It would be two more years before I found out about sex, or aspects of such, from personal experience. In the meantime, I had the trauma of what I came to refer to as Bedbugs to keep me warm at night. Bedbugs was what I went to sleep hoping I'd have nightmares to cleanse from my memory. I guess I was lucky in that, with all the things going on around me, I began to lose details and it eventually became just a word—a word, and a frame whose nebulous, insensate middle swirled with darkness and shadows and scratches of sinister deeds like a Goya. The resilience of youth. “Whisker, honey?” “Hmm.”