With the living, you can be fleet. Room 46, the Owl Hotel echolocating the night. The wet lights of the polder city, Amsterdam, held up from floods but just barely. Vivi and Alexi were still on the bed.
“Let me bug you some more,” Alexi said. “Play the pest. Was the python vest pattern on your back from the bomb your first lesion, then?”
She laughed. “Hardly. Do we have to talk about this stuff? We should go out.”
“We just got in. Don’t let me make you nervous.”
“I am.”
“Nervous?”
“Sure.”
“Why? I’m a nice guy.”
The one lamp near the TV screen up high was casting a pool of amber. “Precisely,” she said.
“You don’t fancy nice?”
“On you I do. My carapace has a different opinion.”
“So it wasn’t the bomb, then?”
“Nope.”
“Radiation, no hair, poisoning, you went through some terrible
