Start of a transcript of *** Copyright 2001 by Emily Short. Type ABOUT for instructions. Release 1 / Serial number 010928 / Inform v6.21(G0.36) Library 6/10 Interpreter version 0.3.5 / VM 2.0.0 / Library serial number 000710(bp) >restart Are you sure you want to restart? y Press H for instructions, or any other key to begin the game. Best of Three is another foray into the realm of conversational game. People who are familiar with Pytho's Mask will already know how the interface works: The chief thing to do in this game is to select from the conversation menu: 1, 2, 3, or (you guessed it) 4. But do not be deceived by the resemblance to a CYOA, for lo, this is not one. First of all, you can change the subject if you don't like your menu options of the moment: to change, type >T [new topic]. It is quite often the case that changing the topic to something related will turn up new appropriate comments. If you go through several iterations of this and decide you don't like what you're seeing and would like to go back to the menu of options you had to start with, type >UNTOPIC and the menu will be reset to whatever it was after someone last spoke. Second, all the normal verbs are still options; and from a conversational point of view, it is sometimes as useful to >WAIT to see what will happen next as it is to say something. Finally, you may find that your player character seems to know about things that you, the player, do not fully understand. A certain amount of useful background elaboration is available through the >THINK ABOUT [thing] command. [Note that this elaboration is always the same, so thinking about [thing] fifty times will be redundant forty-nine of those times.] You may view these instructions again at any time by typing HELP. To end this or any other pause in the game, press the SPACE BAR. "Damn it! Watch where you're going, can't you?" There's an awkward scuffle while he retrieves his balance. It takes several moments, because his feet are entangled with yours and his movements hampered by the bulk of his coat. You lose your footing, and end up having to catch yourself on the wall of the lighthouse. So you don't really take it in at first, but, notwithstanding his resemblance to a drowned rat, he is still himself. Grant Stern. He of the rosewood swordstick and the poetical hands, the grey gaze and the 18th century bearing. >t me (You contemplate your options.) >[hmm, I think I'd rather the old options stay when there are no new ones.] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >t him (You contemplate your options.) >t grant (You contemplate your options.) >t lighthouse Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >[what's the difference between those two?] That's not a verb I recognise. >untopic (You contemplate your options.) >1 "Oh, hi." [Two years you had to make up a witty, spontaneous line for this moment. Nice work.] "Fuck." He stops patting his pockets and looks down at you. "You've made me lose my pen," he says. "Congratulations." (Several stabs into the undergrowth with his swordstick.) "The karmic repercussions will be severe. Expect to live your next life as a dung beetle." You know the pen he means-- or at least, it seems likely that he's still using it, the black fountain pen with a gold clip. Exactly like yours, though you never learnt to write in that peculiar elegant backslant of his. A left-handed trick. >search (Grant) He might resent the intrusion into his personal space. He ignores you and gives the scrubby little bush another vicious thwack, drenching you and your papers (which you'd managed to keep dry until now) with the backspray. >undo Path Around Lighthouse [Previous turn undone.] >search bush With a feeling of resignation, you start looking under the bushes, such as they are, yourself. It rapidly becomes obvious that there simply is nothing here -- unless the pen miraculously flew a good ten or fifteen feet away, there's no coverage dense enough to conceal it. He ignores you and gives the scrubby little bush another vicious thwack, drenching you and your papers (which you'd managed to keep dry until now) with the backspray. >x papers You can't see any such thing. >search bush There's nothing more to be found, and that's a fact. His gaze lights on your pen. "You've had it all along!" he announces. "What have you got between your ears, cotton?" And he snatches the pen and takes off with it. You scramble to your feet. "HEY!" But he doesn't look back; and you stand there in the rain and contemplate the aesthetic incompetence of a universe that would bring the bane of your existence back into your life just to steal your favorite pen. A week or so later, maybe. (Afterwards, you won't remember with certainty.) It's pouring again, the steady monotonous rain that plagues the northwest in the fall. You've sought refuge at the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop, which is at least out of the house; but you find your mind crowding with events you've done your best to put aside: your infatuation with Grant, the formation and dissolution of 3Nigma, the notebook; Robin, and Fred, both of whom are off somewhere doing something now no doubt. >undo Path Around Lighthouse [Previous turn undone.] >drop pen There's no real reason to do so. His gaze lights on your pen. "You've had it all along!" he announces. "What have you got between your ears, cotton?" And he snatches the pen and takes off with it. You scramble to your feet. "HEY!" But he doesn't look back; and you stand there in the rain and contemplate the aesthetic incompetence of a universe that would bring the bane of your existence back into your life just to steal your favorite pen. A week or so later, maybe. (Afterwards, you won't remember with certainty.) It's pouring again, the steady monotonous rain that plagues the northwest in the fall. You've sought refuge at the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop, which is at least out of the house; but you find your mind crowding with events you've done your best to put aside: your infatuation with Grant, the formation and dissolution of 3Nigma, the notebook; Robin, and Fred, both of whom are off somewhere doing something now no doubt. >undo Path Around Lighthouse [Previous turn undone.] >hide pen It's not clear how useful that would be. His gaze lights on your pen. "You've had it all along!" he announces. "What have you got between your ears, cotton?" And he snatches the pen and takes off with it. You scramble to your feet. "HEY!" But he doesn't look back; and you stand there in the rain and contemplate the aesthetic incompetence of a universe that would bring the bane of your existence back into your life just to steal your favorite pen. A week or so later, maybe. (Afterwards, you won't remember with certainty.) It's pouring again, the steady monotonous rain that plagues the northwest in the fall. You've sought refuge at the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop, which is at least out of the house; but you find your mind crowding with events you've done your best to put aside: your infatuation with Grant, the formation and dissolution of 3Nigma, the notebook; Robin, and Fred, both of whom are off somewhere doing something now no doubt. >undo Path Around Lighthouse [Previous turn undone.] >give pen to him Weakly you offer your own pen to Grant. His gaze lights on your pen. "You've had it all along!" he announces. "What have you got between your ears, cotton?" And he snatches the pen and takes off with it. You scramble to your feet. "HEY!" But he doesn't look back; and you stand there in the rain and contemplate the aesthetic incompetence of a universe that would bring the bane of your existence back into your life just to steal your favorite pen. A week or so later, maybe. (Afterwards, you won't remember with certainty.) It's pouring again, the steady monotonous rain that plagues the northwest in the fall. You've sought refuge at the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop, which is at least out of the house; but you find your mind crowding with events you've done your best to put aside: your infatuation with Grant, the formation and dissolution of 3Nigma, the notebook; Robin, and Fred, both of whom are off somewhere doing something now no doubt. >undo Path Around Lighthouse [Previous turn undone.] >stab grant with pen That's not a verb I recognise. >hit grant with pen I only understood you as far as wanting to hit Grant. >hit grant That would be unhelpful. His gaze lights on your pen. "You've had it all along!" he announces. "What have you got between your ears, cotton?" And he snatches the pen and takes off with it. You scramble to your feet. "HEY!" But he doesn't look back; and you stand there in the rain and contemplate the aesthetic incompetence of a universe that would bring the bane of your existence back into your life just to steal your favorite pen. A week or so later, maybe. (Afterwards, you won't remember with certainty.) It's pouring again, the steady monotonous rain that plagues the northwest in the fall. You've sought refuge at the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop, which is at least out of the house; but you find your mind crowding with events you've done your best to put aside: your infatuation with Grant, the formation and dissolution of 3Nigma, the notebook; Robin, and Fred, both of whom are off somewhere doing something now no doubt. >undo Path Around Lighthouse [Previous turn undone.] >x me You're not entirely dry, more than a little cold, but with the mood you're in, it's seemed wisest to stay out of the house for a while. Being inside shrinks you: your mother's presence reverts you to a kid, and any measure of self-knowledge you've earned in the last two years slips away. Out here you get to be Helen Tsakis, adult person. For whatever that's worth. A moment passes. His gaze lights on your pen. "You've had it all along!" he announces. "What have you got between your ears, cotton?" And he snatches the pen and takes off with it. You scramble to your feet. "HEY!" But he doesn't look back; and you stand there in the rain and contemplate the aesthetic incompetence of a universe that would bring the bane of your existence back into your life just to steal your favorite pen. A week or so later, maybe. (Afterwards, you won't remember with certainty.) It's pouring again, the steady monotonous rain that plagues the northwest in the fall. You've sought refuge at the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop, which is at least out of the house; but you find your mind crowding with events you've done your best to put aside: your infatuation with Grant, the formation and dissolution of 3Nigma, the notebook; Robin, and Fred, both of whom are off somewhere doing something now no doubt. >[Wow, all sorts of intriguing snippets. Weeping donkey coffee shop?] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >l You're seated in your favorite part of the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop -- it generally eschews the name of Cafe. Your booth is in the corner, a generous window looking out over Main Street, the booth's dividers shutting out most of the rest of the restaurant. Mounted on the windowless wall is a framed illustration of Eeyore under a willow tree; and the booth is also within ready access of the bookshelf, where they keep a selection of reading material eclectically composed of whatever people have wanted to leave behind, minus whatever they have taken away. There is also the Donkey Journal, a large blank book with curious and variable entries from the customers which range from the philosophical to the Powerfully Inane. On your table are your cappuccino and a menu. A potted ficus plant obscures your view of any other possible patrons. >think about 3nigma It was your own idea, actually-- though somehow or other Robin assumed leadership of it almost immediately. YOUR concept was that the world needed more mystery. Hers was that the popular kids in school needed something to startle them, a sense that something was going on beyond their ken. At least while you were involved with it, 3Nigma left people inscrutable little messages; sometimes it was like Secret Santa, sometimes more jokey or sinister, though never dangerous or mean enough to attract the attention of the school administration. Caused a certain amount of stir among the students, though. >think about notebook Like all the angst-ridden teenagers of all time, you once kept and wrote in a notebook the various trials and tribulations of Being In Love With Grant (sometimes in prose, but more often, more's the pity, in a kind of Dickinsonian verse, touched with long dashes-- and heady words-- and Thoughts most suitably conceived in a chaise longue --but then, Disaster struck, and when you grew tired of the weary unrequite of love, and threw the thing away, Robin, reclaiming it, passed it to its object with an explanatory note. Humiliation is a hard thing to forgive. Suddenly you become aware of someone standing over your table. "Good, you're still here. I saw you through the window and ran home immediately." He does seem to be breathing a bit hard. He sets your pen on the table. "I am here to humbly beg your forgiveness for insulting you and making off with your personal possessions. All week my conscience has been haunted by the vision of you crouched in a garret writing with a lumpy Bic." >[Odd return there after 'conceived'] That's not a verb I recognise. >1 "That's okay. Did you find yours?" "My own pen was sitting on my desk at home. I normally carry it in my pocket, but apparently I left it there." He shifts from foot to foot. Grant slides into the seat opposite yours, setting his cane so that it leans against the booth. Now, if you can just get rid of him again without revealing anything too embarrassing about The Past, everything should be fine. The fact that he's sticking around to talk to you in the first place is a little unnerving, all the same. (It isn't, you think with a twinge of Old Bitterness, as though he generally had time to talk to you in the past.) >t me (You contemplate your options.) >[See, now *that* time the old options didn't go away.] