“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 42: bad place

In our previous episode our international adventurer Dick Ridpath somehow found himself, clad only in his old kimono, in the boudoir of young Hope, clad only in a diaphanous nightgown.

He finds himself quite overcome.

A hazy shade of September in 1969, some several miles outside of a town called Disdain, in a land of enchantment called New Mexico...

(Go here, if you must, to return to the first chapter of our serialization of which Edmund Wilson has said, "The words 'sprawling masterpiece' come to mind.")

That falling outward feeling. He’d felt it first when he was eight years old, walking down the aisle to Communion in St. Pat’s in Philadelphia, this feeling that he was leaving his body. He had grabbed onto the arm of the kid in front of him, and the kid turned and looked at him like he was crazy. Dick said something to the kid, something stupid, mundane, anything, something to pull himself back before he slipped away entirely and forever. And he felt himself coming back, and he sighed as if he had just crossed a tightrope over some yawning great bottomless gorge.

These attacks or whatever they were had recurred throughout Dick’s childhood, usually when he was lying in bed at night, and he had learned to fight them off by running into the bathroom and turning on the light and staring at his face and repeating Hail Mary Hail Mary full of grace Hail Mary Hail Mary full of grace until he felt himself coming back, settling back again into his body.

Once it happened when he was lying in his room listening to Fibber McGee on the radio. He felt himself slipping rapidly away, and he ran (with what seemed like a comet’s trail of his own self trailing behind and above him) into his father’s den where his father was reading a book, and he babbled something and his father said, “Are you all right?”

As Dick became more adept at pulling himself back he also learned to tell the warning signs and how to avoid the attacks.

And so he grew up and never quite went insane, and by his early twenties he felt he had himself under control. The trick was simply not to let his mind drift too far toward a certain place where it became all too aware of its utter aloneness. He was already quite aware that he was alone, but to be too aware was to open the doorway to, and step into, insanity.

When Admiral Quigley first asked him to experiment with LSD Dick went right ahead, and, very much to his surprise, he loved the experience. (Some of the other guys had a terrible time, and in fact a couple had been turned into gibbering wrecks and had spent months in the psych ward at Walter Reed as a result.) But even at the peak of a “trip” Dick kept away from, and was able to keep away from, that awful place of utter aloneness.

Some years and dozens of LSD and mescaline trips later, along came Daphne. That glorious beginning of their affair, and she read an article in Life about LSD and Ken Kesey and his mob. She wanted to try it. He happened to have some excellent government-issue stuff stowed away in his old seabag for a rainy day. They gave it a go, and as they were peaking they started making love. He was on top of her and she was staring deep into his eyes. As many times as he had taken hallucinogenic drugs he had never done so while having sex, let alone while having sex with Daphne, which was already an amazing experience in and of itself, and he began to have that feeling again, but instead of floating away he was falling down into those grey eyes and he was not afraid, and it was like all the universe was passing through him into her and up out of her eyes into his.

Then they lay there drenched in sweat, listening to the sounds of their own breathing, to the sounds of the city. Then it was up and out to the Automat, because Daphne wanted cherry pie and coffee.

And so they experimented, taking acid together, trying to break through into some permanently accessible exalted state.

They discovered that they could go even further than they had gone that first time. He would let himself go, falling away inside her, and these journeys into some disembodied almost but not quite egolessness became longer and deeper, swooping wild soaring flights, and Daphne was always there flying right along with him, in him, and he in her, until one time he went in so deep that suddenly she was not there. It had happened. He was alone, horribly alone and all in darkness, and there was no going back ever and not even the hope of extinction. And he howled and howled but the howling was silent, all was silent and black.

He gradually awoke and became aware of his body again to realize he was huddled in a fetal position in a dark closet. He got out of it and Daphne was over on her bed, sleeping. It had been the most horrifying experience of his life, and he had seen a good deal of horror in his life.

When he talked about it later with Daphne she listened quietly and then said, “You shouldn’t have been afraid. You should have gone on.”

“I couldn’t go on,” he said. “There was nowhere else to go.”

She pause for a few seconds and then she said, “There might have been.”

