Finance fellows, their profane sense of tragicomedy nevertheless unseemingly ribald given all the crude remarks I overhear transgressing Providence's Downtown on the various shortcomings of womankind in its reputed attempt at permeating what they euphemize to be "the space" (of crime against common men) as well as — from time to time — womanhood's somehow collective and universal struggle to sexually gratify those to whom these men think it beholden in its manners, daily deeds, and various incomes, stride too quick, too dead, to savor the setting, derelict to say the least when one really knows where to look (as the tuxedos and business-casuals do not), though to my detriment I'm moved to confess that neither I nor any from the numbers of the others around have at any time anything beyond a moment, and thus I too join the scurrying bustle, my uniformless presence clearly unwelcome — yet policemen surely will not tell me apart or attribute to me anything but the refinement of a good civis Romana even knowing the many-eyed, variegated, and man-swallowing delinquency perennial at my former institution of, mayhaps, choice, the very same place Rico, with whom I want to fall out of touch, left up in flames in trying to kill that bastard Goni (an ancestor no one can revere, I'm sure of it, for anyone who tries in earnest to revise his legacy faces unimaginable tortures at my twin bloodied hands through subtle tremors — so to speak). Returning to the financiers, under some of whom I have gracelessly interned, I despise them — while they are not cruel to me, they would be were they privy to what I must do. Self-distracting under the terms of my trite observation, I see no enticement-cloy billboards, glance diverted downward for there is nothing left to seem to condescend on me when my steel-buckle shoes (of which a dealer in antiques from a dot of a town in Pennsyltucky is now bereft and seeking, chosen hastily on the then-recent, yet still-fresh recognition that laces, for the most part, are a liability, but also for the symbolism of the Old Boys — leading me to acknowledge thence that perhaps the unseen price tag revealed real value in these loafers I could not then see) take priority, and Rico, with whom I cannot much longer belong knowing how she sees me and what all she wants from me, has provided the unexpected grace of reprieve from her constant stream of digital-domain correspondence, something I do not often receive despite my liberty not to answer. My destination, at any rate: our meeting-house (and not that of Rico, whom no one could really understand, much less myself), sufficiently close to the Amtrak station, bodies ambulant to and fro, and the symphony of auto traffic is the unmistakable feeling of entrapment reshaped into music of the spheres (separate?) because no matter how much PR work the order — in its unintentionality — commissions, this kind of infrastructure does dig trenches, does whittle down its matron Earth, and has always widened the expanse of time to gape and then prolapse, and the trains' sluggish trails only serve to remind me hereof whenever the old drug money I let myself embezzle over the years is not opportune to put towards a flight out to wherever my employ may take me. Presiding over all this is Goni Jino, the man I am reluctant as much as disgusted to call my grandfather, is currently the oldest supercentenarian male (mortal as all declared and unrepentant men are, like Ari tells me) on record, verifiably aged one-hundred and twenty years, the thorn spurring Bureau Hotel since the second decade of the twentieth century and a thorn in the side of what most would call "God" since some years after his birth (on January 2, 1893), the regret of all who would've had to know their bloodlines culminated in such a pathetic, conniving man, but his absence is felt not unlike a welcome midsummer breeze easing the heat of being human amidst the inhospitable.

In what I recall of the Candidates Tournament the ghost of Faraday haunts his statue at Savoy Place diligently, maybe that day (or any of the other days inside that span) with increased fervor, what with all the scandals in the news. His cage is ineffective against HF RFID — the reception of engined moves via cellular device which are then gestured from inside the live audience, Vietnam-blinked, observed by no one but target, neither can it block the Earth's electromagnetic field and thus compasses, hands bipolar-hemispheric-acculturated (wayfinding by the North or the South, two ships passing each other in the night with different ideas of appropriate ornamental gold use); they seemed to have caged the windows there as in an observatory installation regardless — I snuck away on occasion to fire off a post or two on Tumblr — without thinking I outplayed Magnus and last night like many regretful 'last nights', with all due respect to Anand (the West may have the North Star but his cardinal direction has the genesis of the game itself), I was at the Hyatt Regency in Chennai, that building with an exterior so much like a shopping mall in Eastern Europe soon to fall into a disuse that stays just so frustratingly above water that no losses can be cut and nothing can be liquidated, this dredging of legally dead chemical runoff riverbed; at that point all bets were off the table, feeling so much like the only game in town even through honest effort and rigged by nothing but wit and the ability to keep composure, this process having dragged all month with unnecessary rest days that my computational abilities neither require nor enjoy (even days, then one prime) — the match was decided by the twelfth game; finally, peace — until I stand bolt upright from my seat and declaim "Now that I've proven this can be done, can we be rid of the farce of Women's Chess as a separate sport?", and that demarcates the zenith which orients to its fullest extent the long shadow of dissent (wrath of Sol Invictus); feeling demiurged once again (all this paganism here again), although with diminishing sense of transparent psychic detainment and inner death in the face of having had to play games hooked up to EKGs, take polygraphs and perform, dressed as Rubinstein or Bernstein — whatever the suit that day, pawnless chess compositions while playing (that disgrace to the sport, those things that look good on television) blitz games (or at least without touch of the piece of primary), problems stacked atop the problems of womanhood (Stack Overflow), nothing unusual, quidquid pro quo (ha) — the full omnium of my talent visage-forward spat with suspicion; at least I was spared the exercise in masochism of having to play online, being much in demand over-the-board (the only right way to play the game, even more correct if in Classical), this whole world a Faraday cage for feminist magnetism (Laughing Out Loud) or whatever she'd say (whatever I'd say when liveblogging my own games under a sockpuppet, in support of myself, in the moments where I'd sneak out to take the breaks that do not breach, quid pro quo, the performance of doing nothing for nothing in the way of respect, the mandate of falsified limits, that performance of human flaw); fortunate am I, O Fortuna, Lady Luck in all her lackadaisy and boredom that only the monic tokens of the pagans can know, condemned they are to their arbitrary purposes, the water cycle in its phase of expel explained away by the copulation in the chaste marriage of the rain god and the earth god (moral monism: marriage of Heaven and Hell), their one trick, a polynomial return to one, to now be away from all those moments and in a non-metaphorical waterlog where the sun don't rise, the literal Place of Providence, that peninsula named, in an act of litigable false advertising (measure rage and hurt in Kelvin and find the certainty of brown stains — the most boring fact is its lack of frivolity), after the nearby island.