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >t him (You contemplate your options.) >t 3nigma (You contemplate your options.) >t notebook (You contemplate your options.) >[oops, 'hoping you'd forgotten that' not appropriate yet, probably] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >t him (You contemplate your options.) >3 "So, what have you been doing for the last two years?" "I've been at college for a while," Grant says. "And I took a semester abroad." The waiter passes by the table with a tray of alfalfa-laden sandwiches. "College isn't bad," he goes on. "And to be honest, any kind of change at all that got me away from here for a while would have been an improvement, right after my senior year. It's gotten to the point where I miss this place, though, which is why I came back." One of the waiters materializes by the table, scooping up the menu. "Hi. I am, like, so sorry to interrupt but my boss sent me over to make you order something." He rolls his eyes. Grant leans back in his seat. "What's good today?" "Well, we've got a very nice mocha today with just a kiss of hazelnut syrup," he suggests. "Then on top goes whipped cream with the chef's specialty, cinnamon hand-ground in an imported Brazilian cherry-wood grinder." >3 You turn to the waiter. "I'll have another cappuccino, please." "Oh, you people are always so unimaginative." >1 "You can go ahead and take that." The waiter picks up the cappuccino cup and saucer. Grant turns to the waiter. "I'd like a small pot of freshly boiling water and two Earl Grey teabags in a mug. Do not attempt to begin brewing the tea yourself, please. On a separate plate, I will require a strip of lemon peel-- the full circumference of the lemon at the center, that is, no half-measures-- and two cubes of raw sugar. That would be the light brown kind. Also one cookie, the driest you have." The waiter's jaw drops, expressive not so much of annoyance as of awe. "Great! I will be right back with your order." The waiter vanishes. >1 "This town in general depresses me." "Really? Why?" "I get so bored sometimes. I can't believe I'm living here at times like that." "My mother always used to say that only the boring get bored." Just when you are about to come up with some rude retort, his gaze shifts back to you and he smiles a little bit. "I suppose the lesson we can extract for the present situation is that boredom is all a matter of perspective. And also, possibly, a result of not looking closely enough for what is interesting." Across the street, a couple of women emerge from the quilt shop with bags of remnant cloth. One of them stumbles, letting free a train of red-gold cotton that quickly darkens in the rain. "If you hate this place so much, why didn't you leave, go someplace else for college? Practically everyone else did." He sees you wince and makes an apologetic gesture. "I'm sorry, I sometimes have less tact than I ought. But I still find it hard to believe that you didn't get in anywhere..." >think about family Which do you mean, the the Startons or the family? >the family Which do you mean, the the Startons or the family? >startons You can't think of anything relevant. >1 "Given my family situation, I couldn't go to college away." "Is one of your parents sick, or something?" A sudden bubble of hysteria rises in you, the desire to cry or shout. "No, not sick, exactly," you say. "But I have twin brothers who need a lot of looking after; my mother works in Portland all day, and my father... well, suffice it to say that he's not in a position to provide regular supervision." He pushes his glasses up his nose. "My mother does-- well, did, who knows what she's up to now-- anyway, she did understand enough about me not to push me in any particular direction," he resumes. "And my father isn't a pushy type." >1 "What's your mother do?" "My mother lives in Arizona with her lover. I haven't seen her for three years, though she has been kind enough to send pictures of the two of them together." The silence is punctuated by the cash register ringing open. "This guy Mom wound up with is a, how does he call himself, sculptor of western scenes. He wears silver and turquoise belts and he constructs finely detailed bronze pieces showing such stirring topics as how to lasso a bronco. She says he has 'put her back in touch with her spiritual side,' which is odd considering that he doesn't believe in much of anything other than ripping off the tourists who come through Phoenix. I'm told he's quite a success, however." >2 "So does this paragon of sculpting virtues have a name?" He snorts. "Regis. How he got into the western art business is anyone's guess. I would have expected they throw you out at the door for having a name like that." Rain continues to patter against the window. "Mom sent us a bunch of pictures from a roadtrip they went on. Which when you think about it is a pretty phenomenal thing to do. 'Hi, honey! Having a great time! Glad you're not here because you'd really get in the way of me boinking my new boyfriend! Who, by the way, is using this trip as an opportunity to gather more sketches for his so-called art." >1 "Ouch." He doesn't say anything, just sets his jaw a little and runs his hand through his hair. >t him (You contemplate your options.) >1 "Where are you living?" "I'm staying at my father's place for the moment, which is to say, the vicarage at St. Cecily's, since he's the vicar there.." He pushes his glasses up his nose. "Why do you wind up watching your siblings? Does your father work around here, too?" >2 "It's not that he works, no. He only holds down part-time jobs, and then only sort of; for a while, he had this job working as a pseudo-ranger down by the beach, and he had the keys to the lighthouse and would go up there occasionally to check on it. But the thing is that that's about as much work as he's willing to do. He'll go do something for about two hours a week; the rest of the time he putters and drifts around. He does a lot of work on the house, to be fair, which needs constant upkeep, and he also supposedly writes, including some absolutely dreckish poetry which he keeps on yellow notepads and addresses to my mother. I mean, wretched stuff, like Hallmark-card level." "And looking after kids is not on his list of activities of interest?" "Correct. He's not quite chauvinist enough to explicitly say it's women's work; he'd just say that it's not something that he's personally suited for." >2 "He's not an entirely bad guy, my father. He doesn't have nearly as many 'problems' with me as my mother does, for one thing. More or less lets me do what I want to do." "As long as what you want to do includes taking care of your brothers and covering for your mother." Rain streaks down the window. "It doesn't seem very fair to ask you to do all the childrearing work that they're not willing to handle," Grant adds. "Some of us have noticed this, yes." >1 "They're named Lucas Castor and John Pollux." "Wow." "Well, I suppose they're fortunate to have escaped with normalish first names. I mean, in point of fact everyone calls them Lukey and Johnny." In the background, the tinkle of the door bell. "I've always found my name intensely boring. But there's something to be said for a name that no one can make fun of in school." >1 "Where did you grow up? Before here, I mean." "We moved around a bit," he comments. "Since Dad is clergy and they sometimes move people... and also, I guess, because my mother would get tired of living in one specific place for too long. She had this program to see as much of the world as possible, which in our case mostly extended to places around the Pacific Northwest and then a year and a half or so in Santa Fe." Rain continues to patter against the window. "I didn't mind moving around as a kid. On the other hand, I didn't like most of the specific places where we lived, other than maybe Santa Fe, so it was no great loss to leave them again," he continues. "I didn't tend to blend into the crowd in elementary school." >2 "I'm imagining you as a kid, only with a shorter cane and littler glasses." "And a shriller voice." You glance in his direction. A strange crushing familiarity settles on you. As long as it has been since you even laid eyes on him, you know the line of nose and chin by heart; and lust remembered is not very different from the present-moment sort. "My father kept white mice back when we lived in Santa Fe," Grant adds. "Most of them were just normal white but there was one that was an albino, with these little red eyes, and I thought that it was the evil one.." >2 "My brothers have a frog they're pretty attached to." "Hmm. I've never seen the attraction of anything smaller than a medium-sized dog, personally." More customers emerge from the quilt shop, empty-handed this time. "The thing I liked about Santa Fe," he goes on. "aside from the fact that it was sunny all the time, was the feeling that-- despite all the tourists-- there was some genuine history there. I felt the same way about New Orleans when I visited it, and it's also one of the things I like about here. There are, yes, piles of people who come to see the remains of that history and therefore it's been repackaged in this aesthetically simplified, soothing package, but there's still a grandeur in the age." >1 "How long did you live in Santa Fe?" "Oh, a couple of years, I suppose," he says. "I liked it. It was a decent sort of place. Lots of art galleries, lots of sunshine. Mom took us to the opera once or twice." He pushes a stray bit of hair out of his face. "One time we drove up to Los Alamos, just me and my mother," he adds. "She'd decided she wanted to see it for some reason, so she kept me out of school for a day and bundled me up there," Grant adds. "It's, I don't know, maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes from Santa Fe, and there are these weird rock formations on the way there, which she told me where the leftover lava from extinct volcanoes. Somehow that stuck in my head; I think I was impressed that there could be mountains that went away, leaving only the core of themselves behind," he continues. "Anyway. We got up there and, surprise, it's not very interesting-- I mean, there's nothing to see, it doesn't glow in the dark. There's a little museum, which is cute and focuses a lot on what the Lab is doing now, and there are a couple of leftover buildings, like the lodge, and there are some bronze busts of Oppenheimer around, but...." >1 "I've hardly been outside of Oregon. We've occasionally crossed over into Washington for a little bit, and that's all." "Never gone on a family car trip or anything like that?" "My parents aren't-- hmm. They somehow aren't the sort of parents who plan out joint vacations. Mostly my mother works very hard, and then she burns out and has to go away by herself." The owner comes out of the quilt shop with a newspaper over her head, locks up hastily, and hurries away to her car. "This is dreadfully impertinent of me, but-- were your brothers an unintentional development on the scene?" >2 "This, if you can believe it, is my parents' idea of family planning." He raises an eyebrow. "They decided when I was fifteen or so that we didn't 'feel like a real family' to them and an only child wasn't enough. Apparently, they'd always been planning to have more children, but I'd been 'a handful' (so you see, this is my fault) and they put it off. But now it would all be better because you see I was old enough to lend a hand with them. And thus began the indentured service." "Oof." The waiter brings your cappuccino and Grant's tea. The former is in another boat-sized cup; the latter, on the other hand, is a multi-stage production involving several plates, a pot of boiling water, the teabags removed from their wrappers but pristine and dry; a long strip of lemon artistically curved on itself; a stack of exactly three hard square-ish cookies; and a doily. You have never received a doily here on any occasion. "Have you ever tried discussing things with your mother and explaining that you don't think you should be giving up your future for the purpose of looking after the children she decided to have later in life?" >3 "We don't discuss things in my house. We communicate by a process of applied guilt." "Meaning?" "Meaning that when my mother didn't want me applying to colleges in the first place, she started off by sighing heavily and looking distressed whenever I mentioned them, and then she took to making a lot of references to her income and the difficulty of looking after the kids." "And during all this your father..." "Stared into space. This stuff is water off a duck's back with him." >t doily (You contemplate your options.) >[ack, my list went away!] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >x grant He has at the moment that kind of intense look of restrained energy and furious concentration that comes upon him when he's thinking about a subject that interests him. Hair a little dishevelled, perhaps. He's dressed in a black wool coat, which pretty much obscures anything else. "I guess you could take up a program of whinging about how your future is being ruined and you will never be able to do anything useful with your life because of having to look after your brothers," he says. "I recommend taking to the chaise longue, if you have one at your house, and waving smelling salts under your nose. If that doesn't work, progress to some more serious illness." >4 "Nope, no chaise longue." "My father has one. We could loan it to you for the time being. It's a discreet brown velveteen appropriate to any decor style." Rain continues to patter against the window. "Do you at least have somewhere you can go to be by yourself for a while? To get away from things?" >1 "What do you think I'm doing here?" "Heh." "Seriously -- I had to pay a babysitter to watch my brothers so that I could do something else for a while before I killed them." "Your mother doesn't give you any time to yourself?" "She takes them off my hands for study purposes. So if I'm up in my room reading a textbook-- and she will just randomly walk into my room sometimes without knocking, so reading, say, a novel instead will not work-- then she will look after them. If she finds me not working, she will decide that I'm obviously not busy and thus available to take over for her when she's exhausted and overwrought. And she's always exhausted and overwrought." He takes a sip of the tea. "Gah," he says, making a face. "I spent a lot of time during high school down at the Egyptian," he goes on. "This was before they renovated it, you know, and it was a wreck in there-- all the plush had come off the seats in the main area and it was pretty skanky, so I'd sit up in the balcony where the wooden seats were." >1 "Was the Egyptian even open? Weren't you afraid of being caught?" "You could get in through the side," says Grant. "I think they had people come around to look at the property from time to time -- after all, someone or other still did own it, it wasn't completely abandoned -- but no one ever caught me." You can hear the waiter extracting a dessert from the display case. "How long have you had your pen?" >1 "Since Ms. Littenberg's AP English class." He nods, as though this was somehow what he expected or wanted to hear. "Right, okay." Rain continues to patter against the window. "I don't think I ever saw you using it." Naturally not: he sat in front of you. And didn't turn around much. >2 "I got it because I saw yours and it looked cool." "The thing I remember most clearly of that whole class with Ms. Littenberg," he muses, "was the time she decided that she needed to do a dramatic staging of that speech from Lear -- do you remember this?" You shake your head. "It was stormy outside and she turned out the lights and brought in a huge red candle." The memory does come back to you now: the dance of shadows over her face, and her mezzo voice trying to approach the gravity of King Lear and simply coming out a bit silly. >2 "When I think of Ms. Littenberg I remember the damned squeak toy." Littenberg-- you tended to drop the title for private thinking-- Littenberg had a habit of pacing up and down the rows of chairs carrying a dog's squeak toy. Whenever she thought you weren't thinking hard enough or participating enough, she'd hold the thing next to your ear and squeeze. "It drew attention!" he protests. "Involved the students!" >2 "It was annoying as hell!" "Heh. Well, I have to concede that." In the background, laughter from an adjacent table. "This should amuse you," Grant says. "Apparently Ms. Littenberg in her spare