The Group

We needed a timeless place, with a whole history unlike our own pasts. We wouldn't really be able to see ourselves otherwise. Common language made the only home we could share amid the illegible city. Above us, the old, high ceiling echoed our melancholy -- enchanting us with rumors of the home missing inside all of us. We gathered often in that Chinese mansion, to converse and to read.

Triss ran the household and she nurtured all of us; we were her gang of surrogate lovers: perhaps, because none of us was the one, she needed more than two or three guys. There were several women around, too. Everyone knew each other's friends: as in every Asian city, the English language makes a small communal node. All of us were just past our mid-twenties; some of us were already thirty-five. Our instincts came together, reaching to articulate the birth of new experience. What is it that brings friends together, but feeling too lonely and blank? You urgently need to be spoken, and peaceful bliss slips into uneasy curiosity; it's that sensation like waking up to forget where you are, having traveled far beyond the old confines of habit. Consciousness takes hold of you with that feeling for being arbitrary; then, expression shows life to those whom you love.

We were all so homeless. Our roots hung suspended above our heads; and we laughed at each other, creeping awry. Memories want to be lost then. Paradise is like something which must have lived long before we arrived in it. When you discover it, then it seems made by somebody else for purposes you would never have imagined...

Triss shared the old three-storey mansion-box with six wanderers -- she would have loved all of them had she effaced her dreams. We called the mansion, "The Cherry Blossom." It was built ninety years before, by a migrant from Shanghai. It was a merchant's home, a deeply feudal and fatherly design. You get the impression that the man responsible for designing it had no qualms about constructing a fortress precisely to house his taste for ripe fruit. His desire for the easy life was conventional and suitable for a fellow so rich. How intent he must have been on establishing his avid sex in Taiwan, as if to set a sturdy example of ideal life amid modest opulence.

But nowadays, no Taiwanese occupy the old place; instead, only the young foreigners were willing to rent it. Why? Because long ago, one of the merchant's four wives had killed herself here, and it's taboo to live in a house occupied by a ghost... So we would look carefully at what was around us; while the mansion attempted to express one man's eternal urge, the place still seemed unsavory: the heavy leaden bars on the windows made the place into a prison for the nightmares of women. But that too was the Chinese way. The fear for material security undercut the grace. Some attempt had been made to relieve the stark hardness of the place: little birds and tree branches and scenes from the opera were carved into the wood panelling. But the handiwork appeared hastily executed. Perhaps the old man wasn't willing to hire the best artisan he could find. Progress and its speed and demand for economy shaped and distorted everything now. But the building had an ancient aura. If the original story were true, the blatant sexual design lay revealed clearly: the four women's rooms were arranged together on second floor beneath the master's suite. Ninety years ago the tiny city already demanded the rudely monumental character of modern intentions, however parsimonious the final product actually appeared. The Chinese used to believe that a home ought to be commodious yet humble enough to meet the city's social and physical limitations. So, what the expensive land had snatched from the surface areas was transmitted up into doubly high ceilings. Behind the house, a wild garden still crawls up around wooden window frames reminiscent of Georgian proportions. Beyond those few trees and two metres of rank grass -- new buildings have climbed all around. The antique is completely hidden from the city.

Ah, but today isn't yesterday. Should even the ghost of the master decide to pay a visit, nothing would make any sense to him. Too many strangers live here now, many of us have blonde hair, and we speak the biting tongue of a people inexplicably urgent. In the evening, we foreigners cackle and talk too much about nothing; we are too full of empty opinions, small moods and loose impressions. Perhaps only the early morning silence resembles the murmuring past. Before, women intoned Buddhist prayers for love. Now, electrical music plays, but it sounds squashed coming from a black plastic box that fails to fill up the big space.

The modern time prefers a poker face full of silence, and if you actually expect to hear a shy smile give you guilty admissions... Well, what do you know about who you have to be, and what she expects of you? All of us talk, but we speak with voices too low to be heard. Only a lover's face, close kept by the eyes can communicate who you are. The old master never spoke like we do to his girls -- he just made them do what he wanted in the dimness of dawn. A smoke like burnt molasses upon his breath was all his girls ever knew him for.

Today, the master's top floor is home to Triss and a feisty American queen in love with the painless Chinese male endowment. Triss lived across a hallway made of red-stained window frames filled with squares of opaque glass. Maybe it was once the master's study or his first wife's room. She made a nesty mess of it.

Triss drew comfort and calm from wandering the fertile trails linking neuroses with love's memory and her future plans. Her life, as many others, was made of that fecund yet immaterial thing -- anticipating her hopes. Living in Taiwan gave respite from delusion, and her new, positive feelings had out-lived the usual cynicism. She was like a perfect sphere, glowing with the healthier and more feminine decision to be optimistic.

Triss only recognized her failings in the reactions of her friends and foes. She tended to ally or withdraw like a rapier, quickly cutting, and remorselessly, she aligned affection to minds least abrasive to her weaknesses and wishes. She had no wish to aspire to anything she wouldn't need to be; while boldly intellectual, she remained adamantly defiant. She made all her wit out of an independent study of things and refused to tolerate disenchantment. Social class and its random but inescapable configuration added up to a big nothing in her eyes -- food for snobbery and excuses. Circumventing the way others would see the world for her was a way of life for the girl.

So many people come to live in what amounts to voluntary exile. To explore the other side of the Earth is an adventure. For others, it's sheer perdition and they return quickly home. Triss hadn't even talked about home with her friend, Craft, a Canadian like herself; asking why didn't trip her up as much as wondering about who you were -- after you arrive and then live in a place that changes you.

Triss was waiting for Craft to come up early -- to help unfold chairs and make some snacks. Everyone else would come along later. The group had multiplied recently, giving birth to triplets, all graduates of philosophy and Canadian. Strange, how additions are drawn upon an osmosis of familiar words, an attraction of likes amid an unknown culture. Likes come to likes almost as if they fear forgetting who they are. Perhaps again, the essence about who we are becomes more pronounced whenever we awake among strangers. For there are others from Australia and Britain unlike we Canadians. But everyone knows each other.

Searching out resemblances is a compulsive thing: people want the security of home. In fact, it was Craft who first suggested that all racialism arose out of a fear of losing like minds; the impatient ignorance of racism comes from misunderstanding, a lack of empathy. Racism occurs almost accidentally, upon the awkward clash of tongues ignorant of the habitudes, ploys and mechanisms behind each culture. One group of people simply refuses to enter the consciousness and experience of another people. So, this frustration leads to an insecurity, which becomes a reactive antipathy. Anyway, nobody would be thinking about this topic tonight, especially since everyone who comes to live in a foreign land evolves into the opposite of bigotry.

The names and phone numbers added up, and including herself, Triss counted fifteen unique individuals. Craft and Starky were the ones who knew who everyone was. For Triss it was an act of blindness, bringing all these people who didn't know each other very well into the same space. We imagine trust needs to be exercised to be effective against our presumptions; but that's because nobody really knows how to be free in the first instance...

Craft came in first, "Triss, you're looking fine."

"Considering this mop's my new boyfriend, hey, I'm doing great."

"Has anyone called?"

"Why should they? You expect anyone to no-show?"

"Not the ones going home soon. But I did the inviting this time, not Starky."

"So?"

"They don't want to know me like they do each other."

"You're crazy. Really, let's not care who comes or not."

"Did you buy anything to drink?"

"Just my wine. Hey, the first to arrive may not be the last to leave."

"You have met another new someone, right?"

"You're all bastards -- you men. You expect to rule our hearts because you think we are the ones who expect more than we actually do. But that's just a lie to get back at us, since you really think you own the right to make us do everything you want; then you assume, because you're so in the right, we should want it too."

"But we don't expect you to want what we do. You have to lust a man first to want him. I'm not going to make you pretend what you want for me. It's funny. Before I met you, I'd begun to imagine women had stopped searching for ideals. I see you putting all your faith in Mr. True Blood back in Montreal. But why don't you just relax about living now? I'm with you -- it's okay to let yourself love yourself enough to open up and invite somebody in. A little lust leads to love, doesn't it?"

"Men are too inept to let us enjoy sex. Women don't enjoy sex. We pretend to, and it doesn't mean anything to feel 'lusty' because that isn't an orgasm, do you know?"

"Come on Triss. I've met more than one girl who needed to have sex as much as they want friendship, stability and everything else. You said once your parents had sex and loved it for years."

"I did?"

"Sure."

"I didn't mean it. Men are bad. Dad spent himself whenever he could on other women. I don't want the same type for myself. You make me look freaky, just for knowing who I love. Crazy Craft -- no wonder; don't pretend you're not just another one of those clams who won't open except to say the opposite of what you pretended to believe in yesterday, just to satisfy your wish to bed some girl."

"My complacency, you mean..? I'm not the world's finest, but I am good to people I care about."

"You men only 'care about' those who -- who prostrate their lousy spirits before your childside -- your vanity, I don't know what it is. Working with kids too long... Ha, ha -- have you every worried about becoming a pederast or something?"

"Oh yeah sure. Well, sometimes everyone wonders if they're queer or whatever. But I knew I was okay when I kept getting big erections while I was teaching at that Catholic girls' high school."

Craft's lady friend grinned queasily and she saw how he looked at her body, as if deciding over and over again that she was, after all, attractive enough.

Someone else was clunking up the wooden stair. Actually, three people -- three girls, close buddies. Vera, Melody and Alexandra. All of them came from America. Saying hello Craft put their wine in the fridge and introduced them to the balcony upstairs.

Vera, a blond with long limbs, large eyes and a feminine quickness: the way she flips her head to look at you, the sudden blinking over the inexplicable pout, the undeliberate self-assurance, the bossiness that sometimes scares away her allure. But she has an extra charm, her thin limbs are formed finely. The ready smile always hides her real opinion as if she wants you to guess it... The blond hair is girlishly long and she's nearly thirty. Ha. Vera the primp. But really, she left America to thaw out from failed love, a desperate long love of many years. She still isn't here yet for most of the boys. Only one or two girls are taller than herself? She's succumbed to too few sudden lusts. This woman, of all the women present, can really write.

She comes with Melody and Alexandra -- east and west coast Chinese American girls. English comes easy and their accents are startling and idiosyncratic; so if you close your eyes, you imagine a couple of white babes who grew up in a very specific suburban milieu. You could even identify it precisely -- if you knew how to recognize all the voices behind each American locale.

