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skidding on the slick tatami, drunk, queasy. My skin felt too thick; I wanted to take it off, to go naked before Rafu and be loved as the women in her life had been. I deserved that, didn’t I? I careened into a wooden candlestick, bounced off of a low table of red wood, bruised my snout on Rafu’s corner; she clattered to the floor.
    I threw up on the grass mats and lolled in my decrepitude beside my waste.
THE UNRUSHED FAMILIARITY OF A HUSBAND
    A man lay on the floor. The substance of my retching. I vomited up Milo’s dream, and it lay on the floor in a white uniform streaked with the silvery stuff of my digestion: tears, the honey of lost days, sweat, night-semen. His officer’s cap tumbled off onto the tatami; his hair was wet and matted like a newborn’s.
    He stirred; Rafu held her slats together in terror, as silent as she could be. The man crawled to Milo’s sleeping shape and curled into it as I had done, with the unrushed familiarity of a husband, or a frequent Baku. He kissed her hair, left streaks of silver on her neck. I watched from the shadows as he called her name and she rolled into waking, rolled into him, her face unfolding into a smile as I sometimes unfold into a man.
    “How are you here?” she marveled, as well she might.
    “I missed you,” he murmured, slurred, unsure of English, as well he might be, having been in my stomach a moment previously. Liar , I thought.
    “I’ve been so lonely,” Milo sighed. “I hate it here. Can’t we go home?”
    “Yes, of course. Tomorrow.” He was not listening to her. The sailor pulled at her frumpy nightgown, pulling her greyish, threadbare underthings away, pulling his sex from his crisp white trousers, clung with silvery dream-glue. She moaned a little, frightened, half-asleep yet.
    “It’s so strange,” he gasped as he thrust awkwardly into her, with all the grace of an elephant falling upon a hapless antelope. “I was in the desert just a moment ago. Everything smelled like oil and sand. There were men on a raft; they shot at us, and all around them the sea was angry, blue and green, phosphorescent with spilled fuel and algae. It glowed, and the men’s faces were so hollow.”
    Milo began to cry silently. Her body lurched with his motion.
    “We shot back, we had to. I pulled their bodies out of the glowing water.” He started to laugh roughly, pushing faster against her. “And it was so weird, their skin just came off in my hands, like a coat. So soft, like they were made of nothing, with nothing inside, and all we pulled out was skin and blood, no men at all.”
    “Don’t laugh, it scares me,” whispered Milo.
    Her husband put his hands against her ears as if to blot out the sound of his laughter, which spiraled up and higher and further and faster, until water came from his mouth and his hands, water pouring into her, the salt-sea scouring her, shells and fish and sand and blood splashing out of him, into her ears, into her womb, into her mouth. She spluttered, coughed—he pushed the sea through her, and her lips became as blue as the waves, her hair streamed like kelp, his fingers left purple anemones on her ribs.
    “Aren’t you happy I’m back? Why don’t you kiss me? Don’t you love me?”
    And he kissed her, over and over, wet, salty smacks in the dark, and above the sound of them I could hear Rafu crying, huddled like discarded furniture against the concrete wall.
YOU CAN’T LOVE MEAT
    The dream-vomit sat cross-legged on the floor, waiting for someone to serve him tea. Milo lay broken by him, her face swollen, water dribbling from her mouth.
    “Your name is Kabu. Akakabu,” he said slowly to me. A child might well know its father. “Is my name Lieutenant?”
    “No.” I walked out of the shadow of the American television stand and sat on my haunches next to him. “Your name is Gabriel Salas, but you’re not him, not really.”
    “No, I know that. If I were Gabriel Salas I would still be in the desert, and the sea would