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worry about the pants.”
    A car passed us slowly, and the driver, a man in a sport coat, looked over.
    “We better go,” I said.
    Nichole put her cigarette in the ashtray and moved the shifter into Drive. I felt okay again, because I was with my girl and that’s all I wanted.
    That first day we drove for hours. Nichole seemed to pick roads and highways and exits at random. She smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. She told me how her mom finally moved all the way out of the house and how awful it was now, and how her dad never had more than two words to say to her. So I told her about how my dad signed me up to be some kind of guinea pig without even asking me first. It was hard for me to follow a critical line on my father for long, though, because I could see him in full 3-D vision.
    “What do you mean 3-D vision?” Nichole asked.
    “I mean I can see things from his point of view. I know how tough it’s been for him, losing his stupid Boeing job and my mom and brother.”
    “Well, you lost them, too. Except for the job.”
    “I know.”
    “So why does he get a special pass to be an asshole?”
    I winced inwardly. “He’s not really an asshole. Not a total asshole.”
    “ My dad’s a total asshole. And my mom’s a flake.”
    Steering with her left hand, she felt the empty pack of Winstons with her right, crackling the cellophane, making certain the pack was empty.
    “My mom’s a complete fucking flake ,” she said, throwing the crumpled pack into the passenger footwell.
    We slept on the sand in Long Beach, Washington. Nichole had brought a couple of sleeping bags. We zipped them together and snuggled into them behind a driftwood windbreak. Bonfires blazed up and down the beach. Silhouetted figures holding beer bottles capered before orange and yellow flames. Smoke chugged into the night sky. We were part of it and remote from it at the same time.
    We had been talking a lot, but now in the double bag we stopped talking. The stars were diamond hard. So was I. Well, not diamond hard. But pretty damn hard. It was my first unequivocal erection since my operations. Of course there had been the physical trauma of the accident followed by the deliberate trauma of scalpel and stitch. But lying in the bag with Nichole I realized that I’d also been depressed, maybe even clinically depressed. And now I wasn’t. Just like that. It had been like the ambulance ride to the first hospital. The medics had stanched the blood gush from my wrist with a tourniquet. I’d kept staring at the soaked gauze wrapped over my stump, and I knew a piece of me was gone. Even in my deep fog of pain, I knew I wasn’t whole and never would be again (at that point I hadn’t known they’d put my hand in a cold box right in the same ambulance or that there was a chance surgeons could successfully reattach it). A profound sadness and sense of loss had descended upon me—and abruptly lifted the next day when I saw that I had my hand back.
    Nichole had been severed from me for three months .
    “Hmm, down boy,” she said in the bag, reaching into my underwear and taking me in her hand. I whimpered a little, but in a manly way, of course.
    “Do you know why I invited you into my room that night?” she said.
    “Not really.”
    “Because it was like I remembered I knew you.”
    She fell asleep first, all tangled up with me in the hot bag, her head snuggled against my chest. I gazed at the stars, the taste of Nichole still on my tongue, the smell of our sex enveloping us like another bag. I fell asleep with the minute knitting of muscle and tendon tingling in my pinky.
    In the morning I woke before Nichole. The sky was a pastel suggestion of lime. I watched Nichole’s sleeping face and I took her hair into my fingers. I used my left hand because the right one was trapped under her shoulder. It was a few moments before I realized that all my fingers were working, that I’d regained, in my last sleeping hours, the full function of my hand.