Story: The Illusionary Stage

***

1

It's easy to romanticize. Especially about the past. And easiest of all to romanticize about your own. Most people don't realize how early it begins. It's not when you're getting close to middle-age. You begin working on your high school days, for example, as soon as you've been a year or so in college. Maybe even before. And it keeps happening. It gets to be a sort of tradition.

But every now and again, in my own case at least, something in my life now will recall to me the way things really were in those days. It wasn't such a different world.

I haven't seen Don Arcott for more than two years, since before I went to Europe. We don't write each other very often anymore. He doesn't answer letters promptly, as he did for a short time. Even though we were not especially close in high school, Don and I did always seem to get along pretty well. And after his troubles with Alice were finally over, we wrote each other fairly often for a couple of years. I was in Europe when it happened. He began to write that summer, saying he might be over there too for a while. When he did, and I was back in the U.S., we still exchanged letters now and then. But our letters became less and less frequent as that year went on.

Alice was a year younger than we were, and in some ways she seemed even younger than us than that. Even to Don. We were juniors, then, when Alice first joined us, and Don was already becoming a fairly important member of The Players. He had never before been an especially good-looking boy, and, in his nervous energy and theatrical personality, he always seemed to stand just a little apart from the rest of us. But he was well-liked. He was funny after all, and I think that was why we liked him then. He seemed to like to make us laugh. But after the performance was over, whatever it was, it was hard to talk with him about just ordinary things. I think even in those days one of the reasons we liked him was that he seemed just a little younger than we did. Age gets mixed up that way. It's not like a calendar or a clock. It's more like an amateur photograph with several images confusedly superimposed one on the other. It won't make a pattern, and the various images may even seem unrelated. Maybe one will come into focus for a minute and maybe then another. Or maybe it will all just seem confused and blurred.

Alice didn't seem so very special to anyone else. Don and Paul, his good friend in high school (who went with him to Europe), were already joining the ones who ran The Players when that year began. Miss Lutz let the officers of the group make a lot of their own decisions. She chose the plays we would do, and cast and directed them, of course. But the officers and the rest of us who voted each week at our business meetings, we decided about publicity and parties and how to raise money. Don and Paul liked audiences and talked a lot in the meetings. We didn't mind.

They were very popular with our plays' audiences too. They seemed to alternate from one play to the next, taking the silly "comic relief" roles and making them somehow the best parts to have. Both of them really wanted to play serious roles, though. Especially the romantic lead. They looked all right for it, especially Paul. But Miss Lutz didn't ever cast them that way.

It was hard to get many girls, who could talk, on the stage. A whole lot of them wanted to work, pasting flats together and painting, and washing the stage. They especially liked to take tickets and hand out programs on show nights. Alice, though, came with one other girl from the junior high across town where Miss Lutz had been drama coach one year before. She did know pretty well how to "project," as we used to say, and how to move on stage. It wasn't very long, then, before Alice was beginning to get some of the better small roles in our plays. And it was sometimes the comic relief's sentimental girl-friend.

She was able to convey from the stage a kind of charm that seemed at the same time special to herself and common to all our collective fantasies. I mean that she was delicate and graceful, with dark hair but a fair complexion and fine, pretty features. She had a kind of sparkle about her, especially from the stage. I guess I've colored the picture a lot now trying to remember it. Still, I think we used to do that in those days, too. But Alice didn't seem to captivate anyone else the way she did Don. I for one can't remember ever even considering her for myself; but maybe that shouldn't count. She did get enough invitations to dances and things, but only from the musically-oriented kind of fellows who would ask anybody. Don interested her more. Of course, he was a year ahead. In high school that counts for a lot.

I never knew Alice well myself, but she seemed to be all right. Somebody said to me once that you were always just a little worried when Don got interested in a girl. Afraid that he would be hurt as had happened so often. I did know myself that there had never been anything lasting between Don and a girl. Still, with Alice you wouldn't have been afraid exactly. Her own parents had just been divorced the summer before she came to our high school. Evidently it had been coming for a long time. And then, her mother had married again, someone else, only a few months later. I don't know where I learned this unless Don told me himself after it was all over.

Looking back now, though, I think maybe that you saw in Alice's face, even through her "little girl" look. You had a feeling she knew a little bit about what was going on. As I say often now, that's the best way to avoid pain, or causing it to someone else - to expect it. It helps you anticipate the way people open themselves up for getting hurt or for hurting themselves. You even find yourself that way sometimes.

I don't guess I'll be able to go on with this in a straight and simple way. All these new things keep occurring to me. I don't want to think about them much. That's the way you distort things, and I don't want to do that. I want to just tell the story of Alice and Don, just a factual account. But then, the reasons why things happen - that's part of the story too, isn't it? Maybe that's why I wanted to write all this down in the first place. I want to be able to understand the why of these things, now that my own life looks as though it will change in a permanent way. . .

It's especially hard, I guess, for a guy to think of another guy as "glamorous" in any way. But that must have been how Don was for Alice in the early days. Just about the time they started dating besides, he began to grow better-looking. Maybe he always stayed just that little way distant even from Alice too, and maybe that was an especial reason why she was held to him for so long - in a kind of fascination.

It always took Don a long time to get rolling in a courtship. I always thought I was shy because, until I went to France really, it never occurred to me to ask a girl out unless I was prompted by someone else. Don, though, wanted to, on his own, from the first. He would want to first in a general way, and then there would be a particular girl he would decide to ask. But he couldn't ever just come out and do it. He would manage to be around her a lot and talk to her, and be funny and clever. Maybe he would even plan to ask her to a dance or a movie next time he saw her, but would then decide to telephone. Then when he was home with that ugly old telephone the Arcott's had in their awkward, cramped entrance hall, he would decide it would be more than pleasant to ask her the next time he saw her.

He had to go to a lot of trouble to get Alice's number because she was living with her mother even though she had not changed her name. Besides that, she and her mother and stepfather had just moved in the beginning of the year. But Don found out. I wouldn't even be surprised if he followed her home one time after rehearsal and then sneaked back late at night to read her mother's new name off the mailbox. That's much too spectacular a picture, I guess. Anyway, he had the telephone number, but didn't use it for a long time.

That's one of the things about all this that is so funny. Don was like that. He had trouble asking a girl out. I guess it wasn't too bad when they were just talking during breaks in rehearsal and times like that. But even then, you could tell he wasn't comfortable. All that nervous activity. And being funny.

But Alice wasn't that way at all. She had a lot of vitality all right, but it wasn't exactly nervous energy or covered-up timidity. Or at least not on the surface. On the contrary. She seemed to have real social skill even pretty much in the early days. You could imagine her, for example, having big parties and introducing people, Don didn't have that kind of poise.

Maybe all of what happened was just the result of bad luck - a lot of sad coincidences - chance. Alice hadn't really matured, of course, when they first started things going, so maybe it wasn't obvious that she would develop this kind of social grace. Maybe Don only saw the "little girl" look or the sparkle Alice created on the stage, and didn't see how it was just a nonchalant and knowing front Alice was developing to be pleasant for the world. But now it occurs to me that, if it was just a front - only a more complete and more successful one than Don's clowning pose - maybe Don eventually got to something none of the rest of us ever knew, underneath. . .

I'm afraid I'm getting it all confused.

I never did know exactly when they started dating. We all got used to seeing them talking and laughing together. They were with Miss Lutz a lot. She was a pretty close friend of Alice's - and later Don's too. But Alice and Don weren't actually dating for a long time.

Then, late in Alice's first year with us, we had one of our big events. We always did a one-act play in the spring in a competition with other schools. It was a big thing, and everyone in the state took it seriously. A University in the northern part of the state invited us several weeks before the competition to come put on our little piece for them as part of a big conference. The University drama students and professors would then criticize and give us advice. Miss Lutz thought it would be good experience. And besides, she was afraid the people in the play were getting "stale" without an audience. Alice had the biggest part in the play, and Don had the most difficult. It was a peculiar little fantasy-play. Alice actually played a little boy. Don was a kind of strolling performer. Miss Lutz thought it was a comic part, and Don played it that way. But the rest of us never thought it was funny. The whole little play had that kind of odd feeling to it.

I came as close to knowing Miss Lutz on that trip as I ever did. All of us drove up the day before our show, except for Paul and Don, who for some reason couldn't come until that night on the bus. She seemed pretty young, Miss Lutz did. She just threw herself into her work with us with a zest and dedication that seemed like schoolgirl eagerness to those of us who knew the calm, sort of professional attitude of the older lady who had been our director just before Miss Lutz had come. But we knew, of course, that Miss Lutz was not just out of the University, because she had been teaching at a junior high across town. I remember that some time or another too, after this first year I'm talking about now, someone showed me a picture in an old yearbook of our high school. They used to print pictures of all the teachers as well as the students. It was pretty hard to tell at first because of the strange hairstyles they used to wear in those days, but it was Miss Lutz in the picture. She had been teaching English then, and her name was Mrs. Davis.

Sometimes Miss Lutz would look suddenly tired. It wasn't necessarily a time when things in the show were going badly either. Something would just happen in her mind all of a sudden, and the firm smile she usually wore above her great, energetic motions would drop away, leaving her cheeks a little heavy and her eyes a little droopy.

We had two flat tires on the way up north in Miss Lutz's car. She seemed angry about having gotten poor quality tires, but I think she was pretty embarrassed about it. It was already very hot on the highway even though it was only March. But the three of us boys had the tires changed in just a few minutes. When we stopped in a gas station each time to have the spare repaired or replaced, they worked fast too, and were very courteous to us. Still, the last part of the trip was not comfortable, and it was altogether about a six-hour drive. We were pretty tired that night and went to bed as soon as we could.