But that had been enough for him. He knew how far he could safely go now, and before he reached that point he always forced himself back. He would neither go there willingly nor let himself be pushed there. If he went to that black place again there was no guarantee he would come back, and that place was the one place he did not want to get stuck in. If there was something beyond that place -- and he was pretty sure the only thing beyond it was oblivion -- he would just have to reach it by going around the black place, and if that were not possible he would simply have to live and die the ignorant unachieved fool that he was.

But now for some reason, standing here caught in the scary but thrilling charm of this mad little witch Hope, he wanted to let himself go there, to that place. He was tired, tired of holding back.

But it didn’t seem the thing to do, really. Not here and now with this poor girl. He felt he’d better speak and break the spell before it was too late, or perhaps he would fall, willy nilly, fall away into those bottomless brown eyes.


Hope had asked what?

Why were he and Daphne here.

“I don’t really know,” he said.

His voice sounded stale and flat, the snapping of a dead twig on a dead branch of a dead tree, but he knew that by speaking he had pulled himself back, and he could already feel the sweat on his back cooling.

A sighing moment passed, and he was actually on the verge of taking a deep breath and going into the whole tedious transistor radio business for the second time that day, but then she simply took her hands away and said, “Are you going to the barbecue?”

“Um, yeah --”

“I’ll see you there,” she said.

He could feel where the energy from her hands had been cut off from his hand, and suddenly his hand felt cold, and separate.

(Continued here.)