Melody is a sleek one, and she's happily mixed up. She loves to chatter and has long tresses and is shaped for easy love. But like many of her ilk, she may look easy, but isn't -- at least not for everyone. Most fellows want in, but she's the type who won't even tell her best girlfriends who she does actually bring home. At the same time she suffers from conventional class-caused pathologies -- wanting to do something good for others without knowing how, except to say vague things: "I should go volunteer for Greenpeace." She's smart although she tries to deny her conventional form. She conceals passion with intellect, as if she was brought up to hide herself silently away -- she's had to secret everything that is not herself -- like having sex, in an utter privacy that only her lover knows.

Her bosom belongs to Alexandra, who is contemplating leaving her innocence and sapphic infatuations behind for some of the fools who fall for her modest, open heart. Alexandra wants to believe the world is smooth and would be kind if people would let themselves grow up to be less pessimistic. The girl doesn't believe in her own dreams, though. She's easily annoyed. Often, she smiles as if shy, and the boys don't know her any better after all, do they..? The girl is attractive tonight and she wears denim cutoffs on her body; they make her strong limbs seem longer, and her bum is the roundest of all the girls here. Nobody knows when Alexandra last had sex, if she has ever had it. Girls like her, middle twenties, becoming women: they know so well what they want from life, even if they never say it aloud to anyone. The body understands everything it really wants, having done it or not.

Everyone in the group is acquainted, yet none of them knows everyone else very well but those few who form closer knots outside, like these girls. Soon some of their boyfriends come up; Craft only met these guys last month.

Starky comes in with Smitt. Starky is British, actually Irish, but he grew up in the midlands and Smitt is American pie, still steamy. Starky and he are joking about a fast bike maybe Quint will buy. Starky is a controlled gawk, looks well put-up, and perhaps is a touch too self-adhered to the way he sees things. He has nothing going but a perceptual knife, and he uses it compulsively to cut out opinions from the glib melange collected in his memory. His mind constantly eschews the softly blind and accepting naivete that's expected by the way the world uses us. So, he trusts nothing and works too hard, lately on a vast piece of journalism designed to expiate his wish for talent, and to show the world some intimate vision of his current home. Exile extraordinaire, Starky has some of that unprepossessing flamboyance and confidence so many have given up, and which younger persons occasionally mistake for arrogance and false pride. But he has enough knowledge to know better. His face is like a Roman's, pale and yet chipped. His glance mischievously betrays ten centuries of broken hearts left behind. His big round tummy -- oops -- comes from the pub, and offers his only comic relief. He's single, and maybe gay, but never wanted to be... Starky's whole person seems to suggest "complexity" is an idea used to understate life's more obvious compulsions.

Smitt is married and wears a brown bear beard and doesn't smile for cameras. The adventure of Asia was not supposed to be permanent, but like so many foreigners, the distance from home truth feels more comfortable than smuggling himself back again. Smitt is like a natural born chairman: and he asks questions others daren't. He writes fiction but can't believe he can, so he distracts himself from devotion with daily, serious concerns, a homebody care handed down from a long line of quietly authoritarian papas who also wondered how to give full swing to their deepest intuitions. But having moved to a country where investment without consulting a fortune teller is anathema, well, wouldn't you be confused, too? So, he's come to suspect that thinking for yourself may be a little too in vain.

They know the women and Starky tells them about having to move out of his flat due to a nosey policeman landlord.

One of Smitt's pizzas is already gone.

Then Avo, the local Taiwanese artist, finds the place after another phone call and he sits with Craft in the kitchen showing him a folio full of comic book myths.

"The hero flies up there. In the cloud lives a dragon he has to kill, of course. Then he gets the girl."

Avo sometimes he jokes that his mother conceived him during a moment of freedom soon after his father left home for a few months following an argument over his, not his mother's, fidelity. Nobody knows but the woman who his real father is. The feminine spirit in him guesses more than he cares to mention. His creativity is unresolved and he wants time to finish the explanation later. Avo's nature and Craft's are allied by the same light, the immanence of imagination: creativity brings work into being because it already lives now. Art makes them give what we need today to eternity. Imagination is that infinite herb, and like a stalk, it grows up into its given genetic form. So many are born to realize visions, always trying to make the imagination become reality. Art is a rapid compulsion, and it tugs us beyond the fixed imitations of identity. Getting over yourself is having something to say about life. So, making art is living.

But it's not much for making a living. Avo's money comes from odd jobs, a taxi, dealing dope, doing the odd tattoo and moonlighting as a lone-shark. Not so safe as he would like, but who's about to be choosy? Avo's dark-skinned and his long locks, reddish, wreath his face, fanning out over his shoulder. Nobody would say he's a bore. He looks clever but too hungry; he's very gaunt and so always appears as if he's waiting to tell you something. He sleeps when he isn't creating, and seldom goes out but to drink with his pals, musicians in a thrashy metal band. For a fellow who has never lived abroad, Avo's English vocabulary is mysteriously large.

Eustace and Quint come from New Zealand and Australia. Eustace writes fantasy novels and has lived for years away from home -- because he has fun and feels comfortable with the easy love he makes. He's the opposite of the usual artistic introversion and always goes out to meet friends and talk. His worldly plans and obsessions have expanded while his desires have become increasingly frustrated, having learned the limits of oriental woman. So, he's always a touch cool at the heels, and has given up all hope in free love; now, he forgets himself by constantly seeking pals, immersing his regrets among the many cracked shells who already know what he expects to hear. Those heaps of words flow at each other, and even if minds are at odds -- their words use the same language. That talk is comfortable, and so friends make a home among his quiet inability to belong. The man arranges life around the most immediate needs; instinct for flesh drives his eyes open to the night: how he wants a woman to share his worship of orgasm. His is the eternal battle against false charges and the unkind demand for solitary penance; and he's the first and happiest exponent of selfless, selfish abandon. Only three of the fifty women he's bedded have dared say that his need to conquer comes from the desperate wish to edify himself, to feel worth "something" -- any small bit of a thing -- since he's never wanted to "be" a someone. At least those three women didn't accuse him of greed; he's already well-acquainted with himself and the impulsions of insecurity.

Quint is short and spry compared to the bulky height that frames Eustace. But Quint's eyes are always flowing into yours: a look like that wants to get to know you, even if he doesn't care for anything but the girl, already present at the party, the woman whom he's loved in vain up to now. He would appear comic, weren't he so destined always to meet someone new.

Also present tonight are two more fellows who frequently enjoy coming inside girls' pussies, and this mansion: Sullivan and Bertrand. Both come from the same western Canadian province, and as they enter, they exchange remarks about how many people a taxi is allowed to transport simultaneously by law. (These two guys do not accuse others of being provincial for not having a large circle of social butterflies to associate with on a regular basis; as a matter of fact, it would never occur to them to argue over whether or not so-and-so was a sophisticate or a provincial based on his social life alone. Actually, it's what you know and how you do things, along with the scope of your comprehension, your spontaneity, and your openness to others and unfamiliar ideas: these are the natural modes and qualities that ultimately free you. Otherwise, that stayed-in-nation-state, any old heritage of rotting roots, standing in a line -- all that nonsense will eventually lend your character its tired, provincial caste. But familiarity doesn't have to breed contempt if you can get out the door, once in awhile! Neither Sullivan nor Bertrand are self-important in that pompous, ministerial way that so preocuppies the demeanour of government and corporate technocrats... Face it baby, a poptart's a poptart, and the slinky fake always feels more free than a dumpy old bag. And why not!? Sex is made for the young. God is "forever young" and his mold is too. But as for humans, I'm told that children with cancer die easier than the old. And it takes many years for important-people to realize that they are merely "self-important," and that ultimately their significance had little to do with anything but figuring out to keep wealthy, or at least, how to stay-on-welfare. It's true -- the enron clones rake in the flunky dough without a qualm, pal.) But as for today, Sullivan and Bertrand would rather talk about how to brew coffee, and when to drink champagne. They would prefer to discuss their chances with the local girls -- who to hit, where and when. The club expects to keep its members firm. In case you haven't noticed, Canadians are too often found looking small in a big place, without any trace of guile, and you wouldn't dare ask them to decipher a lovely foreign lass. But they try and try again; like most of us, these good boys are practiced at pretending to know what's going on.

Sullivan is unpolished vigor, a man fired by opinions, his goals are barely meshed, he's a constant irritant to many. He's full of that forgivably adamant certainty that accompanies not really knowing enough to talk. Sometimes he silences his victims whenever they begin to doubt he means well. He wants to go home, but cannot unless he saves enough money to pay for his abandoned wife and children. Sullivan, the scenario who deserves to be happy, if he could only point his mind in the same direction as his heart, his purest heart, which is in love with forgiving and dreams about showing the good he always intended to do for the others who hated him for no reason when he didn't want them to.

Bertrand is the contrary of Sullivan's colliding desires: everything about him, his neat, yet colorful appearance, his organized way of approaching strangers -- reassuring them with a deferential brand of joke. He wants to know people, but when obliged to judge, he deflects the tragic, the destitute sensation in us all -- and scrounges for some redeeming observation, as if to show how in love he is with learning all about you. Venality and avariciousness are his enemies even if he cannot help feeling superior, sometimes.

Darla arrives alone. She unclothes herself slowly, revealing the secret thrill she gets whenever strangers see her pale skin beneath that tiger-prawn skirt. She glows and is so tightly caught in her fishnet hose. She's obviously a woman who became romantically inclined only after she learned how to manage her physical appetite. Sex replaced food when she was still a teenager. It was a way she used to try slimming. It didn't work -- she can't get rid of her baby roll, and the man she loves doesn't care because she really loves doing it all the time, which makes her a rarity. That her folks repeatedly accused her of slumming only reinforced her independent flight plan. She made war against middle western leisure-suited bible-belt bozos for years before her need for laying around made her leave town forever. Lovers, one after the other, never alone, always with -- always talking to men who needed to talk to her; she acquired a directness, a sensual candor which women of any class, poor or privy, could envy easily. Her unself-conscious talent for living without the drag of any dead and dying sex-fear, and none of the usual communal moral rigor mortis, at least makes her appear almost supernatural to the unwittingly uptight minions of her childhood: an upright, suppressed, sexless and completely joyless society of hypocritical zombies. That's how she sees her home. She never had a chance to bring home her idea of good society; people's expectations were something to be rid of, in favor of making her own kind of live action movie in the comfort and privacy of her own home.

