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handprints on the wallpaper tracked over into the mirror his own face now occupied, and more handprints smudged an awful dollar-store painting of a sea manatee which hung crooked over the lumpy bed. The room stank, of course, like a porn parlor. Roaches chittered in a bathroom cornered black with fungus.
    It was still daylight; through the closed blinds he glimpsed the shadows passing the window, but none quite possessed the silhouette he craved...
    The magazine’s glossy images made his eyes feel lidless. He stared, as someone lost in the desert would stare at a mirage. The letters of the magazine’s title stretched across breasts so swollen they looked fit to burst, and a white belly equally swollen: BUNS IN THE OVEN.
    As he proceeded, Heyton couldn’t have felt more ashamed, nor more impassioned.
    ***
     
    He was surprised by how often he got lucky. From Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, from Baltimore to Frisco to Miami to Seattle—there was always some identically seedy thoroughfare peppered with fleabag motels and fleabag people. Crack reigned supreme, a devil’s contract for the new age; there would always be plenty of regrettable women who’d sell themselves for a twenty-dollar “rock.” This was south St. Petersburg; Heyton hadn’t had to drive far in the rental car to know he’d found the right kind of neighborhood: pawn shops, adult book stores, and rundown rowhouses. Perfect, he thought.
    The sodium lights on 4 th Street seemed to ooze on as the sun fell, painting the street in a glittery glaze the color of urine. Heyton spied stars struggling to wink through the hot, smog-tinged twilight. Monolithic buildings pushed upward past ugly rooftops, a craggy black mesa against a dull sky. Heyton thought of lost worlds.
    As the night deepened, they began to appear as if disgorged from the street’s tacky crannies and alleyways: the lost women. Thousand-yard stares propped up over false smiles of wantonness, they began their endless trek on either side of the street, big-eyed scarecrows in high heels and hot pants and tubetops banding fried-egg breasts. Most were emaciated, with mops of soiled hair the color of dirty dishwater—the proverbial crack whores nearing the end of the line. Any city had plenty of them. A few were obese, comically so, waddling the dirty sidewalk on swollen ankles and feet ballooned against flip-flops straps. One, whose face look inflated within a preposterous Benatar shag, beckoned Heyton with a wave of a fat hand, mouthing some carnal promise. Her buttocks in giant jeans looked like a cramed duffle bag. Not tonight, honey, Heyton thought.
    He drove to the end and back again, eyeing for police but seeing none. A black woman—clearly not a prostitute—exited an ice-cream shop with a toddler on each hand. She smiled in her routine, clearly a happy mother...
    I never knew my mother, Heyton thought.
    But it was a self-realization that always arrived via a shrugging objectivity. He’d been raised by a single father. “She died,” he’d dismissed to young Heyton a few times, “a long time ago.” End of story.
    Heyton didn’t care. He didn’t feel under-privileged, and he couldn’t discern that he’d missed anything in childhood. His father had raised him well regardless, then Heyton had excelled through life to this point: $200,000-plus per year in a company headed skyward.
    Nevertheless, that was the chief reason cited: the lack of a maternal figure during formative and adolescent years.
    Thinking back to the last few had him squirming on the LeBaron’s faux-leather upholstery. Kansas City a month a ago, and Phoenix the month before that—both gems. The images—so sharp, so freshly white with ghosts of blue veins beneath ever-so-tight skin—melded with further images from the magazines and dumped a narcotic heat over his groin. Good God...
    Cyesolagnia was the clinical term, but he’d also seen others, even more bizarre, like Gravidophilia and maiesiomania—a