But that was nothing compared to what happened to Paul and Don.

The show was scheduled to go on something like nine o'clock the next morning. We got the props and the lights set up the night before. Don and Paul were supposed to get in a little after midnight, but the bus they were going to ride on broke down. They had to take another bus through a couple of other cities and even had to convince the driver to make a nonscheduled stop in the city where we were, just to get in by 5:30 a.m. We all got up at seven.

Despite all that, the show went better than we would have thought possible. They especially liked Don as he pranced around and grimaced and laughed. He hadn't even had time to look where the furniture was before the curtains opened, but everything was all right anyway.

I'm only telling this because Don's behavior was odd all that day. He was usually somewhat frail, needing a lot of sleep and quiet and regular hours. Paul was the one who can get along on next to nothing. But somehow they switched places that particular day. Maybe doing so well in the show just set Don up to it.

Anyway, after the show Miss Lutz stayed to watch some of the other plays, but the rest of us went straight back to the hotel. Paul didn't even have a very large part, but he was so tired he was almost sick. But Don was feeling great. Paul took a shower and went back to bed, and the rest of us scattered. There wasn't much to see downtown - a lot of banks, closed. We didn't feel like a movie and it was still pretty hot. So mostly we just roamed around in two's or three's or four's, talking excitedly and having ice cream or a Coke. We must have toured every store there was downtown. Some of the girls bought little things for souvenirs.

Every time we wandered back up to our floor in the hotel, we saw Don and Alice. The floors were shaped like a horseshoe with the elevator in the center of the top part. In front of the elevator on our floor, there was a big mirror and a shiny table with dried ferns and flowers in a vase on it. Next to it was a divan. The boys' room was all the way out at the end of the horseshoe, and the girls' was at the end of the other arm. I guess they did that on purpose. Miss Lutz's room was not even on the same floor.

Anyway, no matter where we went on our floor in the hotel, we had to pass that little divan in front of the elevators. Every time you went down to tour another store or get a coke or a magazine, of course you had to wait there. Usually two or three of us would meet in the lobby or at the newsstand, and go back up together. It was just a little surprising for the door to open right in front of Don and Alice sitting there. It shouldn't have been embarrassing since they were obviously having such a good time. They called out to us, and we talked to them later when several of us together were waiting for the elevator to go down again. We also traipsed back and forth a lot between our two rooms and so had to pass by there a lot.

We all thought they must be having a much better time then we were. We just couldn't sit still like that because we were so keyed up from the trip and the play that morning. We brought them Cokes or ice cream once and sat down for a while, but then we'd begin to fidget and would have to move on. Later, after they had been dating for a while, someone else saw them sitting like that as they used to do before class in the speech room every morning, and said they "looked like sunshine." For the first time they actually seemed to be having fun. Not just trying to, scared of each other.

I don't know how it happened, but finally, late in the afternoon, one of the girls said that we could go up to Miss Lutz's room. She wasn't back yet, but would meet us for dinner later. Don and Alice joined us there after a while trying to look as though nothing had happened between them. But it had, and we all knew it. We were really just sitting around talking and joking. Alice and Don kept finding little excuses to touch each other on the arm or shoulder and to look each other in the eye. Don would tell a quick story, laughing and genuinely smiling a little more than he usually did, and at the important moments would lean forward just a little and tap lightly on Alice's forearm.

There was one old romance among members of our group. They had been "serious" about each other for a long time already by then. But it wasn't the same.

The fact is, rest of us were enjoying it too. It made us feel a little older, and protective.

So, I've always thought that that was how it got started. Really started, and not just playing at it, even though we didn't hear of them actually dating until a while later. Maybe the hardest thing for me to realize is why Alice hung around so long waiting for Don to get it going. After he did, I guess I can see how it kept on.

Of course I can see that, even if he was a little stiff or shy when it came to kissing her and that sort of thing. And then, maybe he wasn't like that. But if it wasn't going to work out at the last… That's what I can't understand. If it wasn't going to last them all their lives or whatever, why did it last as long as it did?

No, that's not the real question. The real question is, Why did it start at all if it wasn't… No, I mean why did it seem so right, even to those of us just watching… What is it that I don't know?

What is it? I can't go on with this. I should not have started.

2

Donald T. Arcott met Alice Emily Laurel while they were both attending high school. Their friendship grew as they, together with the drama teacher at their school, a certain Miss Lutz, led the school dramatic club to state prominence. Arcott was president of "The Players" when they won the state one-act play competition. Though he took no role in the winning production, he served on the crew along with the quiet, veteran member named David Grosman. Alice was awarded an "honorable mention" in the best actress competition at the finals of the state contest, and the best actor award went to another member of the winning play's cast, Paul Mann. Arcott and Mann had been close friends for several years.

That year was the pinnacle of "The Players" success. The year before they had barely reached the regional competition and so did not compete in the state finals. Judges said privately that Miss Lutz's production that year was superb, but her choice in plays was in some degree responsible for her group's failure to reach the finals. The piece presented that year was a peculiar fantasy play without a strong story line and yet without a comic interest. Arcott, who performed in an important supporting role, was awarded an "honorable mention" in the best actor judging both at the district and the regional meets.

The year after winning the state meet, "The Players" continued to be successful in their home theatre at the high school. Alice Laurel became very popular with her fellow students and especially the parents and University students who attended "The Players" productions. Most observers agree that her most memorable appearance was in a popular play about the Old South; her death scene was considered deeply moving.

At that time, Alice was being coached outside of "The Players" organization by Arcott himself, of course, and by Miss Lutz, who though she had retired from active participation in the productions of the group, continued to be a close personal friend of Alice and Arcott. Arcott was no longer active in dramatic work, but he became friends with several of the drama students at the University where he was studying in a basic liberal arts program. They also became interested in Alice, both as a friend and as an actress, and continued to encourage and advise her during the year. No one was especially disappointed when "The Players" new coach - who had just graduated from the University the preceding year - decided to present another full-length production for the home audiences in the spring rather than enter the traditional one-act play competition. The play presented was such a popular success that the usual four-day run was extended to a full week including two weekends with a break Sunday and Monday evenings.

Alice and Arcott grew more and more close during the year. Arcott even began to talk of the day in the distant future when they could be married. That would not be, of course, until after Arcott had completed his University studies, and so they did not yet consider themselves actually engaged. Some of their friends in the high school, however, may have.

Immediately after graduating from high school, Arcott took a part-time job washing bottles and test tubes in a biochemistry lab at the University. He had always been quite interested in science and had decided not to major in biology or chemistry only because he thought such a course would commit to too many years in school. He wanted to have his B.S. after three years of study. He worked in the lab for two hours every weekday afternoon. The University summer school session began one week after Arcott's high school graduation. He had always been a good student though never near the top of his class. He did, however, pass one "advanced standing" examination at the university, and was exempted from the freshman English requirement. In the summer and the following fall, he completed most of the major courses required for freshmen and sophomores in Liberal Arts. He was not yet certain what his major field would be, but he was assured that any broad background would prepare him adequately for a career in business something like his father's in real estate sales and management. Miss Lutz, whom Alice and Arcott visited now and then during the summer, did not long continue her attempt to persuade Arcott to study for a career in drama. There would be no security in such a career, and not enough money - especially at first - for marriage and a family. A background in fine arts, also, would not prepare him for a business position. On weekends in the fall, Arcott took a job writing headlines for the Sunday and Monday editions of the local newspaper.

Arcott did not find his studies as difficult as he had always expected college would be. His grades, in fact, were better then they had been in high school. He seemed to find a new kind of energy which allowed him to improve his concentration on his studies, to work longer hours at his two jobs, and yet to be more relaxed and cheerful in social situations than he had ever been before. He usually picked Alice up at high school rehearsals after he had finished his work at the lab. If the weather was nice they would drive around a while or stop at some especially lovely part of the city to enjoy the sunset together. Each of them was surprised that they could feel so comfortable together, and Arcott felt that they shared everything.

It was almost always Alice who pointed out when it was time to be going home. Except on weekends, they didn't often have supper together because Alice would have to do her homework. Arcott's family liked Alice very much, and Mrs. Arcott would often invite her over for supper on Saturday evening. Even though they saw each other for a little while almost every day during this period, Arcott and Alice often talked on the telephone too. Alice would sometimes call to ask for help on some of her homework.

This continued even after Alice had entered the University, even though she saw somewhat less of Arcott then, since most of the University drama group's rehearsals were at night. She worked on several "crews," as they were called, for each production, and attended all rehearsals even when she did not have one of the small roles she was sometimes given. Arcott was able to change his work schedule at the lab that year to the evenings and often gave Alice a ride to rehearsal. She usually asked one of the members of the drama group to give her a ride home afterwards.

One evening in the spring of Alice's first year at the University, Arcott and she stopped for a few minutes on their way to school to look at the sunset from a little park on top of a hill overlooking the town lake. They usually found a few minutes together like that to talk of one thing or another. Alice had been particularly willing to stop a few minutes that day because she had been wondering for some time if perhaps she shouldn't begin to tell Don that she didn't quite feel the same about him as she had at first. He did not seem quite as exciting to her as he had at first and had continued to be even all during her senior year at high school. She still liked to be seen with him, and he was very popular among her friends in the University drama society. She was beginning to think, however, that it was important that she could not quite understand why they liked him so much. He didn't very often tell stories and joke the way he had done in high school.