In the span of an hour these individuals had come in, perhaps not quite so quickly as babies are born into the world, but at least the mansion was putting on that barometrically full feeling that demanded people speak up into each other and start to make friends of strangers.

Monica and M-sister met at the bookstore and neither would have guessed where the other one was going until one of them asked the other if she knew where Yendeh street was... Then it was a cab ride down to the river. Monica paid, since she hated busses.

Monica is California, rich. She is brown-skinned south Taiwanese, a belle kept hidden away, locked up in a church. Her wardens are the good Lord and her wonderful old pal of a dad; so she still lives the achingly dull repression of ancient feudal denial of female individuality, add to that the religious inversion that makes her hate pleasure because someone is making her wait for it for far too long. She needs, really, to fuck big brother, not coddle him like a sister.

Monica is an unpicked rose in a garden scavenged over and over again. She is proud of her virtue and hardly cares to notice that half the culture she represents is a great hold over: society hasn't come up with something more appealing to her. She is waiting for a man and she is very concerned that he be very appropriate to her and that he must appeal to her folks. But actually, she really needs to have sex more than she needs to find a conservative matchhead. She knows it, too, yet doesn't know what to do.

M-sister is a receiver of people -- young men and emotional signals. She is as young as Monica, and that's the source of their humor, both only 23. While one has known ten guys in only two years, the other remains a nun; well, the nun seems more of a grown woman than M-sister -- a curious irony. There's a reason for this distinct behavior, naturally. While Monica's been alone, she's had time to strike-up a conversation with her own personality, and while M-sister's been laying around her boyfriends' homes, she's had to play-act. Simple really. While Monica dreams about her mature future and becomes ingenious, M-sister gets sly and has to pretend all the time. Both feel superior/inferior to each other simultaneously -- they know their lives and experience are completely different, and yet both sense they don't know much about each other... Because they're women. Women can sense things inside one another without having to speak of it... Men can't see that; like when two women share the same impression of a particular guy, and he could never guess what their opinion really was. Men may occasionally perceive the collective impression, but these vague sensations inspire fear, respect, love and hatred. And then the women, reacting against the men, become very unpredictable and the truths slip out -- stubborn lovelorn whispers, and irksome jealousies -- like when M-sister says she likes to fuck just because she sees Monica is the ultimate guai guai girl. What a silly scene.

The taxi arrives without both girls restoring their giggles in each other. Petulance is M-sister's specialty, and she's had to exercise it too often and so she's bored of her own personality. The only wish she has now is figuring out how to escape the narrowness of her formation. Having met Craft a month ago, she says this much, "I don't love him, but he can be fun and he can make me become people I don't even know myself for -- and he's like a vampire, sucking out my personality. Maybe he loves me, but he thinks he's king slut too. He has to say stupid things, like that he wishes he could be honest with the women and tell them he only wants women who need sex and he needn't waste their time with romance or fanciful expectations. He has a gentleness though, and he tries to please me so much. I don't know, he must be afraid of losing me."

"Not a nice boy."

"But he acts like he is. He tries, he would be nice to a girl like you, even if more awkward than with me. He wouldn't know what else to do but be nice."

"That's my problem, all the boys I know are too nice to me because I'm a good girl. Some guys are mean too, because all they see is their own frustration in what they can't get from me."

"You better do something fast, Monica. Or, they'll stop wanking over you!"

Monica coolly ignores this last, common lump of earthy insight, finer than temple incense.

"Who do you know here, by the way?" asked M-sister.

"I was working with a girl, maybe you know her, Alexandra. She'll be here tonight. She's my uncle's cousin's niece, so I guess that makes us, what, third cousins? I don't know."

"Not cousins at all. What work do you do?"

"Journalism. I write business summaries for the wire services and freelance pieces. How did you get the name, M-sister?"

"It's because of a boyfriend I had, he always said he was looking for girls who looked like his mother, so I was his mother-sister, and the name held onto me even after he dumped me, ha, ha."

"I'm going to go back to school in September," Monica tries changing the mood, still annoyed.

"Back home in California?"

"Yeah."

"Can't meet the right rich guy here, huh?" rubs in M-sister.

"Very funny."

The two very different girls have arrived on Yendeh street, and they buy some fruit before going upstairs.

All the folding chairs, the bean bag and the mattress were covered in people. Three more pizzas were ordered and went down quickly.

Starky stood and raised his hands for quick attention. "It doesn't really matter we don't all know each other," Starky said by way of warm up, his voice a salubrious purr, quite consciously soothing; he liked to put on that air of dominant male self-assurance. He tries all subconscious hooks -- look them deep through, pause and gather the eyes of particularly attentive individuals in the audience, give them time to laugh, insult no one, inspire confidence and expand the atmosphere to make people escape the masked persona hiding them away from really free expression.

But then Starky gave a brief, autocratic lecture anyway, while trying hard to sound positively suggestive, "We have to discuss the format. Since we have so many members, it's obvious that we won't all be doing the same kind of work. Nor does it look reasonable to demand we all do the same assignments especially since this isn't a class or workshop. Some of us want to give talks on philosophy, and others want to read poems. All is fair here, and there are no rules. The only thing we want to do is open our minds."

Sullivan had to interrupt, "But isn't that going to be confusing? Wouldn't a set exercise be better?"

"Why should it?" asked back Vera who instantly disliked boy number three from Canada. "If we want to do an exercise, then we can do it right here and compare notes spontaneously. So, why shouldn't people also bring whatever they like to read?"

There was no discussion and Melody was chosen to present her poetry first.

" 'Freight sandwiches, dolled out for all to use, they leave my thighs cooling blue,' " she read in a voice too quiet, yet imprinting the poem with the nervous, feminine rebellion that originally moved her to write it.

"Is that a Haiku?" asked Quint.

"Could you read it again?" asked Avo. "I like it but I wonder what you meant it to say? "

"Whatever you think it means," she answered and read it again.

Then Triss said something smart, "That's really wishing love was sweet, but you can't help being sardonic, right? Like in a few words you're saying love is not long enough, or men are just taking your love away with sex. I mean, freight sandwiches -- they're penises, right?"

Then Melody giggled like a girl hiding from her hunk behind the high school locker door.

Quint's turn. He bore his lack of concentration like a personality cue, softly laid across his silent visage, the modest undertone was uttered precisely, and he trailed the end of each sentence to silence before moving onto the next one, " 'The sky turned a vivid, translucent purple despite his gray sense of loss. Life was being lived again -- but absolutely without his participation. Again he had been abandoned by the lovers and his wish for freedom was thwarted. Only old mama nature remained to comfort his despair. He wanted most of all to feel light and laugh as a child free of care and remorse. The sun had set for him, unwilling. Just like an inexperienced girl, Taggart felt. Then came the new spring rain, and life lost would become life refreshed and the dead tree would open unexpectedly.' ...That's all."

"It's got something to it. But you should highlight the intrigue and get rid of the cliché word images, like trees opening unexpectedly. The good mood draws you in but then drops us off the edge of whatever none of us can learn," this spicy acceptance came from Darla who kept silent up to the moment before she planned to read her own weird thing.

Then Sullivan said, "You know, I'd like your stuff more if you weren't so vague all the time, Quint. Where are you leading your reader to -- a dead end? I mean, you start off by describing this desert and then you go inside his spiritual landscape but you have not showed us how he can be saved by that love of nature. Give us something happening to him, like someone stealing his water and the rain comes when he doesn't expect it anymore."

"But give him a chance," piped up Eustace, who liked Quint, being from the same southern hemisphere. "He's looking for himself in the world and he can't find anything about himself there, only nature. And even his inexperienced girl doesn't know what she's looking at. That mood comes through pretty clearly."

"How's that though? How could he know what he wanted to find if his world wouldn't let him feel it right in front of him first?" Sullivan was always about to shut up, but not yet.

"I think you guys are off track, and I think it's okay," Alexandra said, who really liked Quint, too. "He's just into a mood, that's good."

"Yeah, a mood. There's no other word for it. It's a spiritual clap on the back for the lost who still want to be found," Craft nodded eloquently.

"I don't know if he does, really, want to be found," and that was all Quint had to say about his own man. Neither he nor any of the other fellows in the group really liked Craft, especially since he always appeared so easily clever and claimed to have written so much already. But he was just as much a yokel as the rest of them.

Bertrand read an attempt at comedy about a winter hiking trip into the mountains of southern Alberta with some unprepared confreres.

It was crisply written, and he enunciated his words buoyantly, with comic flare, adding that he'd written the piece that very same morning. People laughed along with his subtle wit. Bertrand was exquisitely inoffensive, and would remain the ideal gentleman for the rest of his life.

Triss had noticed this, and she saw Craft looking at Bertrand as if he wanted to know who he was. She felt that her own hunger had some glitter left in it, and her sensual imagination was rapidly drawing buckets of hope and wishful wonder up, up into her dreams.

But she kept quiet when she caught the man's eye. Since nobody had anything critical to say, Darla pointed fingers at herself when the others glanced at her.

"Me, you want me to read now?" Darla, ever-present, spoke yet as if she didn't need to be noticed. Everyone focused on her. Darla unfolded her poems and thought, why do people come to listen? Perhaps to retrieve something of themselves that they left behind.

Maybe the silence was listening to them. But not to every word. The ignorant air hoped for more; some of them wished to be told what they were doing there. Just once, everyone wanted to hear words that would free them from doubt.

Darla's sensations were her own. Time teased her; long ago she was detached... She couldn't remember -- how she felt, how she changed, coming away from home. Home held no sense anymore -- but the loss of a memory makes one nostalgic for the original thing. Leaving wasn't so painful as the sense of loneliness after her lover was lost.

The English language was home to many. Literature helped to regain experience, and the word could put sense over confusion. Words were so tantalizing... Darla knew that everyone expected too much. No illusion was grotesque enough to supplant their plain feelings. None of them could do anything about finding themselves alone in a place entirely foreign to their understanding.

So, Darla wanted to remind her friends that they lived alone or in love, and their only real home was one's own heart. She read bravely...