Thankfully I am saved by this mass of mossy driftwood turned by Pan into solid land (or so I heard) and by the grace of traveling in disguise with a fake passport fresh from the embassy the embarrassment of yet more decorous nothing for nothing, that pretense of jetlag — time itself obsolete and ouroboral, the past inside the present, the future yet another treeshadow at high noon providing no cool nor breeze. Res and I arranged for us to meet about three o'clock (perhaps a bad idea for her to move out at the damnable time where the whole of this side of the country descends into gridlock). I had left the airport at about ten in the morning (its shape, from bird's eye, at termination of terminal, passing to the runaway like many turned to stone while laid prostrate or dead) and almost failed to recognize myself reflected in many surfaces. "Who are you?" I asked. Myself responds to myself: "I am you." Res had failed to distend the impending Bureau business and sever herself from it and abandon all externally imposed-upon hope of job prospects, her employment railroad stunted not by the bombing and aborted graduation. I imagine the pictograms populating the neurotic numerosity of visual assistance leading the arrivals here helpfully astray into this city of evil committing suicide bombing in even falser hope of martyrdom upon realizing that this is not the place to lead the innocent into, yet failing to recognize that all cities in the region are alike and no dent will be made in this wicked system of things if they, the guides into nihil's maw, simply cease leading people into Providence. The public will lead itself and turn all in uniform paid to be screamed at into collaborators in their own, simply mental self-sacrifice.

I open Ari Notes, a self-built full-featured text editor (something compels me to say WordPerfect clone — well, all word processors are) running on my jailbroken iPhone (with a design language resembling the desktop Pages) and load/unload my own post-postgame analyses, never having much to do with the game itself beside fundamental attacks on my opponents' playstyle and their character as human beings. The cup overruneth in regards to Magnus Carlssen, who is the subject of the most black bile e-inked onto full color screen — not that I regard much of the rest of the FIDE leaderboard as competition, as the post-postgame writeups on games irrelevant to my primary rivalry tend to move away from 'talking shop' with a recipient of only myself to attacks on the commentators and suggested formulations for strategy questions. I get asked disturbingly little about why I use famous openings devised by European players against Americans. It must be something in the way of Bureau policy.

Having compartmentalized and mentally indexed the entire buildup to becoming World Champion, skimming perhaps hundreds of thousands of words of vitriol and algebraic notation (sometimes full hypothetical games in imitation of the opponent's style where I have to get my head inside the gutter of underachievement), I finally check the news to take mental note of how far my 'public outburst' has travelled. To the surprise of no one the first person they thought to ask was Polgár, who had expressed the same sentiment while only holding the eighth place globally. She seemed to play coy. ("I was playing the World Champion and didn't want to cause unpleasantness during my first invitation to such an important event." Many could swear they saw Kasparov undo that move in regret, red hand on knight.) Many seemed to regard this as the 'culmination' of 'my public-facing character', or else 'the ultimate expression' of my 'refusal to comply with the status quo' (i.e. refusal to take corporate sponsorships and arriving to each game with conspicuous suitcases full of money or that time I arrived at a game dressed as Augusto Pinochet, fully decorated with replicae of all of the medals and proceeded to dethrone Carlssen from the number one spot globally), the acts of 'the strong, self-determined independent woman' as Bureau leaflets on female business ownership would have it.

I open Tumblr on my iPhone, one of about thirty sloshing around inside the waterfall of preservative object-reconstructing-upon-retrieval-request (who am I, Jul?) acid flowing through my hair and ready at moment's notice to be thrown at walls when Allah sends them home and exercise haste in making note that it is about time to face Mecca. Turn one-hundred-and-two-point-twenty-seven degrees, intersectional east-southeast and attempt echolocation to verify ("trust, but verify", said Massie to Reagan and so said Reagan too) — produce expected result: ringing in ears from nearby sonar pollution rendering a send of signal ten thousand kilometers across ocean impossible. I don't know why I try this every single time. Perhaps I thought the forgotten attic gloom, sky of erinacene dust clumps, would deter the usual naval traffic from leaving port. Or that it would finally rusticate the entire Bureau fleet, or else depress the crewmembers into a stupor and make them number themselves amongst the majority of suicides that take place before nine o'clock, the upper limit just after the serving of late breakfast and thus tardiness of arrival to the institutions of learning most of these engineer-seamen slept through or else sleepwalked through with a calculator that now appear to them as nostalgic moments of comparatively liberating boredom, with those ancient lowered stakes of simply not getting suspended, and if they do, there's always another school. Calculate the sub-momentary disruption in wind airflow upon hypothetical punching of the air — I'm a woman of good manners, so the thought will have to do. Actually, let me take their radars down.

Exercising full concentration and still having time before I have to scamper indoors and unroll the rug to be in communion with the One (or else find a gazebo inside some park, quoth the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him: "The whole earth has been made a mosque and pure for me" — I figured I would pray upon meeting Res but she seems to be running late, trains in the abandoned part of Americas left to slaveowners behaving as usual — or is she stuck in traffic? regardless, I loiter until I can receive the call from her; with the quality of upkeep of public facilities in this city I figure I would have to make clean the area of the public lodging inside the park and find my own broom inside my own hair and find my own wet wipes and find my own sanitizer and find yet more of my own sanitation utilities inside the proceeding of making a place pure), I fire off a couple dozen echolocatory pings directly towards the ships themselves, and with head now tilted down-forward, directly into the dark heart of the horizon itself and still yet blown, blue-downward, into the bay, hoping combined volume of sends will drown out the periodic pollution of sonar, especially at approximately the point at which my ears start ringing as the instruments' own sends deflect off of seafloor. Deliberating not the pettiness of this act and instead self-congratulatorily exalting its righteousness, not only for myself but for most of the sealife in the radius ("Whoever is an enemy of Allah, His angels, His messengers, Gabriel, and Michael, then let them know that Allah is certainly the enemy of the disbelievers"), I turn again to the horizon and it does not part. Standing not so far from port, annoyed grunts cross my hearing if reception is calibrated to amplify, and then running back and forth on the upper deck.

It is about time now, then. There exists some remnant green space back of portside — open laydown area, they call it. Still yet green, but diminished, left bare under the dust sky. ("To Allah belong the east and the west, so wherever you turn you are facing towards Allah. Surely Allah is All-Encompassing, All-Knowing.") After unrolling six layers of sleeve to perform at least ablution of the hands and forearms, then onto the face (wet hair) and yet another six layers of half-unrolled leg cover for the feet (a level of exposure that might as well be suicide, it feels like — to be seen with any skin out at all a violation; modesty makes one inviolable but I must do my duty before the One, so in this act of felt immodesty I am inviolable and yet more modest and sanct), now for wiping. Where could a towel be inside my hair? Oh, forget it — let me just reabsorb it all through my skin for desiccation. Let hurry not test the faith. Except I am hurried. I unroll the prayer mat for Dhuhr (the midday prayer, performed at the declination of the sun from zenith, even its peak of luminosity now but a yolk-obscurity in the gray) and move to perform the four stages. First to glorify God: Allahu Akbar. Next, the opening dua: Glorious You are O Allah, and with Your praise, and blessed is Your Name, and exalted is Your majesty, and none has the right to be worshipped but You. Next, Al-Fatiha, the first chapter of the Holy Quran. To conclude, a free choice of verses. Al-Baqarah had taken up residence in my head earlier today and has not left (surely a sign), thus my nomination is made. ("And guard yourselves against the Day when no soul will be of any help to another. No ransom will be taken, no intercession accepted, and no help will be given.")

