CO:--/TP:--

The city's hotly lit. Backward from here and now it seems it is always lit. Daytime, night, all the same so that when I found him, as I told before, I didn't know what to do--it looked the same--day and night--I had found, at least, his gun. I didn't need any stinking gun.

I needed answers. I needed organization--organizing, I mean. I meant, I needed an organizing of thinking toward the beginning of an end to this. But not there and not then, said the body. Even from the closet, where I'd put it to keep quiet, I could hear it, whispering beneath the suited stranger's words, "Are you or they using our or your genuine relations to manipulate us or you--or are you or they indeed the source of our or your relations, with which you or they have been manipulating us or you all along?"

He offered me a cigarette which I didn't hesitate to accept. Things were different now, you see. Different since I arrived. I had no reason to wedge a distance between myself and the suit-wearing man. No paranoia could best the better champions of fear that had been parading my mind for days--weeks--unquantifiable stretches of time--these are new to me though their novelty had yet to breathe life into utility.

So I stood there, waiting, cigarette heavily hanging from my lip.

"Whatever," I spoke quickly breaking through the smoky ribbons, "you've brought, you might as well out with it." I knew well as anybody that I had been followed, that I had been lost, and that being followed after I had been lost I was now followed with an intensification of effort comparable only to those following some mystic in the desert, who says little but is trailed word to word as from oasis to oasis; I put a most Bedouin face forward.

"What the hell is wrong with you? Where's the body?" Said the suited man. Turning from him I started, "You can't come here talking to me like--" but a clip, cut off, struck swiftly across the back of the neck and I went down.

It couldn't have been more than a moment I dazed; he was mid-sentence as I came to, "ucker and you're gonna skin a cat not that way and not today you get uhh" but I went out again. Down in the desert, there was the blind chief, leading his tribe by the taste of sand; too granular here, westward into the basin. Saltier, now over the transverse ridge. We went up, I thought I would collapse.

He was pulling the body from the closet. I whispered across the room, "I didn't think anyone had gotten so close."

"What?"

"You knew--you'd already known before you came near this place."

"Of course we've known--I'm the one that's been put up to handle this shit. You've done nothing since you've gotten here--everyday since we started watching, it's been this--endless messages, cheap code, and shit, shit, shit," as he pulled the corpse onto the couch.

He began undressing it, I grabbed his arm; but cut, again, across my face, the desert gusts and the taste of sand.

As I woke out of it, I made a face, dragging my lip toward my nose and my nose toward my brow, as if to squeeze the pain from the center of my face. He was gone, he had taken the body. I got up and, reaching to the couch, nearly tore the coat I suddenly realized I was wearing. His suit--he'd put his suit on me--he must have taken my clothes, I thought before I remembered that he had been undressing the corpse just before he knocked me. But he couldn't have worn the corpse's clothes--bloody as they were. Or--if he did, why would he?

Time to organize. He might have needed to conceal that the corpse was a corpse, to get it out of the building, he must have taken its clothes, put them on himself, found that his suit was too small for the corpse, put my clothes on it instead, and put his suit on me. Made sense, no, almost made sense. There was no reason for him to dress me. He could've left me naked. I wasn't going anywhere. Why did he take the trouble to dress me?

Organize, I said to myself. His suit on me--why? To mark me? If he wanted to mark me, it'd be because he wanted to take me out. He could've taken me out--right then and there. Was it then to follow me? It seems they're doing a fine job at that as it is. Or maybe, no, or perhaps there is another party--somebody else tracking him and to take the heat off himself he put me in his outfit, so I'd buy him time while his ghosts spooked me, thinking I was the sharkskin fellow.

Too much--and the suit was not ill-fitting. Could I wear it? Maybe there was something to be gained here, I thought to myself. The gun! I then remembered. I'd thrown it under the couch before stuffing the body into the closet. I reached under the seats for it--it was there. Things were coming together. I put it into the suit pocket.

Money, I would need cash if I was going to trail the suit-switcher. I had none, I checked his pockets, he had left me a bit. The rushing fool. I straightened the wads into a countable stack when something dropped from a clump--

"Hell," read the matchbook. An address was scrawled within a crown of flames on the inner cover. I lit a cigarette, finished counting the money and reread the address--I had, you see, by this time, learned about addresses--and had a beginning, at last.