" 'It doesn't matter where you are. I'm with you, I'm with you when you come back to see your home returned to sender, unread. My love for the land was not national, and my mother never taught me pride and I was lucky -- without longing. I lived because you saw me. The earth is born for each of us to see. Happiness was to be a confidence beyond lies, or the honest answers we wish for. When we went away, it was as causeless as age turning upon ceaseless time. What is it? What is it that I am saying? You stopped me with your kiss. Around you came again to strike twelve and you made me pay for the feeling. I said you are so lustful and all your friends agreed with me. My kiss you said was like the beginning of being whole. I wanted love? You wouldn't ask me anymore. Lust is the blindness of worship, a lucky something, a habit -- like we have faith to throw off the absence of its reason. The modern mind is too conscious of civilisation's motives: all our reason, along with the blessings upon the curses beneath all humanity's spiritual motives... all of that, all the rarified, unphysical emotion first annoys our fear, then your hate and pride laugh the demon away. Like a rich man shooing out urchins; buying cheaply made and over-priced cars is more crucial than knowing your lover's heart because you won't be allowed to love her unless everything can be tallied up, and that's the rub of sleepy reproduction; the singular remnant -- the wish for uniqueness is the impetus of rebellion. We grow up stuffed with pretending to be a purposeful someone. Such anti-personal socialization is like losing your mind to a land-mine. But to attack the social disease risks ridicule. Delusions rise as walls fall down. You and I are falling into the gaps in history's carcass. Warfare has no weapon but a sweaty grasp. Kick and fight back you may -- you wish and wish and beg to let the lord perceive your need for mercy. What is mercy to the needs of the body? What is home to sexual comfort? When the mind presents your lover with its innermost dilemmas, when she accepts your strange elocutions, and blows out her nose at your imitation of suffering, then you can go back inside and scold yourself like the simpletons used to do. But do you forget that they live at home? The only one you want now is called lust and she leads to love -- everything you wanted. Kiss her. Hold her. Press your long bony fingers hard into her flesh. Make her turn into your new home. Fuck her soul until you've forgotten everything again. I didn't know you, lover. You wanted me -- but the right place couldn't find us together. It's a victory for the spirit of adventure, for freedom from toiling tarnish, the slow sapping of life by identities confined by rulebook rubrics coined and fearfully shouted out by mommy and daddy, and the institutional church. A popgun reaction is the same thing as knowing it all while knowing nothing at all. My investments were mute, darling. I wanted to sell out, really. Really, I did! But the Hun, so to speak, wouldn't let me do it. He said I ought to go back and try again, again. Until I found out what I'd failed to learn. He was a very clever liar, and he made a good living out of not bothering to understand us. He wanted to get me to use my own truth, without knowing what it really was. The enlightened ones are like that, so deft at employing our ignorance to point out whatever we "yet must learn," but that's the catch -- they can't show us what it is: we have to "find out for ourselves." Ha, ha, ha... I saw you kiss her and I wished she was me and I was she. You kissed her until you got a hard on. How do you manage them so easily? Her mouth must be richly red and that soft caressing wetness all around, it awakens that quick tingling lust, like a flower opening into her body -- it's the love she wishes you could feel for her. Did you know she cries for you sometimes?' "

Darla's voice was overturned suddenly, as if she'd knocked something with a burst of emotive tongue and she wanted to shift her weight to another, emptier room.

Smitt was mildly agog, like a fine psychiatrist, and so he said, "Amazing Darla. You have this emotional charge behind every idea you're trying to say."

"She's riding an elevator into the heart of godhead or something," said Bertrand.

Craft nodded sleepily.

"Come on you guys. It's personal nonsense," Darla didn't look up.

"Who was the guy your character wanted?" Triss asked her.

The others, especially all the girls, seemed to be a mirage of smirks and one or two of them had a look of rapt blankness -- as if their deepest mind alone had had understood Darla's words, which were like drops of water on a plate, rolling off, unabsorbed.

"I'm finished and don't want to explain myself," said Darla and she shut up.

"I didn't understand it," said Melody. "I'd like to take a copy home and read it again."

"Yeah, me as well," said Alexandra. "It sounded so beautifully packed with emotional truth -- but the meaning was hidden in the music."

"I wish I'd written it," mumbled M-sister. She was strangely quiet, as if she was off envisioning how it would be once she'd found the type of guy she most wanted. Because weren't all the others were already in love with others? Well, most of them.

Monica was alone, but religiously good. Vera's boy was still being left behind. She wouldn't tell anyone about that though. Eustace was going into his third year of cheap disco philandery, but was still promising himself, one day, to try for an uptown supersleek. Starky was torn by a physical need for men but programmed to make it with women. Triss was pretending to be betrothed to a French-Canadian homebody. Quint had it in for Alexandra who wanted him back. Bertrand was involved with a girl he'd met at a coffee shop whom he'd seen sitting alone every Wednesday for a month. Smitt was in the middle of being married almost happily to an exotic darling. Sullivan, no one here knew, was divorced and resembled no one you'd ever met before. Craft had met M-sister two months ago while dancing. He understood that the bored audience was much more concerned with processing their papers than attaining ethical wisdom. Avo's girl was the silent type of model gal who knew very well what it was that she needed to be happy, now that she wasn't anymore. She knew he was looking for other girls whenever he wasn't at home for her to worship.

"Who's turn is it?"

"I have something about love, too," Alexandra said, sitting up. "Not about love of a man, really. Well it is, but I didn't start it like that. It's more of a piece about nature. We used to walk the canyons north of L. A. Me and my old boyfriend."

She glanced round to make sure everyone was paying attention. A polite group, everyone sat silently submerged between self and listening. Most people who live in the city are used to shutting out the stupendous volumes of traffic noise. But Alexandra has a voice that reminds them of a piano: uncomplaining, she stirs subtle modulations through her senses to yours. Her voice is like a piano played with more interpretative style than technical perfection, that rising, leaping nocturnal voice recalls a dancing lamb trotting to and fro. The music in her words stroked the close nub as feelings transform from one to the next, as a sadness comes upon the joy, or a rush of hope washes away the bitter memory. Her voice was like that, a reminder of something done with a long ago lover; she was missing it and couldn't forget.

" 'We didn't know there would be nowhere to go at the end of the canyon. A web of boulders demanded professional gear and we only had hands and we were hanging onto them. When we got to the end we couldn't believe there was no way but back. The hands written in the rocks pointed fingers at our foolish wish. We are too old; you are too young. Is it true? The writing can be read by immortals, they alone possess the spiritual honesty needed to nab the crack between the teeth of myth. We are not the rocks too tall to climb. Even they bade us climb at risk of falling. The rocks do not fear, they do not fall. Why do the young have to grow old? Why not slip through early, gain the perspective of a lifetime before its too late? Civilisation would be polished and safe were young men blessed with a firm, astute insight.

" 'He held me by the heart and maybe that's just why we have to learn everything by experience. Nothing is real until someone touches us. We turned back and our steps felt different. Given a rope or a hook, he would have slipped his fingers into the moist cleft of my own wall. I'm made of spheres and gemstones hanging from one another -- a sticky paste of butter and bloodied sea fish. My body is always too much for him. Sunsetting red, my urge compels his eyes to open mine out of their well. Yet when I have awakened him, he still needs to climb down into my self-pity and he hates that -- says so -- why don't I shape up and accept my role, since I'm gifted, that's his word too -- gifted enough to type over the stereo taunts from people on the street who remind me of the satisfactions others get, while I'm still denied, and for no good reason, either. He thinks he's already immortal. Poor slob. I'm in love with a man who is too young not to suffer jealous pangs. Look at the vanity, the supreme vanity which comes, as I come, from knowing what you want from life. When a man and woman turn back from their happiest moments and find something to fight over, for no reason, except maybe that happy moments become too repetitious. Immortality is the comparison we cannot help but make. Love needs no day. It is a moving breath. After love is a dispossession. Happiness is hardly a friend to consciousness -- but despair is truly a sleepless companion to memories made of wishes. The absence of love is too dark to see beyond. Yes, I was happy with him. He is gone now and the one thing I find funniest about my life with him is that none of you will know what he did for me. How could my friends know what I gave to him for what he made me feel? So, that is love's special nature, being together, being one. Once separated, two people continue to live together forever, alone with the other's being, like a shadow crossing the mind of memory. Then we walked outside and the sun made us drink the rest of our water. Our tent was too hot, but the wind among the beach trees cooled our suspended flesh. One of the most beautiful things about making love are the innocent regrets that pleasure always makes for us later. But as we make love, pleasure is the whole world, a bright moon, wonderfully ignorant of all bad feeling.' "

"It's good," said Eustace betraying an awareness of Quint's waiting for the young woman's look.

"But it drags a little," rattled Sullivan. "I think you could focus more on the metaphors, or you should tell us about the relationship directly with actions and use less of that thoughtful, streamy stuff."

Melody sought to defend her girlfriend, "But why? She's dealing with pure memory. I don't even think she could handle it any other way than that."

"I just want to see where she is more. Is she camping in a canyon or hanging onto her lover?"

"I'm here in this room," Alexandra said, shrugging.

"You're also on that paper there. So is he," Sullivan always bit back.

"Maybe you will be too," Eustace mimicked a feeling by conjuring memory. An old actor's trick. In this instant, he oozed a wooly slow sort of heat that hinted at backing off.

"You've been coming to these meetings for weeks now and you haven't brought anything to read. Are you ever going to?" This time it was Vera, eager to underline the communal distaste.

"You should be more tolerant of criticism," Sullivan said as if he was unconcerned but prepared to be docile.

"We're ready to listen if you participate and bring in something to read of your own," and that was all Vera had to add.

"I think we shouldn't really have to tell each other what to do," put in Darla, who was liable to feel sorry for creepy types like Sullivan.

A sort of pause emptied the space of all but breath. Everyone's glance shied from the chance for fresh accusations.

"Who wants to read next?" prompted Smitt. He was pulling the brown wires growing in the chin of his busty mug.

"I'll go," said Triss. "I'm not so sure you'll want to hear this. It's a letter, actually, to my mother."

Some few laughed out loud, Craft included.

"Are you sending it really, or is it a rhetorical dream, like the one you want to, but never do mail?" wondered Bertrand.