Sagas dry as Gobi are a genealogy never to have happened, a runway unoccupied to necessarily accommodate painterly pre-photographic oil-record fashion. She is such. Obsessive-compulsive the tale of myriads regarding her, nothing is her dress, nude save for the fitting of layers numbering a riot. It bleeds from her. This country, this inhospitable mosaicized starscape wherebetween worms grow disemboweling could-be skyraisers, would beg for her yet never in truth want her were these garments — as I note differ from her eccentric habit otherwise, though this face superimposed may be recognized only through one eye — for there is an abudance of red, likewise of so many qualia. It is painful to watch. I feel sorry for her — this is neither my nor her place. As much as as literature bores me, it excites me alike insofar as it renders her a potential among kinetics, to blossom when I am with her, the orchid I have misted not for tuber, not for flower-trim, but for ongoing life, though the irony of her florid floral-language pastiche bouquet held of but rare species is not lost on me as I turn such things 'round in mind. In recollection I mustn't embrace her, lest any one concealing element be her Judas in groundfall — my experiential torture. I approach and let desire die lest it seem we walk together. Refuse-lined avenues and saline Carthaginian earth (understanding this town is, indeed, too a seaport) will come back to the toss-aside slouches whence they, irreverent of nature, began, solely to recoil from her as she skips behind me trailing, and a man sees her gaunts match my prims, so I keep some unwelcome degree of distance when those close quarters have come so seldom, even moreso than Halley's comet approaches and the ancients comment (albeit with the caveat that, I think I know, inconveniently few Babylonian survivals scribal did so in their bronzed and brazen superstition — a similar raison not to être), and the turgid third line works towards subverting the scenario introduced and elaborated in its predecessors, thereby meaning I must note we are young, disciplined virgins, never of note, chaste lest we lead something out from hell by a wanton meeting of the wombs (possible though contrary to humanity), which is anyway precluded by the truth that we are too young, too careless, bishops of the same sorts of squares, fated killers, queen's raids, and so on and so forth. Surely it is close now — here there is no solace. In tandem I imagine a malarian malaise overcoming the place as was long seasonal in certain latitudes and as made the ancients suspicious of anyone at all who was — even by that day's standards — believed to be "fully well," like financiers who expect some losses day-by-day in a struggle to temper the gains. Such disease wafts 'round through drafty airs, makes itself endemic in rusting ex-factories holding the atomized yourh 'til conspecting pigs gnaw and then club them to that fabled electric immobility of limbs we humane humans once reserved for misbehaving elephants (while the homeless stood or sat overnighting dreary dreams in England), an overstatement the actualization of which I often heard — hushed all pertinently petty tones — in earlier parts of my still-ongoing youth, and for chance has exempted me from facing justice, I am other to the caught because I shall not, as they will, be eaten. Indeed my protist, to which my dear Ari is immune, feasts (unlike that dreaded Deceiver) on genuine hopelessness and all ennui that festers, so it may shit out thoughts of fitting and desert folkways thence put to rest. Whatever separates blood and brain nary constrains such illness — its measure is the unimagination. I digress.

With my exceedingly spasmodic mind's-eye and verily also despite the salient hiring preference for aphantasiacs Bureau Hotel's hovering bigwigs have marked up and out in clandestine meetings of the board, its chairs, and so on given such mindless persons' reduced proclivity to meaningfully conceive of what ramifications the exact structure of a corporate hierarchy, presupposed in an inverted-arboreal form, could exert upon its unruly complex of nodes — a hypothesis "proven," they think, by data plucked with just as much drooling subreption from middle-managers and the underclassish intern populace, over whom to wield power is a diffuse, constant pleasure to their bloated Überandere lurking above — which, even in light of the pessimism it may on many overcast mornings and afternoons elicit from and foster within me gazing closer into this beast's tree-ringed eye, is the reason, in the negative, for my recent success in climbing, for the barrage of visions keeps me company, even if cruel, in my dear Ari's physical and particularly ocular absence, one which revanches my heart in semblance despite her proximity because I cannot yet meet her lips and suppress all my senses' recoiling disgust at the makeup which has shifted the hues of her every element beyond familiarity, but when someday we become naturalized to broadcast, when sometime far off (yet not too far) hundreds of millions, I imagine, will clamor jilted for our icons projected through this first of three Earths, surely it will feel more ordinary to have my outline circumscribed by her lipstick. Alas, we have arrived at the crumbling domain, abandoned as the ransacked capital of that empire that dared call itself Heaven, dared kill the innocent, dared impose a libido of death (1322 years into the Common Era), just beyond the Downtown I just now denigrated. That I am not met with the stench of death rushing — both of us gilded by soot — thither is a pleasantry not many places seem anymore to afford me or (if I may be unreasonable) the very few dear to me, for Dickens would baulk, Kafka erupt out of his already-careless comportment into ripped-up laughter, seeing these times wherein the honorable theoretical works of immortals (a word I only ever use literally), among them the presagers of Marx prior to humanity's "printing press," are ignored in favor of tales (among them shameful Julmala fal Gero's pulp) of shock, murder, and a multiculturalism of flattening experience to signs, this moment in history that knows not how to say, much less think of, where it itself began and whither it itself goes, reminiscent of Plath's sycophantic reception on a broad scale (as much as these things should not really be said), and were I to seek not this morbid kind of learning-by-experience, I'm sure Plato would mock-strangle me, Aeneas (from nothing) reweigh the worthiness of my heart in belt-witness (to call into question the integrity of the Gestalt of this bloodied project, although harkening back to the canopic country whereof Manetho wrote), the oracle who spoke to Croesus mislead me likewise rursus into doom (which I say after Herodotus), and, insofar as my life would have thus ended (also after Herodotus), Ammianus Marcellinus praise my sportsmanship yet, mid-portraiture (ekphrastic?), complain of my peculiar hesitancy to dine on fruit (which would be slander — apples, among many others, are of much value to me). I write eight-legged essays even though am troubled by a pervasive inability, despite my excellent grasp, augmented daily, of the standard sort of Mandarin, to speak any measure of French, and many do enjoy the terms which I've over time invented — my best schooling has been individual, independent, or in Ari's company. As I awaited her she told me, burner (phone) near, that her mothers' excursions in the Americas predate the development of powder cocaine (which Bathys does often enjoy) by a great many years, and Saturn Thebes, the first wife of Bathys, drank an otherwise-inaccessible infusion of coca leaf each morning she awoke in Sicily and enacted her wishes of torment onto its innocents' livestock whom she'd swallow whole as would any other monster, leading local Catholics to lend greater credence — in excess of the Papacy's allowance (since like Santa Muerte, the stories only grew and grew, and might could not Neptunishly quash or otherwise calm their fama-flying spread) — to faraway tales of St. George and his dragon in reference to her, for lack of a better way to understand, and while I have not seen her, I am astonished regardless that someone purposefully willed beyond the form of a "featherless biped" could have sired my dear, conceived centuries ago and incubated as are all the Alaries, such that she is who she is today — though when her sentient follicles cocoon me by night, it is, indeed, a comfort. I tell the story now and it upsets me: what else could rouse this mind from its confines? Am I to know anything more? Is this in excess of human thought?

