sunglasses, like a Hollywood Boulevard vampire.

• In a characteristic gesture, Bobby tossed a pompadourlike tussock of inky hair out of his eyes while simultaneously patting down the cowlick that coiled like a busted bedspring farther back on his head.

• Bobby’s face was changing expressions faster than Clark Kent changed underwear. He went swiftly from astonishment to relief to annoyance to amusement to imagined comprehension. “Okay. Alrighty. I get it. Even a maniac like yourself wouldn’t go to all this trouble just to mock the afflicted or play a cruel joke on your ol’ podner. So’s I reckon you’re fixing to go deep cover, and you’ll be trying to convince some alleged bad guys somewhere that you’ve been crippled by the forces of imperialism. The CIA and Actors Studio: telling them apart has never been simple. Did you know Mata Hari’s real name was Gertrude? But hey! Anyway. I’m gladder than shit you’re not actually stoved in ‘cause I was hoping we could hit a dance club or two this evening.”

• Bobby sucked on his beer bottle like a tot on a lollipop or a tout on a pencil.

• Like chip dip with a short shelf life, the imported Scandinavian sunshine had commenced to degenerate, reverting to the cod paste from which it was synthesized.

• Scud blew by close to the surface of the sound like dank puffballs of bacterial fuzz, and the men could almost taste mildew in the air. The atmosphere was leaden and thin simultaneously, as if composed of some new element that defied known laws of atomic weight and could be properly breathed only by lifelong residents of the Pacific Northwest. Feathery and innocuous on one hand, sodden and ill-willed on the other, it was the meteorological equivalent of Pat Boone singing heavy metal.

• The big blue nude rose like a mountain range, an azure Appalachia of loaves, humps, and knobs, a topographical maquette constructed from huckleberry jelly, a curvaceous cobalt upland where clumps of wild asters clung precariously to the hillsides and the bluebirds all sipped curaçao.

• “In that case,” said Switters, feeling like the vice president at a Senate deadlock, “I cast my deciding vote for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Now come on home.”

• When, at about six o’clock, she came down the hall to his room with a can of Pepsi and a plate of brownies, came in her school uniform (pleated blue skirt and loose white blouse), came with her tiny gold crucifix twinkling like an eastern star above the twin mosques of her breasts (my, how they’d grown! that old training bra couldn’t begin to corral them now), came with her round rump ticking like two casseroles in an oven, came with her smart smile and guileless gaze, he could sense the want spreading throughout his organism like a cotton-candy cancer, and his mania once more had the wind to its back.

• Yet, like a model threatened with loss of employment, he held the pose.

• He sighed again, massaged his arms, and, like a railyard dick chasing hobos off a flatcar, swept the beans of sweat from his brow.

• Whatever that little bastard Brian might be doing to her (or she to him), she still smelled like the punch line in a nursery rhyme.

• She had just slid onto his lap and was tightening her tawny arms around his neck, her tongue muscles quivering like the hamstrings of a cheetah about to spring from its lair, when his mother made one of her periodic checks of the room.

• She watched an odd, ironic smile bend his lower lip like a bartender twisting a peel of lemon.

• As Switters read, then read again, the preceding two paragraphs, his forefinger hovered over the delete key like the meatless digit of the Reaper pausing above his black eraser.

• Yet, here he was, a fever flaming in his veins, a thunder in his pulses; his lungs ballooning, then deflating, his thoughts all over the map like a fast-food chain.

• Then, perched on the edge of the bed like a stone cherub urinating into a fish pond, it occurred to him that music wasn’t the issue.

• Again and again, his mouth formed her name, but the sound stuck in his throat like a fake Santa in a crooked chimney.

• But like a miser making a night deposit at an inner city bank, she leaned over with a kind of fearful glee and planted a peck perilously close to his pucker.

• Like every smoke ring ever blown—like smoke, in general—it bounced in the air like the bastard baby of chemistry and cartooning.

• Like some beggar or street performer, he would dock the wheelchair beneath the aged arcades of the labyrinthine Pike Place Market, and there, in the grotto light, protected from the rains that pounded the cobblestones and hissed beneath the tires of delivery trucks, he’d turn a keen eye on whiskered parsnip and hairless apple, and bathe himself in the multitudes.

• Not infrequently, he’d spot one of them in the market again and exchange with her one of those futilely desirous smiles that are like domestic postage on a letter to a foreign destination.

• When she unhooked her bra, it was like a farmer unloading a cart, and when she pulled down her panties, Switters thought he was back up the Amazon.

