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bottles of whiskey. The more bums showed up and the more ways the $$$ was grabbed-up and thinned-out, the less long it would keep them off the bricks.

11
    T hat night Chase flew drunk, landed on a beach somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard outside of Brutalia. He needed a superhero name for himself. He had two powers, he could fly and he could see himself from any angle. He had pale skin, sleek blonde hair in bangs, a skimpy stringless black eye mask over a delicately pretty face. He had the private school blazer over jeggings. For now that was his costume. And his one mission was to somehow locate Kieran. He closed his eyes and saw his Canadian Kieran, his heart twanging the sweet conspiracy that was a love affair, two against the world in a secret hiding place made of dreams. He had to get back there.
    His head was plugged into the iPod but it was turned off. He sat on the sand. He had drunk the entire bottle of Her Blue Majesty’s champagne, a
a Bollinger Blanc de Noirs Vieilles Vignes Francaises 2001
at $600 a bottle. The night rolled over him like a lost highway. He lie back on the sand, let the sea breezes wash over him. He gazed at the star points way up there. His eyes closed. Time passed.
    The iPod was growing with the songs that gave him flight. It held an eclectic range of picks from Ravel to Rufus Wainwright. He didn’t pick the songs, they picked him. But he had to discover them first. Then he had to learn how to control them so he could recharge his flight power at will. But the day had been long and gross. He had too many enemies. Too much had gone down. There was no going back home, no going back to school. There was no warm bubble without Kieran. He was exhausted and he was drunk. Right now Beethoven at top volume wouldn’t get him off the sand.

12
    M ilo Spector was nude on the bed, his pulse only an assumption, the TV volume way down until the sound was subliminal. The screen ran 1973
Soul Train,
a hundred Afros and plaid bellbottoms soundlessly doing the brick house atomic boogaloo popping locking kicking splits down and back up.
    He knew who he was. From faded Space Age color film his face had been identified as the face of Dr. Milo Spector. The Kinner & Membert ID photo framed the face of a still-boyish black nerd with glasses. It was the same face and everything else he saw in every mirror and when he looked down at his body. It was a man whose every public or private record pre-2000 had been erased.
    “It’s cold,” Mona Doll said.
    She went
brrrr
touched her stiff nipples, warmed up. KM technology had perfected holosynthesis in the 1970s. A fusion of virtual reality and holography, she seemed so real she had a pulse. Yet Milo had such control he could draw every curve of her to suit the sweatiest corner of his psyche. In Brutalia only those at the top of the superhero food chain had tech like this. She was black in his matching shade of brown, black bangs, her face somewhere between gamine and pixie.
    Mona Doll said, “You keeping count?”
    Spector said, “This one will make five.”
    Mona Doll said, “Not that I believe the average. I mean, I don’t actually buy that the average person has only eight orgasms a month. Maybe if the average person is ten years married, right? Settled into a boring pattern of sex on Tuesdays, or whatever. Maybe.”
    He said, “Mine is eight.”
    “So you need three more this month.”
    “Yes.”
    “I never asked this,” she said. “Why limit your monthly number of orgasms?”
    “I only do what’s necessary.”
    “Why?”
    “More than that is unnecessary.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “As far as I can tell.”
    “More than eight orgasms in one month is too many?”
    “I don’t get to be self-indulgent.”
    “Why not?”
    “I’m a superhero.”
    “That’s a profound sacrifice you make for the good of Mankind.”
    “I live with it.”
    “You have an uneasy life.”
    “It’s a discipline.”
    “Does that make you an uptight