to a new martini bar, but the olives tasted like bad Parmesan, so they hopped a train to Notting Hill.

They'd met through a personal ad, had been seeing each other four months, and now settled into a comfortable routine of Thursday night alcohol grazing. Right away, on their first date Ant had recognized Mike's voice from the radio commercial: Carpets! Carpets! Carpets! And how! That's right, Mike had said, I'm the little man in your radio.

He was also quite good-looking — at least that's what everybody said, that his face was wasted on radio. Ant was a stick. Mike pushed a basket of shrimp toward Ant, but Ant grimaced. He wasn't hungry.

There was a soccer game tied in the forty-ninth minute and at the break a cartoon cat chased a cartoon mouse up a drainpipe. It was an ad for insurance. Ant told Mike that he should get work doing cartoon voices. Mike said he had, once, a while back, but he hadn't liked contorting his voice into that of a leprechaun. It dried out his larynx. The cat picked the mouse up by the tail and dangled it over his mouth. Mike bummed a cigarette from someone down the bar, lit it and told Ant how even from a young age, really young, five or six, he couldn't stand it when the cat didn't get the mouse.

"Sylvester's torment," Mike riffed, "was always unbearable. Why doesn't he ever get the bird? Same thing with Tom and Jerry. The same thing over and over: cat never gets the mouse. Coyote and Roadrunner, same thing: coyote never gets the roadrunner. It's the only thing he wants; he'll never get it."

"Why would you feel sorry for a bloody toon?" Though, truth be told, Ant thought it cute. He liked Mike's weird riffs. Mike, however, was serious. He really wanted to see Jerry vanish down Tom's throat. The thing was, what he felt wasn't exactly sympathy for the cartoon predators, but he wasn't ready to explain that yet.

Over the past few weeks they'd been piecing together the coincidences that had invisibly bound their lives until they'd met. Actually, there were very few. Mike was 35, three years older than Ant, and Mike had grown up in the country, where Ant was from the city. Mike was white, Ant was black, Jamaican. Still, they wanted to know where-were-you-when-I-was-here? Just the night before, over a pitcher of banana daiquiris, they had discovered a mutual early erotic thrill: the strongman on the Super Kid's Fun Time Variety Hour. The strongman, complete with twirled moustache and oiled skin, used to lift dumbbells in a skimpy swimsuit to cheesy music. Every time Ant saw him he had escaped to the loo to cool off. But that was a live man, not a cartoon. Cartoons bored him. Maybe because the cat never got the bird.

Exactly, Mike said, the cat never got the bird, but that didn't bore him, it made him feel wistfully pained.

"Bored, you mean."

Mike asked Ant if it wasn't even vaguely agonizing to him that Sylvester never got Tweety. Ant sipped his beer and stared off at himself in the mirror.

"Sure, a little." He shrugged. "I always hated granny. She was agonizing. Always after the cat for bein' after Tweety and beatin' him with an umbrella or fucking cane all the time? No wonder she was a spinster." Ant sighed. "Fuck, we're lucky."

Mike just nodded. He knew what Ant meant. Still, he was trying to get at something. He told Ant that he had always felt that hydroencephalitic canary deserved nothing more than to be devoured. But he didn't dislike Tweety.

"Of course you didn't," Ant said, "you were bored and wanted something to fucking happen."

"No," Mike said. "Because I felt a strong identification with Sylvester."

Ant ran his palm around his shaven head; a small quiet smile hung on his face. "It's because you're a lisper," he said, "and Sylvester's a lisper." Ant did a spittle-flecked impersonation of Sylvester. Sufferin' succotash. Mike gave Ant a fuck-you look because, after all, he didn't lisp. Mike was, in all ways, straight-appearing. The thing was this: He identified with the cat's hunger.

They picked up the conversation at another bar, where Mike took a pint and Ant inexplicably went over to port. Mike was melancholic now. He moved his stool closer to Ant's. The bartender was gabby and Mike wanted Ant to himself; he had wanted to tell Ant this for weeks. He was trying to tell Ant that, more to the point, he liked to think about Tweety getting caught. He felt, like, just get him. It was the same as watching Tom and Jerry. Resolve it already. Follow-through was what he wanted.

"But what if Sylvester just bit the fucking bird in the head?" Ant howled. "How about that for fuck's sake? Little kids losing their fucking little minds?"

Indeed. Sometimes Mike was a howler. Mike was a riot. Mike told him it wouldn't be funny though, would it, if he were to say that he found the idea of Tweety being swallowed alive a sexual turn-on? Well it was, Mike said, it was a sexual turn-on. For him, Mike. It was a weird little fantasy he'd harbored ever since he could remember. Furthermore, Mike liked to think about Tweety caught in the cage of Sylvester's teeth and the struggle as Tweety's over-sized skull was forced down the cat's throat, and then the suffocation, the crunching and tugging of the intestines, the trip through the duodenum, the flush of gastric acids, depilatory and blistering, the beak breaking off like a loose tooth, yes, he relished how Sylvester's intestines looked, down there, in the stomach, and at the particular point where Tweety finally transcended — went to the other side — became actual shit, well, that made Mike almost come in his pants. Weirder still, Mike told Ant, sometimes he wanted to be swallowed — swallowed alive. Swallowed whole. He wanted to withstand the sea of bile, the peristaltic waves of joy. He wondered what it would be like to come out the other end in a spray of shit. This and everything else he told Ant. He told Ant that he wanted to be his edible homunculus.

Ant looked at Mike for a long time with a confused smile. He twiddled his cocktail napkin. Mike was leaning toward him with a kind of panic. Ant pressed the heel of his palm to the bridge of his nose and rocked his head woefully. He did not understand. Devour me, Mike said, I want you to devour me.