Lacking the endowment in riches an Achaemenid would engender in procuring a fresh kandys, I stick, again, to the secondhand, as much of my knowledge also is, for I know I stood out absent when Rico made her injurious decisive impact at the would-be commencement of May's term (which has proven Red Swan Academy's death blow in months since), still innocent in the ignorant law's eyes no matter their means of investigation given the meticulous effort with which she sculpted the deed into its form without my knowledge, surely thinking the only way she would please me would be by blowing my evil progenitor to smithereens as from the balcony he spoke such words as the timeless "Your opportunism and poise combined will someday lead you even to altruism," or perhaps (like Rico transcribed it shortly prior) "Take pride in your accomplishments and see them duplicated in those beneath you as you go into the tree that is this world, clever yet restrained." Soon, between some sentences an unmistakable pause emerged in the slow, senescent speech's stream slipping from the fucker's dry lips, expectedly brief since shortly all knew would the deluge of diplomas follow, echoing from the balcony to demarcate its matched courtyard in electrical sound routed with care — however false — for those assembled by means of a ludicrously-priced PA many fondly recalled hijacking at midday to proclaim some gang or another victorious in its extortion of some rival or another — chore as it was to weather such sneering panegyric mid-class on a day I might, say, look forward to only for its unremarkability — Rico, who would otherwise have had to bear another year at the Academy with me struggling to stall my admatriverse (which see Latin verto; the rest should be clear), avocidal (much simpler; see any Latin dictionary's entry on avus or otherwise compare, for instance, French aïeul — it will become clear whom and what I mean by this) designs, snuck herself from the pavilion upward, never caught in anyone's sight given her cunning cloak she had made from the umbra downcast by the covered platform's posterior, and deployed her munitions she later told me she held even with the watch-bomb ticking, apparently willing to disfigure her lithe form as a symbolic gesture in the event she was not fast enough to distance herself from it, and thus indeed Rico did so thinking she would usurp my right to kill that man and take an outer cornerstone of Bureau with him, the man who could not bear even the sweet sound of my cello for which he did not pay even a cent up, knowing hitherto she had still been a dear friend. Its detonation collapsed the balcony down the sum of two stories' vertical cascade, leaving Goni with a single gash on his cheek (as if there kissed by, again, Judas) and taking with it the lives of two unsuspecting Academy administrators and one janitorial staffer. Because the crumbling of rock and expulsion of shrapnel spared so many yet struck such fear into their hearts, all were honorarily conferred top marks on permanent records, written letters of recommendation to positions so lofty and so impersonal within Bureau as to wholeheartedly merit the term rarefied, and many from the class are said to be facing difficulties with interviewers given the utter spotlessness so universal across their artificial transcripts. As for all others enrolled, the institution was swiftly disestablished, its mass of remaining funds funneled into organizations purporting to promote "youth enrichment" and "character building," all with nondescript, phonologically compact names which invariably escape me the instant I try to recall them — this was the category under which we were subsumed, bereft of credentials yet able to say clearly we attended, socially lithe and unusually experienced in our shadowy ways. That Rico bothered to do this deed, no less in C4 reserved for other purposes, looms over me still, the spectre haunting Rhode Island, and when I begin now, "Regarding the tides of May," to mention the deed to Ari, always on borrowed time between her drifting personae, she interrupts swiftly: "Make no mistake that you and myself have come here to discuss not resonance, but the originating function's cutoff. Your life, Darling, is but part of the greater system which myself embodies and you enact. This may mean we speak of love — yes, it very well may — but does it not scream 'look forward' to you? If Darling's face remains full of dwelling-on, so be it, but that should not be all." I find myself but nodding my affirmative.

Res Jino has a very prosaic view of terrorism and a poor sense of danger. After the trial of Dhuhr I, (by) myself quit loitering at port (independent decision) and pass by the synchronized modern dance of simultaneous grasscutters and the play of the sun on nothing in particular. Moving through the city very fast on foot is easy when you can push cars back with your bare hands — if that is something you elect to do and have no moral objections to. I will not comment on my stance on this matter; it can easily be understood only with a whiff of gasoline and the smoke the inhalation of which actually makes one meet her end in a burning of a house and again the unmistakable sound of running in circles, now on land. We meet at Amtrak, central and hug it out after months of love only testified in absentia (what is the sentence? fifteen minutes of public gush, something worse than the chair or community service.) While we exchange pleasantries and metaphors about weathering the latter days of the Empire and raising our very own chickens (Platonic) by the name of Roma on the outskirts of sturm and drung (things best suited for love notes in turn best suited to unfurled calligraphic scroll), it would be a very good time now to mention that yourself (myself) can feel a scope trained on yourself (I, me — prescriptivist arguments about phrases such as "her and I" need not be had) if you're always ready to trade fire. While laser scopes are often deployed in military simulations and endemy cinema for easy guidance of the eyes to danger unnoticed by character but not by audience, reddening the black heavy air, they have no real world practical use (and would in fact give you away to a target who will then forcibly find time to find cover, making new time out of nothing, or else borrowing the new time you create in the moment you realize that you've given yourself away and you falter) — urban sniping takes place inside radii of a hundred meters and loss of target, whether stationary or moving, means loss of time and relocation of outpost (the Grim Reaper finding a new inconspicuous corner at a house party as the traffic map of a prior hiding spot becomes unreadably saturated and alcohol blood contents inside a mark go up to transit-ready level.) The safehouse is approximately ten to fifteen minutes from here — it stands to reason you would need someone with a deep grudge to be fooling with the scope, as if with licked fingers, bit lip, a cat tongue run of hunger, things of the sort, from more than a hundred meters away — less aiming at actual targets but eroticization of their imminent presence, proxy theory of the pleasure of possessing a weapon itself; hell, a full kilometer away (the distance lapped over time elapsed) — someone caught in deep anticipation, it would appear. Here marksmanship need not apply. How long is the enemies list? It must be surely enough to populate the whole nine circles. How long is the list of people with an inclination to acquire a rifle specifically for an ambush and have it be so felt over this distance? In narrowing down the scope of my speculation (the scope of speculation on whomsoever it is looking through that scope) it would be helpful to note a light touch on the shoulder I felt during departure antiportside. Either it is the misfire of the instincts or it is telepathic forewarning. One person comes to mind, then. In one episode in Res' storied but ultimately succinct and scant muay thai career (a ritualized sport at RSA, which gave rise to its own castaway cottage industry of sportsbetting where the jockey-account was stored inside hijacked lockers of students lower on the hierarchy who were then doomed to keep everything on their own person; this should contribute to a rise in future scoliosis cases amongst the population of the now thought-foregone academy, I would think, what with the full hiking backpacks of leased books their parents renewed the license to once per month, going directly into Goni's pocket) one challenger stood out — a woman with strong inclination towards spurious fleeting contact, in the service of, as it turned out quickly, psychic bugging; Melisende Lowell (the sometime-ago-aforementioned 'New England crime heiress') won that match by sheer force of disorientation, implanting suggestive thoughts into Res' head. Her iron will only lightly oxidized, she kept on but the spurious contact, like all contact, kept leaving trace. The chatter in the crowd that is taciturn in its awareness of the bell and doubly taciturn in its refusal to foreground this awareness, to step out of the moment of a spectator sport where you know you're watching something illegal is one drone, Four Violins, second fiddle microfactionalism, all the different formulations of what in the world could be going on? (multicolor fireworks in their volume of ignition failing, despite individual and collective effort, to heighten the logarithmic volume of the monotone boom), a transient spell of blindness that enforces the orthodoxy of a locked room mystery. In a surprising display of honor amongst thieves, the match's result was nullified and all bets were grudgingly refunded, this seemingly resulting from Lowell's own call to retract (pang of guilt). I did not forgive her so easily.

