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him inside. Hand did it.
    “Like lifting a very fat cat,” he said.
    Now the anteater was lying under a chair near the door. Pilar put the saucer of milk near it again, and added another saucer of water. The animal looked dead.
    “If it dies tonight, it’ll smell,” Pilar said.
    “It won’t die,” Hand said.
    Hand sat on her bed and Pilar stood before him. For a moment, Hand continued to watch the anteater. Then he looked up, grabbed her shorts from the front and pulled her toward him. She sat on his lap and leaned into him, but when she wanted to put her mouth all over his, he spoke.
    “It’s resting. It came here to rest.”
    The only graffiti Pilar had ever found thought-provoking was the line she’d seen again and again in bathrooms: Sex invented God . Each time she saw those words, for hours afterward, it was the way she saw the world, as stupid as she felt about it. She loved her life, but the only transcendent experiences she’d had began with provocation of her skin.
    The animal unmoving, Pilar and Hand were side to side, and kissing slowly. Pilar wanted to kiss him harder and push him onto his back and stand on his chest and dance, but she didn’t, because now they couldn’t talk and they were strangers. She continued to kiss him quietly as they lay on their sides, facing each other. They waited for judgment, they wondered if this was working, they hoped they would get excited.
    “Hi,” she said.
    “Hey,” he said. “We should leave the door open. In case he wants to leave.”
    Hand got up, opened the door a crack, and jumped back to the bed. Pilar swung her leg around him. She was above him, straddling, and from her vantage point Hand looked so far away, so old and dead. She leaned down and held his face in her hands. “This face,” she said. It was like holding a rock painted gold.
    They took their clothes off and she lay on top of him, placed her ear to his sternum, and the water inside him went shuckashucka and kissed her again and again.
    Where had she been snorkeling before? Florida, near Pensacola—another place where everything was for sale. It had rained all day and she and her father had gone in anyway, with rented equipment and just a few hundred yards out.
    They hadn’t seen anything then, everything so murky there, close to the breaks. But this, here, is what one wanted from snorkeling. The coral was dull colored, and there were no schools of fish. Here the fish traveled alone, loud blue ones, and very orange ones, small, and there was one with black and white stripes from stem to stern, and red on the hull. There was an especially bright yellow one that wanted to join Pilar inside her mask. It followed her, almost perched on her nose.
    They had paddled a shoddy two-person inflatable kayak out to an island in the bay, hoping to watch the sunset here, closer to it. They’d pulled the kayak onto the island, which was not, as expected, covered with sand, but was made of shells. All of its white—the island was white when seen from the beach— was shells. Millions, edges and distinctions worn irrelevant. Pilar and Hand broke a dozen of them with each step. The outermost Pacific-facing side of the island was settled by what seemed to be pelicans but weren’t; they were more elegant than pelicans, and numbered about fifty. The surface was lavalike, but was more cartilaginous than that. It was the consistency and color of burned flesh.
    From the kayak they retrieved the snorkeling things, putting their mouths on plastic mouthed by hundreds before. With the cold fins snug they fell in.
    All the fish on the floor were being pushed and pulled by the tide. And though this was their home, it didn’t look like they were the least bit accustomed to the underwater wind. They seemed baffled and cautious, like Californians driving cars through rain. Pilar’s hands, propelling her forward, appeared in front of her mask, glowing in the sun, angelic. She was an angel, she thought. But what were