She tried to study his face when he opened the door for her to get out of the car. He smiled at her, and again she liked him very much. She could not go through with it. He seemed so confident now. He seemed to trust her. That was what made her uncomfortable, she thought as they walked up the flat stone steps toward the top of the hill; his trusting her that way made her feel a little ashamed that she was annoyed with him sometimes. And there was nothing really bad about him. No, she would have to try to make him understand just a little anyway, or she could never feel right going out again for a Coke with Tom after rehearsal. Tom Palmert was a senior; he had the lead in the next play the dramatic society was going to present, and the summer before, he had brought down the house as Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Arcott himself was enjoying the warmth of the spring evening and the natural beauty around him. Trees and rude stones, the lake waters below and, far beyond, the pink and orange clouds strung out over the western horizon - that was just fine. It was warm and the breezes that rustled Alice's dark hair and the billowy sleeve of her white blouse were soft and caressing. He smiled again at Alice as she came up to his shoulder by the old wall that ran around the rim at the steepest part. "It's always quiet up here," he said. "I never understand why more people aren't always here."

Arcott put his arm around her shoulder. "I'm glad too," he added. She felt a little stiff to him, but she turned up her face so that he could kiss her lightly on the mouth.

She gently pushed him a little away after a minute and smiled at him for just a second. "Don?" she said.

He smiled down at her again. Yes, she could depend on him to understand. She could trust him now just as she had always done. Alice had often asked Arcott's advice about how she could behave with her parents. And she felt that Arcott always understood. Yes, she would only have to hint at it and he would understand everything.

"Maybe," she said shyly, "maybe we ought not be so close when we're together." That was a good way to do it, she thought. Arcott only seemed a little puzzled and not hurt. He had always let her decide how intense their love-making could become, and would be able to adjust. "After all," she went on, "it'll be a long time still before. . . before we could even think of getting married, for example." She was becoming a little flustered.

Arcott noticed that she was blushing and smiled again. She almost seemed to stamp her little foot as she looked suddenly out over the wall.

"Do you see what I mean, at least?" she asked rather shrilly.

Now, Arcott felt, I must answer something. Then he realized that he did not really see what she meant. "Do you mean," he asked, "that because it's at least another year. . ."

"Yes," she said and looked back at him. She wasn't as frightened now. He would understand. "We wouldn't want to get too excited now."

"Has it been-- Well, has it been uncomfortable for you so far?" he asked, frowning slightly.

"No, no!" she said quickly and laid her head on his shoulder. "No," she whispered, "it's been wonderful. You know that." Now she was certain that he understood everything. He was so good, and they could go on being as close as they were at that moment.

He had put his arm around her shoulder again. "It's a little hard?" he asked, "a little uncomfortable, to have to leave off. . .?" He didn't want to talk anymore. He had so often gone home with a paralyzing ache at the base of his stomach wishing for her, wishing for the time to pass. It made him feel strong with her there now to know that she too felt that way. "We can be together," he said, "without being together, can't we?"

"Oh yes, Don," Alice said. She looked up at him and then pressed lightly again her head on his chest.

Arcott knew then that he could not have gone on that other way alone; but now that they were sharing the awful agony of waiting, they could live it through together.

When Alice was sitting in Tom Palmer's car that evening at the hamburger stand where they usually stopped for a coke, she remembered again how well things had gone with Arcott before rehearsal. She was ashamed now for having been afraid he would be hurt.

Arcott and Alice continued to date often and to see each other or talk to each other on the telephone almost everyday. Arcott saved the money he made from his two jobs, and in the spring of his third year in college, several months before his graduation as an English major, he used part of them to begin payments on a car for himself and Alice. The wedding had been planned for some time in June. Two weeks before Arcott's graduation, the plans were canceled. After a month, Arcott took his savings away with him to spend a year in Europe, following his high school friend David Grosmann to France, and then to study at graduate school in the East; at the end of the summer when he went away, Alice was married to an older member of the dramatic society of which she was a member.

3

So she's not home.

She knew it was late but they so often were together on Saturdays that she hadn't thought it would matter much that she had forgotten to call before. That happened sometimes; you just got used to expecting something or wanting it that you thought everyone else would know too, automatically. It was nice having Alice over on Saturdays. Mrs. Arcott didn't even get nervous anymore because they could just have hot dogs and potato salad which didn't take anytime at all. She could telephone again in a few minutes. She could have Don call. She didn't like Alice's mother very much, and she hadn't told her who she was that was calling please. She would just call back later.

But Mrs. Arcott thought that the wedding would be very nice anyway. When were they going to start planning the details? Even if it was just going to be family. She didn't want to mention that herself. Maybe she was afraid Alice's mother would? That was Don's and Alice's right to mention it first. But Alice and her mother hadn't made any sign yet.

Now that she hadn't found Alice at home she didn't know quite what to do. That's right, a mother's job is never through, she thought. But she couldn't start the hot dogs since it was still early. Don's dad, her husband, would be coming in soon. She had already changed clothes. But she started setting places at the kitchen table. It was all right to do that even if Alice came. She hummed a little tune as she moved around the kitchen - oh, it was so pretty out on late spring afternoons - and wiped a water spot out of a spoon (that old plastic table cloth looks all right today). It was amazing to her how everything just seemed to have a tiny, quiet glow about them these days.

Oh there it is ringing, and she hadn't called Alice back yet. No, Don was going to.

Surely, Alice dear. Now there was just something in her voice on the phone that made her not what to say anything herself. It could just be a cold or maybe she's not talking on the home phone. That one step, just there and nowhere else the carpet was wearing thin. Why did stairs do that way? Don was studying, but he wouldn't mind, of course. She would knock first because he was older now. That handle still needs fixing.

Yes, it was Alice and would Don ask her to come for supper tonight? He's gotten very tall by now and especially thin. They would fatten him up now, she thought and almost laughed, she and Alice together.

She heard his voice at the phone because the stairs didn't make noise if you went down slowly. The phone wasn't pretty and was awkward there at the front door, but she sees him coming up the front walk. Don doesn't say hello to his father because he is so interested in the telephone. Hello, dear, she said to her husband. Did many come out to see the house today?

No, they were not talking about supper tonight so she had no right to listen. But it was hard not to, since the kitchen door just swung a little back and forth and didn't touch around the sides. He will like that beer before supper.

Yes, plenty of time. He would be able to shower first.

Alice is coming, I think, too. Isn't it nice that it's so warm again? He liked a beer in the evenings now that it was warmer. The clear tall bottle of scotch now would stay half filled up in the kitchen cabinet probably until next winter or fall. They got along all right, the two of them. That didn't mean anything that there was so much trouble and divorce now today. She could just step outside a minute to see how warm it was and see better than just through the window.

But ah, Don hung up now; and she could ask him if she were coming before he went upstairs again. Did he hang up? She didn't hear a sound. Well, yes, there was the shower from the upstairs bath. No, that stopped now.

It was very quiet, which she did not understand.

Don shouldn't slump over like that; it made him look ill.

After she stood there for a minute without saying anything because her son seemed to be thinking about something and looking down at his hands, he looked up at her.

"Alice is not coming to supper," he said and stood up

It's the way that people have to slide their feet on the front edge of the steps that makes them wear thin.

Don? She didn't know if he were ill or what.

"I'm not feeling well, Mother," he said without looking back as he trudged up the stairs. "Please, I want to lie down."

He must be very tired. Or maybe he's coming down with something. She could always make him soup. He was right to tell Alice not to come if he was sick.

Now, what was that sound?

She was hurrying up the stairs but her husband had reached Don's room before she did and - his back was still damp from the shower, in his shorts - he was helping Don up onto his bed. It was just a couch now with the cover still on.

"What's the matter, son?" he was saying.

Don didn't seem to be quite able to speak. He wasn't excited or hot. No temperature, she was sure of that.

"All right," he said. "Please, let me alone." He said that very clearly but without seeming to make an effort.

It's all right, dear. Yes, that's right to dry off better and get dressed.

Don didn't seem to mind her being there. But she felt helpless. He lay there heavily in front of her. His eyes were open and looking right at her, but there was no expression in them. His hands were at his sides, and they shook. Only his hands. She took a blanket from the top shelf in his closet and covered him with it.

He didn't say anything. He didn't move, just looking emptily toward her. She started to stroke his forehead brushing his hair back. But he moved slightly away. "No. All right," he said again. "Please."

She was sure he wasn't sick then. It wasn't right to leave him alone. He should have someone to talk to him and brush his hair back and sit next to him. He wouldn't have to say anything until he wanted to.

At the door, she looked back toward him.

"It's silly," he said. "I can't control it."

All right, dear. Do you want anything? But he hasn't heard anything we've said to him. She didn't like to leave him alone, but there wasn't anything else to do.

That handle still needs fixing. One of these days, it's going to stick.

Reminiscence: A Summer Job

***
1

My first summer job came when I was thirteen years old, between the seventh and eighth grades. I did yard work for several different families, my parents driving me back and forth from home. Miss Mattie, Miss Edilene, Miss Louisa and her husband Rev. H----. These were all members of our church; I don’t know if it was my mother or my father, the well known Dr. Derrick, who lined them up. I also kept the yard for a neighborhood family during their month-long vacation. Their daughter Jeri was a school acquaintance, and I had probably told her what I was going to do for the others.

My most memorable summer job was between eleventh and twelfth grades, when I worked as a bell-boy in a historic guest lodge in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. It was the grown-up son of a church member who hired me, which by this time seemed normal. How else would a kid get a summer job except through church contacts, set up by his dad?