interview with dan leo

like a drop of water forming endlessly but never falling, or an arrow that can never reach its mark because it has to keep covering half its distance, the internet novel railroad train to heaven revives the glory days of high modernism when "only the exhaustive was truly interesting". we caught up with mr dan leo, the author of railroad train and many other fine works, in the shadows of his cork lined study, overlooking a rocky windswept beach somewhere east of valhalla. does the blog/twitter/internet novel have a future? does it have a present? Sure. The problem is that most of what people put on the internet is going to be crap. Who can sift through all this garbage? Who has time? did you set out to write an "endless novel" or did it just happen? This of course refers to my Railroad Train to Heaven, which runs on my own blog. No, I really didn't plan it this way. It all started after I spent a year or so not writing anything creative; all I was doing was writing query letters to agents for another novel (Uncle Buddy's House). I had read that it was a good idea to have an "online presence", so one night on a whim I followed the Blogger instructions on how to start a blog, all the while thinking I wouldn't know how to do it and that I'd just give up. But then all of a sudden, sure enough, I had a blog. At first I just put up a couple of funny photos I found, with made-up captions. Then I had a story that an old friend of mine named Brian had sent me. He only writes about one story every five years or so, and all he does is send them to me and then apparently forget about them. A real outsider artist. But I always liked Brian's stories, which used to come hand-written, and then eventually typed; then, finally, with this last one he had gotten a computer and an internet connection and he sent it to me electronically. I asked Brian if I could put the story on my new blog, and he said yeah, but not to use his real name. This is the story ("Gangsta Dream", by Kevin McDoom AKA Frank Scattergood), if anyone wants to check out some really original insanity, just as it appeared on my blog on that fateful date of March 25, 2007. So now I had one story up by a friend and some funny "found" pictures with captions. Now what to do? I had two supposedly "finished" novels in the can, but I was reluctant as yet to put them on the blog. (Although later I did revise them and put them up.) So, inspired by Brian's story, I started writing these odd little stories supposedly about real people and events set (as Brian's story was) in our old neighborhood of Olney in Philadelphia. I presented them as if they were true tales, written in a sort of neighborhood-weekly jargon, even though the events described were rather outrageous. Oddly enough I have gotten more than a few e-mails over the years from former Olneyites asking me if such and such really happened, and I always have to tell them that sadly all this shit is made up. (And I discovered an odd thing about the internet, i.e., that if you don't clearly label something as "fiction" some people will always think you're describing real events.) So for a couple of months I occasionally knocked out these little tales of old Olney, this quartier perdu that no one outside of Philly has ever heard of. (I'm still waiting for another story from Brian by the way, but he's on another one of his extended hiatuses apparently). One day I remembered this strange demotic poet who would write sentimental little poems every week in one of our local papers when I was growing up, poems about a mother's love and a puppy's eyes, that sort of thing. I decided to try to write one of these poems, and I invented a persona for the bad poet, "Arnold Schnabel", a 42-year-old bachelor who worked for the railroad, lived with his mother, and who was an usher at the local Catholic church, St. Helena's. On the side he wrote one poem every week for the local paper, the Olney Times, a noble publication which did actually exist for many years but which sadly folded last December. I continued to write or channel these poems and I found that they were starting to tell a story, i.e., Arnold's descent into madness. Arnold did lose his mind, on a dark night in January of 1963, but he continued to write his poems once a week like clockwork, and, despite their growing strangeness, the Olney Times continued to print them. He comes home from the mental hospital after a few months, but he is still too psychologically fragile to go back to work as a brakeman, and so the railroad puts him on an open-ended disability pension at half-pay. That summer his mother decides to take him to the seaside resort of Cape May, NJ, to stay at her sisters' boarding house, and (she hopes) to recover his mental health. All of this was documented in Arnold's weekly poems. Then one day I thought, hey, I'll have Arnold write his memoirs, as a sort of therapy for him, but also to pass the time (his time, but mine too I suppose). And that's how this particular endless novel, Railroad Train to Heaven, started. I didn't really mean it to be a novel, or endless, but it developed that way. (I get a kick out of working on more than one thing at a time. Currently I'm serializing an older novel called A Town Called Disdain on flashing by. My method with this is not to think about it at all until I'm ready to put up a chapter, and then I look it over and rewrite whatever seems too stupid and then put it up. Another online rag, Troubadour 21, is running "the early years" of Arnold's tale, and I use the same method: don't think about it until the editor says it's time for more stuff, and then I look over the old chapters, make any changes that seem necessary and send them off.) There's something insane about writing an open-ended and possibly endless novel, and I very much doubt that I would have ever started it if I hadn't started a blog. There are precedents of course -- Proust, Henry Darger, and other novelists who write these long novel-cycles. I think the open-ended blog novel is also a bit like the long-form TV that's developed in the past fifteen years or so -- The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men. Why not try to do in prose what those excellent shows do on film? The trick is to make each chapter feel like a separate story in the story-stream, to have something happen, something real, something that will make the reader want to read the next chapter. do you have now , or have you ever had, any interest in "experimental" writing - "cut up" or randomly produced writing? does the phrase "rub out the word" make your heart beat or your blood boil? I'm always interested in experimenting. I look on each time I sit down to write as an experiment. Like, will I think of anything worth writing? But as for "cut-ups" and that sort of thing, no. When I'm writing a new chapter I hardly ever have any idea what's going to happen next, and that's plenty random enough for me. if herman melville and nathaniel hawthorne were alive today, would they be movie directors, tv writers, video game producers or jonathan franzen? It's amazing that you should ask me this, because I'm seriously thinking of putting Melville and Hawthorne into the next Arnold chapter! God knows what these guys would be doing today. Haven't looked at Franzen's new one yet, couldn't get through The Corrections. To me that sort of thing is really boring. I really don't like writers who seem to be trying to show you how clever they are, and, by extension, how clever you are because you get how clever they are. the supreme cultural council takes away all computers, smart phones etc from schoolchildren and commands them to dedicate their lives to reading one author. which author? (besides yourself) Boy, that would be a tough one. I do really like writers who have a rich body of work you can just sink into. And you discover that some of your favorite authors really are just writing endless novels, but they just put them out in installments and change the titles and the names of the characters. But you can read a page of some of my very favorites (Richard Stark, Patricia Highsmith, Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis) and it could just as well be in one novel as in another because their styles are so distinctive and they write about the same themes over and over again. Cormac McCarthy totally is that way, although his last couple of books got a lot less florid. can literature be fun and meaningful again? Sure, but first writers have to write from their souls and not from some idea of what they think a writer should be writing. But you have to have talent, it's either there or it isn't. And even talented writers squander their gifts, trying to write great novels when they really don't have anything interesting to say. And talent comes and goes, inspiration comes and goes. Great writers tend to write not-so-great novels toward the end of their careers, if they live too long. A funny thing about even good writers is that they often don't know when they're writing crap. A musician will know when he's played badly, but a writer will put out the most arrant bilge and think it's good. I remember reading Norman Mailer's book on writing, and I had to laugh because this book on how to write well was chock full of bad writing. Oh well. And even your best friends won't tell you when the inevitable decline sets in...

