Gundi shrugs. “They are plants.” She sits across from him, facing him with the full ammunition of her body, her back very straight. A square, steaming lake is rising between them.

“We don’t really belong in this desert, you and I,” she says.

“When we have used up all the water and have to leave, the plants and snakes will be happy to get rid of us.”

“What about your unconscious Hopi desires?”

“Sometimes I feel I belong to this place. Other times I feel it is only tolerating me with a curled-up lip.”

Jax curls his lip. “Did you see how much H2O the blonde puts in that tub?” he asks in a cactus voice.

Gundi laughs. “You should write a song with all this angst.”

“I think I was. Before you and Bill the Mailman impeded my progress.”

They both watch the surface of the water, pummeled by the incoming stream but still glossy and intact.

Jax asks, “How do you claim your position as a citizen of the human race?”

“I don’t know,” she says apologetically. “Register to vote?”

“But how can you belong to a tribe, and be your own person, at the same time? You can’t. If you’re verifiably one, you’re not the other.”

“Can’t you alternate? Be an individual most of the time, and merge with others once in a while?”

“That’s how I see it,” Jax says. “I’m a white boy, with no tribal aptitudes. My natural state is solitary, and for recreation I turn to church or drugs or biting the heads off chickens or wherever one goes to experience sublime communion.”

“The only people I know who experience sublime communion all the time are yogis and heroin addicts.” Gundi tests the water with the ball of one foot. “Do you think it’s possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings?

To belong to a group so securely you don’t need to rise above it?”

“As I understand it, that’s the policy Turtle is being offered.”

“It sounds very romantic,” she says. “But when I went to the Navajo reservation to buy jewelry, I saw people living in falling-down mud houses with television antennas and bottles stacked by the door.”

“And that’s the whole story, poverty? Nothing else more important could be stacked behind those doors?”

Gundi is quiet. The clasp of her ankle bracelet winks in the slanted light.

“I think it was bad strategy for them to jump bail,” Jax says.

“Bail? Taylor was arrested?”

“Not legally. Morally. She felt accused, and was too freaked out to stand trial, and now they’re fugitives. It makes it look like she’s in the wrong.”

“Why did she go, then?”

“For the reason mothers throw themselves in front of traffic or gunfire to save their offspring. It’s not an answerable question.”

Gundi places both her feet on the surface of the water and looks at them for a long time. “I don’t have children,” she says finally. “I suppose I don’t know that kind of love.”

“I suppose I don’t either. To put yourself second, every time, no questions asked? Sounds like holy communion.”

Gundi turns off the water and eases herself, a pale croco-dile, over the dark bank of tile. “You are supposed to be relaxing. Come into the water, I know a type of massage for bodies floating in the water.”

Jax laughs. “The problem is, as I told you, I don’t float.”

“Of course you do. Every living human body floats.”

“Theoretically it’s possible that I’m dead,” he says. “You decide.” He slides onto the scalding water, inhaling slowly.

He begins gradually to sink, first his feet and legs, then the rest of him. He empties his lungs and refills them just before his face slides under the surface.

“All right, you don’t float,” Gundi says, reaching under his arms and pulling him up, dripping and laughing. His hair lies close to his skull and his forehead is gleaming. “You’re extremely dense, for a human.”

“So I’m told,” he says. Droplets of water collect in his eyelashes. Gundi lightly touches them with her fingertips, stroking downward from his face to his neck and then his chest. His nipples are hard. His mouth and hers exchange a gentle pressure and their tongues salute each other, blind sea creatures without armor, touching one another’s soft surfaces with hopeful recognition.

Jax slides around behind her, holding her against him, burying his face against the nape of her neck. Her hair is a soft veil around her, still dry except for the ends, hundreds of small dark points like watercolor brushes, ready to paint the world with more than its ordinary light. Jax explores her strong, slick belly with his hands, thinking for the second time in a day of porpoises. But then he turns her around to him, cupping her jawbone gently in one hand and placing his other on the small of her back, yielding to the urge that humans have, alone among all animals, to copulate face to face. At least for the first time. At least with an unknown member of the tribe.