It took me a lot longer to find Circe’s than I’d thought it would. Weeks. Many days of slowly mounting loneliness and hormonal hauntings. Scouring first the bright white glare of the net for a mention, a hint, a rumor, a map; then scouring the dark closetlands of the West Virginia panhandle for the place itself—which, when located, turned out to be nothing more than a remodeled barn or a hangar of some sort: a metal halfbarrel lying on its side in an overgrown field, flickering beer signs covering one end, a random mix of cars and trucks and even an old schoolbus sitting quiet and dark in the trampled grass all about. But what had I been expecting? Something like the mythical Area 51? No name visible anywhere, but this was it. I could smell all manner of sweat and other strange stinks soaking the humid July air around it.

I entered cautiously by the only door and found myself in a tiny, neon-lit antechamber, walls covered in photocopied posters for local bar bands, missing pets and children, want-ads for stripclubs and private dancers…and in one corner a little counter where a thin, twitchy boy sat behind a cash register watching something on a video iPod.

“Five for the bar, ten for the underground,” he said without looking up. On the iPod I caught a glimpse of a strapped-down forearm, a scalpel, a smear of something; a tinny scream or some kind of music whined from the earbuds.

I opened my jacket and pulled out the email I’d printed out the day before: a series of random graphics and slivers of text, dates and times. “I’ve got an invite.”

The boy took the page and squinted at it. “Y’sure do. Serena, huh? You’re ‘bout an hour early, though.”

“Uhh. Yeah.”

“Well. Don’t think that’ll make any difference. You just go in to the bar n’ you give this to the bartender—he’ll hook you up. Enjoy.”

I nodded and passed through another door into the bar itself, a little box of drywall and fake wood panelling in which a handful of disparate drinkers—men and women, some old, some young, some clearly monied, others as filthy and disheveled as bums—slouched together at the dim, scarred bar. A Johnny Cash tune played from somewhere in the greasy shadows. The bartender was another boy, thin and pale as the first, with black, sickleshaped hickies all over his sweaty white throat. He took my invite and glanced at it, nodded, and picked up a phone from under the bar. Mumble mumble mumble, and then he turned to me and said, “Just go through there, go up the stairs, n’ then you tell the bouncer you’re here for Serena. She’ll be expectin’ you. You want a beer or somethin’ first?”

My mouth was dry but still, strangely, sticky—but I was not sure what kind of effect alcohol or too much sugar would have on me now. “Nah. Maybe later.”

“Allrighty, then, tiger. Enjoy.”

One of the drinkers looked up as I passed, muttered: “Serena, huh? Sick motherfucker.” I spotted a loose gray smile deep in a beardy thicket and smelled some kind of oil souring his breath. I walked on and passed through the door the bartender pointed out.

At the top of the rickety metal stairs, a drowsy black man wearing what looked like a woman’s nightie was waiting for me, sucking a toothpick. He had some sort of contraption strapped to his forearm, lengths of medical tubing winding up his biceps and into the nightie. His eyes were wet and horribly bloodshot, the pupils vast. “You’re Serena’s?” he said. “Li’l early.”

I nodded.

He shrugged and led me through a ponderous metal door that looked like it had come off of an oldfashioned meatlocker, and down a long, toobright hallway illuminated by a number of bare bulbs dangling from fluorescent orange cables. Numbered doors lined the hallway. The man led me up to 9, nearly at the end, and knocked. Taped below the number was a postcard depicting an old Japanese watercolor of a gapemouthed geisha lying sprawled on some cushions, her kimono open, an octopus sprawled between her spread legs, tentacles looping up over her breasts in suckered knots.

“Yeah?” a slurry voice asked through the door.

“Serena. Eleven’s here.”

“Oh. C’mon in.”

The man opened the door and watched with those bloody porcelain eyes as I ducked in out of the hallway. The door clunked shut behind me.

I was in a comfy, if small, livingroom awash in aquamarine light. The walls were covered in cheesy murals of ocean waves that tried to ape the Japanese style but ended up looking like fish scales. A couch, a chair, a coffeetable, a weird metal lampstand covered in unshaded green and blue bulbs.

Serena was lying on the couch: narrow, wan, black-and-white hair heaped up atop a narrow skull, a backwoods face—pretty, sure, but stippled with acne scars under heavy pink pancake makeup—and a spindly body hidden beneath a heavy terrycloth robe. Just a girl.

“Hi, baby,” she said. Sickly cheer. Acrid breath. She was full of some chemicals that no doubt made her job easier—and certain other effervescent concoctions that made my nerves sing tunes I hadn’t heard in years, it seemed. “I wadn’t expectin’ you for a while yet.”

I shrugged. “I….Didn’t take me as long as to get here as I thought.” I’d actually tracked the location yesterday, and had done my best today to kill time in the shoddy little town a few miles away where I’d gotten a motel room, but…I’d come here for only one reason.

“Ah, well, that happens. Siddown, sugar. Want me to have Buster send up a li’l somethin’ for us to drink?”

My mouth was still violently dry, but I said, “Nah.” I sat down in the chair, not quite looking at her body, or her highschoolish face. She was older, I could tell, but she’d aged surprisingly well.

“So what’s your name?” she asked, never budging from the couch, barely moving, eyelids and fingertips heavy.

“Carl.”

“Carl. You come far?”