The Angel Leah by Jesse S. Mitchell. (from the novel "Mythic Creatures")

excerpt from "Mythic Creatures" by Jesse S. Mitchell



Paris, 1962.

1

The Angel Leah is a demon and a cannibal, or at least she has her tendencies. The same evil that lies in all souls, slippery and black shiny, it lies in her soul. Our diet is much the same, paint and words and amphetamines and analgesics. The search for sustenance is toil. I watch her as she brushes her long brown hair. She sits perfectly stick straight in front of the mirror and brushes down flat the wayward strands. Her eyes are weak but mine are weaker. I can barely see anything unless it is put right in front of my terrible eyes. I look out of our cracked glass window though and today because it is uncommonly clear I can see for miles. I can see the Place De La Concorde, where the giant men have stepped, and I can see down to the Pantheon where the giant men have slept. I dare not walk down that way; I am still much too slight a man, but on this fact I am working on a remedy. A remedy or a protest, a brilliant thing to take me to unforgettable lands, to place me into some not so indifferent hands. A good time may be all I ever find.
I watch out the window and I block out the sounds. I only watch and wait for the clear sky to crack open and let down the golden drizzle. And I will not leave this apartment until it comes.
“Jack? Are you listening to me?”
I do not blink my eyes. I take in all the light that the sun can send. I can take the heat. I can take the energy. I can focus. I can focus through the pain in silence.
“Hey, can you hear me?”
“What?”
“I have been speaking.”
“Sorry, I was watching the street. I was a thousand miles away.”
“Take me downtown.”
“Why?”
“I am hungry, and I need a few things.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Yes, no. Not yet.”
“Are you still worried about being deported? No one is looking for you.”
“No, I am not going until it rains.”
“It doesn’t even look like rain. Why do we have to wait on the rain?”
“Because I am watching the sun and I am waiting for the rain.”
“Well, I suppose I will just sit here and starve.”
“You are too young to starve.”
“No one is too young to starve.”
“Maybe you are too beautiful then.”
“No one is. Now come on.”
“No! I will not go until it rains! I said that.”
“Did it never rain in Poland?”
“No, it just snowed.”
“Never rained?”
“Well, maybe it rained a little for the Germans but they brought it with them. For the rest of us it just snowed and snowed and snowed all year long.”
“I can call Raquel to take me downtown.”
“Yes, do that. I will come along later.”
I watch the cars line up around the block and bounce back and forth along the road. Like a child’s toy, the cars just keep going around and around the streets. They all look the same and as far as I know they are all the same ones, all day long. Man and woman and child and beast and bird swirling around down there in automobile and bus and on foot. A catastrophe always circling with them, a bloody disaster always awaiting man’s steps and I would pray for them if I knew how…if I knew how to pray for them. I can save myself, that much I know for sure. Buried beneath the mud in silence mouthing any supplications I knew, the small body of a boy slept in tears long enough to escape the fire and boot…I know how to save myself.
As I let my eyes wander over the landscape below, I listen to the blurred sounds start to come through the north-facing wall of our apartment. It is the longest wall in the whole place and it is covered in glittery golden paint that one night, in a daze of swilled and smoked creativity, I coated nearly everything we own with. Behind the wall the chants and bellows from our neighbor, Ali, start to murmur through and then grow louder and louder still. He is making his sounds again. He is a wild Algerian wizard. He claims to have died a thousand times and always returns from the grave to further honor the name of the Prophet. His voice is as deep and gravelly as a stone quarry and he moves like hell, throwing himself around without a pause for gravity to catch up. He is a madman and very thin with black, tired eyes. He never sleeps or eats, just bellows out stories and legends to himself all day and night of Rifs and Berbers and Djinn. He is usually polite and harmless enough. I can detect no major moral inadequacies in his character.
I listen as Leah dresses herself in a white papery dress and tall boots and steps hard around on our bare wooden floor. The tinkle of jewelry. The swoosh of femininity. She is off to meet her friend Raquel down the street at the corner. She pauses by the window and looks and lets me know she is leaving and to meet up with them later. I think I shall go out and find Hashhead Millicent, Millicent the Magnificent, and buy some pot. I tell Leah this as she leaves floating out the door. She agrees. Millicent, the West German émigré heiress, so tall and solid. Millicent the robot, she is a metal red eyed machine, with mechanical arms and legs and breasts and lips so bright, and she has the best tea in Paris. No one ever leaves any room for me. I make my own room. I find a tiny little crack in a life or place and I squeeze right in and make myself comfortable. It is the nature of all my relationships. Follow along with me long enough and you will see, you will understand. I grab my notebook and pull out my chewed up pen. A few lines written before a leave makes me feel more successful with my day in general. A few lines of verse or prose, blend the two and no one can help it, they will hate it. I scratch down my words, in scribble, some letters far too big and some too small to see, the meaning lost between the lines and affects. I close the notebook. I know I am done when the sides of my hand get covered in gray charcoal dust. Black suit, I always wear a black suit. I put the jacket on and the shoes next. Walk to the mirror and straighten the tie. Oh my, starlight in my eyes, red, red and moist. I pull my sunglasses off the table and press them hard on my face. I hide my eyes. Bend down and dust off my shoes and grab the keys and creep out the door. Crack it open, pull it open in a rush, bang, shut, closed and down the hall I go.