So it was Mom and Dad, mostly Dad, who arranged for my many summer occupations… Or at least that was true until the summer after my high school graduation.

Boy, did I feel like a grown-up! Not only was I preparing to go 1,100 miles away to college in three months, but also my job that summer had come along entirely because of my own efforts. All my life I had been my parents’ son. I wanted to be “Byron Derrick,” not “Dr. Derrick’s son,” and the time for that was coming soon. What a good feeling.

2

At the beginning of my junior year, my seventh grade English teacher, who had also been advisor to the junior high newspaper, replaced the retiring high school journalism teacher and advisor to that schools’ newspaper. To be frank, we hadn’t gotten along very well in English class. Most of us had found Mrs. M----- boring if not incompetent.

Looking back I realize that the state curriculum had seventh graders read quite unsuitable literature for youngsters. Maybe Longfellow’s Evangeline might have held some interest, at least for the girls, but the curriculum emphasized the fact that this was POETRY, to which reverence was due. We concentrated on learning what a dactyl was and counting feet. It seemed an interminable time we spent on this magnus opus. But even less suitable for kids our age (and high energy level) was the novel we were assigned: George Eliot’s Silas Marner, which is about a very old man and a very young child. None of us could relate to that, even those of us who were dedicated readers.

(I think this was just at the end of the period when Mother would take me to the children’s room of the downtown public library once a week, and I always checked out six books - the maximum number allowed. I preferred Kazan the Wolf dog and White Fang over Silas Marner, and I read biographies of great Americans more than any other one thing.)

So it was suprisising to discover how well Mrs. M----- and I got along in second-year journalism in high school. Toward the end of that year, in fact, I was named Co-Editor of the high school newspaper for the senior year. I was to write a regular column and whatever other stories I wanted. I was the reporter-editor; K------- was the copy-editor; all the staff had to sell ads.

I figured I must have done well when, in April of the senior year, Mrs. M------ told me about a local weekly paper that was starting up; she was the editor-in-chief. She showed me a copy of the first issue; it looked like a real newspaper. It was called The Women’s Press. I showed it to my father, who was always interested in local papers. He said it looked good.

Well, Mrs. M----- wanted to pay me for reporting for TWP, starting right away but working full-time in the summer. Mom and Dad said it was all right, so this was my first job that I had earned for myself.

3

It was a local election year, with the real action being in the Democratic Party since the Republicans ran someone only for Mayor (and never won). My job was to write stories about the candidates for City Council. There was an enormous number of candidates; the districts must have been large and the number of seats small in comparison. I plunged in, first reviewing all the candidates’ printed material, not ignoring what the daily papers were writing, of course. Then, dividing them up I focused several articles on the opponents for each seat. It seemed like a heck of a lot of work for a guy finishing his senior year, but I really liked it. All the candidates and all of their little staffs took my stories seriously and gave me what seem like a lot of time every time I called them up.

We were planning on much more in-depth reporting for the summer leading up to the primary. I was going to interview some of the top civil servants about the issues mentioned to me by the candidates, and eventually I was going to interview randomly-selected voters to see which ways they were leaning and why. It all seemed real authentic and was pretty impressive for an inexperienced high-school kid.

And then, very suddenly it was all over.

Mrs. M----- called me at home one afternoon a week or so before the end of the school year and asked me to come over to her place right away. It wasn’t far from my house and since there was no car to drive, I wrote a note for Mother and walked over. Mrs. M----- had apparently been crying and did not seem herself at all. Now that I think back, I wonder if she had had a couple of drinks. She told me flat out that we were both out of jobs. The business manager had disappeared with all the money, there was little hope of tracking him down, and the owner - who may have been Mrs. M----- herself - had decided to bag the whole enterprise.

4

Now, I was up a creek. All the usual church contacts were all played out that late in the year, and this time it was important since the family had all been counting on me to earn most of my spending money that summer for the college freshman year.

Dad got on the telephone right away and called an acquaintance at the local book publisher. They weren’t looking for anyone to read proofs or that kind of thing for just a summer, but he had Dad bring me in for an interview, which seemed pleasant enough but didn’t seem very hopeful.

So, there I was, thinking I was on my own, earning my way by my own devices, only to find that I wasn’t going to be earning anything at all! I think Dad was unhappy too, feeling he had let me down.

The week before high school graduation, however, Dad told me his friend had just called and there was an opening, not on the publisher’s editorial staff, but at their print factory. It would be hard work, but the pay would be good. I had nothing to lose, so the next day I drove myself out to the factory on the far edge of the city at exactly the right time, and opened the one door I saw off the big parking lot; the noise bursting out was overwhelming.

But a guy wearing a white, short-sleeve shirt and a tie met me just inside and led me by the huge four-color printing press to his little office in the back. Closing the door helped a lot. I had to fill out a few papers and sign a couple of others. He mentioned that I would be the only non-union employee, but for one summer that was no problem.

He said he would take me to my work station. The noise again. He cupped his hands over my ear and said that it was so humid in the factory because the air conditioning was set up to keep all the presses running. We went by another huge press, this one a web press with big spools of paper winding up and down from one end to the other.

After the noise and the related vibrations, the most noticeable feature of the factory was how dirty it was. It seemed dim too, with only the work stations scattered here and there being brightly lit. In-between the presses were stacks and stacks of paper on wooden pallets. As we made our way toward a back corner, I thought I may have seen a rat shuffling around among the paper.

Wow, I was thinking, isn’t this great! I’ll bet my dad never worked in a huge, noisy, dirty factory like this. This was me. I was doing this, making my own way.

We came at last to what seemed by comparison a tiny press, only about 10 feet wide by 20 feet long and 8 feet tall at the highest spot. That was where a white-haired, wiry little Hispanic man was transferring this black wax-like ink from a tray balanced on his arm to a big, long tray at the top of the press.

The man in the tie cupped his hands around my ear again and said he would introduce me and pulled on the other’s trouser leg. The little man looked me over as he came down from his ink-spattered step ladder.

This is real life, I was thinking. I’m on my own, and I’m going to make it!

Cupping his hands around Frank’s ear, the supervisor said something at which the dark, wiry old guy started, looked back at me, turned and bounced over.

Ink-spattered hands around my ear, he said in a bright, loud voice:

“Not Dr. Derrick’s son?!”


***

Freedom in America: Who Cares?

***

1

A political leader recently stated that his party was “based on freedom” (with emphasis), and his audience clapped and cheered. Virtually every political party in American history would no doubt say it too was devoted to freedom, but this speaker – and, alas, also his adoring audience – seemed to believe that this statement was both clear and deeply meaningful.

Statements are clear and meaningful, however, only if they answer clear and meaningful questions. Saying that one is committed to freedom, while it sometimes pleases a crowd, does not answer questions; the key questions are in fact raised by such a claim.

Every sane and responsible leader – including this speaker, I am sure – acknowledges that people are not and must not consider themselves free to do anything they want. Are you free to sock your boss when he takes credit for an achievement for which you alone are responsible? Are you free to take that laptop left on a table in a Wi-fi café while the owner is getting another cup of coffee? Are you free to incite violence? To drive through a stop sign? To make lewd advances to a child? To deny a woman the health care she wants and deserves by law? To walk around naked in public? To give poisoned candy to trick-or-treaters? To burn down a church preaching a doctrine you don’t like? To lie on your income tax return? Are you free to break a law because you do not think it should have been passed?

Perhaps no one would say that his political party is based on such preposterous “freedoms” as these. And no one even in the audience who wildly cheered thought this speaker was referring to limitless freedom, irresponsible and anti-social freedom harming or endangering others or others’ property. But what did they think was being referred to?

The key question they should have been thinking about – although at that moment they may not have been in a thoughtful frame of mind – is, Freedom from what?

2

The American leaders who have preceded us, regardless of party, have all maintained – in deed if not in words – that the freedoms  to which all of us are entitled include:

1. Freedom from fear


2. Freedom from want


3. Freedom from intolerance


4. Freedom from violence, force, and intimidation


5. Freedom from injustice

and

6. Freedom from the cruel bondage of unequal opportunity.

We do not have to fear that we will be arrested for no reason, separated from our families, and taken to work camps or death camps. We don’t have to fear that our property may be damaged or stolen without serious consequences to the vandal or the thief. We don’t have to fear that we will be abused because of the position we take on a public issue. As much as is allowed by life itself, with all its inherent uncertainties, we may live free from fear.

Our “unalienable rights” include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Life is threatened by hunger, homelessness, lack of adequate clothing, or lack of necessary health care. None of us should have to fear extreme want – or poverty – to such an extent that our very lives are threatened. That is one of our basic rights in this country, promised by the Declaration of Independence, guaranteed by the Constitution, and bolstered by generations of law-makers and judges.

We are free to worship as we please, or not to worship at all; we do not have to fear religious intolerance. We are protected from discrimination against us based on race or gender. We will not be punished because we support the losing party in an election or a controversial point of view in a public debate. We will not be assaulted or spat upon because of the color of our skin, at least not with impunity. Our Constitution and our laws free us from intolerance – whether racial, political, or religious.

We will not be forced to work in somebody else’s fields for little or no pay. No one may use force to prevent us from doing anything, at least anything that is not against the law. We may legitimately expect to be protected from violence by those who disagree with our moral values, so long as our values do not put others at risk and are not contrary to law, or by those who want us to change our opinions on a matter of public debate, or by those who want us to vote for a candidate whom we do not support. We will be free of threats of harm if we do not conform, except to civil law, free from intimidation. We are free to think for ourselves.