Approaching the obtrusiveness of Catholic dioceses (much like the arrangements adopted between local administrators and not-readily-corresponding Bureau conferences often subdividing or transgressing state bounds otherwise "united") in their rude superimposition onto the cerebral-terrestrial landscapes of the present are the tumultuous tumors of bygones I cannot elevate beyond eye-level, one-to-one renderings of whole cities exemplifying the sorts of hyperobjects I may in mind fleetingly construe, but that the Melisende Ari surely reminded me of in passing could be someplace in the wait having long prior been in the vying with me for either (as she saw it) rights to further Boston Brahmin centers for the ruining of their lives or (as I, not a truly ruined life yet to my name as I see it, have long preferred to call it) simply convenient access to whatever provisions were necessary in maintaining operating costs at a minimum and ensuring the goalposts of escape from the Kafkaesque labyrinth would not suddenly move beyond the tracks traced out as mnemonics by the dragging of the shoelaces on which our enterprises in those days ran rickety (now stronger), but Melisende Lowell — née known to me (and few others) to be the more distinctively immortal Poe-Ketzerin, the former element indeed derived from the more respectable Edgar Allan's pedigree — was of the mind, her comportment impolite and her radiant skin betraying not one bruise from even excellently backhanded strategy which would innovate and disrupt (as some day) with unknowable seismic spasms in the field of muay thai, that she might at last reduce the very same Episcopalian-caste types who dared adopt even a youth so greatly orphanage-sickened that she took no orders but those opportune in her share — a trait from which she did, to her credit, one day make herself free when she befriended another who is, to this day, her sole confidant, a barber whom she might jokingly call Groom of the Stool if not for her irreverence for all things even tangentially aristocratic and tendency in tandem to romanticize the garishly nouveau riche over reappropriated, disparaged imagery of the old money who insisted on her inability to succeed and enlisted her at our disestablished alma mater — to rubble. She rose the ranks both internal (to Red Swan) and external (to the same) and never took any as her allies but the lady who lays claim to stool-grooming (in truth moreso ordinary grooming of follicles, necessary to maintain looks like hers), working rogue without agents to stake out in hallways at the expense of their grade-marks' requisite attendance percentages, sacrificing her own only seldom, kickboxing anyone who dared question her to knockout in basement spectaculars authorities did not ever question or even admit. In this regard, she synthesized my precise attributes and Rico's prime wunderkind merits into one body many considered to beg the fine-tuning problem with the care she always afforded to its tiresome upkeep, and bodily sanctity was no concern even when I, the woman who some said struck fear with her heterodoxy in martial arts — trained in that old Jino way, always concealing a blade and even its hilt as is ritual and as apart it sets me into local memory's allegorical eternity — and poise, tried my hand against her once and set myself into bitterness for what seemed on some days like forever, for I was not cleanly bested — no way in hell — and only narrowly escaped total humiliation thereafter. I remember why we fought, the pettiness of the rationale that her means were dishonorable and I thereby wished to softly dismantle her clockwork psyche and investigate it for myself not at all lost on me now or then, but that I believed I might succeed brought me to the makeshift arena — cheap sodium still its luminosity, a familiar lack of proper visibility engendered thereby — only to lose, and the technical virtuosity Melisende displayed, not realizing Ari Augustenburg, buried in the audience to root for me that night, would make her pay for it, astonished me in flashes, representing her idea of me and my petty heritage of supposed hermitage (as if crying "the headmaster's son [sic]") with a jab of knee, quieting down the skirmishes of history running between us, failing repeatedly and indeed mutually to make contact by the auspices of limbs or their termini, until after so much had passed us by, I felt, catching my breath as I assumed (even in close quarters) she would as well, secretions from her fingertip and was overcome with an unnatural urge to throw the match in her favor, compelled to let my limbs be soft as yarn, that (as this thing I can only call witchcraft to match her post-Puritanical neuroses compelled) I might thereby win, and in my belief, I let myself be beaten unconscious before a crowd of at least two hundred, unable to express that sorcery it was, sorcery it had always been that her successes were so universal, not justified by great skill alone, and this is where my memory of the moment ends and my snap back to the present begins. She is not watching me, but as do many moments in Providence, she hangs over.