paths... (3)

by human being

with contributions by francis scudellari and horace p sternwall

illustrations by rhoda penmarq

third of five parts

to begin at the beginning, click here

the circle i draw  cuts its own path i watch it lovingly as it disappears out of my sight * There’s a sidewalk here, the city has poured, cemented with smooth and perfect squares. It leads to all the usual places, only altering when at last it crumbles. There's also the rough- cut route I’ll walk, taking Aeolus by his shaky hand to stroll where moths mingle, dandelions dance, and destinations giggle tickled by our setting suns. - Late summer's stroll  by Francis Scudellari * on my way i came across a woman buying and selling other people's secrets - buy something! - i don't need anything... i travel light - you want to sell some of your secrets then! - no... i've got none - everyone has got at least a few secrets! - nobody has got any secrets - then what are these i have here? - they are your hiding places inflation is not a change but deflation is on my way i came across an unflying bird she was lying on the ground with drooping wings and an unsinging beak i hold her in my hands and looked into her sad eyes he loved me, she started in a broken voice, but his love was a cage he'd envy the sky if i flied he'd hate the trees if i sat in them he thought all i sang had to be about him relating my songs to himself reproaching me for the joy or the grief or the anger i expressed towards things in my life i didn't fly i didn't sing i forgot my voice and even my wings but one day i came to myself i was not a bird anymore who am i then? i ran away but he came after me he said he loved me but his love was a cage he said he loved me but his love was death these were the last words of the bird gradually my hands grew cold i buried her in my words and continued on my way wondering if the hunters ever love the birds * many strange dreams i tried to weave into what i really believe but something always broke the spell so now - i'll never tell - i'll never tell  by horace p sternwall *