• Dev’s pubic mound was like the hut of a shaman. Fruit flies picnicked on her thighs.

• The sky went blue on them, the sun bounded on stage like a cut-rate comedian who doubled as his own spotlight, and within a day the market streets and gutters were as dry as rye.

• The air had become like cotton candy, spun not from sugar but the sex glands of meadowlarks and dry white wine.

• When he ventured out of a morning, freshly if resentfully groomed, yet bearing Dev’s funky signature like a laundry mark on a shirt, Switters left his topcoat at home.

• Thrilled by the strange implications of such questions and at the same moment embarrassed by them, he examined them repeatedly but sheepishly, like a forensic scientist sorting a collection of crime-scene lingerie. These private musings occurred mainly in public—on sun-smeared corners, in shadowed archways, or beneath the great cartoonish market clock—where the murmuring of unsuspecting throngs washed over him, and Florida grapefruit and Arizona melons, like the popped orbs of Buick-sized frogs, watched him without blinking.

• She threatened to cane-whip the tightwad who might try to move her into an efficiency apartment and gun down like a landfill rat the Nazi who would plant her in a nursing home (Switters and Foxweather exchanged glances that indicated they both knew the old lady wasn’t joking), and home care was not inexpensive.

• Owing nothing to society, expecting nothing, the painting bumped against the brain like a cloud against an oil derrick. It had the innocence and brute force of a dream.

• The land spread out before him like a pizza. Its topography was flat, its texture rough, its temperature hot, its hue reddish yellow, studded with pepperoni-colored rocks; and, at the moment, it glistened as if drizzled with olive oil.

• Switters’s Adam’s apple flopped in his throat like an eel in a creel.

• The boat, flaring in the distance like a millionaire’s teeth, belonged to Sol Glissant, a Beirut-based French national who had made a chunk of his fortune rebuilding Lebanon’s swimming pools after the war and was known as the Pool Pasha of the Levant.

• This was due to the fact that he would be needing his wits about him, but also because the last time he’d had his fill of the bubbly, he’d gazed into Anna’s face and told her that her eyes were like a morning mist on the fur of a squirrel. Or something along those lines.

• The wind was already escalating, and between the darkened yacht and the rocky shore there was considerable chop, but Skeeter slid over the crests and attacked the troughs as if mastering a difficult composition by Thelonius Monk.

• Surrounded on all sides by an immense silence, the only sound he heard beyond his own shallow gasps was sand crackling beneath his wheels and thorny weeds brushing against the spokes like a tone-deaf witch trying to pluck a banjo.

• Theirs was not the Sol Glissant swimming-pool blue of Suzy’s eyes, however, but a sapphire blue, almost an anthracite blue, as if hardened into being by millions of pounds of chthonian thrust.

• It sat there, almost loomed there, like a mud ship becalmed in a rusty bay. Its contours, its lines, were simple but sensuous, organic but intrusive, utilitarian to a fundamental degree yet somehow oddly fanciful, like a collaboration between Antoni Gaudí and a termite colony.

• The sweat drops on his brow were like tadpoles. They migrated down his neck as if in search of a pond. Still, he didn’t care. A night such as this was worth anything! His aching only gave pitch to its beauty.

• Moonlight enveloped him like a clown suit—voluminous, chalky, theatrical—into which he was buttoned with fuzzy red pompons of fever.

• Another time, he was sure he heard female voices, cautious but caring, and sensed that figures were gathered around him like the ghosts of dead Girl Scouts around a spectral weenie roast.

• He uncovered his face in time to see the moon spin into view like a salt-encrusted pinwheel.

• He tried meowing once or twice, but it hurt his gums, which were swollen, and his throat, which felt like a scabbard two sizes too small for its sword.

• In any event, after a week of pain, fever, nausea, coma, and phantasmagorical rapture, his lids sprang open one morning like mousetraps in reverse, and he found himself, feeble yet curiously refreshed, upon a low cot in the tiny, blue-walled room that served the convent/oasis as a rudimentary infirmary.

• Around her eyes the skin looked as if it had been trampled by sparrows, a tracing that caused him to put her age at forty.

• In shadow, Domino’s hair was dark brown; in sunlight, reddish tints shone through in streaks, like claw marks on fine maple furniture.

• Like the helmeted heads of an itty-bitty army springing from the trenches, goosebumps appeared along the length and breadth of Switters’s epidermis, where they marched in place, as if, intent on pillage, they were preparing to advance on his brain.