time writes Regency romance novels under the pen name of Mystique Lacey." You blink. "Really?" >1 "Oh? Have you read any of them?" "Romance novels have always struck me as silly and pernicious," he says. "Encouraging a romantic understanding of what love is about that doesn't at all map onto the reality of human interaction." Rain streaks down the window. "Take your Harlequin romance, for instance," he goes on. "A bit conservative, a bit 1950s for the modern taste, but: they tend to turn on having a virginal heroine who tames the hero by resisting his sexual advances until marriage -- at which point she surrenders the only power she could wield, the right of refusal. It's archetypal but it's not very interesting." >2 "Your description of romance novels bears no resemblance whatever to ones I read." "Perhaps not, in that the modern romance tends to involve a little more premarital action, but the man still has to be subdued into marriage, tricked or compelled into letting his sensitive side show and his fear of commitment slide. Then suddenly as though struck by lightning he changes his whole view of the world," he says. "Allow me to suggest that the actual process of admitting someone to your life is slower and more fraught with complexities." >4 "Now you're just being pompous." "Maybe I could've phrased it better than that, okay. But I still don't ultimately find that sort of thing even very interesting." On the other side of the booth in which you sit, some little kid is bouncing up and down. You can feel it through the back of your seat. "Apparently Ms. Littenberg belongs to the Oregon Regency Reenactment society and spends her free afternoons in Portland, wearing a gown with an empire waist and drinking tea with other similarly-inclined people." >undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >2 "What is it that you're disdaining as a romantic conception of love?" "This idea, I suppose, that love is something transformative that happens to you from the outside, over which you have no control; that the presence of feeling makes all things possible, and the absence of it renders all things blank." In the background, the waiter extracting a dessert from the display case. "It doesn't sound as though you get along particularly well with any of your family." "No, that's fairly accurate." "And you have no more distant relatives to whom you can appeal for intervention?" >[Um, that was an odd transition, no?] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >1 "My grandfather's the only one who would have influence on Mom, and he's dead." "Ah." Grant takes off his glasses and polishes them carefully on the sleeve of his coat. "These things are a bugger, you know? But I hate contacts worse." "My grandparents died when I was pretty young. I'd met them a couple of times, but it didn't make much of an impression. I must have been, I don't know, six or seven, and since they lived in England I think I had a hard time separating 'dead' from 'away as usual.'" >1 "Your grandparents were English?" "Well, not exactly. I mean, ultimately, we have English blood, but in fact they were American citizens who went back there to live in some dramatic quest for their heritage. Or possibly just scones. They were native to New Jersey, and you'd figure that if they were going to be overcome by some retroactive nostalgia for the homeland of their ancestors, they'd go and live somewhere picturesque and interesting, like on a dairy farm in Devonshire or something." Outside, the light is slowly fading. "So you really minded that AP English so much? I thought it had some redeeming features whether or not you, er, appreciated Ms. Littenberg's teaching style; how can any class in which you read Tolstoy be a loss completely?" >2 "I didn't read Anna K. for Ms. Littenberg." "You'd already read it?" "No," you say, amused by his aghast expression. "I skipped it. Entirely. Not a word thereof passed my eyes. I wrote my paper on a different book for that section of the course and I said whatever popped into my head in class, and she had no clue." "Your loss," he remarks. "It's a good book." Grant pushes his glasses up his nose. >[He's right, you know ;-] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >1 "Do you like Tolstoy?" "Sure. It's great and muddy and grand, and not particularly like Dostoyevsky." In the background, laughter from an adjacent table. >1 "You dislike Dostoyevsky?" "Don't even let me get started. It's unendurable. Everyone's emotions run over like a vat of boiling borscht poured into a thimble; there's such a gush of strong feeling and strong philosophy, and he can't seem to make up his mind whether he's writing a story or an essay. Half the conversation is just an excuse to air opinions of his own." >3 "Which do you have a problem with, the borscht or the thimble?" "What?" "Is it the excessive quantity of the content that bothers you, or is it the inadequacy of the vessel into which it is put?" "Yes and yes, but most especially the excessive purplitude of the content. Borscht. The color! Yuk! Nothing is natural that has beets in it." You wait. He backs down. "You're right, of course. I'm getting carried away. And being facetious. What I meant is that there doesn't seem always to be much narrative momentum, just people sitting around spewing out ideas. Sometimes they're interesting ideas, but they're all stated in the most verbose mode possible." >2 "Couldn't you say that of Russian novels in general?" "Not at all. There are other novelists who don't just write for the sake of putting the greatest possible mass of words into the air, who don't just make their characters into talking heads for their own ideas; look at Turgenev, look at Tolstoy to a degree. They all have something more of a sense of mimesis, and Turgenev more than Tolstoy, so that the characterization of the character is allowed to some extent to dictate what gets said, and is not merely the idealization, the summation of a single position. Dostoyevsky allows his characters to talk as no one ever talks, in long periods without interruption, without the tics of dialect, without the modulation of even a bit of a physical gesture-- just speech." >[Woo mimesis!] That's not a verb I recognise. >2 "So you only like novels that are accurate about human character?" "It seems like it's something to strive for, at least." "Seems to me that that's only one of the possible points of literature." Rain continues to patter against the window. >2 "Literature is foremost to communicate something to the reader, don't you think?" "I think you're putting the question too simply. Look at it this way: suppose I'm an author and I write something and then Martians come to Earth and can't read it. Is that my fault?" He begins soaking a lump of hard sugar in his tea, scrutinizing its dissolution. >3 "It is if you were writing for a Martian audience. Writing is an act of communication. A text," you go on, "isn't an autonomous thing functioning away by itself, unconnected to author and reader. If you rip it out of its context and its audience, you run into trouble." "I couldn't agree more," he says. "I'd go so far as to say that the text makes its meaning by interaction with the culture in which it is born: that some is inherent and some is context, and that the thing itself is not all there is." In the background, the cash register ringing open. >1 "I liked the Italo Calvino we read." It comes out almost as a concession. "Right. Which one did we have in that class? Marcovaldo?" "And Invisible Cities," you say, "which was almost like poetry." "If I didn't know better I'd think you chose your favorites by length." Rain streaks down the window. >t books (You contemplate your options.) >t lit Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >t literature (You contemplate your options.) >t him (You contemplate your options.) >1 "People are strange." "Ayup." He, done messing with the sugar lump, pops it into his mouth casually and crunches up the rest, meanwhile doing some strange corkscrew twist of his bit of lemon peel in such a way that lemon oils spray out across the surface of the tea. >1 "Uh... does that business with the lemon peel do anything?" "Nah," he says. "It's practice." "Practice for what?" "Bartending trick. You spray lemon oil across the surface of a freshly prepared martini and it looks cool. But you can't drink martinis all the time." A red Jag pulls down the street, its headlights illumining the water on the windowpane. >1 "You want to be a bartender?" You can't help it; it comes out disbelieving. "No, I don't want to be a bartender," says Grant. "But I'm always interested in arcane arts.." He pushes a stray bit of hair out of his face. "I learned to fence in part because I like odd behavior." >1 "Does carrying a concealed weapon around get you into trouble?" "It's concealed," he points out. "Most people figure that I need it for walking." Faint smile. "I don't use it on people. At least, not on people who haven't agreed to the terms in advance. Besides, there's a button on it." On the other side of the booth in which you sit, some little kid is bouncing up and down. You can feel it through the back of your seat. "My mother saw the advertisement at the library that there was a fencing instructor in town taking on new pupils. Which she brought home and showed it to me: I believe because it used a typeface she particularly admired," he adds. "Anyway. I decided to give the guy a call, and the rest, as they say, is history.." >1 "What's a button?" "Thing that goes on the end of the foil to make sure that it doesn't go sticking into anyone. So the most damage you can inflict is a small but painful bruise, unless you're aiming for the eye or some other specially susceptible spot. And when you fence you wear a mask and body padding." Grant pushes a stray bit of hair out of his face. "He wanted to meet with me, so I went to see him down at the park. I went down there, but the only person I could see was this wizened old man." He chuckles. "It was like something out of the movies, you know, this ancient master whom no one takes seriously until he shows his tremendous powers and takes the young apprentice in hand-- anyway, he was this old Italian guy who had learned his art in the old country, and it turned out that he was looking for someone WORTHY to pass it on to." He grimaces a little. "He died last year. My father performed the funeral. And there I'd figured the old guy would be Catholic for sure." >1 "So you're now a fencer?" "You laugh, but that's about the sum of it," he says. "There are fencing meets and so on, in Portland and other places. I've gone to a few; they also asked me once to teach a few guys over in the drama department how to handle a sword so that they didn't look like idiots on stage, but that was more frustration than it was worth, frankly. Stage fencing is-- a flamboyant activity, and not particularly precise.." >1 "How is stage fencing different from 'real' fencing?" "Stage fencing is not much like the real thing. Real fencing has rules, for one thing. There are places you aim for and places you don't." He catches your glimmer of amusement, but doesn't comment. "Besides that, there's the issue of color. Fencing done properly is a controlled thing, without a lot of circling and climbing on furniture; you move back and forth, and that's about it." Over the radio, you hear Mozart's "Requiem." "Ssh," says Grant suddenly, holding up a finger. In utter stillness, you attend to the Lacrimosa; then the music passes into the hands of $$$$Sussmayer, and the spell is broken. >[$$$$Sussmayer?] That's not a verb I recognise. >1 "I didn't know you liked Classical music." "I don't know music particularly well," he replies. "A few corners of it. In most respects I'm deaf to the things that musicians care about, as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, there are pieces that seem as articulate, and as moving, as a speech in words. And Mozart's Requiem is one of them." >2 "I wish I knew what made a piece of music do that." "So you know what I mean?" "Yes." "It's not the lyrics--" "No," you agree. "No, lyrics get in the way. It's something about the music itself, that makes it seem to be about something-- consolation, or joy." You become aware of his fixed attention and break off, embarrassed. He runs a finger along the edge of the table. He looks at you thoughtfully. "I think you're a Romantic by nature," he says. "And not the kind with a little r either, but the kind that likes craggy landscapes and sees a certain nobility in poverty." >2 "Aren't those people all poets or something?" "Some of them. Do you mean you're not one?" Again that level grey gaze as though he were going to bore through you. It seems not exactly a casual question, but to turn it aside would probably reveal as much as answering it would; and you've never been much of a liar. >1 "I occasionally write poetry. Or have done so, at least." He just waits. "I think it's mandatory for teenage girls who are unhappy," you elaborate. "I hope you won't take it as a sign of my character." >t me (You contemplate your options.) >z In the background, the cash register ringing open. "Did we have anything other than English together?" >1 "Biology." Two hours a week in lab, but it's not surprising he doesn't remember you there: you were always slung against the wall in misery, nauseated by the formaldehyde fumes, while Fred sliced and diced your mutual frog. "Seph Antibe was my lab partner. Most of the year, anyway." You remember that, of course, though you hadn't actually remembered her name until now: a gloomy, Gothic girl who seemed to have a permanent case of sniffles. If it had been someone else, you might have resented her, but she was so plump and so morose that it was hard to regard her as competition. >1 "Most of the year? I don't remember--" "Seph spent a fair amount of time out of school when Tyler killed himself." Tyler Whitfield. You haven't thought of him much since his funeral three years ago. Rain streaks down the window. "Did you like Bio?" >1 "Do you know why Tyler killed himself?" "Yes, a bit. It's a strange story." "Oh?" There's a long silence while he contemplates what he wants to say. "Actually, I guess boiled down to its essentials it's not even that odd," he says. "Though melodramatic. You think of people nowadays killing themselves for reasons relating to terrible boredom and weariness and angst, but his reasons were more old-fashioned and romantic: he fell in love with a girl who wasn't interested in him." >2 "As simple as that?" "It was a bit complicated by the fact that he was good friends with this girl and her best friend, and somewhere along the line he realized that they were lesbians and had secretly been involved with each other for a long time." >1 He glances away, looking out the window to let you talk. "It was snowing. The pall-bearers kept slipping on the cobbles on Church Road and everyone seemed to be annoyed about something." He nods. "The family was enormously embarrassed," he says. "They were descendants of the Startons; they didn't think anything like that could happen to them, and here was their son not being buried in hallowed ground." "This is the thing I don't understand about high school in general, I guess," he says. "People have or claim to have these crushes which are blazingly important to them, but none of their