We will not be imprisoned without a fair and public trial. Someone who owes us money will not be permitted to simply walk away from the debt. We will not do the work for which we are hired only to see our employers successfully avoid paying us our due wages. Laws will be applied equally to us and to those poorer than we and to those richer and more politically well-connected. All that would be unjust, and we in our country will live free from such injustice.

That final natural right cited in our Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of happiness,” would be violated if we were denied the schooling needed to get a decent job because we are poor and powerless, or if we were denied the opportunity to compete on equal terms with others of different races or religions or gender. We would not have the right to pursue happiness if our socio-economic status prevented us from being able to compete fairly with others more fortunate than we, or if our own businesses were not able to compete with big corporations because anti-trust laws are not enforced, or because prices are fixed among our competitors, or because suppliers collude with the big businesses to deny us what we need in order to complete fairly. Our national values protect us from unequal opportunity, and in so doing make us free.

3

A political party based on these six freedoms – from fear, want, force and violence, injustice, and unequal opportunity – and that actively, proudly, and aggressively pursues them would be one we could enthusiastically support.

Yet, somehow, I am inclined to think that the actions of the party referred to in the recent speech are not in fact founded on principles of freedom as I understand it, or at least not on freedom for all.


*****

Wise Sayings 2

* * *


Plan
For the best

Have a
Back-up plan

Or
Two
………………………………Ron Lucius


* * *

The Present Implications of the Constitution (essay)

***

1

Whenever we consider or debate an issue of national significance, it would be very good for everyone to use the same frame of reference and vocabulary in the dialogue. Bringing my own religious tradition to bear on such an issue, for instance, is helpful to me and believers like me, but once we have made up our own minds as to right or wrong in the matter, that frame of reference is not likely to be useful in a public discussion.

And what better frame of reference could we all use than the U. S. Constitution?

Preamble to the U. S. Constitution

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Constitution to which this introduction is attached was "ordained" and "established" in order to improve the rather loose affiliation established among the states by the Articles of Confederation. In other words, these concepts – establishment, make more perfect – are matters of history; this is what the Constitution did when it was ratified.

The other concepts – "promoting the general welfare" and the others – are the purposes for which the Articles were replaced by the Constitution; and since the Constitution, as amended, is still in effect today, these purposes remain the goals and responsibilities today of our democratic republic.

In somewhat more current language, that is, our government exists today in order to do (at least) the following:

1. Establish justice
2. Keep peace within the nation
3. Provide for the nation’s defense
4. Promote the people's general wellbeing, and
5. Guarantee freedom to ourselves and our descendants.

Actions that jeopardize any of these worthy purposes - whether public or private, individual or group-led, executive or legislative or judicial - are reprehensible and should be stopped and punished. Laws and proposed laws that threaten any of these goals should be rejected or repealed. Leaders, media, and public figures who advocate or promote actions contrary to these fundamental goals of our nation’s government should be criticized and prevented from such behavior.

Let's look at these founding notions one at a time.

2. Justice

One has the impression that the concept of justice was unambiguous to the nation's founders. The colonies' experience with the government of England in the decades preceding the outbreak of the Revolutionary War had been filled with injustice. The colonists' lack of the ability to participate in governing themselves at home and in the mother country was unjust. Without a modicum of democracy, they felt, there could be no justice. "Taxation without representation" was a particularly onerous injustice to all the colonies.

At the micro-level too, the concept of justice seems to have been clear. It is unjust to imprison an individual and refuse to tell him (or her?) why. Conviction of a crime without a trial by a jury of one's peers is unjust. Establishing laws capriciously or arbotrarily is unjust. Punishing an individual for breaking a law that was not adopted until after the individual's offensive behavior is unjust. This was all clear.

Whether or not the concept of justice can be applied to all of society (a claim called "social justice") is not determined by the Constitution or its preamble. Can all of a society be said to act unjustly, or only individuals? But this question too could not even be debated, as it has been and is today, unless the concept of justice itself were understood with reasonable clarity.

Perhaps like us, two and a half centuries later, the citizens of the new United States agonized over precisely what was or would be unjust in their world. Would it be just to establish a high tariff on manufactured goods, produced mainly in the North, without doing the same for agricultural products, most of which came from the South? Would it be unjust to require every able male citizen to serve for a term in the military? Was it just for the right to vote to be limited to land-owners?

But in order to debate these questions and others like them, or even to deliberate within oneself over such questions, what justice is has to be reasonably clear, as it was and still seems to be.

3. "Domestic Tranquility"

This essential concept, on the other hand, seems somewhat less clear. We can note at least that this concept seems intended to contrast with the following purpose of the federal government: protection from external threats or defense. If peace with other nations should be maintained by the federal government, peace within our own country should likewise be maintained.

An armed insurrection by one group of citizens would certainly be a threat to internal peace, which may explain President Washington's firm and decisive response to "Shay's Rebellion." (Shay and the others were outraged by what they as poor farmers, of course, saw as the injustice of high taxes applied to rich and poor alike and unrelieved debt leading to debtors' prison. Work to insure that their representatives in both the state and national legislatures voiced their concerns and peaceful demonstrations in public would have been a "tranquil" or peaceful, non-violent means of overcoming such perceived injustices.)

On the other hand, injustice affecting large numbers of citizens with no voice in their government and continued over a long period of time would perhaps also be a threat to peace in the nation, because widespread and prolonged injustice provokes potentially violent public outbursts (like the American Revolution itself!). Taking this line of reasoning leaves to the individual the determination of precisely what social conditions are just and what are unjust and are not the responsibility of government. But the responsibility for maintaining "domestic tranquility" implies the responsibility to avoid creating wide-spread and enduring conditions that a significant proportion of the citizenry consider unjust.

In order to provide for the domestic tranquility, that is, the government must establish just laws, enforced justly.

At the micro-level, threats to the domestic tranquility may come simply from individual criminals. Interstate connection between crimes would naturally make it a responsibility of the national government to respond, as would violation of federal laws - such as income tax fraud or the denial of equal opportunity to a woman because of her gender (a violation of federal anti-discrimination laws) - despite these crimes' occurring entirely within one state.

Insuring peace and security within the nation thus requires federal action protecting against mob violence as well as individual crime.

4. Defense

The responsibility of the federal government for defense was apparently unambiguous to our nation's founders, as it still seems today. The original phrase, about providing for the common defense was evidently necessary to clarify that the national government is responsible for protecting the entire nation, all states in common, from external attack.

5. "The General Welfare"

The term "welfare" in the Preamble is not to be confused with public support to a disadvantaged individual (as in the phrase "a welfare check"). With this simple understanding, however, the concept of "promoting the general welfare" does not seem particularly ambiguous.

It is the duty of the U. S. federal government to insure relative prosperity for the people generally, not just for a few.

Even before the Constitution, our Declaration of Independence had declared that among the "inalienable" or inherent rights of every individual is the right "to pursue happiness" or wellbeing. Over the generations, it has become if anything even more apparent that guaranteeing an equal opportunity for all individuals to achieve personal prosperity is a key to maintaining the prosperity of the nation generally. Of course, all will not succeed equally well, but each must have a reasonable chance to succeed in order for the general welfare to be sustained over time.

(The first inalienable right is the right to life itself; the "general welfare" of the nation cannot be maintained over time, it seems obvious, if every individual does not have the wherewithal simply to survive.)

6. Liberty

And the other unremovable right of everyone is to liberty, the blessings of which it is the government's duty to insure are available to all. The meaning of this emotion-laden concept seems clear. Liberty is freedom from control of others, freedom to decide for oneself what one will do.

It is also apparent, on the other hand, that the freedom of one may actually threaten the freedom of another. In 18th-century America it was natural for some to feel they were free to own slaves, as many of the founders - and we today - understood and understand is self-contradictory. One cannot be allowed to feel free to infringe on the freedom of any other adult.

The freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, since 1791 a part of the Constitution, list what seemed to the nation's founders the most important liberties to cite individually: freedom of speech, freedom from an established religion, and so on. But in listing these specifically it was not thought necessary to clarify what the term "liberty" means, other than to use it interchangeably with the term "freedom."

Although in practice a complex matter, liberty or freedom is still well understood as a concept.

7

These are the most basic purposes, then, which the United States' government is designed to serve. I have written elsewhere that the cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all. "Peace and prosperty" are identified in the Preamble to the Constitution by the terms "Domestic Tranquility," "Defense," and "The General Welfare." "Equal opportunity," too, is addresed by the purpose of our national government to "promote the general welfare." The two phrases from the Pledge of Allegiance to the U. S. flag, promoted by presidential decree in 1892 and formally recognized by the Congress in 1942, "Liberty" and "Justice" are named explicitly in the Preamble.

As issues arise in the public debate, it seems obvious that these founding principles should be the first considerations in our minds as we attempt to decide where we stand. We should not argue, that is, for a proposal merely because it "seems right" to us at the time. The prohibition against one person's freedom impinging on that of another must be considered as well. What is obviously right from my point of view is not necessarily what seems right from another's perspective; I do not have the right to impose my belief on others, unless my view of what is right also serves the national purpose as described in the Preamble.

A proposal benefitting one group of people should be considered first in terms of whether or not to do so may reasonably be expected to address an existing injustice and in terms of whether or not the wellbeing of our society generally will be promoted by such a move.

A social condition that deprives any group of individuals an equal opportunity to participate in the general prosperty of the nation should be considered a threat to our shared value of justice and to the goal of insuring the wellbeing of all.

