He said several times over coffee, over lunch, over afternoon tea that he felt totally let down and betrayed.

As swift as a gazelle, she sprinted through the weaving rows of corn to the teepees beyond.

If he reached to shake a hand, hordes became so frenzied he was whisked away.

She wandered in her own wilderness.

Unable to contain his curiosity, he wrenched open the boxes in the driveway.

She flicked on the television only to find infomercials invading the networks.

He was abducted in his vestments by a Calvinist gang and frogmarched to the Market Cross, where he was tied up and pelted with ten thousand eggs for four hours.

She had not yet plumbed the depths of his villainy.

He snatched a glass of champagne from a waiter and drank it in one gulp, then, as the man moved on, reached for another drink.

She blinked at the nightstand she found on the sidewalk right outside her home one morning.

The blood glowed under his skin as he remembered another word.

So, she lifted weights; took voice lessons; got a flat-top haircut; and learned to apply fake stubble to her face.

He hated error, and therefore, to confute it, he shouldered his way into the very sanctuary of truth.

Then she filtered the whale oil from each lamp into a clean container and disassembled and cleaned each lamp, before putting it back together.

Throughout the 1960s, he wandered the campus of his alma mater in red high-top sneakers, keeping to himself; students teased him and called him the Phantom.

Despite the strange beauty of her movements, he could not understand why she was dancing, naked.

He might slow enough to drop a missile with a warhead of tailored algae, if a target world could be found.

She went between men and women, seemingly unable to decide which gender she preferred, and was often unfaithful to whomever she was with.

When old, he wilted and handed out flowers, preached "pure Christianity" and warned against involving yourself too much in anything but a relationship to God.

She longed to be a flame.

He flipped through the book's pages until he found a pair of limbs that matched the woman's.

Then she saw a small peach with a soft neon glow.

One morning, he wrote down all of the passages in the Bible that he felt were the backbone behind Seventh Day Adventist philosophy.

Later, she found his name in a history of the blues.

At times, he loved her and at times he thought that she was his father's lover.

As soon as she was out of the magpie's sight, she crept along the short corridor which led back to the garden.

He needled the air with his baton as though poking a rotisserie ham with a thermometer.

For the next three years, she traveled all over the world with her meditation and yoga teacher, studying Indian philosophy, Sanskrit, yoga, Indian music and cooking.

He forced himself to think about Denver.

She lived in a cream-colored world.

He loved humankind dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings.

She flickered away, pale and mothlike in the gloom.

Despite his youth and delicate health, he retired to a desert; he practiced severe mortification, tempted continually by the demons expending all their efforts to make him abandon this life of total renouncement.

Hopelessly behind schedule, she frittered away much of the remaining time on an unrelated project.

Not thinking too much about things, he returned home only to develop a bad case of curiosity later in the day.

But when she ordered a chicken Caesar salad in a restaurant one day, it never occurred to her that the small amount of cheese in the dressing would be a problem.

He grasped the strategic importance of Hungary.

She took the lamb and drove to Boston, where she stayed with a friend.

He knew they could be petty and egotistical but he also knew they were possessed by a writing spirit and were unable to do any other kind of gainful work.

She read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future.