relationships ever last, so what's the point? I guess I don't see how anyone could feel that strongly about anyone at that point in their life." You flinch. >1 "Romeo and Juliet were 14." "People were adults younger then. Besides," he says, "I don't see them as a stirling example of mental health." He sips his tea again. >1 "Whereas you think this love stuff is all a matter of choice." "No, but I think emotion is just one of many possible forces on a person, with habit and circumstance and will all playing in as well; to overcome one for the sake of another is not a simple matter." The red-and-white pole outside the barbershop clicks on, lit from the inside. >2 "Have you ever been in love?" He squirms, a little uncomfortable with this direct an approach. "I wouldn't say I've ever been in love with anyone. I've been attracted to people, but that's arguably not the same." Grant pushes his glasses up his nose. He leans forward. >3 "I had a huge crush on you in high school." Moments pass; your pulse is oddly swift. Not, of course, that it matters a damn what he thinks of you now-- it's too late, if there was ever a time-- and in any case... But humiliation is still humiliation. Something to avoid. He is still frowning out the window. >2 "Don't worry about it, it's not important now." "I don't know that I was worried," he says, finally looking directly at you again. A flicker of a smile. "A bit flattered, perhaps, and a bit uncertain how one responds to such announcements." >2 "You only have to respond if the announcement is in the present tense," you remark. "Otherwise you can simply smile and nod, or if you're feeling cruel, say something like, 'I suspected as much at the time!' Generous leads to, 'wow, I wish I'd known that'; polite is, 'ah, thank you'; and if you're too startled to think of anything else some of us have been known to resort -- and I'm not recommending this but only mentioning it because it is the only one I myself have tried -- to 'uh, well, that's ok.' "Heh. A wealth of options. To answer the implied question: no, I didn't know at the time; I wish I'd been aware of it, but I seem to have been oblivious to a lot of things; thank you; and here is my smile and nod:" and he demonstrates. He runs a finger along the edge of the table. >1 "What is love?" "Love is, I think, about action, not about sensation; the experience of 'being in love' is some fleeting hormonal thing, and what matters in the long term is what you do. A consistent motivation that makes you place the other person's interests on a level with or above your own, that's love. The rest is just, I don't know, poetic flourishing." The silence is punctuated by the clinking of silverware and china. He pushes his glasses up his nose. >1 "How is your definition of love different from a general altruism, though?" "Hmm. Perhaps it's not -- though I would add that my general altruism doesn't extend very far when it comes to most people. So part of the question with romantic love, which is I gather what we're concentrating on here, is how responsible or involved you feel, I suppose. Everything about the other person becomes your business, whereas with strangers I don't feel invited to comment on all of their inappropriate behavior." There's a pause, then the beginning of the pulsating tunes of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo. >1 "If being in love means correcting someone, how is that different from being their parent?" "That wasn't quite what I meant. At all. I'm not setting myself forth as some kind of moral arbiter. Especially not in any nonreciprocal sense. That was just an example; look at it this way. If you find out that a stranger is an alcoholic, that's too bad, but it's not yours to try to correct. If your wife is, that's more of a concern." Rain continues to patter against the window. >1 "I don't think anyone has the right to be a moral arbiter for anyone else." "No? So you'd rather that your friends watch you do things that you shouldn't, and make no comment?" Over the radio, you hear "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" (as sung by Madonna). >1 "Would you want me commenting if you did something I didn't approve of? Hypothetically." "Well, but do we--" "Would you?" He shrugs as though making a concession. "Sure, all right. I suppose I could take it. I don't know that I'd agree with you that what I was doing was a bad idea -- we haven't spent enough time comparing notes for me to know how our moral structures line up, and mutual knowledge is, I think, another aspect of this picture. But leave that to the side. Why, have I done something that you thought was morally wrong? Other than walking off with your pen, which we've established was an error." "No; I was just curious how you would deal with it, I suppose." The sodium lamps come on outside. He runs a finger along the edge of the table. >drink cappucino It's warm and welcome. "Oh, hey, you've got foam on your nose." He reaches across the table and wipes it off with his thumb. You blink. A sort of buzzing comes into your head for a moment. Grant sits up straight. "This is funny, but-- do you remember the 3Nigma Club?" You feel your ears burning. This is not a turn you expected or wanted the conversation to take. >1 "Sure, I remember." The effort at non-chalance comes out poorly, on the whole. "The thing about 3Nigma that fascinated me is that the messages and pranks and so on all felt as though they had some message to impart," he says. "And even if you couldn't tell what the message was, it was still attractive and fascinating in a way to contemplate and wonder...." >1 "What was your first encounter with 3Nigma?" "It was when they left tarot cards in some of the lockers-- do you remember this?" Quite vividly; somewhere or other, you probably still have the list you made of which cards should go to whom. "And that impressed you?" "I don't know what I thought of it at the time. Later as more and more people found them it started to seem more and more interesting, and I got disappointed I hadn't been included. I remember Jenny Samantha throwing hers away and Jason Crawford gluing his to the inside of his locker because he thought the chyk on the card was 'a real babe.' I quote directly." Rain continues to patter against the window. "3Nigma was the only clique," he muses, "that I wished I could be part of, and wasn't, in high school. I had no desire to fit in with the computer people or the yearbook people or the chess club or, heaven help us, the rugby players. The drama gang was a bit more tolerable, but we had different purposes in life and were content to coexist without overlapping too much... "But 3Nigma, 3Nigma was like the Illuminati of high school. They knew stuff." >2 "What makes you think 3Nigma knew that much more than anyone else?" "This is one of those cases where the illusion is more powerful than the reality." "Then you should be glad you weren't part of the reality." He half smiles. "Except that I would still have liked to know the people who were clever enough to be a part of that." He lifts his cup. "Ever get any messages from the 3Nigma guys?" The 3Nigma guys. Three because there were three of you; three because three seemed symbolic; three for the inverted E. You and Robin and Fred, who were, once upon a time, the anti-clique, the Three Musketeers, the oracular fates: you had all sorts of names for yourselves, and all sorts of plans for what you were going to do, and in the end you accomplished none of it. Nothing but making each other unhappy and ruining the friendship, such as it had been. >1 "I never exactly got a message from 3Nigma, no," you say carefully. "But something did happen with them?" He can't let anything drop, can he? >2 "They took something of mine they had no right to." "Ah." In the background, the cash register ringing open. "Seph Antibe-- she was a friend of mine-- got some notes from 3Nigma, but they were mostly of the totally-cryptic-puzzle variety rather than the practical joke variety or the disturbing-fortune-cookie sort." Weird. You can't remember writing anything that you would have described as a 'disturbing fortune cookie,' though it is of course possible that Robin or Fred did. >1 "Disturbing fortune cookie?" you repeat. "Didn't you ever see any of those? They had these statements like, 'the Anger of the Cosmos is Focused Upon Your Ears'." He sips his tea again. >2 "I was a member of 3Nigma." "Ah." Long silence while he looks at you; it's hard to tell what wheels are turning in his head. "And who else was in it? Assorted cheerleaders and members of the band?" "It was me and Robin and Fred; just the three of us, never anyone else." Grant pushes a stray bit of hair out of his face. He puts his elbows on the table. >undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >1 "Sounds like it was invented at random. Possibly by someone listening to NSync." Grant laughs. A couple of women pass your table on the way to the bathroom. Grant runs a finger along the edge of the table. >2 "3Nigma worked on observation, logistical cunning, and a taste for the bizarre," you remark. "There wasn't anything they knew that couldn't be known just by watching people and listening carefully, and there wasn't anything they did that wasn't simple organization." In the background, the espresso machine steaming a drink. >z He sips his tea again. >1 "I was a member of 3Nigma." "Ah." Long silence while he looks at you; it's hard to tell what wheels are turning in his head. "And who else was in it? Assorted cheerleaders and members of the band?" "It was me and Robin and Fred; just the three of us, never anyone else." A moment passes. "So there's something I have from high school, from 3Nigma," he says. You say nothing. "Come now," he says. "Presumably you remember this." And he produces it from the depths of his coat-- the cardboard cover blotched with pink and yellow hilighter in the interstices of the black and white pattern, the pages dog-eared a little and thickened by a coffee stain, but otherwise pristine, no different than it was on the day you threw it away. "You know," he says, "I spent years wondering who wrote it and how it was that I missed noticing them. I should have realized it was just a malicious prank, but somehow I thought more of 3Nigma than that." >1 "'Malicious prank'?" you repeat carefully. "Wasn't I supposed to feel guilty when I got this? For tormenting you and making you unhappy and so on? When in point of fact I hadn't done anything to you at all--" >1 "What makes you think it's mine?" "It's all in black fountain pen, for a start," he says. "Which was what made me think of it in the first place. It's full of pages and pages of poetry in the style of a sort of contemporary Emily Dickinson, for a second-- how much of the world's supply of dashes did you use up just on this one thing?" Your cheeks stain an involuntary red. "For another thing-- and I don't mean to sound egocentric here-- I sense that you were perhaps not wholly indifferent to me in high school." A pause. "I won't claim that I've been pining all this time for whoever wrote the notebook, but I have been wondering-- who it was, why I missed it," he adds. "Whether it was a hopeless case or just something that I failed to recognize the virtues of at the time." >1 "I did write it." "Okay then." "It just seemed like an embarrassing issue to raise," you say. "I never meant you to see that. The situation wasn't under my control." "Understood." No one says anything for a little bit. "Well," he says, "you have this back-- and your pen-- and I've done as much as I can do here, and it's getting late." He stands up, collecting his stick and leaving some cash for the bill. "Um, hey, also. I realize that this is officially the Wrong Time to ask this and that I should go home and wait a couple days and then try calling you, but I had negative luck with that last time, so-- how would you be disposed to-- I mean, um, would you feel weird about-- you want to see a movie at the Egyptian, or something?" *** The End *** Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, or QUIT? > 1 Please give one of the answers above. > [Awww, what a sweet game.] Please give one of the answers above. > [The last conversation option is still down there, BTW (1: "I did write it.") Please give one of the answers above. > [Also, it'd be nice if the options were cleared for the pauses. I kept thinking the game hadn't noticed I picked one of them, and was still there.] Please give one of the answers above. > restart Press H for instructions, or any other key to begin the game. "Damn it! Watch where you're going, can't you?" There's an awkward scuffle while he retrieves his balance. It takes several moments, because his feet are entangled with yours and his movements hampered by the bulk of his coat. You lose your footing, and end up having to catch yourself on the wall of the lighthouse. So you don't really take it in at first, but, notwithstanding his resemblance to a drowned rat, he is still himself. Grant Stern. He of the rosewood swordstick and the poetical hands, the grey gaze and the 18th century bearing. >[Thinking about it, I get it--he got my pen, and it made him think the notebook was mine. Heh. Cute.] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >[Also, 'swordstick' made me think it was some kind of alternate future/present or something.] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >x coat You can't see any such thing. >x lighthouse You can't see any such thing. >[heh.] That's not a verb I recognise. >x grant Dressed in the usual black wool coat (not very unlike yours), with black jeans and (from what you can see) one of those tab-collar shirts, onto which his hair is dripping steadily. Water is trickling between his eyes. "Fuck." He stops patting his pockets and looks down at you. "You've made me lose my pen," he says. "Congratulations." (Several stabs into the undergrowth with his swordstick.) "The karmic repercussions will be severe. Expect to live your next life as a dung beetle." You know the pen he means-- or at least, it seems likely that he's still using it, the black fountain pen with a gold clip. Exactly like yours, though you never learnt to write in that peculiar elegant backslant of his. A left-handed trick. >2 "How is that my fault? You weren't looking where you were going." Anger comes swift and steadying. He ignores you and gives the scrubby little bush another vicious thwack, drenching you and your papers (which you'd managed to keep dry until now) with the backspray. >1 "Thanks ever so." Not that it matters, with the rain still coming down. His gaze lights on your pen. "You've had it all along!" he announces. "What have you got between your ears, cotton?" And he snatches the pen and takes off with it. You scramble to your feet. "HEY!" But he doesn't look back; and you stand there in the rain and contemplate the aesthetic incompetence of a universe that would bring the bane of your existence back into your life just to steal your favorite pen. A week or so later, maybe. (Afterwards, you won't remember with certainty.) It's pouring again, the steady monotonous rain that plagues the northwest in the fall. You've sought refuge at the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop, which is at least out of the house; but you find your mind crowding with events you've done your best to put aside: your infatuation with Grant, the formation and dissolution of 3Nigma, the notebook; Robin, and Fred, both of whom are off somewhere doing something now no doubt. >[He really seems like a completely different person in the prologue. Did he evolve in your head as you wrote the piece?] That's not a verb I recognise. >think about robin Robin was, with Fred, one of your best friends in high school; the three of you formed 3Nigma, and it was only when she got carried away and revealed your private notebook to Grant that you stopped speaking to her. Fred somehow got caught in the blast radius of that explosion, and you haven't talked to him much since, either. >think about fred Much the mellower of your two high school friends and fellow 3Nigma-ers. He had a kind of placid, almost dreamy outlook on reality, in which he was aware of physical objects but complex things like emotions did not fully register on his radar. He would listen with something like exasperation to your confidences about Grant, but he was generally supportive and even (in his peculiar brotherly way) affectionate. >think about grant The intense scrutiny of the year you were in love with him has made all his gestures, his expressions and movements, entirely familiar, and it is hard on that account alone not to think of him as a friend. But his character is a more complicated and less scrutable matter. Suddenly you become aware of someone standing over your table. "Good, you're still here. I saw you through the window and ran home immediately." He does seem to be breathing a bit hard. He sets your pen on the table. "I am here to humbly beg your forgiveness for insulting you and making off with your personal possessions. All week my conscience has been haunted by the vision of you crouched in a garret writing with a lumpy Bic." >3 "Oh, when I lose my pen I use a quill dipped in goat's blood." He slants you an odd, sidelong glance. "I see. I hadn't really taken you for that type, but that just goes to show one can never tell." He shifts from foot to foot. Grant slides into the seat opposite yours, setting his cane so that it leans against the booth. Now, if you can just get rid of him again without revealing anything too embarrassing about The Past, everything should be fine. The fact that he's sticking around to talk to you in the first place is a little unnerving, all the same. (It isn't, you think with a twinge of Old Bitterness, as though he generally had time to talk to you in the past.) >3 "Planning to stay long?" you ask pointedly. "I thought I'd have something to warm me up. I'm soaking wet." The silence is punctuated by the waiter extracting a dessert from the display case. "My own pen was sitting on my desk at home. I normally carry it in my pocket, but apparently I left it there." One of the waiters materializes by the table, scooping up the menu. "Hi. I am, like, so sorry to interrupt but my boss sent me over to make you order something." He rolls his eyes. Grant leans back in his seat. "What's good today?" "Well, we've got a very nice mocha today with just a kiss of hazelnut syrup," he suggests. "Then on top goes whipped cream with the chef's specialty, cinnamon hand-ground in an imported Brazilian cherry-wood grinder." >1 "I don't think you ask that kind of question here," you mutter. "Ah, the ordering of drinks is a subtler art than you know," Grant replies. "Observe and learn." He turns to the waiter. "Do you have any lemons?" "We certainly do." "Okay. I'd like a small pot of freshly boiling water and two Earl Grey teabags in a mug. Do not attempt to begin brewing the tea yourself, please. On a separate plate, I will require a strip of lemon peel-- the full circumference of the lemon at the center, that is, no half-measures-- and two cubes of raw sugar. That would be the light brown kind. Also one cookie, the driest you have." The waiter's jaw drops, expressive not so much of annoyance as of awe. Grant turns to you. "Want anything?" He glances at your cup. "It looks like you're still working on that." >2 "Yeah, I'm still drinking this, thanks." No one says anything for a little bit. "Great! I will be right back with your order." The waiter vanishes. >1 "Do you always torture waiters?" He smiles. "A man has to have his standards. Besides, he's probably bored out of his head." >1 "Do you come in here much?" He looks around thoughtfully. "When I was in high school, yeah, I used to come in here all the time. I don't think I've been back since I graduated, until now." He nods at the ficus. "That's new. The rest of it is about the same, as far as I can recall." For a moment there's no noise but the espresso machine steaming a drink. "How long have you had your pen?" >1 "Since Ms. Littenberg's AP English class." He nods, as though this was somehow what he expected or wanted to hear. "Right, okay." Rain continues to patter against the window. "I don't think I ever saw you using it." Naturally not: he sat in front of you. And didn't turn around much. >[Hey, I don't have that option I had last time. Heh.] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >1 "Well, I did have it. I just didn't bring it to school much." "The thing I remember most clearly of that whole class with Ms. Littenberg," he muses, "was the time she decided that she needed to do a dramatic staging of that speech from Lear -- do you remember this?" You shake your head. "It was stormy outside and she turned out the lights and brought in a huge red candle." The memory does come back to you now: the dance of shadows over her face, and her mezzo voice trying to approach the gravity of King Lear and simply coming out a bit silly. >1 "You were lucky: Ms. Littenberg liked you. It's a good thing she had NO ear for parody, or she would have been a lot less receptive." Whenever called upon to do one of Ms. Littenberg's irritating style exercises Grant had always managed to produce a lampoon that left the teacher on a cloud of bliss and the rest of the class twitching in their seats with concealed laughter. "Even if she had caught on, what would she have done about it?" Grant adjusts his glasses. >1 "What she did to me," you say tartly. "Oh?" "Namely, take you aside and tell you that your attitude exemplifies everything that is sad and unhappy about our world today, and that if the youth could set aside their cynicism, open themselves to their emotions, dig down deep inside and reveal their innermost feelings, it would all be a better place..." "What bs. If everyone in high school revealed their innermost feelings what you'd have would be, not Universal Peace and Harmony, but a war." Rain continues to patter against the window. "You know," he adds. "People are always going on and on about the value of sincerity. But I'm inclined to prefer etiquette over sincerity, since you can say what you mean in a perfectly horrible fashion; but as long as everyone at least plays by the same rules, chaos does not completely take over." >t chaos Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >t etiquette (You contemplate your options.) >drink coffe You can't see any such thing. >drink coffee It's warm and welcome. "Social rules are a wonderful thing," he remarks. "They make everything possible. You couldn't communicate without it: the actual content of what you say is only a small part of communication, and then there's body language, and timing -- what the pragmatics people call chronemics -- and your tone of voice, and whether you're responding to something I said or changing the subject, and whether it's an appropriate topic to have raised at all... and so on and so on and so on. I risk monologue, which is a gaffe in itself." >t social Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >t me (You contemplate your options.) >t him (You contemplate your options.) >t waiter Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >t coffee (You contemplate your options.) >t here (You contemplate your options.) >t high school (You contemplate your options.) > I beg your pardon? >1 "People are strange." He seems faintly taken aback by the turn of the conversation, but he goes ahead gamely anyway. "Ayup." The waiter appears at this moment with Grant's tea, arranged on a tray. This turns out to be a multi-stage production involving several plates, a pot of boiling water, the teabags removed from their wrappers but pristine and dry; a long strip of lemon artistically curved on itself; a stack of exactly three hard square-ish cookies; and a doily. You have never received a doily here on any occasion. >t doily (You contemplate your options.) >t waiter Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >sigh That's not a verb I recognise. >x tea It's still in a kind of preparatory state. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" >1 "I have twin brothers." "You know, since I got back I've run into these twin girls about five times. They're always wearing little black or purple dresses--" "Pinot and Noir," you say. "Speaking of evil names to give children." "Good god." "They're the daughters of Rick Dark, the winery guy. His wife is the kind of woman who thinks that that's cute." No one says anything for a moment as you gloomily contemplate what sorts of people those must be. >drink coffee It's warm and welcome. >x me You're tired but at least somewhat calmed by having been out of the house for a while. Rain streaks down the window. "You know, this morning I found Dad standing outside in the rain putting snails in a bucket." "Why?" "He said he thought they were going to drown," Grant replies. "Though I figure it is much more probable that they'd drown in the bucket than out of it." He frowns into the middle distance for a bit. "It's a bit worrying. My father has never been quite the same since Mom's departure." >1 "What's your mother do?" "My mother lives in Arizona with her lover. I haven't seen her for three years, though she has been kind enough to send pictures of the two of them together." He runs a finger along the edge of the table. "This guy Mom wound up with is a, how does he call himself, sculptor of western scenes. He wears silver and turquoise belts and he constructs finely detailed bronze pieces showing such stirring topics as how to lasso a bronco. She says he has 'put her back in touch with her spiritual side,' which is odd considering that he doesn't believe in much of anything other than ripping off the tourists who come through Phoenix. I'm told he's quite a success, however." >3 "Why are you telling me all this?" "Ah-- just making conversation, I suppose," he says. "I don't know many people here at the moment." The waiter passes by the table with a tray of alfalfa-laden sandwiches. He snorts. "Regis. How he got into the western art business is anyone's guess. I would have expected they throw you out at the door for having a name like that." >1 "What are this guy's sculptures like?" "I looked up his website." Grant fastidiously examines his fingernails. "The first clue to his lack of aesthetic sensibility was probably when I noticed that the man uses blink tags and an animated gif of a galloping horse." You glance in his direction. A strange crushing familiarity settles on you. As long as it has been since you even laid eyes on him, you know the line of nose and chin by heart; and lust remembered is not very different from the present-moment sort. "Mom sent us a bunch of pictures from a roadtrip they went on. Which when you think about it is a pretty phenomenal thing to do. 'Hi, honey! Having a great time! Glad you're not here because you'd really get in the way of me boinking my new boyfriend! Who, by the way, is using this trip as an opportunity to gather more sketches for his so-called art." >1 "Ouch." He doesn't say anything, just sets his jaw a little and runs his hand through his hair. >1 "Are you mad at her for not coming back to visit?" "When Dad divorced her I was glad that he was finally getting her all the way out of our lives." A couple of beats pass. "I know how that sounds," he adds. "But you know I don't think it would do him any good to ever talk to her again. She's morally bankrupt and totally without any sense of empathy. So on the whole it's not the kind of situation where her absence is a big loss." >3 "How did your father react to your mother's departure?" "He spent about three months wandering around our house looking for the ghost of her. If I hadn't cooked he would've starved to death because he never remembered to eat. He didn't do anything, in fact. The only thing he could remember was that he was supposed to go on writing sermons. They weren't very good sermons even so. And I had to get a supply priest to come in and perform all the marriages for a while there." Rain continues to patter against the window. >1 "So your father -- who is he?" "Dad's the rector over at Saint Cecily's Episcopal. We moved there about six years ago. He lives in the so-called vicarage there." There's a pause, then the beginning of Mozart's "Requiem." "Ssh," says Grant suddenly, holding up a finger. In utter stillness, you attend to the Lacrimosa; then the music passes into the hands of $$$$Sussmayer, and the spell is broken. >[Ack $$$$Sussmayer] That's not a verb I recognise. >t father (the his father) (You contemplate your options.) >1 "Do you get along with your father?" "Most of the time. He's a decent person and doesn't disturb me much. If he also doesn't particularly understand me, perhaps that's not his fault. In any case he wasn't abusive, he wasn't too restrictive, and he mostly leaves me alone, which is what I would ask for if I were selecting a parent for myself." >1 "It's too bad we can't do that, isn't it?" >t fine then, don't respond (You contemplate your options.) That's not a verb I recognise. >[Woah, that was weird. No options at all, then verb not recognized, then three options.] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >[All about art. How did we get on *that* topic?] That's not a verb I recognise. >1 "I disliked most of my classes in high school; studio art was okay, though." "Any particular reason?" "Mm, mostly that we were left alone to work on things. It felt like the only time I had that didn't belong to someone else. So it wasn't about being self-expressive or whatever, just about having some quiet, I guess." He takes a sip of the tea. "Gah," he says, making a face. "I attempted to take studio," he goes on. "It was not an unqualified success. I turned out to be so disastrously bad with a pencil that I dropped the class before we got to what I wanted to do, namely, slather paint around." >1 "Something wrong with that?" you ask. "No, but I forgot to add sugar. Tastes like old socks without, you know?" On the whole it looks fairly weak to you, because, despite his use of two teabags, he didn't dip them for very long. The water is still fairly clear. But de gustibus. For a moment there's no noise but the clinking of silverware and china. >put sugar in tea You can't see any such thing. >get sugar You can't see any such thing. >x tea It's still in a kind of preparatory state. Across the street, a couple of women emerge from the quilt shop with bags of remnant cloth. One of them stumbles, letting free a train of red-gold cotton that quickly darkens in the rain. "Did we have anything other than English together?" >1 "Biology." Two hours a week in lab, but it's not surprising he doesn't remember you there: you were always slung against the wall in misery, nauseated by the formaldehyde fumes, while Fred sliced and diced your mutual frog. "Seph Antibe was my lab partner. Most of the year, anyway." You remember that, of course, though you hadn't actually remembered her name until now: a gloomy, Gothic girl who seemed to have a permanent case of sniffles. If it had been someone else, you might have resented her, but she was so plump and so morose that it was hard to regard her as competition. >3 "What kind of a name is Seph?" "Short for Persephone," he says. Seeing the expression on your face, he adds, "I'm not sure you have room to be disdainful, 'Helen'." On the other side of the booth in which you sit, some little kid is bouncing up and down. You can feel it through the back of your seat. "Seph spent a fair amount of time out of school when Tyler killed himself." Tyler Whitfield. You haven't thought of him much since his funeral three years ago. >3 "Were Seph and Tyler close?" "He killed himself because he was obsessed with Seph." "Seph?" you repeat, a little incredulously. It's hard to imagine anyone being insanely in love with Seph, so gloomy and always apparently dripping just a little; but perhaps the attraction of black eyeliner was greater than you could have guessed. "She was having a relationship with Lydia Valor," Grant explains. >1 "Are you still friends with Seph and Lydia?" "With Seph, yeah. Technically. I haven't seen her since I got home, so I'm not sure how much that counts. But I didn't become not-friends with her on purpose, we'll put it that way." More customers emerge from the quilt shop, empty-handed this time. "Did you like Bio?" >1 "I wasn't very good at it." "Too much memorization?" "Too much cutting things into bits." Grant begins soaking a lump of hard sugar in his tea, scrutinizing its dissolution. >1 "Mostly Fred did the dissections while I watched." Finding yourself needing to justify this, you add, "I did a lot of the written work for us. He didn't really like it." "I found the dissections therapeutic," he says. "And I don't mean the way some people like to play shooting games to satisfy the inner testosterone-voice, but because it was such precise careful work that it was almost artistic, like sculpting." >2 "That only works if the formaldehyde doesn't make you want to puke." "I imagine so, yes." He pushes a stray bit of hair out of his face. >1 "Do you sculpt?" "Absolutely not." Strange look. "Some of my least favorite people are sculptors." Rain continues to patter against the window. >t art (You contemplate your options.) >2 "What sort of art do you like?" "Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that. The pre-Raphaelites. Giotto. Japanese woodblock printing of the 18th century, the ukiyo-e prints." You can hear laughter from an adjacent table. >2 "What's ukiyo-e?" You stumble a bit, hoping you don't mangle the words. "I don't think it's a term I've encountered." "Because it's not western," he replies; and adds, "and because it's all pictures of actors and prostitutes." This last with a flash of what looks like humor to the untrained eye. "They're popular sheets that were handed around to celebrate, well, celebrities." He, done messing with the sugar lump, pops it into his mouth casually and crunches up the rest, meanwhile doing some strange corkscrew twist of his bit of lemon peel in such a way that lemon oils spray out across the surface of the tea. >2 "Uh... does that business with the lemon peel do anything?" "Nah," he says. "It's practice." "Practice for what?" "Bartending trick. You spray lemon oil across the surface of a freshly prepared martini and it looks cool. But you can't drink martinis all the time." Grant takes off his glasses and polishes them carefully on the sleeve of his coat. "These things are a bugger, you know? But I hate contacts worse." >2 "You want to be a bartender?" You can't help it; it comes out disbelieving. "No, I don't want to be a bartender," he says. "But I'm always interested in arcane arts.." There's a pause, then the beginning of a lilting song by Ice Cream Afterglow. "I learned to fence in part because I like odd behavior." >2 "How did you get into fencing?" "My mother saw the advertisement at the library that there was a fencing instructor in town taking on new pupils. Which she brought home and showed it to me: I believe because it used a typeface she particularly admired," Grant remarks. "Anyway. I decided to give the guy a call, and the rest, as they say, is history.." He pushes his glasses up his nose. "He wanted to meet with me, so I went to see him down at the park. I went down there, but the only person I could see was this wizened old man." He chuckles. "It was like something out of the movies, you know, this ancient master whom no one takes seriously until he shows his tremendous powers and takes the young apprentice in hand-- anyway, he was this old Italian guy who had learned his art in the old country, and it turned out that he was looking for someone WORTHY to pass it on to." He grimaces a little. "He died last year. My father performed the funeral. And there I'd figured the old guy would be Catholic for sure." >2 "So you're now a fencer?" "You laugh, but that's about the sum of it," he says. "There are fencing meets and so on, in Portland and other places. I've gone to a few; they also asked me once to teach a few guys over in the drama department how to handle a sword so that they didn't look like idiots on stage, but that was more frustration than it was worth, frankly. Stage fencing is-- a flamboyant activity, and not particularly precise.." >2 "How is stage fencing different from 'real' fencing?" "Stage fencing is not much like the real thing. Real fencing has rules, for one thing. There are places you aim for and places you don't." He catches your glimmer of amusement, but doesn't comment. "Besides that, there's the issue of color. Fencing done properly is a controlled thing, without a lot of circling and climbing on furniture; you move back and forth, and that's about it." Rain continues to patter against the window. "I like a pursuit that involves a certain amount of discipline, and an etiquette. Stage fencing does not include those things." >t fencing (You contemplate your options.) >1 "Does carrying a concealed weapon around get you into trouble?" "It's concealed," he points out. "Most people figure that I need it for walking." Faint smile. "I don't use it on people. At least, not on people who haven't agreed to the terms in advance. Besides, there's a button on it." Grant runs a finger along the edge of the table. >x table A heavy blond-wood slab, somewhat roughed up. Probably a reject from the local antique shop. "I think I more or less had books rather than friends in high school. There might have been no one to talk to, but I could read, and in the reading come to the conclusion that I wasn't actually as alone as I thought I was." >1 "I'm not in touch with my friends from high school." (All two of them.) He looks sympathetic. "I don't talk much to my high school friends these days," he observes. "In a couple of cases that's for cause, but mostly it's just... I've been away, I'm not a very good correspondent, and time seems to slip past without me noticing it." >t friends (You contemplate your options.) >t family (the family) (You contemplate your options.) >t his family (You contemplate your options.) >t love (You contemplate your options.) >4 "I tend to be most attracted to people I imagine I could talk to." "Oh, back to that...," he says. "That you imagine you could talk to? Or that you actually can talk to?" "Unfortunately I don't always get the option of testing my theory," you say, a little more pointedly than you intend to. "Of the two guys I've dated in the last couple years, neither was exactly a riveting speaker and I wound up breaking up with both of them out of sheer boredom." Rain continues to patter against the window. "It's been, what, two years now," he adds. "And I don't think I've spoken to any of them since the summer after graduation." >[back to that?] That's not a verb I recognise. >1 "Who do you want to talk to?" "I don't know. I suppose for the most part I had acquaintances rather than friends. There was Seph, but our friendship was to a large extent manufactured more by both of us being miserable than by us having very much in common." "Isn't that often how it works?" "I don't know; I'd like to hold onto the notion that there are people out there one can talk to on a level." Grant adjusts his glasses. "It seems like I've always been looking for intellectual congruity. I spent a lot of high school looking for someone to discuss things that I'm interested in-- movies, books, philosophical ramblings, even-- without people thinking that I'm nuts. And that does exist to some degree at college, but there's still a prevailing preference for going out and downing a couple of sixpacks before beginning on the exploration-of-the-meaning-of-life process, which inevitably inhibits the amount of progress one makes." >1 "Have you ever had people you could talk to on a level?" "Sure. Mostly adults, I guess, but yes." "Then you're lucky; all the adults I know are at least as impenetrable as my peers." In the background, the waiter extracting a dessert from the display case. "I know there's a certain amount of raw pride involved in assuming that most people can't hold a conversation that I'd be interested in sharing; unfortunately, though, that corresponds to my experience of the world." "That doesn't mean that they can't; it may just mean that some of them don't want to." "Intellectual disability or simple atrophy of imagination, it comes to the same thing in the long run." >1 "If you assume that, though, you risk not finding the people that you can talk to. Unless you're just going to wait for them to be drawn mothlike to the vivid flame of your personality. And then watch them flutter pointlessly around you unable to make contact." "I guess I lived-- live?-- in the hope that sooner or later someone would enter my life who would have, I don't know, a kind of kindred voice," he says. "And then we'd be friends. And that would be enough, even one." Rain continues to patter against the window. "If I ever found a person," he says, "who was matched enough to my mind to understand me, then I would go any distance to find them. Even as far as Cho-fu-sa." >1 "But what if you found your ideal friend, and they didn't recognize you in turn?" "Then it must not be right, somehow," he says. "I suppose. You keep phrasing this in terms of a courtship, or something, but for all my language I am still talking about friendship. If it's not reciprocal, it's nothing at all." Over the radio, you hear "The Lamentations of Jeremiah." "There are certain authors for whom I feel a great affinity, because in what they write there is not only sense and information, but wit and warmth and personality, and all the things that convey the whole of a person, not merely the mechanism of a mind." >t cho-fu-sa Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >t mind Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >t friendship Nothing on that topic leaps to mind. >drink coffee You drink off the last bit. It's warm and welcome. "Oh, hey, you've got foam on your nose." He reaches across the table and wipes it off with his thumb. You blink. A sort of buzzing comes into your head for a moment. "Why did you go out with people you can't talk to in the first place, then?" >[Aww, there we go.] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >1 "I don't know. Boredom, insecurity, and/or my parents, in some order." "I don't see where the last one comes in." "My mother is-- well, both of my parents are, really-- 'concerned' about my social development, and seem to be of the belief that I am too reserved and too high in my own opinion of myself. And they will from time to time launch into expositions of this, at the dinner table, in the car, in front of guests... whenever it seems like a handy time and place, and at great length. And sometimes they will finish with phrases like, 'well, it's not like you've even been out of the house in six months.'" "Rar." "Quite." >1 "And if you never managed to get them to talk to you? Wouldn't you still think about them from time to time, and watch them, if they were somewhere nearby, and hope for an opening? Wouldn't you suffer when you sensed that they suffered, for the sake of the friendship that ought to be? Wouldn't you find yourself holding conversations with them in your head, imagining what they would answer to the things you would say to them?" "Helen." He cuts you off with something between a sigh and a laugh. "I do, I suppose, understand a bit of what you are so passionately trying to get at." The owner comes out of the quilt shop with a newspaper over her head, locks up hastily, and hurries away to her car. >z He sips his tea again. "This is the thing I don't understand about high school in general, I guess," he says. "People have or claim to have these crushes which are blazingly important to them, but none of their relationships ever last, so what's the point? I guess I don't see how anyone could feel that strongly about anyone at that point in their life." You flinch. >4 "Have you ever been in love?" He squirms, a little uncomfortable with this direct an approach. "I wouldn't say I've ever been in love with anyone. I've been attracted to people, but that's arguably not the same." Grant adjusts his glasses. "Well, what about you? Were you consumingly obsessed with anyone in high school?" >1 "Yes, o oblivious one: you." Moments pass; your pulse is oddly swift. Not, of course, that it matters a damn what he thinks of you now-- it's too late, if there was ever a time-- and in any case... But humiliation is still humiliation. Something to avoid. He is still frowning out the window. >2 "Don't worry about it, it's not important now." "I don't know that I was worried," he says, finally looking directly at you again. A flicker of a smile. "A bit flattered, perhaps, and a bit uncertain how one responds to such announcements." >2 "You only have to respond if the announcement is in the present tense," you remark. "Otherwise you can simply smile and nod, or if you're feeling cruel, say something like, 'I suspected as much at the time!' Generous leads to, 'wow, I wish I'd known that'; polite is, 'ah, thank you'; and if you're too startled to think of anything else some of us have been known to resort -- and I'm not recommending this but only mentioning it because it is the only one I myself have tried -- to 'uh, well, that's ok.' "Heh. A wealth of options. To answer the implied question: no, I didn't know at the time; I wish I'd been aware of it, but I seem to have been oblivious to a lot of things; thank you; and here is my smile and nod:" and he demonstrates. You can hear the clinking of silverware and china. >1 "What is love?" "Love is, I think, about action, not about sensation; the experience of 'being in love' is some fleeting hormonal thing, and what matters in the long term is what you do. A consistent motivation that makes you place the other person's interests on a level with or above your own, that's love. The rest is just, I don't know, poetic flourishing." He pushes a stray bit of hair out of his face. He leans forward. >1 "How is your definition of love different from a general