Whether or not to approve or endorse an individual's or a group's actions that may reasonably be expected to threaten the internal peace within the nation must be rejected (even when I sympathize with the individual or group in question).

And these are only a very few examples of issues the discussion of which could be clarified and focused by keeping in mind the Constitution's purposes, which should be considered as shared by us all.

***

Story: Co-Incidents

***

It was very hot. They would have agreed about that. Even though it was dry. Even though there wasn't a whisper of a cloud and the sky curving overhead was more blue than white. There was no wind, and the intensity of the pervading, penetrating sunlight was like a broad, blunt- ended iron pressing down on the pavements and sidewalks, pressing down the tired foreheads, sticky shirts, and hunched shoulders of the afternoon traffic.

The man in the first car had already remarked to himself that it was actually pleasant to be so hot. He liked to feel himself sweating. He estimated 96 degrees at least.

The man in the second car wasn't even aware that he was ready to explode. He didn't notice his midweek weariness and he didn't notice the heat. His hand was still stinging where he had already banged his fist on the steering wheel, cursing aloud, when a car in front of him had slowed to make a left turn at an intersection without a light. There was no traffic at all going the other way so he hadn't even had to slow down. But he wasn't aware of the stinging either.

Now the traffic stream was moving along as quickly as it could, on a wide boulevard with three lanes going each way. There was a light every four blocks. They were set to let a car traveling twenty-five miles an hour right through. Of course, the rush hour traffic could never move faster than about twenty. The man in the first car had noted this immediately. He never had to drive in rush hour traffic and it didn't seem too important. He was just thankful that the back window of the car in front of them now, if he let it go about two car lengths ahead, did not reflect the sunlight back into his eyes. Even his sunglasses didn't prevent that from being unpleasant. Of course, driving that far behind tempted the cars in the right lane to turn in front of them. Then he would have to slow down a little so that the back window of the car that had changed lanes wouldn't reflect the sunlight into his eyes.

The beautiful young woman sitting next to the man in the first car had been looking silently forward since she had answered him two lights earlier that they would be turning left.

He didn't like changing lanes in that traffic, but a car just next to him had slowed to turn left at a corner where there was no light and he had been able to turn into the empty spot in the stream ahead of it.

The man in the second car had never liked little imported cars, although he was not aware of this prejudice. His frustration and anger increased slightly as he saw a car from the right lane pull in front into the left lane ahead of the little car in front of him. He raised his hand abruptly to push the horn ring, but hesitated. At least he would be turning soon. It was only a two-lane road, but it led away from town and shopping centers, toward open country, off to the left. Every day after he made the turn he zoomed off along the open two-lane road, racking the motor through the gears and exulting in the noise and the rushing wind through the windows. He was aware of that.

The left turn light at the intersection was very quick, even though there was never any traffic in the opposite direction. Sometimes when it was especially hot, or when the man in the second car was especially angry or frustrated, or happy (as on Fridays), he looked around quickly for a policeman and then whipped around the turn anyway, without waiting for the light. Almost no one turned at that corner, so the man in the second car was almost always the only one who turned into the left turn lane there.

The man in the first car had the habit of checking the rearview mirror every few minutes.

"It's the next corner," the woman said. "To the left."

The man did not reply but turned on his signal blinker. When he glanced at the rearview mirror, the sunlight glinted off the windshield of the car behind them and pierced through his glasses. He slowed down a little turning into the left turn lane. The green arrow was showing but it might change at any minute.

The second car was an older model American car, one of the most popular and less expensive brands. It was the best four door model of that brand, however, and was quite large and heavy, especially when compared to the first car. The first car was less than a year old, a deep blue, recently washed and polished.

The second car was a hardtop convertible, brown and cream. The paint was chipped in several places on the front fenders and around the grill, even on the front part of the hood. The grill and even the windshield was spotted with the smashed corpses of dead hard bugs, and the whole car was filmed and crusted with various layers of dust and dirt.

And it did change to amber just as the first car was reaching the end of the left turn lane. The man in the first car eased to a stop, noting how smoothly he had slowed as he turned into the lane, and stopped, as the light changed to amber.

There was a little toot on the horn somewhere behind. The man in the first car had raised his eyes to the rearview mirror before he remembered. The light flamed out at him again.

"Ha!" the young woman laughed next to him, as she screwed around in her seat to look back. She was suddenly revitalized. "We were cursed at, that time," she said and chuckled again turning back around. She was a little awkward in the cramped quarters of the small car. Both of them in the first car also had seat belts buckled around their waists and diagonally across their chests.

The man in the first car acknowledged the toot with a snorting sound noting surprise, but not amusement.

The woman lapsed into immobility and silence again.

When the light finally changed, the first car very gradually inched forward into the intersection. The man inside was completely aware that the movement was not only smooth and graceful. It was also remarkably slow. He wondered briefly if the young woman would be amused by this also. He smiled slightly himself, but didn't look into the rearview mirror.

The first car inched into the intersection and around the turn. The mouth of the two-lane road into which both cars were turning was very wide, almost like a four-lane road. There was no traffic anyway. The first car moved gradually out of the intersection toward the far right edge of the right lane. The man inside figured that by then his reply was sufficient. The woman next to him had apparently not realized that he was going slow on purpose, or for what reason. But they would laugh about it later.

The second car, just as the first car inched clear, thundered out to the left. As it zoomed alongside and ahead, it seemed to hesitate for an instant and the red, sweating face of the young man inside could be seen turned toward the man in the first car, apparently shouting angrily. He leaned toward the other car as he shouted and as his car jumped ahead.

The road narrowed.

The young woman was tall and dark. Her deep brown hair fell over her shoulders and down her back, touched at places with a lighter shade in the front and in faint, irregular streaks away from her face toward her shoulders. She was wearing a thin, smooth dress with a short skirt and no sleeves. The pattern was of magenta, muted orange, and violet flowers strewn across a pale pink ground. Her knees in the tiny car raised up off the floor above her waist. The thighs below her skirt were smooth and tan. She was turned toward the man beside her, looking beyond into the second car zooming by and the man inside shouting. Her eyes were dark and wide with long dark lashes, and her mouth was large and sensual. She was not laughing this time. Her face was quiet, inscrutable.

She saw the man next to her raise his left hand toward the top of the steering wheel as the second car reached a position in which the front door of the brown and cream hardtop convertible was two feet or so ahead of the front seat of the little blue car. The red-faced young man was still looking back and could see them clearly.

The man in the blue car was looking straight ahead. He raised the middle finger of his left hand off the steering wheel pointing it up, forward, and to the left.

He was slight and not tall. He had light brown hair combed neatly and closely trimmed, thick and curly beard. His sunglasses fit tightly around his eyes. They had heavy, black rims. He was wearing a light blue sports coat and black slacks, a neat white shirt with wide cuffs and a silver tie with flakes of red scattered on it. He might have been twenty-five or -six. The woman was somewhat younger.

She quietly regarded the man next to her. He didn't look over at her, or speak, looking blankly ahead down the road and lowering his left hand as the brown and cream hardtop convertible roared in front of them and on ahead down the road. There was a slow bend to the left, and after a minute the second car, which was now ahead, had disappeared around the bend.

The young woman turned back toward the front of the car, smiling slightly and tranquilly, and folded her hands on top of her knees.

The red-faced young man in the brown and cream hardtop convertible had still been shouting as his car moved ahead of the imported blue car, when the man inside had slowly and smoothly raised his left hand toward the top of the steering wheel and pointed his middle finger up, forward, and to the left.

The man in the hardtop convertible was tall and slender, but his shoulders were broad and his arms muscular. His face was long and rectangular, sweating, red, and wreathed with a rough late-afternoon stubble. He had big, hard hands with knobby knuckles and calluses on the palms and on the fingers below the joints. He was wearing a faded brown and white sport shirt with the top two buttons not buttoned, and a tee shirt underneath which was loose and irregular at the neck and soiled with perspiration. His slacks were dirty and tan and fit close to his legs and hips.

He had already roared ahead of the little blue car and around a slow bend to the left when he began to be aware of the full implications of the bearded man's gesture.

Still the couple in the imported blue car did not speak. The man did not know where they were going. The woman ran one hand over her knee and along her shin.

The car was moving faster now and the breeze whipping through the windows was loud in their ears. The man had remarked some time before that, in that dry climate, even on the hottest days, a little shade--such as that provided by their car's roof--and a little breeze was enough to cool one off. He decided it was even pleasanter than sweating in the stymied flow of traffic on the boulevard.

The little blue car entered the slow bend to the left.

The young woman looked toward the man next to her. He turned toward her for a moment and smiled briefly, looking back at the road. She smiled too and put her left hand on the seat behind his head and stroked his neck gently, turning her face back toward the front.

As the blue car came around the final section of the bend to the left, it suddenly came upon a brown and cream hardtop convertible which was blocking both lanes of the road ahead. A red-faced, ill shaven young man wearing dirty tan slacks and a faded brown shirt open at the neck was standing about ten feet before the car in the left lane, moving forward, with both fists clenched and his eyes squinting at the sunlight so that his teeth showed. There were black skid marks on the pavement behind and under the back tires of the brown and cream car across the road, swerving out from the right lane into the left lane.

The blue car had been moving fairly rapidly but came to a smooth stop, without skidding, before it reached the side of the brown and cream hardtop convertible. It had had to turn slightly off to the right, however, although there was not enough room for it to pass on the shoulder. The motor died with the suddenness of the stop.