"Both, except I'll probably send it."

Everyone looked at her. Solicitude and puzzlement contended for their curiosity. Nobody knew her at all.

Triss's voice rent a hole in the drowsy fabric of evening, everyone sat so still, wishing to be moved.

" 'Dear mother, It is a long way from home to be speaking so matter-of-factly. Maybe when you read this you can imagine I never left and I'm downtown and only two hours away. Of course, we always coached each other to face the facts. I'm here, working so much I can hardly find time to do this. I'd love to send you all my thoughts and feelings, wrapped up with a painting of the view from my balcony. It really is peaceful even though we're in the heart of the city. I'm alone but I share the place with others from around the world. So, I'm never lonely, though often solitary -- making my way to work or wandering around shopping. The work is fine and the money is filling my empty pockets. I'm going to get as rich as you always said I was, mother. The boss is on my side for a change and there isn't any crowd of trustees to make me uneasy this time. I guess the only bad thing is the monotony of regular work. I'm good at it, but it's only too obvious to me that I'd really love my own kids, having them, raising them, you know. Have you heard anything from Bill my ex? He's supposed to mail you a whole bunch of CD's and some clothes. That's what he promised in the note he sent, saying he'd found a cache of stuff when he went to move. I miss him but I don't like admitting it. How can you miss someone you divorced, after all? Some of the folks here have graduated from feudalism into the modern world, quite consciously accepting choice Western bias. Some of the Westerners here really don't like the Chinese, but sort of pretend to. Some things will not alter no matter how much time passes. I needn't say anymore than that, except you won't realize just how innately racist white people are until you plunk them down anywhere away from home. That said, people tend to be corralled into hanging out together. Many Western boys go after Chinese women because of the novelty, or I guess they're attracted to the feminine qualities of the women here. That and the fact almost all the women are slim and shapely. The women are not so sedate or quiet as polite society implies once you see them get impatient or angry about something. I can see some of the women here looking hot in bed, capable of lust. Others are pretty squashed down and repressed. Anyway, women and men must be the same in their potential everywhere. There is a wildness here, even a fierceness sometimes which seems to make up for the lack of spine you see. It's like the men are milksops. I may be wrong, but it must have something to do with that creepy stay-at-home mentality and over-dependence on the family -- mom and dad. Speaking of mom and dad, well I can sympathize with closer trust and dependence, at least in the loving, guiding sense. But like I always say to my girlfriends, the women take over the household and manage everything, including their husbands, so they haven't any choice but to be responsible and let their men run wild like irresponsible boys. So, I guess you could say that the women have to be ladies, open for business. It's so the men can do anything they like with them. But it's not like the ladies here are all waiting types. They haven't as much chance to chirp. Now, I guess some girls run around cheating a lot. But it isn't as easy for women to cheat here, though, is it? I miss you too dearly to criticize or be too cynical about your having to be maternal. I feel I'm too sleepy to be writing you this letter, mom. The rush of new perceptions is terrifying and pleasant. The place cannot help being itself and my idea of it must be small compared to its complexity. How can you see a place as the locals do? Impossible. I wonder how is Dad? Is he recovering okay? I imagine he's still complaining, but he ought to be more mobile now, right? Make sure you get him doing something around the house, if he hasn't already. I know he's likely to start something beyond his motive power and that's fine if you can still manage him. I'm thinking of the spring. Here, spring happens as the rain lets up and the sun comes out. I've made a few new friends, too. One guy in particular, Crazy Craft and one of my roommates, Arch Taft. Craft is a freaky sort, claims to be a writer, works as a journalist and teacher. Taft is a queer who happens to live here, too. They're good for talk, but I miss my honey. You would be nice to call him for me on the 15th of next month, his birthday. I write him but he never answers. If I miss him too much, it's because he wants me without saying so. After the children come, then he can realize what I already knew for him. It isn't selfish to make plans when you know what is best for your man, right? How's your quilting coming? What about the new roses you started? Have they budded yet? Maybe by the time you receive this letter, I'll have settled all my psychological debts. Plans make themselves and it doesn't matter who I marry so long as I do. This letter is really boring so I better say bye. See you. Love, Triss.' "

Some are asleep and some are laughing.

"Why?" blushed Triss.

"Bloody, it doesn't matter which man you choose so long as you get married," Starky was chuckling.

"I know honesty sounds too naive," Triss shrugged once.

"The part about whites being racists is a bit heavy-handed, even if it's true. It's something none of us would want to admit," Bertrand spoke up.

"Oh? I'm not racist. I think she's a fruit loop," said Sullivan, whose righteous sense of freedom from prejudice knew no limits.

"From beyond the provincial blindness and rigidity of a fool's martyrdom comes the word," read Monica.

"You want to read now?" asked Melody, who had sat near lonesome Monica.

"Not yet, I just wrote that line as a keepsake. Being who we really are is what we can least help," distant Monica spoke dreamily.

"Let it be, and don't bother trying to change," said Starky, poking his mind at the modest and humble Monica.

"She means it. Something you'll never have is sincerity," noted the mirror behind the mask on Vera's face. Starky loved her but would never say so, or show that he did, except for an instant, eyeing her, in a moment like this. Vera's instincts for surprise were her only defense. Starky's dismay showed a faint grimace, striving to grin.

"Next!" shouted Eustace.

"How about you, then?" his pal Quint spoke back in his face.

"Mine's not really finished and may never be. I'm not one to deny the likes of Starky or anyone who's got something more to give," Eustace was trying to behave modestly, but was merely terrified of performing.

"Come on. Just read whatever you have," prodded Smitt who seemed himself to be hiding behind an uncharacteristically taciturn mood, as if withholding his comments. He had something to read, too. But he hesitated, since he was reluctant to see it torn apart. Others remained completely mum through the reading, like M-sister. She just sucked her cigarettes and nodded her kitteny grin sometimes. Avo, too, bided each moment as if he were concentrating on a difficult musical instrument, settling into a deep and silent well.

"It's a sci-fi fantasy story," began Quint. "It's set in a different dimension -- sort of like between our world and the realm of absolute ghosts and gods. It's a world of many life forms like machines who reproduce themselves as well as people like my hero who arrive by mistake and have to find their way out. Anyway, here goes, 'Brem stole another glance at the Sepulant Form. The creature was unbelievable, an impossible freak. But it was no clever trick. In this world, suspended between reality and aspiration, Brem found he was alone with the Sepulant, which had said nothing in any tongue. The thing waited for him. But it wasn't trying to imitate the human air of impatience at all. It didn't want to look like it knew something that the man couldn't. Brem did feel like a virgin boy before the exalted image of experience, a sultry maid who collected his ideals into a single piece of absolute faith. But the Sepulant did not appear to be female any more than it was a male. Brem turned to stare abjectly at the creature, wondering what its name was, at least. "I'm Zim, Mr. Brem," spoke the Sepulant, reading the man's mind. The whole thing was turning into a flashback of his childhood, and for Brem, it recalled the time he had spent quickly reading sci-fi novels. He'd imagined each one was a real world elsewhere, and only the author knew how real it was. "You are only the second human being I have met, Brem. I am called an expert on humans at home. But in fact, I only know your tongue and little else. You'll have to believe me. The human mind is a mystery to us. You created us a thousand years ago, and it's only natural that you know more about us than we have understood of you." "But our civilisation fell apart after we made your kind, Zim. Isn't that why we made you, in the hope of bequething the finest human qualities to a new world?" "You may say so, but to hear you say that makes me laugh. We're not human beings. We are made with some of your nobler ideas, but we are not so perfect as you imagine. You may have simplified the forms of instinctual behavior and created our telepathic sensibility, but you humans assumed this qualities would make us more than yourselves. Well, in plain language, you really only created a more complicated creature. Our emotional life was not something anyone of you could predict, Brem. Since the Last Lost Age of the Human Era, we have out-lived two great crises, and our civilisation has endured. Not without some tragedies that make the future much less of a calculation than you would have hoped. The Sepulant domain may appear human to you simply because we -- you and I -- all of us are subject to a universal order of being which conditions the character of experience and knowledge. It's a formal question, still, a clash of essence with will, and design with intelligence. You should see how our intellectuals fight about these questions and how, even with our added knowledge and intimacy, we end up in dilemmas as difficult as those which signaled the end of your time. Can you imagine how painful it can be, not to be able to hide the most personal and private thoughts from the slightest acquaintances? Open telepathy tends to moderate the demands of individuality; at the same social tolerance increases and everyone becomes completely uninhibited." "But you Sepulants will never suffer a collapse as we did. We humans empowered you to solve the central problem of life -- that's why we generated your telepathy -- so you could transcend solitude. Nobody but you could ever answer to that.' "

Quint stopped reading and was already trying to defer the criticism he expected and said, "It's too long and boring, I know."

"It's interesting to me," said Monica, who tried being kind since she felt everyone else in the world was too cruel -- for being too alone and selfish.

"Boy, you don't know how far back you lost me," Eustace was shaking his grin.

"I think it's okay," said Vera. "Say what you want to. If you can make your ideas clear -- there's no reason to hide them away."

"But he's trying to write a commercial novel for a market that doesn't have many ideas to deal with. Those boys are interested in science facts and theories, not philosophic conundrums," noted Smitt.

"You're right," agreed Craft. "He can't get away with that sort of style if he's trying to sell. Hey, I've been trying to lighten up myself for years, girls, and I still can't, so what the -- "

"Show -- you have to show, and it's okay to think of metaphors to represent the alien's problems," said Sullivan. "If you can get some action happening -- like the guy rescues the alien from a fight. You leave me coughing."

"But there's no fight," defended Quint. "It's all about what man has to learn from his inventions. It's like imagining you and God return from the ruins of empire to meet Creation at maturity. How would your idea of humanity be transformed by the advances in civilisation's science, philosophy and social life?"

"So that's what you're on about! Well, do it your way then, we won't stop you now," Starky said, obviously gleeful about concealing his sore ass, boredom and impatience.

"I have a piece of novel to read, too," said Craft. "But it can wait till next time. Does anyone have anything shorter?"

"I have a little piece," piped up Monica. "It's something like an essay about an obsession. I was thinking about modelling a woman who could be the main player in a novel I dream of writing. The character's named Sheila. She's a little nobody secretary to a big guy who buys and sells feelings without much feeling of his own. You can say Sheila's dreaming about desires. I guess I wrote it to purge some of my uncertainties. If you get tired of it, just let me know...

