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Whatever, the Bahamalama-Dingdong had come out of the darkness, seduced me, then disappeared.
    These searches didn’t evoke a single memory flashback. No hazy images of pinball machines jumped out at me, no sudden glimpses of Morgan’s long dark hair and pale skin. And, no—being a carrier doesn’t make you pale-skinned or gothy-looking. Get real. Morgan was probably just some goth type who didn’t know she was about to turn into a bloodthirsty maniac.
    Unless, of course, she was someone like me: a carrier. But one who got off on changing lovers into Deeps. Either way, I hadn’t seen her since.
    So this is all I can remember:
    There I was, sitting in a bar in New York City and thinking,
Wow, I’m sitting in a bar in New York City
. This thought probably runs through the heads of a lot of newly arrived freshmen who manage to get served. I was drinking a Bahamalama-Dingdong because the bar I was sitting in was “The Home of the Bahamalama-Dingdong.” It said so on a sign outside.
    A pale-skinned woman with long dark hair sat beside me and said, “What the hell is that thing?”
    Maybe it was the frozen banana bobbing in my drink that provoked the question. I suddenly felt a bit silly. “Well, it’s this drink that lives here. Says so on the sign out front.”
    “Is it good?”
    It was good, but I only shrugged. “Yeah. Kind of sweet, though.”
    “Kind of girly-looking, don’t you think?”
    I did think. The drink had been a vague sort of embarrassment to me since it had arrived, frozen banana bobbing to the music. But the other guys in the bar had seemed not to notice. And they were all pretty tough-looking, what with their leather chaps and all.
    I pushed the banana down into the drink, but it popped back up. It wasn’t really trying to be obnoxious, but frozen bananas have a lower specific density than rum and pineapple juice, it turns out.
    “I don’t know about girly,” I said. “Looks like a boy to me.”
    She smiled at my accent. “
Yerr
not from around here, are
yew
?”
    “Nope. I’m from Texas.” I took a sip.
    “Texas? Well, hell!” She slapped me on the back. I’d already figured out in those two days that Texas is one of the “brand-name” states. Being from Texas is much cooler than being from a merely recognizable state, like Connecticut or Florida, or a
huh
? state, like South Dakota. Texas gets you noticed.
    “I’ll have one of those,” she said to the bartender, pointing to my Bahamalama-Dingdong, which pointed back. Then she said her name was Morgan.
    Morgan drank hers, I drank mine. We both drank a few more. My recall of subsequent events gets steadily worse. But I do remember that she had a cat, a flat-screen TV, black satin sheets, and a knack for saying what she thought—and that’s pretty much all I remember, except for waking up the next morning, getting kicked out of an unfamiliar apartment because she had to go somewhere and was looking all embarrassed, and heading home with a hangover that made navigation difficult. By the time I got back to my dorm room, I had no idea where I’d started out.
    All I had to show for the event was a newfound confidence with women, slowly manifesting superpowers, and an appetite for rare meat.
     
    “We’ve been over all that,” I said to Dr. Prolix. “I still can’t help you.”
    “This is not about helping me,” she said firmly. “You won’t come to terms with your disease until you find your progenitor.”
    “Yeah, well, I’ve tried. But like you’ve said before, she must have moved away or died or something.” That had always been the big mystery. If Morgan was still around, we’d be seeing her handiwork everywhere—peeps popping up all over the city, a bloodbath every time she picked up some foolish young Texan in a bar. Or at least a few corpses every now and then. “I mean, it’s been over a year, and we don’t have a single clue.”
    “
Didn’t
have a clue,” she said, and rang a small, high-pitched bell on