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of Eurasian girls in day-glow bikinis lounging on white sand and triangular silk pillows excite him visibly, and he squirms beneath his seat belt and holds the magazine strategically, feeling as if he were thirteen and not twenty-six. He looks around. A few rows down there’s a sexy Hong Kong Chinese girl he’d wanted to help stow her backpack as they filed into the plane. But he didn’t have the guts, and so he stood in the aisle and waited for her to finish doing it herself, surreptitiously studying her ass and the way her shirt rode up to reveal the tempting concavities above her waist. He cranes his head to see her now. He thinks, Something about cabin pressure makes me horny. He blames the long-haul boredom. Eroticism, after all, exists to break life’s monotony. What if—he thinks—she feels the same as me? What if I just took her hand and brought her to the lavatory? The worst she could do is say no. He looks over but cannot see her. He does spot her naked foot sticking out from where she’s tucked it under her leg and her armrest. He marvels at its rabbitlike beauty. Madison had manly feet. I haven’t touched another person in so long. The way Madison held him when they made love often seemed his main purpose for sex. It was like hands slowly being washed in warm water—needful, complete, and it cleansed him of that one thing he kept secret from her.
    He rubs his stubbly chin, a silent-film villain deep in thought, and his watch reflects a locus of light that flies onto the walls, the seat backs, the faces
of his slumbering seatmates. He covers his wrist, worrying his neighbors will see the crown insignia, wondering if they’ll think it a Mong Kok fake. He examines it in the light. His grandfather had given it to him on his twenty-first birthday. This was years after the whole family had returned to the Philippines, years after things had begun to curdle, years after his grandfather had returned to his politics and his women. Stainless steel, pearlescent white face, Oyster Perpetual DateJust. His grandfather has one exactly like it. Almost. The boy’s is a counterfeit, even if premium—real beveled crystal rather than flat Perspex, but with Rado interior works. His grandfather had courageously followed a toothpick-chomping dealer, who he’d said reminded him of a hissing lizard, down an alleyway off Tung Choi Street and up three flights of narrow ramshackle stairs, to fork over two hundred U.S. dollars for the most real fake ever seen. A dedication to his grandson was later engraved on the back, and because of that the boy has treasured it. That and the savory memory of lost family dinners when the two would unclasp watches and trade and compare and marvel. The boy for so long now has passed his off as genuine that even he has forgotten and has allowed himself, along with everyone else, to be fooled.
    *
    He bursts in, like a bomb, the pearl handle of his Midnight Special glinting. “It is I,” he shouts, “Antonio Astig. Reach for the stars!” But the room is already empty. The window open, its panel swinging tauntingly. He crosses the room like a hungry tiger suddenly uncaged at lunchtime. Looking outside, on España Boulevard, he sees Dominador’s bald head bobbing below. He is swimming across the flooded street to a stranded flatbed truck. Dominador fights desperately against the raging current, debris hitting him at nearly every armstroke. Antonio hears shouts of men from behind him, the clatter of their shoes running up the stairs, down the hall. The police! Antonio leaps out the window and into the flood. The water tastes like the tears of all Dominador’s virgin victims. When he surfaces, he sees Dominador on the back of the truck, cutting the ropes of a tarp with his footlong switchblade knife. Above Antonio, police crowd the window, aim their pistols at him. He dips below, swimming like a shark. In the murky water, their bullets cruise past him like torpedoes. He surfaces in time to see