altruism, though?" "Hmm. Perhaps it's not -- though I would add that my general altruism doesn't extend very far when it comes to most people. So part of the question with romantic love, which is I gather what we're concentrating on here, is how responsible or involved you feel, I suppose. Everything about the other person becomes your business, whereas with strangers I don't feel invited to comment on all of their inappropriate behavior." Grant lifts his cup. >1 "If being in love means correcting someone, how is that different from being their parent?" "That wasn't quite what I meant. At all. I'm not setting myself forth as some kind of moral arbiter. Especially not in any nonreciprocal sense. That was just an example; look at it this way. If you find out that a stranger is an alcoholic, that's too bad, but it's not yours to try to correct. If your wife is, that's more of a concern." Outside, the light is slowly fading. >1 "I don't think anyone has the right to be a moral arbiter for anyone else." "No? So you'd rather that your friends watch you do things that you shouldn't, and make no comment?" He pushes a stray bit of hair out of his face. >1 "Would you want me commenting if you did something I didn't approve of? Hypothetically." "Well, but do we--" "Would you?" He shrugs as though making a concession. "Sure, all right. I suppose I could take it. I don't know that I'd agree with you that what I was doing was a bad idea -- we haven't spent enough time comparing notes for me to know how our moral structures line up, and mutual knowledge is, I think, another aspect of this picture. But leave that to the side. Why, have I done something that you thought was morally wrong? Other than walking off with your pen, which we've established was an error." "No; I was just curious how you would deal with it, I suppose." There's a pause, then the beginning of Mozart's "Requiem." He pushes his glasses up his nose. >1 "Where are you living?" "I'm staying at my father's place for the moment, which is to say, the vicarage at St. Cecily's, since he's the vicar there.." He pushes his glasses up his nose. >2 "What denomination is St. Cecily's, anyway?" "Episcopalian. The Startons (doesn't everything start with them?) and the Darks built it with their own money, and the Startons had come out from Boston -- and for that matter Eva St. James Starton was British by birth, which means that the Episcopal Church was as close as she could get to Anglican." A couple of women pass your table on the way to the bathroom. >1 "Where is Saint Cecily's? I don't think I've been there." "No? The big spire off south of Main Crossing? The tallest thing in town other than the lighthouse? You've seen it. You just haven't noticed that you've seen it." And you have, of course; in your mind, it's just 'the church,' the way St. Christophe's is 'the winery': there might be others in the general vicinity, but they're secondary somehow. The church building is about fifty feet from your house; its graveyard runs almost up to your bedroom window. Grant lifts his cup. >t tea (You contemplate your options.) >t church (You contemplate your options.) >1 "Do you believe that the universe was created by some divine entity?" "Ah, this again," he says. "Yes, I do. I don't have a lot of beliefs about that divine entity, but I do think it exists, or existed. Too much feels planned about the universe to have occurred wholly by accident. But that doesn't mean that the whole universe is significant or can be read as a work of art can be read. Some created objects communicate only incidentally: a car, for instance, is made to move people around, and you can get some conclusions from looking at the car, but the conclusions are not what the car is there for." Rain streaks down the window. >[Ah, this again?] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >[(I hadn't had any other topics at hand)] That's not a verb I recognise. >3 "What feels planned?" "Oh, the interlocking lives of plants and animals; the complexity of people, and their capacities." "And you don't believe it just evolved that way? Because, I have to say, if it was all planned it was not planned very clearly at the beginning." He smiles a little embarrassedly. "This gets into a kooky private philosophy of mine... "You know how, when you work on a very complicated project, you can't see how to do all of it at once, so you begin with the part that is the most basic?" "Sure, I guess," you say. "And then when you work on that, you manage to make it work, and you're ready to progress, and you also discover, in the process, that there are capacities to your design that you didn't even realize were there, things worth exploring. So you build the next stage, but it's not exactly the next stage you thought you were working towards: it's something more ambitious in some ways, and curtailed in others, or perhaps just a bit skew from the primordial conception. That's, I think, what happened evolutionarily: the god-equivalent started puttering around creating stuff, and what he came up with was basic but really cool, and then he went on to do more things with it, and some of them were duds, so he threw them out, and others went directions he'd never dreamed, and he kept those." You can hear laughter from an adjacent table. >3 "So how do people fit into your evolutionary scheme?" "That's the best part," he says. "We're the point at which the god-entity figured out how to instill that same capacity for developmental creativity, and once we existed, it's even possible that he (or she, but I'm using he for the sake of brevity) felt his work was done here and moved on to something else. And then we stayed behind, making our own infrastructure and rules, and elaborating upon them, and tweaking what didn't work, both at a social level and a technological one." He pushes a stray bit of hair out of his face. >t god (You contemplate your options.) >1 "People naturally look for patterns. That's part of what intelligence is, I think." "I'm not sure that intelligence is just a matter of looking for patterns," he says. "I mean, people get patterns completely wrong and they're still intelligent, right? You've got people devoting their lives to, say, economics, and they still can't predict the outcomes of the system." >1 "It seems as though, if we see patterns, there are patterns, to the point where it's sometimes worth looking at stuff that ought to be random and constructing meaning out of it." "So you're in favor of staring at static, or, say, Jackson Pollack paintings?" "That's not what I said. My point was more that in a sense the meaning doesn't exist externally, out in the universe; it's a construct inside ourselves." He's still looking dubious. "This is why I like tarot cards," you go on. "You play with them and you get out something that hasn't any externally-based meaning, but which feels meaningful to you because you immediately begin finding resonances for the symbolism." >1 "What sorts of conclusions do you derive from cars?" "Well, you know, the form tells you something about the purpose for which it was made: that it is intended for people to go into, to travel on smooth roads; that it exists in the context of a complicated industrial society with the infrastructure to provide not only those roads but the necessary fuels; that..." "I get the picture." He has another sip of tea, slurping a little. "This is funny, but-- do you remember the 3Nigma Club?" You feel your ears burning. This is not a turn you expected or wanted the conversation to take. >1 "Sure, I remember." The effort at non-chalance comes out poorly, on the whole. "The thing about 3Nigma that fascinated me is that the messages and pranks and so on all felt as though they had some message to impart," Grant comments. "And even if you couldn't tell what the message was, it was still attractive and fascinating in a way to contemplate and wonder...." >3 "The problem with 3Nigma is that it got carried away." "Carried away? How so?" "It started out just doing things that were strange and allusive and creepy (but not dangerous or offensive to anyone) and ended up interfering in people's lives." The waiter moves through carrying a pitcher of water balanced on his head. "I still remember the first time I encountered the whole 3Nigma thing. It was when they left tarot cards in some of the lockers-- do you remember this?" Quite vividly; somewhere or other, you probably still have the list you made of which cards should go to whom. "And that impressed you?" "I don't know what I thought of it at the time. Later as more and more people found them it started to seem more and more interesting, and I got disappointed I hadn't been included. I remember Jenny Samantha throwing hers away and Jason Crawford gluing his to the inside of his locker because he thought the chyk on the card was 'a real babe.' I quote directly." >1 "I was a member of 3Nigma." "Ah." Long silence while he looks at you; it's hard to tell what wheels are turning in his head. "And who else was in it? Assorted cheerleaders and members of the band?" "It was me and Robin and Fred; just the three of us, never anyone else." He runs a finger along the edge of the table. "3Nigma was the only clique," he muses, "that I wished I could be part of, and wasn't, in high school. I had no desire to fit in with the computer people or the yearbook people or the chess club or, heaven help us, the rugby players. The drama gang was a bit more tolerable, but we had different purposes in life and were content to coexist without overlapping too much... "But 3Nigma, 3Nigma was like the Illuminati of high school. They knew stuff." >1 "3Nigma worked on observation, logistical cunning, and a taste for the bizarre," you remark. "There wasn't anything we knew that couldn't be known just by watching people and listening carefully, and there wasn't anything we did that wasn't simple organization." >drink coffee It's gone; all that remains is foam. "So there's something I have from high school, from 3Nigma," he says. You say nothing. "Come now," he says. "Presumably you remember this." And he produces it from the depths of his coat-- the cardboard cover blotched with pink and yellow hilighter in the interstices of the black and white pattern, the pages dog-eared a little and thickened by a coffee stain, but otherwise pristine, no different than it was on the day you threw it away. "You know," he says, "I spent years wondering who wrote it and how it was that I missed noticing them. I should have realized it was just a malicious prank, but somehow I thought more of 3Nigma than that." >3 "For your information, I didn't have anything to do with giving you that. I'd actually thrown it away because I was so pissed at you after English class one day. I don't know if you remember this, but you gave an especially excoriating set of comments on a couple of poems Ms. Littenberg had me post, which included the phrase 'startlingly devoid of imagination--'" A startled light comes into his eyes. "Those were yours? But-- they weren't as--" "Let me finish." You're aware of a cool hush all around, and wonder briefly whether the rest of the restaurant is listening in fascinated silence, and decide that you don't care. >1 "I had one of those blinding revelations, like Saul on the road to Tarsus, where you discover that the person you've been obsessed with is actually an acute asshole. So I threw the notebook out. "Apparently Robin decided that it would be an especially cute 3Nigma trick to give it to you, so she pulled it back out of the trash and stuck it in your locker. As a result of which I haven't spoken to her or Fred since." He opens his mouth, looks down. "I-- ah. Jeezus." He runs his hand through his hair. "I really had no idea that anyone would take the stuff I said that seriously. You know, this thing happens at some point where you realize that you're able to use words better than average and it becomes the source of reassurance, and sometimes you get so carried away in your eloquence that you say things that you don't remotely mean." >1 [Relenting] "Well, it's water under the bridge now." He nods. "Okay. I still feel bad about it, though." "Mmm, well, I overreacted. To several things, in fact. So it's my fault as well, I suppose, at least, my fault that I took it as hard as I did." You spread your hands on the table, a gesture of resolution and peace. "Okay." "Well," he says, "you have this back-- and your pen-- and I've done as much as I can do here, and it's getting late." He stands up, collecting his stick and leaving some cash for the bill. "Um, hey, also. I realize that this is officially the Wrong Time to ask this and that I should go home and wait a couple days and then try calling you, but I had negative luck with that last time, so-- how would you be disposed to-- I mean, um, would you feel weird about-- you want to see a movie at the Egyptian, or something?" *** The End *** Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, or QUIT? > undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >2 "I don't want the notebook back. You can keep it or throw it away at will." "Look, Helen, I-- well, dammit. You seem like a cool person in general. I wish you didn't hold such a damned tenacious grudge for something I did because I was stupid and self-centered and distracted and above all immature, but there's not a hell of a lot I can do at this point to change your opinion of me if that's how it rests, so -- have a nice life." He picks up the notebook and returns it to whereever in his pockets it came from, and removes himself from your presence. *** The End *** Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, or QUIT? > [Aww!] Please give one of the answers above. > undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >2 [Calmly] "I had nothing to do with giving it to you." "Oh." He looks taken aback. "I had assumed that you people worked together on these things, planning them and so on." "We did, for the most part." At least to start with, appropriating Fred's floor (after clearing away the Lexus pamphlets and copies of Popular Science) or Robin's and covering it with charts, notes, files. Robin's little side-projects came later. >2 "We started out haphazard, and then got organized. Then things got out of control again." "How so?" "Well, the first incident or two were things like the crypto-chain letter-- did you ever get that?" "Nah, by the time it reached me the computer guys had already solved it." "Bastards. Well, anyway, we had a few ideas like that-- that particular one was mostly to get back at the annoying people who kept sending chain letters to US. And then after we did that, we started to have grander schemes, and we kept lists of useful information, like a sort of annotated address book and info on class schedules and so on. Also, collections of arcane stuff that we dug up at the library, which ranged from the kitsch to the seriously bizarre." >2 "We weren't much in the habit of forging things." "So this is someone's genuine notebook, but you weren't involved and you don't know whose." he says. "Okay." >1 "I wrote that notebook." "Now I'm confused. You wrote it, and you were part of 3Nigma, and 3Nigma gave it to me, but you didn't participate in the giving and you didn't make it up as a forgery." "Right. I wrote it because I-- because-- well, for reasons that are obvious if you've read it. But