" 'Sheila didn't like to sit still for so long. She contemplated a change of job because of that. The other reasons she neglected to note, but reflections opened memory to the clash between what others wanted for her, the rules she obeyed, and the needs she felt. She grew up being taught that a man was something like a rule to be followed. But life showed that man himself kept no rules of his own to obey -- but only pretended to. This was only the beginning of her problem. What she had observed for years was not going to help Sheila at all. This is the equivalent of a modern paradox, and after percolating awhile, it always instills the same result: she turned to her emotions, she turned again to read the disarray. Like tea leaves, superstitiously strung across the bottom of a cup, she came to worship her own familiars: happy popinjays, angry clowns and sad tortoises, they were the graceful ghosts of fulfillment, taking turns with her heart once more. Finally, she imagined what it must have been like for her mom, making all those men, years before...' ...Hey guys, is this crap getting any worse or any better? I can't tell anymore..."

"It's sublime. Keep reading," Craft nodded eagerly. "Nothing's perfect the first time round. Stab at it. Give her something to drink! You can turn my trick anytime!"

"But I just want to change her, that's all. I want this character Sheila to be me. So, I'll stop using the third person and now it'll be me... 'After my moods billow, they sag and contract, I go really mad and come back sane again. Then finally all that energy, burning, constantly exploding, finally it let's me go. I expire into the next whisper, those words that inspire men to spar for favors. It's as if each individual experience would bestow a deeper way through my confusion. Time revealed one thing: the ideal world I learned came to nothing. I knew that much certainly, now. The real experience I expected to get -- whether I wanted it to happen or not -- was soon to seem as dead a question as wondering what new persuasion my character would assume. Get grimly determined to let the man eat me like a freshly steamed fish, and then beat me? Yeah, I love to come. Which girl doesn't? Not any of us. But is it worth it? Do I have to turn into a suicidal flirt of a bimbo -- just to get laid by some jocky bent banana? I'd rather go for independence than crazy c's. Joyful and Resplendent, and then I can proclaim everything proudly professional and sane. I want to be as completely free from the intense boredom of his draggy, slowpoke love. There's no need for any of his great gravities, he just stole them from others anyway. Then he heaped them onto me -- stupid, idiotic asshole burdens. Barbarism! What was left of all the true love I gave him? His only excuse was that the idea of freedom was missing from the equation we made together. He said that he didn't need to live with someone who had to fight for the next kiss. He wanted a peaceful babe. He really said that. But the simple reason was that he didn't much care for my responsible demands. Men like him always end up so desperate to get laid again, it's like he thinks other people must imagine something more than his dick's been stolen by we women. If he can't take just what he wants from us -- whenever he wants it. It doesn't matter when we want it. Fuck it. It can't be explained. After I stopped yelling, 'Don't, don't,' he went out and did some more girls anyway. So, I guess I was left alone to imitate his free spirit. My path was already charted smoothly for me by thousands of pretty little feet. I feel organically inclined to encourage the main instinct. It seemed a good idea to get off my predictable path. I'm living right now -- as I really need to. Maybe that's how I lost track of all my credit cards, among other things... Like the names and dates of my last lovers.'

"Now I'm going to switch her back to use 'she'... Because if it reads like me, and if you think I'm telling you a true story, then I'll just embarrass myself again. So, listen... 'And she knew well what she wanted. The man wasn't in her office either. He lived in the night, completely alone like herself. He wanted her first. The difference between using and loving came clear well before she could answer to the figure fixed and rising directly above her, that funny, naked little man on the cross. She'd grown up staring at his spare form. Ribs and bony knees and she always thought of him whenever she clasped her fingers tightly together, crossing her hunger. As a woman, she thought about what she really wanted. A lover. Naturally, she was entering that zone of suspicion dividing naiveté from maturity. She latched on the word 'programming' somehow. People programmed each other to do things, to want things and to believe them, too. Now she began to see the difference -- between having a faith in something deeply, because it really must be true -- and the social frame that imposed all the rules and repercussions society derived from accepting everything about that faith. Here, she stopped moving and experienced a pain, a pain like dropping a hammer head on her toes -- alarm, alarm, alarm.

" 'That bar downstairs. She wanted to go there. Leave him behind. But she would tell him first. She would let him know that he was being left behind first. He'd have to be nice to her about it.

" 'The morning sun rose up from behind three tired weeks of heavy, gray rain. Dank frigidity evaporated instantly in the thirsty heat. His own tears would start then. He, unmoving, hid from her new excitement. She, with a living man, one whom she hadn't met before the night came. She, with her wishes, her fresh lust confronting the old world of rules, feeling above all -- the movement all around her body. The six senses are not well known to her heart. The taste of morning bread, staring into a stranger's blue eyes. Nobody will know she's met him, and the one she'd leave behind, she'll not see him weep. The coffee is real. The bumps in the road jar her body. The gray line cutting her sleepless cheek. Alone with the stranger for a few hours. Her mother calls her up. Not home. Not home. Where is she? With a guy you'll never meet. Daughter wants nobody. She has a problem. It isn't even a betrayal anymore. She only suffers pangs of jealousy because she fears men think her inadequate. (Too serious again. Silicone implants might be the answer. She can laugh -- she knows she doesn't really need it.) Ask her to describe the street scene across from her stranger's little room and she'll say, "Why should I?" Her heart isn't really after revenge at all. Only love. The tenderness she gives will change to something harder, even if she doesn't want to grow colder: it's like a candle burns down to nothing and a leaf changes to yellow. Nature infects the moods of men, too.

" 'When will she meet him again? In the evening, walking the dry way between wisteria and bamboo. The broken bricks that were his heart. Romance falls to something rude. No accusation satisfies the missing piece of her soul. He was there when she was still a child. It was like the day she was told that he had died: her young mother hid behind the door. The bus traversed fields of wet green. Her grandmother greeted them with the same smile as the one her mother no longer tried.

" 'The woman alone. Today, the new thrill dispels the mystery of strangers, makes them into lovers: that was the only truth she needed to call happiness. Of course, there is no moral for her. But for us, on the outside, watching her change into the self-hatred, renewing her denial after the thrill is shorn -- and though he's erect and keeps on being tender -- she changes, too, fades and finds some excuse to throw him away. We can see her from outside herself -- and we see the reflection she makes in the mirror of our own minds -- especially when she won't see herself. Her mood dies and wakes up as impatience. She wants to understand impossible things. Then life is made of a fluid motion which cannot cease, and nothing may assuage our desire for perfect love and nothing will reveal the root of our foolishness. Nobody can tell us why we are who we have become. Slut of our lord, never implored in vain, come down, get down and dance with us again.' "

Monica, who was unable to sleep with men, stopped reading her work and failed to look at anyone. It was like she had committed some public shame, perhaps out of an invisible hatred for her own imperfections and lack of experience. Subtle beauty hardly saw herself anymore than the character in her story. She waited in a repose so peaceful, as if inviting someone to love all her fears away. This woman shied from the chance to end illusions, and finally satisfy her unvirginal quest. Which man could give her the enlightenment, the secret physical pleasure, the redemptively subtle humiliation she so desired?

"I think it's wonderful," said Melody.

Alexandra nodded her head and so did M-sister and Darla was beaming, too.

Only the boys felt misgivings, but weren't about to voice their wounds.

Monica shook her head and said, "I can't believe no one has anything bad to say about it."

"Really, it's the beginning of something fine, really on top," said Smitt. "But I don't know if I can make out the difference between your characters. The men seem uniformly bad before we've even met them. And your main character? Does she or anybody get a chance to live here at all? I mean, is your world made of people too naturally bad for their own good?"

The other fellows nodded and Craft laughed out loud. M-sister spoke up, too, after being so quiet, a houseplant waiting to be watered, "You know, Monica. It kind of sounds like me. It reminds me, maybe all of us, of being in love with your first real love more than all the others who came after. Unless we really fall in love, your newest guy is just a test to see if you can make him want to leave, since he can't equal our first passion. It's just a thought. Some of us always make the latest into the biggest. We can't act all the same."

"Sounds like you've known some guys I never met. The funny thing is, I've never had much chance to do any comparing," Monica was demure, but willing to be witty.

Since M-sister was the immediate type who needed no credulity to divide her instincts from getting the desired result, she was a little mystified by Monica's reply. She wondered how imagination by itself could have made something the other hadn't experienced, seem so believable...

"You must know someone who went through that, to write about it like that," she said.

"I did go through it. In my mind and heart."

"That's because you were fighting your faith in the first part, right?" pointed out Sullivan.

Monica looked as if she didn't understand him, then said, "I had to ask questions, doesn't everyone ask them, when they're forbidden?"

"I had a theory about women I was always a bit shy to share," said Craft. He went on since nobody interrupted. "I once met two girls whose father's had died when they were kids. They were sluts, or at least they had no qualms about making love. It was a multiple cause, but they were similar to one another in their lack of inhibition. Anyway, I think it's because a father squashes a family down with saying no and forbidding the freedom to live, of his wife, and his children, especially his daughters, as they grow up. But it isn't only that. If a girl's father dies or leaves when she is very young, then obviously, she wants to find him, go out and get him. In her story, Monica's father seems to be God, and she resents having to lose him too early. So like my girlfriends, your character is free to make love because no one prohibits her life, and I know for sure, those girls also needed to replace their missing and dead fathers with new lovers."

"My dad isn't dead," said Monica.

"Mine died of tuberculosis," said M-sister. "And I'm a slut."

Surprised laughter.

"And I've known some pretty religious whores," Starky added. "They weren't worshipping my money either."

"I've been sitting too long on my ass lamented Quint. "Can we take a break? I mean, we've got three more readers to go."

"I can read mine next week since it's too long anyway," Craft sounded relieved at the prospect of losing his audience.

Since some others were jealous of Craft, who openly claimed a prolific commitment to art, they ignored even this attempt at equanimity.

The planned break didn't happen, but Quint wandered outside with his pal Eustace to buy more drinks. Smitt had been working on a very detailed story for some time. He was onto something, and it was only a matter of finding someone to agree with him.

"My story is very personal. It's nothing. I wrote it because I felt the experience was too good without making it into a story."

