Of course I always had other girls around; and at work, during that time I spent working on setting up my situation at home, I was fucking Thelma. It was her image that I had in mind when I told Leonard that story about the woman at the racetrack, but I'd changed things around a bit. Although Thelma was always at the track she wasn't a gambler but rather my coworker, and unlike the woman in the story she wasn't at all shy about showing off her body. She would flash her tits for no reason at all, lift up her skirt not in the ladies room but on the way to the ladies room. She wasn't much to talk to, but no one cared, especially not me and my friend Bino. Bino and I took turns fucking her during our lunch breaks. I always took her up to the roof. Rolling around up there with the sun beating down on us, we always lost our sense of where we were—or at least I did. It always felt like a dirty metal rooftop in Paris to me, with Thelma my sweet little French pastry that I'd picked up from the sidewalk and brought upstairs.

Bino, though, always brought her to this grassy area right behind the building. Sometimes I watched from the roof as Bino went down on her—he seemed to like that more than anything else. He was one of those sensitive types who liked to get right down to a woman's smell, eating her out as he held her hand while someone like me would always reach up for a woman's tits.

"Hurry up, you mutt!" I'd yell down to him when he took too long, "What are you waiting for? The second coming?" When he'd finally get around to fucking her it wouldn't take very long. Still, he'd hold on to her, resting his head on her chest and sighing. "Okay, Thelma," I'd have to shout, "get up here. Now!" Thelma would then come up to the roof while Bino stayed down below. He liked to listen as Thelma and I fucked, and to insure his pleasure we made as much noise as we could so our sounds would reach him—he was, after all, our friend. But sometimes, as a joke, we remained quiet, which would always frighten Bino somehow. "Hey," he'd yell, "what the hell's going on up there?" It took a lot of effort to be quiet when we were fucking. It was like denying that we were animals, a denial which created such pressure inside of us that when we finally let go the release was exquisite. We'd scream like people in terror, hitting each other as if fending off an attacker.

And one time, after I had come, I pushed Thelma off of me with such force that she tumbled off the roof. Bino had been shouting suspiciously the whole time, and Thelma came crashing down on him just as he started to yell, "I'm coming up there!" at which point I heard a thump indicating that Thelma had hit the ground. While still reclining I reached for my pants then pulled a cigarette from the pocket. I lit it and, taking in the smoke, gazed up at the sky for a while.

It was an overcast day, and as I stared at the clouds I imagined that with the sheer force of my mind I could make them disperse so that the sun would shine upon me. To my delight they began to do just that, and in a short time the sun's rays poked through an opening in the cloud cover. I stretched my arms, letting the light shine all over me.

When I finally got up I walked to the edge of the roof and looked down. There was Thelma, unconscious, sprawled on top of Bino who looked like he'd just woken up from one of his monumental drunks—his eyes blinking, wiping from his brow what to him probably felt like sweat but was actually blood. Adding to his shock was the opening in the clouds I'd created, which sent the sun's hot rays stinging down upon his face.

"Get up!" I yelled.

"I... I can't," he muttered. "I'm in pain."

I reached for my jacket and pulled out the small bottle of aspirin I always carried with me. "Here," I said, tossing it down to him. The bottle landed on Thelma's back.

Bino reached for the bottle, then examined it slowly, his eyes still blinking. "I don't think this is gonna do it," he said with some difficulty.

"You're a pussy!" I shouted as Bino let the bottle slip from his hand.

They required an ambulance to get them moving again. Each of them had a bad concussion, while Bino had, in addition to that, a broken arm. Looking back on it, I supposed that they were lucky they weren't hurt more. But at the time it happened I couldn't take Thelma's fall, and Bino's catching that fall, very seriously. I had just had a good fuck, after which I had made the clouds move, so naturally I was in a rather jubilant frame of mind. Seeing them down on the ground, I expected them simply to rise just as I had risen. That they couldn't surprised me at first, but then I remembered that they weren't like me.

Indeed, no one was, nor would anyone ever be like me. I had been through things that would kill anyone else—and come out of them even stronger than I had been before. I had learned how to make things happen, how to make the things I wanted mine—and how to make the things I saw in my mind become real. There was no obstacle that I couldn't either obliterate or else get around. There was no riddle or puzzle that I couldn't solve. And, above all, there was no one who I wanted to fuck who I couldn't fuck.

That evening, after checking on Bino in the hospital, I went home to Lily. She'd fixed some fancy dinner—chicken in wine sauce with wild rice on the side. I'd already eaten on the way home from the hospital, so I told her I'd bring it with me to work the next day and eat it for lunch. I then sat down in the living room to read the paper while Kiddo stared at the television. Later Lily and I fucked until I fell asleep, and that's the way things should have gone for the next four years. But then a week later when I got home from work Lily told me she'd been to the doctor. She was pregnant again, which meant that another little retard was on the way.

Since I'd only been fucking her for a week that meant the baby was Leonard's. He was apparently such a fertile fucker that his sperm defeated the pill yet a second time. And even though he'd gone, he'd found a way to leave a little piece of himself behind.

It was fine at first. I enjoyed it when Lily's tits started to get bigger, but when her belly grew I was annoyed. I'd fucked enough fat girls when I was in school. The fat girls were always pointless, drunken fucks—experiments in which I was trying to prove what I should have already known by that time: That I could get it up anytime, anywhere, and with any girl.