part 4

the waitress and the satanist, chapter 20: waiting game

click here for complete episode

Gandharvas Gabriel by Jesse S. Mitchell

Gandharvas Gabriel
By: Jesse S. Mitchell
In my bright new wonderful marvelous future, I imagine myself high up in the sky, the blue blue liquid blue sky. I see myself flying, floating, aloft, breathing slowly, below me the air waves like crashing blue waves of some old salty sea, above me the purple black of twilight and space and cloudless clime of heaven and me between the two. Touching nothing, all alone. I imagine it that way because my legs hurt, all this concrete makes my legs hurt and feet swell. This bus makes my bones rattle and this vinyl seat makes my skin crawl. I imagine my future bright and comfortable. I watch the awful everything blend together and race in one big distorted mess coming through the dirty window and my eyes blink and my eyes flutter and make something beautiful out of nothing at all…I can see whatever I want to see anyway. The cars dance in front and behind. The bus stops everywhere for too long. The Earth is still moving, that much is for sure, but the revolution has definitely stopped. I can see my bright new wonderful great fabulous future high above coming down close to me….reach my hand out and grab it on the horizon, trapped inside this bleating bus ride, coughing, clattering, coming undone, karmic prison…I hit my head on the thick glass, crash, crash, watch the world unfold in traffic…in blending speeding traffic. In my future everything is right and all is held in mercy and love and beauty and joy, nothing like all this ugly ugly greed and lost things and misplaced memories, out of tune…one side and then another, set next to each other…one reality here and another very different one here…my future and yours, yes, one and the other. Sri Krishna, drive me between the two sides, between these two skies, two gods, and see who has the desire to fight with me.
The traffic light swings like a pendulum above the bus roof, barely visible through the front window. Stuck on red, time has all but stopped. The light drips down to the green lens slowly…drip drip drip. A thousand lives are lived in those waiting minutes. One hundred thousand thoughts composed and lost, forgotten before the bus slowly lurches forward. The wild sounds of a confused mosaic city life drowning the sounds met for human ears. My ears feel like bleeding. Bleeding red. My swollen feet throb and I can barely move my toes.
I am crawling about in this world. I am just crawling with all these other grasping shadows. Hold on. In my bright blue future, I am flying high above. Flying high above in between blue skies. Flying high above the hard concrete ground and sour feet and long overused legs bent and broken. I am happy, barely having thoughts, high above in the hardly breathing windless sky when the bus stops. When the bus stops at my stop I raise myself up and walk out the folded door. My hand on the little silver handles reflecting the sun. Little pin points of light dance and pop as the crowds move around me. My hands shake in the cold wind. The light makes me shudder, left out in the open, no shade to hide myself under, the hard evil karma of illumination. This is a land of strangers and dangers and sorrow and lights blazing right into my aching head. The awful price I pay is unbelievable. I can see right into the minds of these mad beasts and blood drinking red-soaked monsters. I open the door to the silver glass building…the cold irony…the building is made entirely of reflective glass…the wild irony…the mirrors reflecting back the hideous sights…always, reflecting…back and forth, back and forth…infinitely. Inside the place is an open cavern, lit by electric fire and haunted by half dead spirits. In a rush, I make my way to the closing metal door of the elevator. In my future, I will be all alone…far above all of this demonry, in the blue blue sky.

A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 41: boudoir

Larry Winchester -- long renowned as a master film maker (Croquet Hustler; Two Came to Curaçao; Lesbian Dawn; Assignation in Istanbul), and only now receiving his due as perhaps the greatest American novelist since the days when Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann and Ayn Rand rode roughshod over the literary landscape -- now shifts his point-of-view to that of Dick Ridpath (AKA “Dick Smith”), former naval officer and man of mystery, a guest with his lovely wife Daphne at the ranch of Big Jake Johnstone, father of Hope, the enigmatic child-woman who earlier that day had suffered a disturbing attack of hysterics on Dick and Daphne’s bed.

September, 1963, New Mexico, several miles outside of a town called Disdain, on a tiny planet circling an insignificant star in the fourth quadrant of an outlying district of the 117th Galaxy, Fifth Universe of the Seventh Time-Space Continuum...

(Click here for our previous episode; latecomers to the bandwagon may go here to return to the beginning of our serial.)

(This episode rated M for Mystifying Plot Development.)

Dick came out of the bathroom in his kimono, walked down the dusky hall, and then saw the somehow familiar dark eye peering through the slightly opened door.

“Mr. Smith?”

The door opened a bit more and it was Hope, in her nightdress.

“Oh, hi, Hope. How ya feelin’?”

“Better, thanks.”

“Great. Well, uh, see you at dinner --”

“Mr. -- Smith -- would you -- come in for just a minute?”

Dick found himself glancing furtively up and down the hall.

“Well -- okay.”

He came in. She closed the door behind him and stood there with her back to it, her small fingers splayed against the wood.

“You smell nice,” she said.

“Thank you. It’s these bath salts that Daphne got in Singapore. At the -- hotel. The hotel, there.”

Dick looked around, nervously. Candles of various colors and scents burned on the dresser and on the bedside tables. The room was dark and soft-looking, with Mexican and vaguely oriental draperies and hangings; deep red velvet curtains covered the windows and barred all but a faint leakage from the failing twilight outside. A black-and-white photograph of Clara Bow brooded over the bed.

Dick turned back to look at Hope again, still standing there with her back against the door. She looked at him steadily. He glanced away again and wished he had a cigarette.

He thought of six or seven ice-breakers in succession but somehow couldn’t bring himself to say any of them. Instead he looked around the room again and occasionally glanced back at her seemingly impassive or perhaps simply insane gaze.