I didn't want you to see it. And at some point I got upset and threw it away, and Robin dug it out of the trash and decided that it would be somehow clever to put it in your locker. I think her thinking was that you'd be stunned if you saw the angst you had wrought, or something." "Heh. Well, as far as that goes, she was right, I suppose." He takes a deep breath. "Well," he says, "you have this back-- and your pen-- and I've done as much as I can do here, and it's getting late." He stands up, collecting his stick and leaving some cash for the bill. "Um, hey, also. I realize that this is officially the Wrong Time to ask this and that I should go home and wait a couple days and then try calling you, but I had negative luck with that last time, so-- how would you be disposed to-- I mean, um, would you feel weird about-- you want to see a movie at the Egyptian, or something?" *** The End *** Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, or QUIT? > undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >z A pause. A moment passes. >z A pause. A pause. "Well," he says, "you have your pen-- and I've done as much as I can do here, and it's getting late." He stands up, collecting his stick and leaving some cash for the bill. "Um, hey, also. I realize that this is officially the Wrong Time to ask this and that I should go home and wait a couple days and then try calling you, but I had negative luck with that last time, so-- how would you be disposed to-- I mean, um, would you feel weird about-- you want to see a movie at the Egyptian, or something?" *** The End *** Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, or QUIT? > undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >undo The Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop [Previous turn undone.] >drink coffee This is not the time for horsing around. Silence. >[horsing around? Heh.] That's not a verb I recognise. >t tea This is not the time to change the subject. >look out window This is not the time for horsing around. "Well," he says, "you have your pen-- and I've done as much as I can do here, and it's getting late." He stands up, collecting his stick and leaving some cash for the bill. "Um, hey, also. I realize that this is officially the Wrong Time to ask this and that I should go home and wait a couple days and then try calling you, but I had negative luck with that last time, so-- how would you be disposed to-- I mean, um, would you feel weird about-- you want to see a movie at the Egyptian, or something?" *** The End *** Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, or QUIT? > restart Press H for instructions, or any other key to begin the game. "Damn it! Watch where you're going, can't you?" There's an awkward scuffle while he retrieves his balance. It takes several moments, because his feet are entangled with yours and his movements hampered by the bulk of his coat. You lose your footing, and end up having to catch yourself on the wall of the lighthouse. So you don't really take it in at first, but, notwithstanding his resemblance to a drowned rat, he is still himself. Grant Stern. He of the rosewood swordstick and the poetical hands, the grey gaze and the 18th century bearing. >1 "Oh, hi." [Two years you had to make up a witty, spontaneous line for this moment. Nice work.] "Fuck." He stops patting his pockets and looks down at you. "You've made me lose my pen," he says. "Congratulations." (Several stabs into the undergrowth with his swordstick.) "The karmic repercussions will be severe. Expect to live your next life as a dung beetle." You know the pen he means-- or at least, it seems likely that he's still using it, the black fountain pen with a gold clip. Exactly like yours, though you never learnt to write in that peculiar elegant backslant of his. A left-handed trick. >search bush With a feeling of resignation, you start looking under the bushes, such as they are, yourself. It rapidly becomes obvious that there simply is nothing here -- unless the pen miraculously flew a good ten or fifteen feet away, there's no coverage dense enough to conceal it. He ignores you and gives the scrubby little bush another vicious thwack, drenching you and your papers (which you'd managed to keep dry until now) with the backspray. >t rain (You contemplate your options.) >t bush (You contemplate your options.) >t him (You contemplate your options.) >t me (You contemplate your options.) >z His gaze lights on your pen. "You've had it all along!" he announces. "What have you got between your ears, cotton?" And he snatches the pen and takes off with it. You scramble to your feet. "HEY!" But he doesn't look back; and you stand there in the rain and contemplate the aesthetic incompetence of a universe that would bring the bane of your existence back into your life just to steal your favorite pen. A week or so later, maybe. (Afterwards, you won't remember with certainty.) It's pouring again, the steady monotonous rain that plagues the northwest in the fall. You've sought refuge at the Weeping Donkey Coffee Shop, which is at least out of the house; but you find your mind crowding with events you've done your best to put aside: your infatuation with Grant, the formation and dissolution of 3Nigma, the notebook; Robin, and Fred, both of whom are off somewhere doing something now no doubt. >think about egyptian One of those old-style overdecorated examples of late 20's kitsch, which got closed up sometime in the 60s and only reopened in the last year or two. It now alternates first-run movies with classic silent films. >walk like egyptian You can't see any such thing. >get up But you aren't in anything at the moment. >w You're kind of stuck here for the moment. Suddenly you become aware of someone standing over your table. "Good, you're still here. I saw you through the window and ran home immediately." He does seem to be breathing a bit hard. He sets your pen on the table. "I am here to humbly beg your forgiveness for insulting you and making off with your personal possessions. All week my conscience has been haunted by the vision of you crouched in a garret writing with a lumpy Bic." >2 "It was a bit annoying, yeah." He shifts from foot to foot. "My own pen was sitting on my desk at home. I normally carry it in my pocket, but apparently I left it there." >2 "You might have remembered that before you--" "Yes, yes, I know," he interrupts. "I've already thought of all the angles from which it was jerky of me, and I'm sorry." >3 "You called me a dung beetle!" In the next booth, someone giggles. Grant cuts them off with a look. "No," he says, to you. "I expressed the hope that you might be reincarnated as a dung beetle. Very different." He taps the edge of the table once or twice with the head of his cane. Grant slides into the seat opposite yours, setting his cane so that it leans against the booth. Now, if you can just get rid of him again without revealing anything too embarrassing about The Past, everything should be fine. The fact that he's sticking around to talk to you in the first place is a little unnerving, all the same. (It isn't, you think with a twinge of Old Bitterness, as though he generally had time to talk to you in the past.) >t notebook (You contemplate your options.) >1 "I was hoping that you'd forgotten that. Or never gotten it." His forehead creases into a frown. "I'm not trying to embarrass you. It's too late for that now, anyway. I just wanted to clear up the mystery of it." The silence is punctuated by the waiter extracting a dessert from the display case. "So there's something I have from high school," he says. "It's a notebook I found in my locker, with the 3Nigma business card. One of those Mead composition notebooks, you know, cardboard covers and lined paper..." You nod, transfixed. "It was full of poetry, and I gather-- there was a note about this-- that it was poetry about me." His grey eyes meet yours, and there is a hint of something you did not expect: humility. One of the waiters materializes by the table, scooping up the menu. "Hi. I am, like, so sorry to interrupt but my boss sent me over to make you order something." He rolls his eyes. Grant leans back in his seat. "What's good today?" "Well, we've got a very nice mocha today with just a kiss of hazelnut syrup," he suggests. "Then on top goes whipped cream with the chef's specialty, cinnamon hand-ground in an imported Brazilian cherry-wood grinder." >3 You turn to the waiter. "I'll have another cappuccino, please." "Oh, you people are always so unimaginative." >1 "You can go ahead and take that." The waiter picks up the cappuccino cup and saucer. Grant turns to the waiter. "I'd like a small pot of freshly boiling water and two Earl Grey teabags in a mug. Do not attempt to begin brewing the tea yourself, please. On a separate plate, I will require a strip of lemon peel-- the full circumference of the lemon at the center, that is, no half-measures-- and two cubes of raw sugar. That would be the light brown kind. Also one cookie, the driest you have." The waiter's jaw drops, expressive not so much of annoyance as of awe. "Great! I will be right back with your order." The waiter vanishes. >3 "May I see the notebook?" He produces it from the depths of his coat-- the cardboard cover blotched with pink and yellow hilighter in the interstices of the black and white pattern, the pages dog-eared a little and thickened by a coffee stain, but otherwise pristine, no different than it was on the day you threw it away. Across the street, a couple of women emerge from the quilt shop with bags of remnant cloth. One of them stumbles, letting free a train of red-gold cotton that quickly darkens in the rain. "I won't claim that I've been pining all this time for whoever wrote the notebook, but I have been wondering-- who it was, why I missed it," Grant goes on. "Whether it was a hopeless case or just something that I failed to recognize the virtues of at the time." >2 "I wrote that notebook." He nods. "I suspected that was true, which is why I brought it along," he says. "But then I wasn't sure... but the writing is in black fountain pen, and that alone seemed unusual enough to be worth thinking about." >1 "Look, about why I wrote this..." "Yes?" "I -- I was kind of infatuated." You will yourself to go on and elaborate with something slightly less inane, but the look he is giving you is too withering. "This is the thing I don't understand about high school in general, I guess," he says. "People have or claim to have these crushes which are blazingly important to them, but none of their relationships ever last, so what's the point? I guess I don't see how anyone could feel that strongly about anyone at that point in their life." You flinch. >2 "Perhaps it's a lack of perspective. I mean, I don't think people's feelings really change nature or intensity that much as they grow up; they're just more tempered, maybe, by the experience to know that you outlive individual disappointments and move on and fall for someone else and get disappointed again and etc. But you will survive, is the main point; it's never the end of the world." "Hmm. I suppose. It's not something I can directly relate to in my own life-- but it's true that things seemed more disastrous, generally, that happened when I was a teenager, than anything that's happened in the last two." In the background, the espresso machine steaming a drink. "I wouldn't say I've ever been in love with anyone. I've been attracted to people, but that's arguably not the same." >2 "Not really, no." "How long have you had your pen?" >t love (You contemplate your options.) >3 "I had a huge crush on you in high school." "I think I missed how we wound up on this topic," he remarks. Moments pass; your pulse is oddly swift. Not, of course, that it matters a damn what he thinks of you now-- it's too late, if there was ever a time-- and in any case... But humiliation is still humiliation. Something to avoid. He is still frowning out the window. >1 "What is love?" "Love is, I think, about action, not about sensation; the experience of 'being in love' is some fleeting hormonal thing, and what matters in the long term is what you do. A consistent motivation that makes you place the other person's interests on a level with or above your own, that's love. The rest is just, I don't know, poetic flourishing." Rain streaks down the window. "We were in AP English together, right?" So he doesn't remember you particularly, then. Either he never got the notebook, or he never associated it with you, or it's slipped out of his mind again... Strange, after all that grief, to find that it didn't matter at all. >2 "We had bio together too." "Ah, yes." From the distant look in his eyes you can tell that he doesn't exactly recollect your presence there. In the background, the espresso machine steaming a drink. "Seph Antibe was my lab partner. Most of the year, anyway." You remember that, of course, though you hadn't actually remembered her name until now: a gloomy, Gothic girl who seemed to have a permanent case of sniffles. If it had been someone else, you might have resented her, but she was so plump and so morose that it was hard to regard her as competition. >t pen (You contemplate your options.) >t pen (You contemplate your options.) >1 "Mostly Fred did the dissections while I watched." Finding yourself needing to justify this, you add, "I did a lot of the written work for us. He didn't really like it." "I found the dissections therapeutic," he says. "And I don't mean the way some people like to play shooting games to satisfy the inner testosterone-voice, but because it was such precise careful work that it was almost artistic, like sculpting." >1 "Do you sculpt?" "Absolutely not." Strange look. "Some of my least favorite people are sculptors." He runs a finger along the edge of the table. "The thing I remember most clearly of that whole class with Ms. Littenberg," he muses, "was the time she decided that she needed to do a dramatic staging of that speech from Lear -- do you remember this?" You shake your head. "It was stormy outside and she turned out the lights and brought in a huge red candle." The memory does come back to you now: the dance of shadows over her face, and her mezzo voice trying to approach the gravity of King Lear and simply coming out a bit silly. >3 "A performance to rival the Royal Shakespeare Society it was not." "No. But in a peculiar way you have to admire someone who is willing to risk a little ridicule." Rain continues to patter against the window. "So you didn't like Biology, I take it." >1 "I wasn't very good at it." "Fair enough." The waiter brings your cappuccino and Grant's tea. The former is in another boat-sized cup; the latter, on the other hand, is a multi-stage production involving several plates, a pot of boiling water, the teabags removed from their wrappers but pristine and dry; a long strip of lemon artistically curved on itself; a stack of exactly three hard square-ish cookies; and a doily. You have never received a doily here on any occasion. > That option is undefined at the moment. The waiter passes by the table with a tray of alfalfa-laden sandwiches. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" >[Oops, that was a click] You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can't see whom. >quit Are you sure you want to quit? n >save Ok. >quit Are you sure you want to quit? y