At this point it would be fair to ask myself "how did I make her pay?" and it would also be both courteous and righteous (courtly, if you subscribe to the idea of a philosopher king) of myself to answer; it logically follows from the disclosure of modesty (how nude it feels to roll up sleeves and pantlegs even with more clothes on than is donated annually to beaten orphans left to the welfare state) that I respond to any provocation of touch from behind with immediate neutralizing action: at least a pulled muscle or a broken arm or a retroequine kick in the face (if a skirt is worn, pants underneath it, and then even more pants underneath those pants, a matryoshka; so neurotically alert as to go into something with the expectation that the elements could lead to more exposure and have this perhaps be more important than the actual success of the combat response, beside just assuming worst case scenario assume the worst possible composition of situational elements) regardless of any friendly or simply notary intent or the prelude to an inquiry into the possibility of the provision of help (I would oblige and take the situation-appropriate course of action if approached from the front, I've been asked to write essays in the stead of the person inquiring before); being that it was the day succeeding the fight, I did not take to turning around (as I often try to do instead) and instead immediately made instinctual engagement, wrenching Melisende's arm before it could leave my shoulder (whose else could have it been?) and, in vice grip, twisting it until a sub-crack maximal barometer of pressure was reached; she did not seem deterred at all by this (to confirm this to be so she said wordlessly, resonant inside my own skull: "No harm in a little cast every now and then, is there? Visible disability gains you respect and pity!") — now, at this point in the encounter I went with my first assumption: this woman is a telepath (this, curiously, was wrong — her psychic abilities seemed to be an accident of genetics), all telepaths must be neutralized (the sins of the race) and there is something myself can weaponize against her to fully subdue her (so she taunts me: "Now, what are you to do about me? I'd love to see just how you get yourself out of this mess!", with fake cheer as gloomy as the longitude problem that threw ships against rocks or worse, at the shores of Rhode Island with all survivors as maroons); so now she is to hear her own voice reduplicated inside her own head, in phase, in fake stereo with a simultaneous hard-left and hard-right; every word of new input is reproduced likewise, speech jammed ("What are you doing to me?!", as exaggerated as the expressionist slapstick in silents insinuates the spoken but not heard contents of the intertitles, a patronizing cartoon) — I perceive the past inside the present, all points as simultaneous points, so after intrusion what it would take to hook into and operate inside the innards of my own skull is for the thought implanted to be redirected and associated with that time I was kidnapped right in front of Mother and sent to that godforsaken castle with its heat-ray stained glass of the Original Sin as Mother did nothing (perhaps a passing tear on her face, too fast to register in the blur of motion), which is always happening to its fullest extent and reflected in and reflective of every future moment that captures any seemingly unrelated circumstance — fully visualizable, splitscreened; as part of a conventional ability-hijack energy drain this amount of output, if sustained (although for those who perceive time in real time and do not generate parasitic memory-waste byproduct as an operative norm, this likely will come at great cost of magical-energetic expenditure), should be enough to render a telepath comatose and thus fully neutralize the target (it hijacks the psychic connection and, for lack of a better analogy, sends all ping requests sent during a Denial of Service attack back to sender, doubled) — her face twists into a grin, one of twisted sensory discovery (now she seems to increase her protestation to further intensify the generated output; when I double down on my defensive position and don't even let the generative syntax of complete thought be groundlaid, she starts yelling out loud, and breaks out in hysterics: "What? What? What? What is this feeling? Ahahahaha!"); as resistance proves futile (all resistors inside the frying chipset of available physical memory burn out), she falls back into nearby mud, at the edge of consciousness (it was another shitty rainy day, the sun an even fainter yolk inside a moldy grey egg), and I finally turn to face her amidstslip, and in half-whisper ask her: "Did that feel good?" (no response), and, further, without meaning it (and with the knowledge she also knows I don't mean it): "I didn't mean to hurt you." Pissing rain streams on her face after the breath of temporary disconnection from continuous experience. I kick her in the face repeatedly. With her newfound familiarity with the emotional turmoil (made known to her) in (my) mind, I reasoned she would neither protest nor find bane in the bare extent of my opinion on her character. "Keep your fucking hands off of my woman." (Hit. Why start there? Why am I asking?) "Stick to men." (Hit. Spread some mud.) "You're an inferior species." (Hit. Spread some mud.) "You're fucking worth nothing." (Hit. Hit. Spit on her face.) "I'll kill you and the memory of you." (Hit. Hit. Hit.) "No one will ever have thought of you ever again the moment I'm done with you." (Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit.) "Fucking whore." Satisfied that I've successfully camouflaged her as barren public green space or pathway, I walk away. With this, a new monstrous figure of urban legend has its genesis (as in pre-Biblical oral tradition, myth that retold and taken down to paper will shape and change the world): the Woman with the Mud on Her Face, or at least a high probability thereof exists.

All forgeries reflect whatever revered referent resulted in their value appraising to aspire ostensibly towards reality inasmuch as projected comportment is itself a munition (in particular a projectile) in social-war aristocratic claim disputes not unlike those in which Ari tells me the various Alarie houses engage for spite for everything — per her words — "becoming Augustenburg," the function of life buried beneath hegemonies so subtle and so overlapping they appear not to monopolize every moment as in the uncouth fascism of breathing air or wandering along expressways tossing tossed metal vessels into stateward bags (as every context retraces, leads back), but I strive for only transcendent forgery, which is why I offer Ari, from a stash of imported tea discounted to suspicion, something or another whereon Cyrillic letters she reads fluently proudly display "the highest quality from Cathay" (Cathay my own conservative reading of the arcane Russian exonym accepted there yet obsolete everywhere elsewhere for generations — to which concern Ari retorts, when I declaim this thought aloud, that a near-homonym of China is, indeed, obsolete in Japan, that strange and often gorgeous land, and would there get me looks), which she accepts (despite our brief discourse pertaining) from me and imbibes, remarking on its inauthenticity as if she does not know a good fake just as well as I do and as we have discussed before. Ari and I together scheme however often schemata arise necessities, meandering through the catalog of chattel (merely qua property), in my case dreamt up for a rain check from the summative thunderstorms and their terror fearsome to some, in hers a reality which cannot be pulled apart into its components, all the wealth in the world at her fingertips and indeed at good use, yet never truly accessible, for a stomach-pump alone does not, as it were, cure an overdose brought on by a given substance, and Ari knows — unlike that lesser philanthropist ever-fond of unfalsifiability (the boring sort of quackery, much unlike wartime forgers of Rembrandt who won us Gotland) Wolfram, whom she has ranted against with the entire arsenal of not merely mathematical inclinations, but entire spiels of true substance spiring up to not necessarily infinity or the limit thereto, but theological eternity beaming, bestowed upon her by the time she claims on some days she wasted towards the end of professional chess, on others that she can easily get back with her peculiar talent for the invisible rewriting of history, spoken of only in my vicinity, it would seem — complex systems are to be explained in terms just as complex, and this accounts for the general manner of our private correspondence, which, were it seen by laypeople, would be written off as stilted, unnatural, and perhaps even ugly, even though the winding paths to each idea are, in my eyes, the only ways forward.

Knowing ourselves deprived of the long twentieth century promised in now-retrofutures sent to us from paperback oblivion rotting to yellows at the behest of bookworms and other such maladies of misreading, rooting our work in yesteryears distal to those unpresaging idylls dissected from the quotidian duties of the present's unconditional upkeep, that we are thoroughly unimpressed by the compressed, then compacted dredges left behind by electronic life is no surprise to anyone despite our struggle to remain resolute in distancing ourselves from apocalypses to be conceived of at irregular intervals as counterfactuals, and I differ from Ari wherever I insist that the world will go on without catastrophe even when in lack of an invisible hand — always to be hers in her conception — but in, though it may surprise some, surprisingly few theoretical points, for from time to time she spots me glaring at the most opulent dresswear through a tailor's storefront, infers I feign, in that moment, anger, and lets the silken coat, even itself evocative of escapades aboard airships sometime deep into that lost twentieth century (its generations outside power since they do not recognize themselves), show up on my unfixed doorstep, regardless of where I am staying, fitted to my measurements (a secret in exacts to all but her), and I can never truly tell her it maddens me because never does it elicit even the slightest ire, and for me to contradict myself as such only serves to fascinate her and distance her whims — unadulterated and simplistic impulses attached soundly to the trillions she possesses — from the bundled fasces that fool Mussolini marched into Rome on trains before my dear Ari's own mother had him done away with, ended unceremoniously before he could do any harm but crowd the footnotes of histories, which evades the horrific imagination given the strangling grip exerted thereby onto the mainland who hesitated to follow Sicily in its revolution, which came sprinting (yet enduring) both in a Marxist's Phrygian cap and the decorations of combat any good monarchist-jingoist will bear proudly to capture every populist neurosis in one fell swoop, long prior, in a century not our own.

