When the rattle of his bones being put back together became the rattling whir of the cable cars going up Nob Hill, then he shot forth out of darkness among the square red lights of the other soul-cars swarming from the parking tunnels, zebra-striped gate up and down; for awhile he followed a big dirty bus that had once been a selfish man, and he rolled up Powell Street, which was sutured lengthwise with steel. Crowds were standing off the curb. There was no room for them yet. He saw a man pushing a shopping cart full of old clothes. Globes of crystallized light attacked him from the edge of Union Square. Higher up the hill he rolled by hotels and brass-worked windows, flags and awnings; he saw the pedestrian souls slogging up slowly, the Chinese signs, the yellow plastic pagoda-roofs, the bulging windows of Victorian houses. A girl with a sixpack under her arm ran smiling and flushed up the hill. At the top of the hill he could see far, saw a Sunday sailing panorama off the Marin headlands, with tanned girls drinking wine coolers, and college boys pretending to be pirates with their fierce black five-dollar squirt guns, and the Golden Gate Bridge almost far away enough to shimmer as it must have done for those convicts from Alcatraz who doomed themselves trying to swim there. The red warning light still flashed on the island, now noted for its tours and wildflowers. The cellblock building became ominous again when the evening fog sprang up and the tanned girls screamed as their twenty-four-footer tacked closer and closer to the sharp black rocks, already past the limit demarcated by the old prison buoys that said KEEP OFF; and seeing the girls he wanted to kill them over again but then his cracked bones ached from being beaten and he bared his teeth and thought: If I can't eat them by stealing them, I'll get them another way! and he laughed and honked his horn and other cars honked behind him so he rolled on down the hill and came to the street of souls.
Fearing to enter the candy shop which had brought him such pain, he parked, offering himself again to that knife of fog and silence, the handle a crystal stalagmite; and he came to the coffee shop of souls.
Brass safe-deposit boxes walled him, side by side, bearing buttons and horns. Each one had a different coffee inside. The smell of coffee enflamed him. There were rows of stalls for muffins, each of which reminded him of the pale brown coconuts he had drunk. In his pocket he found a single coin with a hole in it. They gave him a muffin. He became an anthropologist.
On the komatik, whose slats had been partly covered by a caribou skin (now frozen into iron wrinkles), he lay comfortably on his side, gripping two slat-ends with his fishy-smelling sealskin mitts which were already getting ice-granules behind the liner (an old bedsheet) because every time he wiped his nose with the skintight capilene gloves the snot was soaked up by the old bedsheet which then began to freeze; and as the komatik rattled along at the end of its leash, making firm tracks in the snow-covered ice, the wind froze the snot around his nose and mouth into white rings, but not immediately because it was not cold enough yet to make breath-frost into instant whiskers; however, it was certainly cold enough to make his cheek ache from contact with the crust of snot-ice on the ski mask; meanwhile the smoothness of the sea began to be interrupted by hard white shards where competing currents had gashed the ice open and then the wound had scarred; sometimes the ice-plates had forced each other's edges into uprising splinters that melded and massed and hardened into strange shapes; the Inuk wended the Ski-Doo between these when he could, going slowly so that the komatik did not lurch too badly; his back was erect, almost stem, the rifle at a ready diagonal, and he steered south toward a thick horizon-band that seemed to be fog or blowing snow; in fact it was the steam of open water. Over this hung the midday sun, reddish-pale, a rotten apple of the old year.
Then the groaning ice fissured into a shape like a girl's mouth, and the komatik broke through. He fell under the ice. The other girl was waiting beneath with her mouth open to drink his blood and he was already freezing and paling, but then the girl breathed upon him lovingly and he was warmed. The first girl, the one who was ice, opened her mouth; the second one lifted him on through to the sky.