• Domino shook her head, causing her cheeks to wobble like puddings on a pushcart.

• After all, she was a woman who could ferry the chamber pots of the sick, whereas he thought of the rectum, on those very rare occasions when he thought of it at all, as a receptacle for white light, the intake valve through which that mystic energy that Bobby Case’s wise ol’ boys called kundalini entered the body to slither up the spinal column in radiant coils, like the Serpent bringing divine knowledge to the unsuspecting bumpkins of Eden.

• She smiled, and it was, he thought, like a cross between the Taj Mahal and a jukebox.

• He was like a puncture in a high-pressure hose, spurting in all directions, spuming with an irrepressible puissance.

• With Pippi and Domino holding the superstilts steady, he climbed aboard—and for a few breathtaking seconds, he jiggled, tilted, leaned, and swayed in slow motion, like a dynamited tower so in love with gravity it couldn’t decide which way to fall.

• It was so much like a one-man circus parade that he had little choice but to break into a booming, up-tempo rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”

• By the time Switters relinquished the stilts, dusk was settling onto the oasis like a purple hairnet through which a few stray strands of blondish daylight curled.

• The telling took the better part of an hour, and when at last he slapped his now permanently soiled trouser legs as if to punctuate the end of the story, Domino seemed, well, not so much perplexed as hypnotized, not so much stunned as drunk, her customary radiance restored, even intensified, like the sultan’s chronically sick wife who was miraculously restored to health by the stinking beggar’s fairy tales.

• A ruby droplet, at once as authentic as blood and as artificial as a bauble of carnival paste, glistened on her upper lip like an Aphrodite love boil, and Switters felt a bewildering urge to expunge it with his tongue.

• An image of Suzy went zinging through his brain like a hot pink bullet.

• Still, there was something comical about him, like a crow blundering across a pavement grate or a boy in his mother’s high heels.

• Even as she stood stationary, the wart appeared to shudder, like the tiny heart of a shrew, and to radiate, as if a fungus that grew on raw uranium was practicing for fission. Simultaneously feathery and lumpish, like a squashed raspberry, a pinch of dry snuff, a tuft of moss that a wounded robin had bled upon, or the butt end of an exploded firecracker, it caught the candlelight and in so doing, seemed to enlarge before his eyes.

• The really astonishing feature of the protuberance was neither its size nor its color, its brim nor its woof, but the fact, not immediately registered, that it was two-tiered: a second, smaller wart sat atop the first, piggybacking, as it were, like a pencil eraser with a spinal hump, or a little foam-rubber pagoda.

• She shook her head. The wart, like a plug of hairy gelatin, shook with it.

• Switters was relieved to find Masked Beauty alone, that she wore her veil (the wart having struck him as pathological), and that her quarters were once again clouded with incense: he’d awakened too late to bathe properly, and Cupid’s briny chlorines clung to him like clamskin britches.

• The sun was as red as a baboon’s backside. Relentless, it rose each and every morning and like a malicious baboon climbing a staircase, treated those trapped on the ground floor to a rude display.

• Serrated with heat, abuzz with wind-whipped sand, the air outside the compound was like a bouquet of hacksaws.

• The pace inside the oasis was slow, and summer seemed to drone on like a filibuster, even to Switters, who was one of those who believed that time in general was gathering speed.

• He tried to compare it to the third eye of an Asian saint, but the wart was as blind as a mole rat and twice as ugly. Both repelling and compelling, it was charged with the grisly charisma of a serial killer. In its globby piled-on redness, it was a scarlet letter embroidered by an obsessive compulsive. And it was too damn vivid.

• Something brighter than blood sang in his arteries. It climbed up his spine like the high notes of an anthem, clarifying his lungs, teasing his muscles and making them brisk. It wasn’t a syrup of wahoo, really: it wasn’t pure enough for that. Mostly, it was good old retro primal adrenaline, concocted in the fight-or-flight kitchen, the reptile house of the brain. But there were drops of wahoo in it.

• A ray of moonlight striking her double-decker wart made the growth resemble a dab of ketchup-coated curds. Cottage cheese with ketchup, he thought. Richard Nixon’s favorite meal. Probably got the recipe from John Foster Dulles. Patooie!

• Outside, a rooster crowed. It sounded like a spastic adolescent trying to imitate Tarzan.

• Her nipples pushed against the cotton like urchins pressing their noses against a candy store window. In the candleshine, her pubis was faintly outlined, like a map of a phantom peninsula.

