Things get all kind of weird-failed-Oliver-Stone-postmodern for awhile. The forest appears behind them, opening up like an unending iris, psychotropic, psychedelic. Eddie's so young. They're swimming naked through the world. Somebody asks where they are and somebody says, "Nowhere. Everywhere. Together." Fucking in the sky, in flight over a never-ending forest, hair dancing underwater. In the bellybutton of the world, in the heart of the sun. In the middle of Eddie's pain. How could something so beautiful contain cruelty, or ugliness? How could there be anything less than perfect, in this perfect world? This is just the hunt, isn't it? He doesn't have feelings. Thank the buffalo. But this is the difference Lafayette kept trying to explain, which is that you can't let message get confused with medium, because in the real world when you start requiring it you begin to rot: two naked drug addicts, fucking on a dirty mattress in the basement while a tortured, beautiful creature of God watches, weeping tears of blood, bound in silver, his precious blood pouring out onto the floor one angelic drop at a time, useless and ugly, wasted as beauty, while they moan and fuck, insensate in their salvation.

Bill spoons Sookie in a preposterous dressing gown, naked from the knees, asking why she won't sleep. Isn't she tired? She's had a motherfucker of the last nine episodes. She's like, "Yeah, but my death Grandmother has kind of been on my mind and if I weren't all fucked up on V I would have noticed that. Also my dead cat just sprayed blood all over me from where her head used to be, so. He gets all antebellum about how he is all about protecting her, and she explains that it's not being protected but needing to be protected is the issue, that wanting to be protected makes her feel "like the helpless little girl I used to be, all over again." She doesn't look at him, even as Bill gets dramatic about how it's all about him and because of their Total Love people and cats keep dropping like flies and people hate her even more than they used to. "You needing to be protected has nothing to do with you, or who you are. All of it is my fault." He strokes her hair, and she's still sad -- and pretty out of it -- even as he's asking her to let him carry some of the burden. To be the possum, in other words, and this is why Sookie is the greatest thing, because she gets it on a level nobody else seems to, and always says it right to your face with this immensely gracious bluntness, like she's just reminding you of something you already knew but were too polite to say: