Raven ushers Y.T. onto a flat-assed boat with a canopy on top. It is some kind of a riverboat that has been turned into a Vietnamese/American/Thai/Chinese business establishment, kind of a bar/restaurant/whorehouse/gambling den. It has a few big rooms, where lots of people are letting it all hang out, and a lot of little tiny steel-walled rooms down below where God knows what kind of activity is taking place.

The main room is packed with lowlife revelry. The smoke ties her bronchial passages into granny knots. The place is equipped with a shattering Third World sound system: pure distortion echoing off painted steel walls at three hundred decibels. A television set bolted onto one wall is showing foreign cartoons, done up in a two-color scheme of faded magenta and lime green, in which a ghoulish wolf, kind of like Wile E. Coyote with rabies, gets repeatedly executed in ways more violent than even Warner Bros. could think up. It's a snuff cartoon. The soundtrack is either turned off completely or else overwhelmed by the screeching melody coming out of the speakers. A bunch of erotic dancers are performing at one end of the room.

It's impossibly crowded, they'll never get a place to sit. But shortly after Raven comes into the room, half a dozen guys in the corner suddenly stand bolt upright and scatter from a table, snatching up their cigarettes and drinks almost as an afterthought. Raven pushes Y.T. through the room ahead of him, like she's a figurehead on his kayak, and everywhere they go, people are shoved out of her way by Raven's almost palpable personal force field.

Raven bends down and looks under the table, picks a chair up off the floor and looks at the underside -- you can never be too careful about those chair bombs -- sets it down, pushed all the way back into the corner where two steel walls meet, and sits down. He gestures for Y.T. to do the same, and she does, her back to the action. From here, she can see Raven's face, illuminated mostly by occasional stabs of light filtering through the crowd from the mirrored ball over the erotic dancers, and by the generalized green-and-magenta haze coming out of the TV set, spiked by the occasional flash when the cartoon wolf makes the mistake of swallowing another hydrogen bomb, or has the misfortune to get hosed down again with a flamethrower.

A waiter's there immediately. Raven commences hollering across the table at her. She can't hear him, but maybe he's asking her what she wants.

"A cheeseburger!" she screams back at him.

Raven laughs, shakes his head. "You see any cows around here?"

"Anything but fish!" she screams.

Raven talks to the waiter for a while in some variant of Taxilinga.

"I ordered you some squid," he hollers. "That's a mollusk."

Great. Raven, the last of the true gentlemen.

There is a shouted conversation lasting the better part of an hour. Raven does most of the shouting. Y.T. just listens, smiles, and nods. Hopefully, he's not saying something like "I enjoy really violent, abusive sex acts."

She doesn't think he's talking about that at all. He's talking politics. She hears a fragmented history of the Aleuts, a burst here and a burst here, when Raven isn't poking squid into his mouth and the music isn't too loud:

"Russians fucked us over ... smallpox had a ninety-percent mortality rate ... worked as slaves in their sealing industry ... Seward's folly ... Fucking Nipponese took away my father in forty-two, put him in a POW camp for the duration ...

"Then............