• Before either of them could prepare for it, she stepped to his wheelchair, bent over—loose breasts bobbing like turtles on a buckboard, hair swinging around to eclipse her moonish cheeks—and kissed him quite emphatically on the bridge of his nose.

• Oh, well, he thought, these might be fun for a change, so he stork-walked to the office on stilts that put his unbreakfasted mouth at fig level, higher than the ripe lemons that dangled from their branches like bare lightbulbs in a nineteenth-century shoe factory.

• Generally, Bob appeared as if she’d been sired by one of the Marx Brothers—perhaps all four—and now she was alternating between looks of sheepish contrition, like Harpo after striking a sour note on his instrument of choice; popeyed incredulity, like Chico watching the diva disgorge the aria in A Night at the Opera; waggy disgust, like Groucho learning that his best jokes had once again been eviscerated by network censors; and peevish indignation, like Zeppo sensing that it was his fate to be perpetually upstaged by his three siblings.

• Whatever the proximities, and no matter what it was called in Basque, Switters’s rod of engenderment was growing more rigid, more perpendicular, by the moment; was behaving, in fact, like a hydraulic jack, threatening, he imagined, to lift him right off her, suspending him above her prone body as if he were a plate on a shaft, a bobbin balanced on a spindle.

• Gasping slightly from the effort, he lay there beside her with his feet in the air, looking like an advertisement for an aerosol insecticide. (Of course, a dead bug wouldn’t be sporting an erection. Or would it? Hanged men are reputed to be so affected, why not a zapped beetle? Perhaps there was a reason why they were called “cockroaches.” And think of the Spanish fly.)

• For the nearly ten minutes that it took Bob to return with the chair, he lay there like a yogi in the dead-bug asana, growing slowly flaccid; shielding his eyes from the pulsating radiation of a sun, now directly overhead, that resembled a phoenix egg laid in a campfire and impaled on a laser; and talking to his abnormally elevated feet.

• Their lone conversation during this period concerned the round, mud tower that rose above the compound like a silo for a Scud of manna, a missile with a warhead of milk and honey.

• Switters could detect her face darkening (the wart set against it like Mars against a thick winter sky) as he read to her from the monitor how Plato had learned of the gold tablets, the Hermetic Writings so-called, and had made a pilgrimage to study them, but was prevented by the prevailing Egyptian ruler from entering the pyramids.

• For a split second, tiny burrs and shards of steel whizzed angrily in all directions, like metallic bees in a bug riot.

• He swung the grin like a searchlight, narrowing its beam on Domino.

• Domino squeezed his hand and folded against him, moving in his arms like a pendulum moving in a grandfather clock.

• Looking at it from another angle, their kiss was like a paper airplane landing on the moon.

• The first night that they met in the tower and lay on the rug (Switters never dared to test that floor with his feet), admiring a moon that looked as if it had been oiled by a Kurdish rifleman and pointing at the satellites that skittered from sky-edge to sky-edge like waterbugs crossing a cow creek, Domino confessed, with a minimum of embarrassment and no shame at all, that she had “a big crash” on him.

• Only her wart seemed unchanged and unaffected, a clod of red mud from the mean fields of Mars.

• There, he rolled onto the carpet, propped his feet on a cylindrical pillow, and, watching the stars slide by like lighted portholes in a luxury liner, awaited Domino’s arrival.

• Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello.

• (The squish of the jelly. The socket that formed around his finger. The suction of the mouth that never eats. The flutter of the lashless eye. A pink noise that traveled up the spine like the whistle of a toy train. A troll burrow commandeered for a royal wedding. The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. The groom, in purple helmet, yet to arrive.)

• Had he heard them related by a starry-eyed ten-year-old Portuguese peasant girl in 1917, they might possibly have spun the propeller on his intellectual beanie, but now he just stretched and sighed like a hockey coach at a tea dance before proceeding to the ballyhooed main event: that legendary ultrasecret time-release pope onion,

• Chickpea in his mouth, dry heat in his nostrils, papery leaf rustle and narcotic hen cluck in his ears, grainy wind on his skin, distant shimmer (like a flutter of god beards, a pulse of muslin-wrapped phosphorus) in his eyes, thirst never far from his throat: it was, in terms of the senses, a perfect situation in which to try to summon his faint knowledge of that series of writings (like the Bible, it was a disjointed, fragmented collection rather than a unified canon) known as the Corpus Hermeticum.