The young man standing on the pavement approached the left side of the blue car, his fists still clenched at his sides. He was now shouting curses at the bearded man inside the blue car. The man inside did not look at the young man outside. He turned his head the other way instead.

There was a young woman in the seat to his right. She was looking ahead toward the front end of the car that was blocking the road before them.

"Roll up your window," the bearded man said quietly. As she began to do this, he rolled up his window and closed the wing window and clamped it shut. The woman did this also on her side.

"Is your door locked?" the man asked in the same quiet voice.

"Yes," she said and looked toward him.

"Mine too," the man said and for the first time turned to look at the red-faced young man who was steadily approaching from behind and to the left.

The young man was shouting louder now and as he did he waved his arms in front of him, clenching and unclenching his fists. His words were now almost unintelligible. When he saw the bearded man in the blue car roll up his window, he began to run forward shouting more rapidly. He slapped his hand, palm first, on the window at the side of the other man's head. He hit it several times with the heel of his hand.

Then he tried to open the door, but the handle would not move.

The man inside was no longer looking at him, but was looking blankly ahead. After a moment he reached across the knees of the young woman sitting next to him and took from a tray underneath the dash a clipboard with lined paper on it. He began to write with a ball point pen he took from his shirt pocket.

The man outside was banging his fist on the window next to the other man's ear and shouting with his face next to the glass. Perspiration ran down the sides of his face and off his nose and beaded up on the underside of his eyebrows threatening to drip into his eyes. He shook the drops away, however, by pounding the glass and stamping his feet on the pavement.

Inside the man said a few words to the woman next to him. She nodded and turned back around to face the front.

Outside the man could not make out what the other man was writing, and he couldn't hear what he said. He began to bang on the roof of the little car, the sound echoing with his shouts into the sky.

The couple sat quietly inside. The only movement was the man's writing.

The man outside hesitated a moment. Then he suddenly reached toward the front of the car and in two brisk movements had bent the left windshield wiper up from the glass and had torn it out of its socket.

Grinning fiercely the red-faced young man looked through the glass. The man inside had stopped writing and was looking forward. But his sunglasses completely masked his eyes. The other man beat the windshield with the bent wiper and screamed unintelligible curses at the other man's expressionless face.

He moved toward the back of the little car, pounding on the roof but not shouting quite so much. Through the window over the small back seat he saw the man inside suddenly hand his clipboard to the young woman and reach for the ignition key. The motor didn't start at once and the man outside had time to drop to his knees on the hot pavement on the left side of the car and begin to pound on the side of the left rear tire with the jagged edge of the windshield wiper. It bent around his fingers and cut them, but one corner of the torn hinge mechanism caught in a rough place in the edge of the tire. He kicked it and kicked it, holding it still with his left hand as the ignition whirred again.

It popped in, and the tire began to hiss.

The man grinned and pounded on the back fender as he pried his fingers loose from the bent pieces of metal in the tire.

As the ignition ground up again, he suddenly jumped to the rear of the car. The lid was not locked and, oblivious to the whirling pieces under the lid and the grinding noises they were making, he began to jerk out wires and to pound with his fist on the flat surfaces in the motor. They were hot and burned the side of his hand.

He straightened up and looked through the back window at the backs of the heads of the man and woman inside. The man was still working the ignition key. The woman was turned slightly toward him, holding the clipboard.

The man outside did not shout now.

He left the little car and walked slowly back out toward the center of the road, a spring in his step and his arms swinging loosely at his sides. His faded brown shirt was now deeply stained with perspiration under his arms in wide circles and all over his back. He felt the sweat trickling down the inside of his thighs as he approached the rear of the brown and cream hardtop convertible.

It was quiet except for the hissing of the left rear tire of the little blue car.

He felt his shirt pocket standing away from his body as he walked jauntily across the pavement. He touched it and the pack of cigarettes inside. His fingers happened to touch the book of matches he had slipped under the cellophane on one side of the pack. But when he stood behind the car, at the trunk, he did not take a cigarette.

Instead, he opened the trunk lid and surveyed the anarchic, dusty material strewn around the inside. He was not aware of the cuts and bruises on his left hand and fingers or of the burn on the side of his right fist. The heat of the pavement seared through the soles of his shoes, but he did not notice that either.

He pulled from under old pieces of cardboard and canvas a short, heavy chain that had dirt and grease caked on the inside of its links. And from behind the smooth old spare tire at the left he took a heavy black iron rod that had a wide, hexagonal socket on one end and was slightly bent in the middle toward the flattened tip at the other end.

He looked back at the little blue car at the other side of the road. The hissing was already fading away and the car sagged a little, off-balance to that side. The man inside was no longer trying the starter. Yet he remained in the car. Once he had looked out the back window, peering back down the road. He and the young woman next to him now sat motionless, facing directly ahead.

The young man outside, smiling again to himself, returned to the little blue car, carrying the heavy chain in his right hand (swinging it slightly as he walked) and the bent black rod in his left.

He had perhaps expected the other man to get out of the car, perhaps to run away, abandoning the car and perhaps even the woman. He perhaps expected now the other man to plead with him to stop since they could no longer drive away.

The clipboard had been replaced in the shelf in front of the young woman's knees. The couple sat immobile, looking ahead.

The man outside approached the front of the little blue car. He smiled proudly and held the articles in his hands up before the left side of the windshield, close to the glass. First he held up a dirty, heavy chain in his right hand, and then he held up a heavy black rod in his left hand. His face was red and sweaty.

A man inside the car was wearing sunglasses which hid his eyes. He didn't move and there was no expression on his face.

The man outside suddenly struck at the face behind the window with the heavy rod in his left hand. The glass did not shatter, but the end of the rod smashed a small round pattern into the window just in front of the other man's face. The broken glass in the circle was white. White cracks extended out several inches on all sides of the center like a spider web.

The man outside could not be sure if the man inside had flinched, and now he couldn't see his face at all. A young woman on the other side of the car was looking toward him now. Her eyes were wide and dark. After a second, the man outside smashed the window in front of her too.

On a particularly hot day, late in the afternoon on a seldom used two-lane rod, a brown and cream hardtop convertible was blocking the road to a small, imported blue car. A sweating and dirty young man, evidently seized by some frenzy, was fiercely attacking the little car, beating it on top and at the windows with a heavy chain and a bent black iron rod.

The windows were all smashed, although they would not collapse completely. The man shouted, hysterically at first, as he pounded the little car, jumping up before each blow with the chain in his right hand. He worked around and around the car, smashing the headlights and denting the fenders, hood, and roof.

He kicked the car also.

There were two people inside the car sitting motionless and looking ahead. Once, the young woman in the seat on the right had looked toward the back window and down the road behind them, but just then the man outside had begun to strike that window too with his chain, and then the smashed glass became opaque.

On one of his trips around the car, the red-faced young man stood for a few moments at the left rear fender striking again and again in front of and above the wheel. The fender buckled and banged. The man kept striking regularly, no longer shouting but grunting or snorting as he delivered each blow.

After a few minutes he suddenly stopped pounding the car. He was then in front of the car and to the left. The headlights were smashed and the glass on the pavement. The front hood was dented so badly that the front of the lid was open and bent off to the left. Even the left side of the bumper was sagging.

The man in front of the car panted deeply and dropped the chain and the heavy rod to the pavement. Then he began to stagger toward the rear of the car, staring open-mouthed at the damage he had done and looking blankly back down the road behind the little car.

He could not see a bearded man and a pretty young woman inside.


A man was leaning on the left rear fender of a ruined imported blue car toward the right edge of a narrow bending road in the late afternoon heat. He had his left foot propped on the left end of the rear bumper behind him, and he was looking back down the road appearing hot, sweaty, and tired.

The car he was leaning on was empty.

The red-faced young man tapped out a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. As he struck the match to light it, looking down, he noticed a thin stain trickling from beneath the little car below his foot on the bumper. He slowly realized as he looked at it that he had been smelling gasoline for a time.


A man suddenly jumped away from the back of the car he was leaning on as though it was suddenly hot and burned his back and shoulder.

The gasoline was a tiny, irregular trickle on the pavement, slowly emerging from behind the flattened left tire.


Light the cigarette from three feet away. Toss the match toward the left rear wheel of the little blue car. Run back for the other car and around to the other side.

The first car exploded, sending up first a yellow flash and then orange flames and dense black smoke into the sky. In an instant the first car itself was completely hidden in the fire and smoke.

Another car, a dirty, brown and cream hardtop convertible roared to life, swung back toward the right lane, and headed away toward open country.

***

Story: The Fall and Ruin, a Rose

***

1

Her house was like a big, messy mind. And whenever she cleaned up downstairs, which was extremely seldom now, she always ended up brushing things under the rug or behind the sofa, stacking unread magazines in some other corner scarcely disturbing their dust, and throwing most of that stuff she was going to sort out one day into an unused old trunk she kept just under the stairs.

She thought sometimes that there must be things living under there, some enormous, uncharted animal, or rats and roaches and things, a teeming bed of life all covered up and not often talked about. "It was as if the house were built on the sea and if you opened the little door leading under the stairs you'd see the living waters shimmering with never-ending movement and undreamed excitement." That, she thought one time, was eternity...living just under her stairs like a sleeping hypothalamus.

And she never really went under there or even downstairs anymore, no more often than she had to. It was dirty: that was it.

She stood up to survey her work. Gleaming and clean, the tiny room lay before her.

All was prepared.