Smitt was looking between the two people sitting opposite him. He would have preferred reading to an empty room. He pulled his fingers round his beard in an unconscious fashion then began. His voice was a slow-paced monotone.

"The title is 'Coin in the Heart'. By the way -- the first lines sound like I'm introducing the story verbally, but it is actually written like this...

" 'This story is supposed to be a parable. It happened like any other coincidence and only after looked to be a moral worth learning. I don't know how it happened. But it did happen as if it were meant to. That's something I've always failed to understand -- do things happen and become meaningful because they are showing us the intrinsic bond between nature and human life as if meaning was a natural reality -- its own reason for having intelligence to express it? Or, is it that our imagination is responsible, that we have to make sanity and even all our civilisation out of the need we have to create meaning out of nothing? This reappearing act is too complicated to explain easily. So that is why we have parables to explain things by means of a simple story -- the subtle mechanics and the elaborate dynamism informing every metaphoric change always works like a recognition. Then we are inspired.

" 'My mind blocks out this story, as if I am afraid to understand what happened to us. I'll try my best to explain. One day at school, in English class, we were reading a fable about two men who found a treasure buried in the forest.

" 'It isn't so much the sensation that life has to imitate art, but that when it does, we seldom notice it at the time, but we feel good about this pure experience. We laugh and cry... When people are in danger, they tend to find a way to preserve themselves. They never explain the rage to themselves, nor can they see their savage greed, as they run for their lives.

" 'These two boys in my English class didn't usually fight. But this time they had to. It was a fight over some invisible idea, like a fragment of a doubt. One was holding the other's pencils. A child's voice implored the other to return his pencils. But the other boy didn't.

" 'It so happened that our classroom reading dealt with a theft. We were reading what the kids were actually doing. The children perked up enough to notice the odd coincidence. Of course, the two kids involved barely knew what was going on since they couldn't see why they'd roused so much attention.' "

Smitt stopped reading to count the puzzled and bemused looks surrounding him. But nobody had anything much to say.

"This really happened?" asked Sullivan. "You didn't finish the story though. Why not? Did the moral not come clear to you?"

"There was no moral intended. I wanted to show you how coincidences appear meaningful to human beings because they recall the roots and forms of more significant meanings and natural truths. A coincidence is a function of time and place, but that's all. So, a moral can't really arise out of a coincidence if there's no connection between two similar events besides the time and place they happen," Smitt tried to explain.

"That's pretty complicated," Craft nodded, taking the fellow seriously. "You are trying to explain how people feel things are meaningful, or maybe even you want to suggest how superstitions happen? You know you could expand your piece into something big by comparing the absence of moral implications to introduce a tale about a substantial moral meaning, as a way to create a vast ironic illumination about the ambivalences moving our destinies as human beings. You could also use a serendipitous experience, in which two characters actually have the same premonition or something like that."

"Maybe that's too big," Smitt said.

"Too much is never enough to explain anything," Craft propped himself up, since nobody encouraged him.

Silence was laid upon everyone by a breeze. The warmth flows in through the portal onto the terrace. The wind invites everyone home to bed.

Vera broke through the mist, "I have a little thing. It answers a few questions about growth. It's kind of about what you guys were just talking about, too, about meaning and superstitions, too."

"So, you're saying we have a real live serendipity happening here?" someone asked.

"There're so many of us, it's bound to happen," Bertrand yawned.

"I'd better read so we can all go home," Vera said.

"Stay as late as you all like, we'll turn on the music and party," said Triss.

"My story's called, 'A Girl's Will.' It starts out like an editorial because the narrator is a newspaper writer inspired by actual events in her life. Here goes.

" 'What to do about children? The question really concerns parents. Infants quickly walk and talk. Moms and dads feel obliged, somehow, to educate their rapid offspring. The comedy comes from not knowing how to. Everyone says a firm hand and the light of discipline should be enough to inspire a child with self-confidence and a desire to achieve. Children often grow up to mimic their mother's and father's behavior, unless something happens while growing to inspire some spirit of rebellion. Most people come to the conclusion, "I became who I had to become anyway." This may not be true, and maybe it's only a confusion, like a fear of one's own will to change. But looking at our children often makes us think about what we let ourselves be, instead of who we could make of ourselves. Children play and make fun out of nothing but novelties of sensation and movement...

" 'Charlotte saved the file and left her study. The day had not identified itself yet. Her darling babies were still asleep, but her husband Alastair had already gone. Pictures from her life, made of memories and dreams, walked into her mind. Sometimes the impressions gave her satisfaction, but right now she felt a pointed disgust -- that impatiently anguished feeling you have when you see that someone else has managed to steal what you have earned.

" 'Her house was on a hillside beside a rollicking creek sheltered by pines and cedars. Everything was dusky green and dusty brown. The front deck jutted into open, sunlit space. Here she stood each pleasant morning, very nude and waiting for the sun to break through the clouds upon her breast. The space was open far below until the mountainside poured into the blue Pacific fading up to an iron-gray horizon. The sun stood over the clouds like a child playing in a snowbank.

" 'Charlotte's daughter, Louise, joined her on the deck to say, "Mommy, today is Saturday, will you take me with you to the city?" "Sure, but I've got to finish writing my editorial first." "I want to go to the toy shop." "Why?" "To buy a jetman and a puzzlebook." "But you already have enough of those, don't you?" "It's for Arthur's birthday." "Oh, you're going to his party, are you? Who's taking you?" "You or dad can. Can't you?" "I'm not going to wait around there for three hours." "But he'll want us to stay overnight and come home Sunday." "Really, and you think that's fine with his parents? They didn't call me about it, Louise." "You can call them." "Why should I if they are the ones who are supposed to do the inviting?"

" 'Charlotte is thirty-seven and her child is twelve years old. She had her with the guy who would have been her first husband hadn't a redder head taken him away.

" 'It's awful to pretend we understand, she thought, what we cannot even remember about our own childhood. It goes on for a few more pages, but only describes the outcome of her letting the kid have her way and how she gets more spoiled."

"Does anyone have any happy stories to tell us?" Quint wanted to know.

Nothing. Everyone was looking drowsy, watching a boring movie on t.v.

"What do you have anyway?" Sullivan looked at Craft.

"I've been editing this novel for longer than it took me to write it," he answered.

"Novel? You got a whole novel cooking?" Sullivan opened his eyes.

"Sure."

"I need to stretch," Eustace said, getting up and walking outside onto the terrace.

"Me too," Smitt followed the New Zealander out. Beyond the double doors, the terrace was lined with squat balustrades upon which sat a heavy concrete lintel. The terrace felt like a balcony overlooking St. Peter's square, or some similar fortress built grandiloquently over the city, as if to show how high the holy and the mighty had risen above their poor charges. Just below the balcony lay the rife, overgrown garden -- a profuse abundance of intense life, a reminder of the living land below the city. Concrete simply crushed nature away.

Most everyone else drifts outside. The conversations start among the knotted clumps of trees. Someone have gone out to get more beer. The moon has already travelled to its brilliant place overhead, and the city noise is walled out.

Craft sits beside M-sister, still inside. She's still his flame, at least for the rest of this week. His hands play for her fingers. They're kissing, and that feeling of soft heat relaxes all thought. They keep teasing their mutual credulity, that they don't really love each other.

"But I need you girl," Craft whispers, inevitably.

"I know. You just want somebody to fuck, to edify your wish that you are a real man," she chides tenderly.

"So do you -- want to be a rough tough girl. Doesn't that make us suitable?"

"Until we get bored," said M-sister.

"Maybe you'll find another boy, Sis."

"I know you want Triss. She doesn't like me too much."

"Yes she does. She called you a straight-shooter. But she doesn't someone else, a French-Canadian guy. You know she has this vain and foolish wish to get a perfect man. She plays games with guys so she can see, I don't know -- how much they go for her. Or she wants to see how much torment he can take if he isn't what she wants. Like, if she loves a fellow, she won't let him know, but she'll tease him by flirting and playing with others just to make him get up after her even more. But, she'll never settle on one 'anybody' in the end."

"I can just leave you, Craft. I'll go dancing. Pick someone up."

"Now why would you say that?"

M-sister kissed Craft's mouth and he felt that few women were made so precisely for bewitchment and sexual trial. She wanted him, sure, and her way was to live as if she use a man's rules. This instinct for appropriating behavior attracted some and terrified others.

"You should relax Craft."

"That's something you wouldn't have said to me at home. It's cool here with everyone, but I want the togetherness thing we had before."

"I get sick of looking back a month or two."

"But you can't blame me for wishing we could be together again."

"I needed a break from more than you. You didn't have to hurt me, but I let you."

"When I was lao gon gon, the kindly old man, it was you telling me to fuck you up the ass. I still wonder why you had to provoke me like that. It was like you wanted to make me angry and hurt you. But you see I didn't get mad."

"It wasn't wanting to make you mad. It was seeing what you wanted."

"You never said that before, either. Studying love from the future is not something I'd ever want to do."

"You're kissing me for a minute. That's all, I'm not yours -- I'm still free."

"You're saying things I imagined you used to think, before."

"You needn't worry about my mind. You were always repeating yourself, Craft. Already twice you told me that men were just afraid of women who wanted to take care of themselves more than letting themselves be caged by men."

"We said a lot of things together."

Over there the guys were saying something else to the girls, and some of the girls were deciding together what to do about them. Craft noticed this and thought about the times he'd been alone talking with this woman: had he been able to record them in his memory -- how fine the words would appear on the printed page. But he smiled and realized: creative ingenuity turned upon limitations. Man's words to a woman, and a woman's words to a man always revolve through expansions of care or contractions of estrangement. Moods press into one another. The sudden impasse of fear makes everything stop. Then, sudden bravery, the fresh touch, makes lovers go off together. Sometimes drowsy, or starting to attention, quirks are revealed. She learns to taunt, with words as sharp as the tips of her nipples. Her soft-spoken admiration is a chord, tuned to the time of her breathing heart. She shows him that the human heat of passion finally wins.

Over there, the strangers speak together. How far away from their homes they have come, even those girls who had gone through the larger circle of reflection -- to America then back again, no longer so sure where home might be.