While Res waxes Proustian (attempting primarily voluntary time-capture over compulsive time-retrieval, the elected countenance that of trying to make every moment more intimate, more sweet, better, the rest of all life which is but a Time of Troubles only a soft focus light leak; "But, it will be asked, what kind of a treasure is this that we propose to bequeath to posterity?") and philosophical sweet nothings are trending upward to establish parity with the Swiss franc at the bureau de change, motion is tracked. Footsteps taken before nearing the sight of the final encounter and the confirmation of all suspicion, a time-indexing/time-retrieval GOTO loop so that nothing may be missed and so the most correct reaction is primed at the cost of all perceptive resources, now have their ghosts assume audible distances, a quick-time demonstration of the Doppler effect. We then see how it does not involve any contradiction to assert […] that the will, in the phenomenal sphere (with steps taken onto Attic Earth, dusted and grey as the space inside which all that information was copied, recorded and commented on, that same indexing loop, the most complete possible situational comprehension) — in visible action (inside the externally imposed noosphere of a scope trained on an expected object, sight without sightline) — is [not] necessarily obedient to the law of nature (there is no reason for vengeance to be found in the course of the genesis of complex civilization, especially when you take into consideration the fact that natural selection even amongst mortals had stopped and the humanoid form was perfected long before the moment the first brick of weed or clay was laid in Mesopotamia, in Ur-Sumer, no reason for wrath nor the survival of the strongest amongst the selfishly altruistic — and yet! complex emotion betrays us all), although any falter will not lead to failure but only mild irritation. And just in this transcendental or supersensible sphere (the inner city of Providence now rended by practicality of any perceivable qualities as a place of 'sights' and habitation, now merely the recession of point A, cast in proportion to time remaining to make the calculation for a response), where experience affords us neither instruction nor guidance, lie the investigations of reason, such as why one would walk into the conventionally accepted radius (Melisende clearly had studied this) of fair game for urban snipers and not knowingly look back at a rooftop, the very thing Res Jino has just done. I take out my own rifle and do something ridiculous in the pursuit of ridicule. As it was stated above, nobody pursuant of stealth and thus success in ensuring the surprising success of surprise would use a laser scope on a rifle. I dig for one in my hair, and making guidance and instruction suspended inside a now-recording (red dot flashing in a corner, red dot trained on a rooftop) experience, now backreferrable, I tell Res to stand back. I don't tell her to let me handle it. The first priority now is the creation of dissonance. Res, predictably, moves to speak: "It is still possible for us to just talk this one out!" This should hopefully arouse in Lowell the reckless confidence to make the first shot. In predicting unpredictability, you have to play on predictable reactions to unpredictability, to create false opportunities that are thought to arise from human error, from the Achilles' Heels of the single-mindedly intelligent, those with intellectual professions that then presume all else to be easy and act with arrogance; putting it simply, you have to play on the will to humiliate, to want to see karmic justice in the world, to want to see one acting with arrogance knocked down a peg, those idealisms that nobody in their right mind should want to presume are now possible except when presented with the apparent faults in the intelligence of any Other, especially one that One exists in opposition with, the hubris arisen from perceived hubris: that Melisende shoots a warning shot into the pavement, the inevitable cavitation resultant from the unkempt city's decay; that I shoot back, metal rain on tin roof, despite Res' unacted protests, which leads to a mild irritation in her voice that should let us deal with the true mild irritation at hand; that Melisende laughs her distinct cackle as she manages to get her 'opportune' warning shot in; that it assumes a new note of panic as I shoot back and just barely miss her feet. Now Res insists that we really can just talk this out and Lowell, still one for theatrics, leaps from the roof onto the pavement, bent forward in cornering without corner but the one across the street, striking an unsafe pose with crossed arms, the barrel of her own rifle underneath her arm (a finger near the trigger); from there follow the declaratives. "So we meet again, Jino, Augustenburg!" Res, or myself: "I would have thought you have become irretrievably lost in a sea of your own gruel-saliva as you deliberated this ambush, Lowell." As the city now exits gridded wireframe, enters outline and then recolors itself to be a place of habitation and thus shelter and routes of escape, and the advancement is now that of this hostage negotiation instead of the recession of lapped distance towards inevitability (which, now occurrent, can be safely assumed to take place inside an even lapse of time, which needs not to be retrieved in constant update to check for abruptions), the process of egress still takes too long to have recorded reliable reattribution. That problem of transitions. Damn it. The weight of the situation has in fact created a hole in my mechanisms of reason, at the most basest level: the storage of event information. Res: "However, if we do not engage in a civilized dialogue about this matter, I believe you will not find the alternative of a combat encounter with my one and only suited to your tastes in heightened theatrics, Meli, as the alternative will surely be the erection of a no longer hypothetical Theatre of Cruelty." This is patently false, but it would be advantageous for neither Lowell nor myself to retort this — the most fractional knowing eye contract is recorded. We must perform this friendly chat as if it is a Mexican standoff with Darling as the humanizing center of the stakes. I realize now Res had taken notice of the way I would shoot dagger-glances in the direction of rooftops as we neared the safehouse and had deduced that I was not just looking for wild pigeon or crow to eat, and opened negotiations a little too perfectly — she never negotiates from a position of worry. The worrisome to her earns action from her. Another situation of irrationality projected to be open to exploitation.