I can take this. I’ve stood far worse than this. Eventually she’ll say something.

And finally she did.

“I was in your room,” she said.

“Oh. Yeah,” said Dick. “I heard.”

“You’re not angry?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not at all.”

“I -- I went through your things,” she said.

“Well, to be honest,” said Dick, “that’s something I’ve always liked to do myself. You know, um, go through other people’s things --”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“Well --”

“Just for a minute,” she said.

“Um --”

She glided over to the bed and sat in it, seeming barely to disturb the disordered nest of blankets and sheets and clothing that lay upon it. She looked at him and patted the bed with her left hand.

Dick hesitated for a fraction of a moment and then went over and sat on the place indicated.

Drawing her legs up under her nightdress she turned to face him.

It was a very comfortable bed, a feminine bed of the sort Dick had always loved, one of those beds you wanted just to lie down in and never get out of.

He liked this room and he liked the books he saw on the night table. Jane Eyre.Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Thérese Desqueyroux, in French. A collection of the poems of Lorca, in Spanish.

Finally she spoke.

“One of those men tried to get into your room. That Mr. Adams.”

“Really?” said Dick. “How?”

“He picked the lock.”

“Oh. And did he get in?”

“No. But only because I was already in there.”

“I see. Well, thanks for telling me.”

She said nothing, and once again she kept that seemingly implacable gaze upon him. And once again he couldn’t take it, and again he began to look around the room.

“Why are they after you?” she said.

“I -- honestly don’t know.”

“Are they -- police?”

“I’m not sure what they are but I suspect they work for the government. FBI maybe.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I used to -- do -- similar work.”

“FBI?”

“No, no. I was in -- uh -- naval intelligence.”

“Top secret?”

Dick smiled nervously.

“Sometimes.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re after you. Some top secret thing you did or knew.”

“I wish I knew.”

“So you’re not -- like criminals or drug dealers?”

“Do we look like criminals?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“So -- why are you using false names?”

“Oh, right,” said Dick. “You saw our papers and things --”

“Mr. and Mrs. -- Smith?”

Dick looked away for a moment, abashed.

“Well,” he said, “it’s all because of your father. See, he thinks we’re criminals, so we’re just playing along.”

“Why?”

“Well, basically because we’re broke, and as long as he thinks we’re hot-shot criminals he seems to be willing to give us free room and board here.”

For the first time she smiled, and Dick felt a warmth in his heart.

“Fabulous,” she said.

Dick smiled too.

“You -- don’t like your dad too much, do you?”

“Oh, I hate him,” she said cheerily. “How could anyone possibly like such a pig?”

Dick shrugged, but slightly. He felt awkward looking into her eyes, and he lowered his, but then he saw the gentle protuberance of her small round breasts and the suggestion of her nipples beneath the thin cotton of the nightdress; the way she sat crosslegged the cotton was stretched tight along her thighs, and he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to pull that material up, to run his hands along those thighs, to make love with her in this comfortable bed.

He thought he had better go. He realized that if he stayed on this bed with this girl much longer that things might get horribly out of hand.

He got up. He realized he had the beginnings of an erection, and he put his left hand in the pocket of his kimono to camouflage it.

“Well --”

He looked down at those dark eyes. Yeah, he had definitely better go. And then she floated up off the bed and stood before him.

“Mr. Smith -- or Ridpath -- or may I call you Richard?”

“Well, no one calls me Richard. Call me Dick.”

“Dick.”

She said nothing else, but stood there looking up into his eyes as a film of sweat enveloped Dick’s torso.

“Well,” he said, “uh, nice talking to you, Hope.”

He held out his hand and she took it in hers and then put her other hand on it; he felt a hot bloodlike energy flowing from her soft fragile hands into his hand, the heat flowing all up his arm and into his chest, down into his stomach and finally down into his groin. Her eyes stared unwavering into his, and this time he didn’t avert his eyes but joined his gaze with hers, wondering how long this would last before she said something. Or did something.

Finally she said: “Why are you and Daphne here?”

She still held his hand. He didn’t want to look into her eyes, but he found himself doing so, and he felt the sweat trickling down his back.

(Continued here.)