“Pretty far.” Not as far as I thought I’d have to, though. There were places like this everywhere, it seemed: you just had to look hard for them, seeking them in the backlots and under the paving stones of the everyday. There was one in Pittsburgh, too, but people on the one deeplyburied bulletin board I’d begun to frequent had steered me clear of that place: just a bunch of down-and-out Art Institute kids playing around with costumes and masks, they said. Circe’s was much better—more expensive, and out in the middle of nowhere, but well worth the drive….The real thing. Or, well, as close to the real thing as you could get.

She tried to make inane smalltalk with me, to which I responded with little more than grunts and nods. My hands were trembling, my nostrils stinging with her smell, hormones bubbling in my blood and fizzing under my skin. I wanted to leap on her, pin her to the couch—but, paradoxically, the more riled my body got, the quieter and more inward I grew.

Finally, growing tired with my reticence, she said: “Well, Carl….Enough a this. Wanna just cut right to the chase?”

I nodded, a little too eagerly.

She smiled, stood up. The robe fell away and she was naked: a bony body, yes, but welltoned and muscular, little breasts with dark orange nipples, a narrow belly sweeping down to a narrower pubis—and there, dangling from the strut of bone, a small, blue-and-green clump of tendrils, each no longer than my finger, each slightly curled and pinkish at the tip.

Beautiful. Saliva flooded my mouth like a gullywasher after a yearlong droubt.

She stepped toward me carefully, a little unsteady on her feet, and her tentacled sex was level with my face. Real. Real enough. As much as I’d anticipated this moment over the past months, I’d never quite envisioned it like this. I’d expected something more…cartoony? I don’t know. I’d expected more and less.

They were false, of course—prosthetics, special-FX appliances—but very, very professional: my online “friends” had told me Circe’s employed a number of silicone make-up artists to sculpt their illusions, making them as convincing as possible. And Serena was convincing. The illusion was damnear perfect to my pheromone-saturated eyes.

She made me stand up and undressed me, slowly, careful when pulling things over my hands or my hips, noting what was there. When I was naked, she ran her hands carefully over my body, massaging the muscles, smoothing over the bones, relaxing me—touching all the appropriate places where the nerves bundled close to the surface of my skin. She’d made a career out of men like me, and knew her job well.

“You’re a nice one,” she purred. “How long you been out?”

I shrugged. “Idaknow….A year? Year and a half?”

“Wow. You take good care a yourself,” she said. “I like a man who takes care a himself. Y’know?”

Her breath smelled powerfully of opiates and aspartame, and stranger molecules that unlocked a cascade of stages inside me.

“But you’re all so tense, sugar!” she giggled. “First time since y’came up for air?”

No need to lie. “Uhhh. Yeah, actually.”

“Awwwww. Well, I’ll take good care a you.”

Without another useless word, we moved into the next room: a small, quiet bedroom. A naked waterbed took up much of the room, covered in oil and mud. Nearby, an antique clawfooted bathtub sat full of cool, murky water that stank wonderfully of saltwater and iodiney seaweed. Gorgeous.

We tumbled onto the bed and she kept mumbling, “It’s okay, just be yourself, just be yourself,” and after a few awkward moments I was, shutting off my mind and just letting the urges that had been building up in me for months now take full control, unhooking my bones, relaxing my skin, letting myself spill out and cover her and writhe blissfully in the cool oil and the clayey muck, her body a warm bolus swallowed in my loosened flesh. Her eyes drooped shut and she panted, fighting for breath as I wound myself into the warm clump of tentacles at her groin and into the warmer opening hidden beneath them, fingers uncoiling deep into her, writhing with excitement, pushing deeper and deeper into her damp, tidepool heat until they reached her core where they could taste only the brine of her body and there I boiled over, blinding heat convulsing me as I filled her with eggs and venom. It must’ve only taken a minute or two.

I woke slowly in the tub, entirely submerged, staring up through vague shadows and a thin film of algae. I faintly remembered crawling here after finishing with her. I stood up painfully, flexing my arms, my resolidified fingers, running them over my lumpy hips, tucking a stray filament in here and there. Serena was lying on the bed, smeared with drying filth, an empty bottle lying on her distended belly. It reeked of some tart, dessicating poison. Something that would clean her out in a little while. To keep her human.

She grinned blearily at me. “So how was it…?”

I smiled pleasantly, a little numb now that the soreness of reintegration was rapidly fading. “Excellent.” I felt wonderfully empty—the pressure and the seething need that had haunted me for weeks now gone, my body cool and silent, its seasonal imperatives completed.

“Good.”

I sat around, waiting for her to say something more, wondering awkwardly if there was anything more to say, but she’d passed out. I kept staring at her belly, wondering, curiously wishing—a little—that she were real and not just a very desperate girl working for a place that dealt in convincing appearances.

After a while, I found some towels and wiped myself off. I dressed and the black man came for me and led me again down the headache-bright hall. As we passed number 6 the door creaked open and a child of maybe seven or eight looked out, amber eyes sparkling painfully, needles of chitin working like sewing machine parts between her painted lips, spinning out a long, silvery thread of saliva. She smelled strongly of a terrible loneliness that clung in my sinuses, making me sneeze.

The bartender winked at me as I left and, outside, I sat in my car for nearly an hour, letting the damp summer breeze lick the last beads of fever and pondwater from my temples, thinking about going home and about not going home. Thinking about my real home and the dry, dusty city where I now lived. The little girl’s loneliness had seeped into the recently-emptied parts of me and made me feel hollow, confused.

Something came through the grass while I sat there, just a breeze at first, but soon a thin and lonely shape that passed by me on many wirefine legs and went in to Circe’s—another someone like me, I supposed, seeking a little succor in the middle of a vast and lonely place.