"If you want to survive this, you've got to love that. You've got to get off a plane, meet people, fall in love with them, treasure every moment, and know that moments are all you have. Then you get on a plane again and you love them forever. Otherwise, every new meeting is sour because you know how soon it will end. It's like starting to say your summer-camp goodbyes before you've even unpacked your duffel-bag. You've got to embrace -- or at least forget -- that every gig will end in a day or two." Perry took a moment to understand this, swallowed a couple times, then nodded. Lots of people had come in and out of his factory and his ride over the years. Lester came and went. Suzanne was gone. Tjan was gone but was back again. Kettlebelly was no longer in his life at all, a ghost of a memory with a great smile and good cologne. Already he was forgetting the faces in Boston, the faces in San Francisco. Hilda would be a memory in a month. Hilda patted his hand. "I have friends in practically every city in America. My folks campaigned for stem cells up and down every red state in the country. I even met superman before he died. He knew my name. I spent ten years on the road with them, back and forth. The Bush years, a couple years afterward. You can live this way and you can be happy, but you've got to have right mind. "What it means is you've got to be able to say things to people you meet, like, 'You're really nice,' and mean it, really mean it. But you've also got to be cool with the fact that really nice people will fall out of your life every week, twice a week, and fall back into it or not. I think you're very nice, too, but we're not gonna be a couple, ever. Even if we slept together tonight, you'd be gone tomorrow night. What you need to ask yourself is whether you want to have friends in every city who are glad to see you when you get off the plane, or ex-girlfriends in every city who might show up with their new boyfriends, or not at all." "Are you telling me this to explain why we're not going to sleep together? I just figured you were dating that guy, Ernie." "Ernie's my brother," she said. "And yeah, that's kind of why I'm telling you this. I've never gone on what you might call a date. With my friends, it tends to be more like, you work together, you hang out together, you catch yourself looking into one another's eyes a couple times, then you do a little circling around and then you end up in your bed or their bed having hard, energetic sex and then you sort out some details and then it lasts as long as it lasts. We've done a compressed version of that tonight, and we're up to the sex, and so I thought we should lay some things on the table, you should forgive the expression."