Mentally she surveyed the lab one floor below - the electrodes, the meters and computer, the as yet lifeless woman-model itself. Yes, all there too was waiting, ready, as she had left it. All was quietly awaiting tomorrow.

She stepped again across the tiled floor, stooped to peer into the crevice between the slick wall and the bottom of the stool, genuflected briefly as her aerofoam sponge swiped across the cool and curving stone. The drying film of moisture sparkled in the light.

She straightened again, and turned. Yes, here too in the tiny third floor room, all was neat and ordered. The sink, the tub, the stool itself, the cabinet before it where alone on the shining shelf sat her black box of bank statements and stock reports. All shone and winked at her, and she felt calm and relaxed.

"It does a woman good once in a while," she used to say, "to get down on her hands and knees." (Did her old mother used to say that?)

It had been during one of the times when she was reading over those bank and stock figures (her grandchildren, she called them), then when her neat little bathroom was still on the ground floor, one day already so long ago, when she had suddenly thought of all the dirty little things crawling around in her under-the-stairs basement. Perhaps she had been thinking of insecticides and rat poisons, and she had very distinctly heard a noise. Not a very frightening sound in itself, but definitely she heard, or was she only imagining it? a peculiar little rumble, or a snarl.
She had become somewhat alarmed, and had left that first tile-smooth chamber, somewhat dingy and old in those times, to prowl the great downstairs floor. She hadn't gone far, however, when there was something, was it a sound? a vibration? something which guided her attention to the doorway under the stairs.

It was then, and immediately too, that she had decided to move upstairs. For from behind the shadowed doorway there had been, or she felt there had been - she told herself now, of course, she must have been imagining it, "her reckless imagination" - what was it? how did she perceive it? a deep, sighing, groaning moan.

It had been - her eyes glazed now remembering it, and her stomach felt empty - "it was as if the house were built on a windstorm and now the winds were whirling through the aging beams of a pirate's trusty schooner, listing and creaking as the masts trembled and the ship groaned before splashing down, down into the turbulent waters of the sea below."

She had gathered all her things, her then small collection of equipment too, and had moved entirely and unhesitatingly to the house's middle floor. And ever after, despite the filth which had met her there (she surmised that the under-stairs pipes had been somehow blocked), despite the days of toil she had been forced to spend cleaning the foul rooms of the excrement she'd found there, she had made her decision final, and almost never again descended to her house's lower floor...no more often than she had to.

And soon, of course, she had been forced to leave that entire middle floor for her burgeoning laboratory, forced again to move up a floor, to lose days of valuable time cleaning the filth-choked rooms upstairs. But she had carried on, knowing then, of course, that there would soon be her own porcelain suite, spotless, bright and clean.

2

By now she had left the bathroom for the bedroom, and had begun to prepare for sleep.

She sat there in her clean little chamber with the fluorescent lights on before bed. She sat there, holding a shoe thoughtfully in her nimble hand. "Tomorrow," she said to the shoe.

Tomorrow she would descend to the lab (and there was warmth in the thought of it), and she would finish it, the woman she was building, her mirror image. Then she could begin, "and all her works would praise her name."

That, she thought to her shoe, is eternity.

She occasionally thought as well, though she said nothing of it since she didn't want it to seem she was complaining, that it was rather unpleasant to have to work where it was so dirty. Her laboratory was on the middle floor of her house, though sometimes she worked out of hours in her nice little room upstairs. And she couldn't help noticing now and again that there was a door which led from one dark corner of the lab into that eerie little storage room under the stairs by means of a short narrow staircase leading almost straight down. She would, on occasion, throw furtive glances in the direction of that little door, though it had long since been bolted and barred, and sometimes wondered if, when the lights were out in the lab, though they almost never were, she couldn't see just a little bit of a glowing, showing from underneath the door. "As if the house were built on the sunset and the door was the last cloud the old sol would wink behind before bubbling its hot orange magic underneath the very mountains she was standing on." (Where did these words come from?)

It had been only after the second move - she was getting into her pajamas - when she had left the middle floor for her lab, that her work had taken its new and decisive direction. She was building another woman, a model of herself, a woman which would walk and move and have her being just as she herself did. A perfect replica of the human form, just what humanity needed, a woman-model to observe. The model would show her what they required, for progress. And there would be no involvement, no uncontrolled subjectivity. She would be like a test tube or a centrifuge, the algae, or a mouth-watering dog.

It was such a great idea!

She swung her legs onto the bed, and, sighing, lay back. The fluorescents above sparkled through the water in her eyes.

She was never quite sure whether or not she liked her work. Not that that was important, but it sometimes amused her to try to decide, "lying there waiting for sleep to invade, like Ethiopia over Mussolini."

There was, of course, the money. Reluctant governments were nevertheless paying dearly those days for research and construction perhaps destined to solve oh so many problems facing humankind at the moment, perhaps at any moment.

"I'm not doing if for that," she said to herself. "Oh I'm not working for the money." For indeed, she had no real need for money, her house, her equipment, her food and simple pleasures all so freely provided by the government or from privately donated funds. Yet there was the little black metal box placed carefully on the empty white shelf in the bathroom cabinet, before her when she sat; and she would often pass an hour or two there, reading eagerly the records she kept in the box, the increasing figures, the history of her prolific little grandsons and grand-daughters running around from bank to bank, from pile to pile, from hand to hand, making people happy while they bred a little more the months ahead.

"That too," she liked to think, "was eternity: coins breeding in a fertile pile of gold."

She knew she must like all that sort of thing - and the calculations too - but somewhere, somewhere beneath the while rubberized laboratory trousers she always wore or next to the superthin calculator she often carried in her breast pocket, somewhere where her eyes could not see, nor her microscope, nor her fluoroscope, there a voice "like a warm breeze wandering through the hot fingers of a dry summer night's grass fire" was telling her there was something else in the work, in the lab itself, "something dark and fierce like the uncharted waters in some Louisiana pool." There was something fierce and dark in the lab which drove her on "as a midnight blaze drives a mad, blind stallion charging into the darkness where he cannot see, but charging on and on."

She rolled onto her back; she was panting.

But her work was important, perhaps vital, she told herself, to all humanity; and she would go on with it day by day, carrying on cheerfully, even eagerly. And tomorrow, she would . . .

She yawned, and the fluorescents swam above her. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she dreamed of a racetrack and of herself clocking a speeding unicorn.

3

She had risen early that day, nervous with anticipation. She had stubbed her toe on the cold white stool while her eyes were still filled with sleep. She had dressed carefully, favoring her throbbing toe and concentrating on remaining calm.

She had descended from her little room...as usual, she had thought to herself; it's just a normal day. Yet the key had somehow crawled through her fingers and bounced to the floor when she began to unlock the lab door, and somewhere she knew.

She had entered the lab; there was nothing changed. Her equipment lay still before her, meticulously arranged and prepared. Yet she had not begun her work. She had been drawn instead to turn about the room, which was quiet and somehow unbalanced by the slanting rays of morning sunlight which were playing through the only little window near the back. She had paused there before the little door leading down to the under-stairs; she had carefully reached out her hand to check the bolts and bars, and could not now forget that they had distinctly felt warm to her cold, unsteady fingers.

It had been months since she had checked her small white cabinet just beside the outer door across the room. But now she did; today she felt it was important. She ran a short test on a drop she took from the small black vial she kept there.

It was still potent.

It was foolish, she thought cynically to himself, to keep it there. Yet she did not trust the glowing, snarling, softly waving under-stairs, and the poison she'd distilled from monkey urine would kill any beast or monster she might have to face. Perhaps it was - yes, she smiled at her hesitancy, it was foolish; but she had humored herself that morning and had found there a sort of confidence.

She had moved on and on about the room, and had finally begun.

And just as the woman was born, just as the model began slowly to stir, to blink her glazed eyes and to scowl, then - she could not now forget it - then, she had felt the floor shift "like the deck of a faltering vessel." The room was suddenly warm, and from the little door - she must have been imaging it - there was a glowing like the sunrise and a moaning like a strange imprisoned animal.

The model-woman now sat before her, and knew why she'd been made. The model was wise, and her creator quick to note all her motions and thoughts, though the noting mind often clouded with a dark thought of the cabineted vial.

"I am empty,” said the model-woman.

And she knew that it was true.

Just then, as the model-woman had begun to speak, the floor started to shake and the walls rattle. The fluorescents flashed and died, but the room was light.

There was a rumbling, a snarling, a roaring like the wind in a fire, and the bars on the little door glowed with heat, then fell away.

There was fire everywhere, the floor, the lights. The model- woman's eyes flashed in wonder and in terror as her creator vomited and writhed in her burning rubber pants.

The door smashed open. The model-woman fled, and, running out and up the stairs to the clear white room, she gulped greedily from the foul vial.

But she herself, she did not flee, and knew she did not want to go. She was standing then, awaiting it, and it washed over her in a boiling bath. She stood fast, her hands raised high above her head, knowing that she did not want to run, exulting savagely and painfully in the violent burning of her flesh as the uncharted animal, the swimming seas of boiling unction, the blind, wind-blown, charging stallion, and the flames crashed upon her like black waves on a sunny rock.

And as she died, as she perished in the awful sea from the under-stairs, her house fell to ruin about her, an innocent victim of the dark savage fight between the flowing sunsets from below the floor and the piles of excrement on the roof.

Her house had fallen into smoldering rubble, floating like smelly scum on a sunlit sea.

And today the wet, charred ruins of her house cry out to the never-ending skies: "One day, oh humanity, let there be built a house where seas and stools can live united, as in the well-ordered mind of a rose!"

***