• Hermeticism had its merits, certainly, but it lacked immediacy. It seemed so stereotypically occult as to be fusty and inane, like the wizard hat that Mickey Mouse wore when he played the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

• However, this circuitous reminiscing about the witchman had brought his image fully to mind, and, abruptly, at that instant—wham! bam!—a thought hit Switters like a stockyard paddle smacking a porker’s backside.

• Had it not been so abrupt, she probably wouldn’t have cried, but she had no time to prepare herself, and teardrops, one after the other, rolled like dead bees down the overturned hives of her cheeks as she explained to the astonished driver that the white-suited male (A man? Here?) in the wheelchair would be needing passage to Deir ez-Zur.

• She made a little furrow in her chin, which the tear runoff filled like rainwater in a ditch.

• She wore her veil, of course, but he could detect her beauty-buster behind it, glowing like a holographic hush puppy, a glob of ghost grease in the morning sun.

• During the long, rough drive—east-northeast to Deir ez-Zur (where they passed the night), south-southwest to Palmyra (where they again slept over), and on southwestward to the capital—Switters was compressed like anchovy paste in a living sandwich.

• Dimly lit by a pair of raw forty-watt bulbs that dangled from the stucco ceiling like polished anklebones on strings, the space smelled of motor oil, solvent, sour metals, musky rubber, and burnt gunk.

• They must have had loins of fire, pussies of gold; their libidos must have brayed like wild asses and loomed like desert dunes.

• The migraine shot out of his ears like squirt from a clam.

• The younger, thinner one (late thirties, probably, and lithe as a bean vine) had a face like the instruction sheet that came with an unassembled toy: it looked simple at first and ordinary and frank, but the longer you studied it, the more incomprehensible it became.

• From the air, the desert appeared a loose, lumpy weave of red and yellow strands, like a potholder made in the craft shack at a summer camp for retarded children.

• Their quiet conversation in the backseat had resounded in his ear chip like dialogue in a Verdi opera, and although his Italian was hardly perfetto, he had scant difficulty in piecing together their intentions.

• There commenced a low voltaic drone, like Thomas Edison’s spiritual mantra or the romantic humming of ogres in love.

• He’d held up his vibrating hands to watch their hue redden, his fingers already swelling like microwaved frankfurters.

• Switters’s back felt like the time clock in an anthill.

• The pope, naturally, was curious about the augury that had set his predecessor to throwing off tears like an ice sculpture in a wind tunnel.

• Any winged aircraft, from the smallest Cessna prop puppy to the biggest Boeing behemoth, was a romantic artifact, a swoozy sculpture, a sailing thing of irresistible appeal; but a helicopter . . . a helicopter was like a funky old shoetree that a witch had caused to levitate. Chunky and uncouth, it was as if some weird kid had planted a homemade whirligig in the fat of a turd.

• His answer startled Domino, caught her by such surprise that after jerking upright, she slowly drooped forward in her chair, like a sunflower that could no longer bear the weight of its crown; and for thirty seconds or so, she was so lost in thought that her orbs were kind of an inky smear. He squeezed her knee (one of those familiarities in which he rarely anymore indulged) and the eyes winked back on, like modem lights after a power surge.

• Three months after separation from her divine wad of tissue, Masked Beauty continued to mark its absence by compulsively rubbing and pulling at her nose, like one of those compassionate zoo apes that openly toys with its genitals in order to relieve the guilt of visiting schoolchildren.

• The May moon looked like a bottlecap. More specifically, entering its last phase, the moon looked like a bottlecap that a fidgety beer-drinker had squashed double between macho thumb and forefinger. The moon was making Switters thirsty, and he said as much to Toufic, but the truck driver wasn’t listening.

• But Switters wasn’t in Bangkok, he was in the Syrian desert, and the May moon, entering its last phase, appeared folded over on itself like a thin yellow omelet. It was making him hungry, and he said as much to Toufic, but the truck driver was no longer listening.

• Then, cupping his testes in the palm of her hand, like a farmgirl weighing guinea eggs, she knelt before his Invacare 9000 and gave him a single lick; a long, slow, wet, pedestal to pinnacle lick.

• He was stiffer than before, if that was physiologically possible, and a fever had descended upon him like a satyric malaria.

• Her voice, even more than usual, was like a Red Cross doughnut wagon purring into earshot after a disaster.

• Unlidded, it proved to contain a clear broth—but this being Italy, several meaty tortellinis bobbed in it like fat boys at the beach.

• Both cool and warm, smooth and wavy, the floor felt like fruit skin. It felt like lettuce. Something invisible and pleasurable oozed up between his toes.

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