Valera still pictured Marie on the back of that beastly crude bike built by Hildebrand & Wolfmüller of München. He had recovered from his youthful lust, her rabbit’s foot foot, his haversack keepsake. He was thirty-two years old and had experienced many other women by now, mostly for hire but some for free, and he couldn’t have cared less about Marie, understanding that she was, in any case, surely no longer the person he’d desired. Not burgeoning youth. Probably she’s squeezing out children, he thought, her big breasts heavy with milk. While I am changed only for the better. And still a lover of girls. Ready for Marie’s daughter, soon enough. Women were trapped in time. This was why men had to keep going younger. Marie’s daughter, or someone else’s. Because men, Valera understood, moved at a different velocity. And once they felt this, their velocity, all they had to do was release themselves from the artifice of time. Break free of it to see that it had never held them to begin with.