Another woman came out of the kitchen door, through which I was relieved to see a table and chairs. A tall, thin guy with a hairless chest hunkered in another doorway for a minute, rubbing a head of orange hair that looked like a wet cat. He had on only those beachcomber-type pants held up by a fake rope. I really couldn't tell how old these people were. I kept expecting a parent to show up in another doorway and tell Beach Blanket Bingo to put on his shirt, but then, they could have been older than me. We all settled down on the pillows.

"I'm Fay," the toe-ring woman said, "spelled F-E-I, and this is La-Isha and that's Timothy. You'll have to excuse Timothy; he used caffeine yesterday and now his homeostasis is out of balance." I presumed they were talking about his car, although I was not aware of any automotive uses for caffeine.

"That's too bad," I said. "I wouldn't do anything with caffeine but drink it."

They all stared at me for a while.

"Oh. I'm Taylor. This is Turtle."

"Turtle. Is that a spirit name?" La-Isha asked.

"Sure," I said.

La-Isha was thick-bodied, with broad bare feet and round calves. Her dress was a sort of sarong, printed all over with black and orange elephants and giraffes, and she had a jungly-looking scarf wrapped around her head. And to think they used to stare at me for wearing red and turquoise together. Drop these three in Pittman County and people would run for cover.

F-E-I took charge of the investigation. "Would the child be living here too?"

"Right. We're a set."

"That's cool, I have no problem with small people," she said. "La-Isha, Timothy?"

"It's not really what I was thinking in terms of, but I can see it happening. I'm flex on children," La-Isha said, after giving it some thought. Timothy said he thought the baby was cute, asked if it was a boy or a girl.

"A girl," I said, but I was drowned out by Fei saying, "Timothy, I really don't see that that's an issue here." She said to me, "Gender is not an issue in this house."

"Oh," I said. "Whatever."

"What does she eat?" La-Isha wanted to know.

"Mainly whatever she can get her hands on. She had half a hot dog with mustard for breakfast."

There was another one of those blank spells in the conversation. Turtle was grumpily yanking at a jingle bell on the corner of a pillow, and I was beginning to feel edgy myself. All those knees and chins at the same level. It reminded me of an extremely long movie I had once seen about an Arabian sheik. Maybe La-Isha is Arabian, I thought, though she looked very white, with blond hair on her arms and pink rims around her eyes. Possibly an albino Arabian. I realized she was giving a lecture of some kind.

"At least four different kinds of toxins," she was saying, more to the room in general than to me. Her pink-rimmed eyes were starting to look inflamed. "In a hot dog." Now she was definitely talking to me. "Were you aware of that?"

"I would have guessed seven or eight," I said.

"Nitrites," said Timothy. He was gripping his head between his palms, one on the chin and one on top, and bending it from side to side until you could hear a little pop. I began to understand about the unbalanced homeostasis.

"We eat mainly soybean products here," Fei said. "We're just starting a soy-milk collective. A house requirement is that each person spend at least seven hours a week straining curd."

"Straining curd," I said. I wanted to say, Flaming nurd. Raining turds. It isn't raining turds, you know, it's raining violets.

"Yes," Fei went on in this abnormally calm voice that made me want to throw a pillow at her. "I guess the child..."

"Turtle," I said.

"I guess Turtle would be exempt. But we would have to make adjustments for that in the kitchen quota..."

I had trouble concentrating. La-Isha kept narrowing her eyes and trying to get Fei's attention. I remembered Mrs. Hoge with her shakes, always looking like she was secretly saying, "Don't do it" to somebody behind you.

"So tell us about you," Fei said eventually. I snapped out of my daydreams, feeling like a kid in school that's just been called on. "What kind of a space are you envisioning for yourself?" she wanted to know. Those were her actual words.

"Oh, Turtle and I are flex," I said. "Right now we're staying downtown at the Republic. I jockeyed fried food at the Burger Derby for a while, but I got fired."

La-Isha went kind of stiff on that one. I imagined all the little elephants on her shift getting stung through the heart with a tiny stun gun. Timothy was trying to get Turtle's attention by making faces, so far with no luck.