Conversation is a kind of realization that verbal language holds up the world. Massive complexities only cease when people step back from what they are doing, then enter some new experience. To forget what stops you from living, that's a good thing. Words can swallow your whole mind and when you give back what they made you believe, it's funny to get that feeling of ironic disbelief -- your foolishness. Maybe if you are really self-assured, progress and fascinated essence will come your way, too.

...It was time to walk over there and join everybody a long time ago. Sullivan stands with Eustace and Quint: they discuss how the city of Taipei seems, perpetually, to be gassing itself. Quint points out that scientists have proven people in Taipei are actually sleepier than the residents of other centers -- and this situation is due to the high levels of carbon monoxide and other noxious fumes in the atmosphere! Nobody believes him. Sullivan moves over to Debra, and tells her how fine her poetry is, and that she should bring more next time.

The moonlight pays a pittance to change your mood, your destiny. So, your heart ought to make up your mind for you, easily. The gray light of life is a tenacious string. It pours a constantly dim stream upon the lintels and columns. The moonlight clasps everyone's limbs equally. Their lips open words upon the moon, as if thirsty to drink its fading glow. The window is complicated by the carvings: woodland creatures fawning among crooning gods. Above the wood climbs another material, a steel pitted black, all rusty dibs; the thing makes you ask it questions. The cherubs beneath would wink at you, if they weren't so terror-stricken, and so full of the explosive insouciance needed to exasperate ordinary, living men.

The woman Vera wanted to check out the social patterns, too. Sullivan had been working himself into a likely target for three weeks. Always too vocal about what should be done and who was already doing it, the woman was scratching her figuratively dry ass. She clung to the shifter of gin while sidling up to a guy as if she had to swallow the smile she gave to cut his vexation.

Sullivan listened to her because she was right in front of him. The things that real life will let you do.

"You know we enjoy everyone joining in, but if you aren't too hung up about things, maybe you could bring something of your own to read, then we can feed you with some suggestions."

Sullivan would have saved himself easily if he could have played with her. But it was the curl on her grin, and the slow deep enunciation she sometimes used that put his life up to its responsibility. He'd read it before. Men always get very uneasy whenever a woman tries to change them.

Sullivan was in flight. The man saw her looking past him. The moment was made of his hesitation, a symbol: she didn't know him. The urge to laugh came strongly to him, because her personality was making the demand. Hmmm, but he didn't want to seem too stupid on the spot. So, the urge to get up and fight the mean streak squirting from the bossy cunt wasn't enough. Then she smiles, as if sensing victory would be as easy as waiting for her puppy to sniff around the other dog's pee.

But more appertains to his ache than the size of her pointing eyes. Vera was likely to lay you aside, her intentions placid, but without so much as wanting to understand you. She would do nothing for him, she was going to use him for practice. Even if he had something stuck between his teeth, and she noticed the rumples in his week long jeans, her black swath would not wait for him to answer. And now, Sullivan's hesitation was all too legible to the whole bunch of everyone else.

"Sometimes people won't listen, you know, and then you see some people are too thick to figure out what you're saying, then they start telling you what to do, don't they?" Sullivan said, his voice disinterested and quietly harried.

"Well, you're not telling me what to do, are you?" she said back.

"I think she's just letting you know, Sullivan. People think you're so snide all the fucking time," Starky bared his timely little fangs. "Maybe you did have something to read, but you didn't bother?"

Sullivan probably spelt the nerve's word correctly. If he was to remember later, then he'd likely say something very different to himself than to the boys, together in a ball aimed at him.

When he laughed, he shook his head -- like he'd seen the silver-haired man do in the comedy about paying attention to the three clowns who were sowing the flinty lawn into the earth outside his hometown. That was a funny business, too, one which nobody would bother opening if the water wasn't so prolific behind the sedge on the nose-tip of the permanent profile at the bottom of the beaded red valley.

The funny thing were all his dolls. It was like: too many good ones all in one place, and maybe that's really what wrapped Sullivan back around winter, stanching the wound, but not satisfying his craving. Any man would prefer to exercise love over pride -- and it is embarrassing to get mad in front of women who are apt to giggle at your faults.

Sullivan was liberated by the tarnish on his spoon, the solitary burnish upon the big wooden mouth of his blessed step.

It was the come caught between her fingers that he saw most clearly. He should have told her so, too.

The day was done and it didn't take a punch, a cigarette, or anything to pack him onto the points of his toes to climb outside for a hard look at the winless night, a darkness but slightly broken by the pale glow making everything into the same mute hue.

When talking of distances, it stands out that hope goes farther.

Even Craft was ready to cash in his sense of humor at the slightest suggestion of a scene or disastrous episode. So too, Sullivan hesitated and waited for silence to erase Vera's challenge. The words he would say could be spoken by Starky or Quint instead. How he stares at Sullivan. Words must choose. Their minds dangled from bad air as the mood was shriven, like a slice of wasted hate. Sullivan was a guy who wanted to show some potency. He wanted to flex his willpower, then divide and soothe by sympathetic halves.

Asides and tangents miss the point which Sullivan is becoming now. He does not enjoy feeling such resentment from a woman's anger. He doesn't dream of conquest; keeping a woman like Vera would be like trying to prevent a worthy from breaking out. Not everybody is oblivious to his gaze over the edge of the bin into which he'll be tossed.

Darla was studying the mirror she'd set before her wish to leave man for a higher creature. Actually, she didn't much mind the way Craft and Quint appealed to her weakness for finding love in the least of evils. They were sensitive to innocence even if forgetful, and wanting more tenderness. Faith in an idea of manhood was what these boys needed. She wanted to embrace them with a woman's sigh, embarrass them with imaginative interlocution.

"If you guys fight, we all go home friendless," Darla speaks matter-of-factly.

"It isn't about fighting -- it's about belonging or not," Vera has to say.

"I belong here, just like everyone else," Sullivan manages to be himself.

"A dialogue from a show down? Is that what we came here for?" Eustace's cynicism is tired and bored.

"It isn't necessary to fight about anything," Craft is silly enough to state.

Smitt is sitting uncomfortably, barely able to utter, "I think if you just bring in some of your own writing Sullivan, things will work out fine."

M-sister is pulling Craft away again. Craft doesn't want to go. But Eustace wasn't about to say more. Nor Alexandra, who has been chatting with him about leaving her boyfriend in America. Eustace doesn't know she'd already set a date with Quint. The others, Monica and Avo, Smitt and Triss had knotted to one another's early delight. They fear losing their peace, like most normal people.

But Smitt was more a man than he knew and some ray of discernment seeped from his wish to keep cool, "Sullivan. You don't have to start burning your clothes or hair or anything. Some opinions, and some people, they unsettle the generic modes we're supposed to obey, that's all."

"Well it puts me there," and Sullivan jabbed four straight fingers down at the table top.

"It's not that nobody wants you, man," Craft says, much like any idiot who can't help Sullivan to see how he makes lousy mileage from self-pity.

Sullivan only stood. He offered his hand to Vera, as if to say "adieu" or "sorry." Social automatism preserves his face. You know, every move a man makes is meant to keep himself alive.

"You want to feel real good about yourself. Who doesn't?" Vera smiles.

"Next time I'll be sure to bring you some legendary poetry, a sniff of the humble pie you've been missing, babybones," Sullivan went round and out, all his wires frying and fusing, a plume of cigarette smoke flaming from his nostrils.

When he was gone, Starky stuck up a wet thing and made funny-like, "Don't worry, when he comes back, it'll be with a life-size copy of his autobiography. First, he'll tell our fortunes through his demise. Then we'll get him drunk and make him fletch shit from the girls' asses."

Not everyone wipes gloom away like Starky. Craft felt sprung, like the shucked skin of a rattler. Really, he was finished with cynicism ever since he noticed that most bright people, even the ones you love, never reveal that they've guessed whatever opinions others hold of them. Inspired by feeling incapable of egocentric illusions, such virile uneasiness is difficult to bear. Craft was no one's thread anymore. He was an immense uselessness, a rippling futility.

"Maybe that's all we're doing here," Darla was struck. "We're like the ghosts of the civilisation we left behind. Only some of us, like Sullivan, haven't realized that leaving is freedom, too. He must have had great troubles getting along. I feel sorry for him."

Craft could care less about whatever had mixed-up Sullivan. About all he felt was a wish to beat the fear of ending alone like Sullivan. So, he didn't want to say it, "I want to feel sorry for him, but why should I? He told me his wife left him. So, he's just crying for love, like us. What's new to pity in that?"

Three more guests refresh their punchlines. Distress isn't allowed anymore, so Triss sums everyone up with a vague shrug, "One thing a loser can't stand is another loser."

Craft has ignored his love for Triss. He wishes finally that M-sister had already left him for someone else. Because now it feels too late for anything but silence and letting the atmosphere do its breathing for them. Tension dissolves as the men and women find favor in each other. They balance this illusion carefully, fine-tuning it to take a regular social shape. Now they can get back to the secure work of attracting familiar personalities.

It's like being bitten by lost love -- having to remember the last joy before she flew back home, such happiness upon her, living her favorite song. Then she belonged to herself; he couldn't make her happy anyway. Everyone here was almost old enough for one lost love. But not like Craft, who felt as if he had lost two in one night.

Everyone here needs to get over it. The first left him because he was unbearable and the other, because he never gave her the chance. All women leave for the same reasons.

It's so light, despite the early hour and before the sun has risen. The air is already warmer. Silence and weeping cloud the eyes, then laughter moves the lips, like nervous virgins get ready to let go and live.

Being desperate and calmly so. All the big bother about nothing, just a mood unfamiliar to the taste. You grow into what you know anyway. Tell each other again: who loves you is whom you love. Staying complacent isn't always easier than accepting fresh love, and making peace with platitudes: minds are made to share; strangers are no more, we are all the same folk. Then the feeling -- nothing much matters since we suffer the same faults -- that makes you relax and feel friendly again... People ought to give each other life. Living to love makes all groups whole. Even so, the outcast is still misunderstood, and runs away, chasing pride, regret and pleasure -- his stolen soul. She loves you, but maybe that other bad boy still wants her much more than you do, after all. So -- is your deepest longing ever satisfied over a weekend?

It's over. We haven't a clue where our friends have gone. Except for two sleepers, the Cherry Blossom is all but empty. Triss breathes so peacefully on.

Copyright © May 16, 1997 by David Antoniuk