As brisk air accommodates another anonymizing barrel-flung barrage of projectiles — thus making for a brutal flourish uncharacteristic of an Augustenburgian assassin's play no matter how great a farce might be the result ensuing amidst the chaos also thence resulting — into the jigsaw disarray of continuity's distal wreckage justified to the margins of a tear-damp page, I allow nothing from my own weaponry despite the constant it forms in perpetual carriage at the hilt, and herein to reason is to defeat purpose insofar as Melisende has so often taken the gracious and the sovereign only to turn heads and disobey precepts to whatever greatest extent is at that time allowable, yet it tempts me to flash more pride than I do dignity reflecting the sun. Melisende seems to reason pride virtuous, unrooted her irreverence for classical educations and unretrieved pay frayed from its finance, and its nozzle's leakage surely makes an intrigue of a spectacle from afar, yet the spout clogs when introduced to unfamiliar fluids — Ari's intent. I, without a deal negotiated, peace talks breaking down, the city gone deliriously sober from a lack this grave of wine (one glass enough to inebriate me in my light weight), the people raging for their soma, glance down Melisende's own revelatory instrument of the psychic power wrought by Firearm Freud (as I call that clever — and dead — man in the homely absence of psychoanalysts to which I've, sensibly, grown accustomed) before I meet her eyes with my own and await a word or two from her throat, scored by too many a wine she's had despite her greenness shared with myself and she who (unlike Lowell, thief of the Brahmin surname) near-always calls me Darling, thereby revealing discontent when she cannot come forward to touch me once more sans a brutalization she will not see again towards herself or anyone else should she choose to make said approach, in theory or in practice. Quoth the poison-skin girl, porcelain, it would seem, 'til the neurospastic slime exits every pore in hallucinatory touch, whereupon the color, I suppose, remains the same as, one thinks, it was: "Weeks pass; days are added until seven days have become ten, as in the Francophile's domain, the domain of he who saw it like Jefferson and thought Robespierre a direction which would not lead to that shameful Napoleon. You two bear the human or human-like errors which these kinds of things slip through, betrayed by and to those with simple motives not unlike my own — isn't that right, Jino, who didn't want to rewrite the muay-thai rules for my sake? Thus, prithee end it and be bold: fire through my windpipe that my elevated speech might cease even momentarily because you bet it brings me down to the level of piss soaked into ground and returned to sun to bring my diction up to yours, intelligentsia pigs." Her queer demeanor brings not one shiver, yet I object with a gesture to Ari that she should open fire into the ceiling, obliged thereafter, and thus I tell her: "Were you not, as it were, humiliated by your own demeanor even when it came in a greater camouflage in those days to hide its qualia-colors from us, the flimsiness only appearing in the gaps that were still widening? The sneered-through teeth on your face say it all when you resort to such a physiognomic" — meaning, in this case, irreconciliably arbitrary — "argument for our futility in the face of a history you've dreamt up? To villainize us is to disparage the proles whose acquaintance you're too acquainted with making for one of your pedigree even orphaned, so it, to say the least, cracks me up that you bothered with this ordeal, stalking us hither, but there's nothing you can raise us to prevent encroachment into your domain as we start eating the tumors to prevent the unimmune from receiving the kuru Bureau bears, devouring spent brain as they tend to, and your scorched-earth policy could just as easily be resolved in a bar — better known as a public house — over fake identifiers passed between ourselves as through carpeted ammunition as we do now, interspersing your words with booming threats made without a word, and it's easy to imagine your complaints' emptiness than to hear each grievance out to the fullest." Melisende, of course, following along: "In answering the question of how come this crown jewel of a milestone, Bureau's eternal absence, flanks neither you nor her at the crown befitting an Aleator, Jino, I deduce that it must be that both of you haven't the slightest as to the purpose of the title! The Aleator deals in pomp, strong-arms her rump states out of catamite states amongst themselves, stops their running amok, yet cherishes their existence, something your totalizing vision doesn't allow even in theory, and surely it would mean less blood for me to interrogate out slowly with enhancements in no hurry" — that famed festina lente — "but I do digress. Am I interrupting you two?" I, Res Jino, Julius Caesar to her: "I wouldn't say so. In fact, you're rather timely."

Regarding this intrusive girl, I have long observed that sadistic precepts have, per what history of hers has over time been made known to me, been the mode under and through which her neuroses have played and are playing out with sulks, but compartmentalizing these more dirge-worthy pieces away to theoretically void the bludgeons of personality which have left her psyche bruised through many years spent on enclosing deeds — enclosing as are those pitiful Acts passed some time ago in England — and furthermore enlightening myself with passing secondhand glimpses of the ways she spent spare moments, I know she, in her hesitation to charge at me, will indulge but in nothing's doing am I to bring forth the right words, to evoke a pair of images she cannot at all resist, but I place moratorium, indulge in delay, lest these things fruit too soon, the pomace entice her to bend me to her will by the very mechanism of which she has time and time again shown herself capable (and culpable with respect to). She and Ari are both passed the snicker leaving my lips, a move bereft of charisma by my own sparkling intent and turned on its head to leave the wrong suggestion of my nerves hanging in the air, the ruse available only to the latter, she who knows just what I do each time — or close — without fail, and while in the wind flutters past without concern a page of paper contrived by print to read near its head "Marriage License" in blackletter below revealing names of parties too swift in their departure for care — an occurrence sapped completely of its potential serendipity by the official properties of such a drifting piece disproportionate in documentarian keyness to whomever it lost in leaving — which I hope to be rectified by whichever parties chose or allowed its abandon at a later date than today though for now it's gone as quick as it came, I gesture for the gun to be put away and stretch an obverse hand that Melisende will know to remain where she is that the talk continue that a conclusion be reached, and my measure proves effective on coaxing her to speak, for even though she seems poised to tell me in some genericized manner she shall put to use her force should we not cooperate with her demands, Ari's glance dissuades her from igniting the verbal trail of gasoline I intend to leave for her quite yet, no matter how tempting I know it will be when it comes. Indeed, Ari interrupts Melisende as she breathes to speak and substitutes these words for what would have come from our dear adversary: "I've not the time in this forebodingly botched climate, Lowell, and your preposterous intervention outlines nothing in the way of a future, much less one to which myself may look forth to, eagerly or in anxiety. Do you realize the extent of the imprisonment I myself experience when not here in my dealings? It is rife with exaggeration when expressed, yes, but there is a place whither I must return and it is not here, never here, not a here myself would like to hear of going forward, whithersoever forward leads. Are you, in your precarious position between the working class with whom you claim to align and those you harass in interrupting our grand designs, perhaps a counterrevolutionary yourself, a squanderer of teaching moments for the people, a coward who cannot kill? Indeed, you stand such until proven otherwise by labors myself cannot assign you lest you trash your duties as you have done this encounter between myself and Darling. Had you aligned with us, many secrets would be yours, yet none are, and you have languished in ignorance. I grant you the opportunity as such." Melisende finds a response difficult, if not impossible, but manages: "Mayhaps, then. I work for myself no matter what though, even with what you've said, and I don't like to inflict or receive pain which would not otherwise be penance necessary, and that's what I like providing when I get the chance, which, to your credit, is often, not seldom. Still, is this your only response, that you haven't the time to negotiate? I'd dare call myself hurt!" I begin: "Would such a circumstance not inflict a grin unto your face" — at which point Melisende blushes before undoing the sign lest I saw it, which, surely to her dismay, I did — "and would you dare" — pause — "forfeit were the pain enjoyable to you who command no partisan force in no peak of occupancy without anyone fighting for you even in, say, a disparaged name? I know from your first meeting with my dear here that you felt more than you let on, and it stands a familiarity in my mind that your neurotic impulse stems just as psychosexually as any lunatic's, even my own, so let it be known" — I raise my voice — "that Melisende Lowell not only takes joy in kindness and hesitates to murder, but also holds onto quivering memories of a beating she cannot and will not forget lest it cease to rouse her after nightfall when no one watches, not even her always-present hairdresser written into her will should she perish from the Deceiver filling a vacuum of false peace at her failing to admit these truths, simple as." My words unbearable, she slowly retreats without a struggle, and the world seems at peace again.