Pool_1

>> Cafeteria 2 <<

What is time anyway? Clicks of a clock? Maybe, technically, at least as a measure. But we don't feel time that way, not most of us. We know time by its pain, waiting to be called on, or finally found out, for something embarrassing to be over.Will it ever be over? How long is that? Or by the strain of memory.How long ago was graduation, or how remote is a needed vacation? Time at its worst, raw time, is loneliness. Years? What the hell are years? Circles of a big wet rock around the sun? Do we think that way? We don't feel ourselves hurtling through space in the grip of a star. But puking nonstop after too much gin? That's time in its most instructive mantle, misery. Some of us savor time in missions. Shannon blathered on about hers into the invisibly closed ear of her doctor friend who was lost in his own space, unaware of time. There were only the distant sounds of traffic outside. Shannon's dialogue was just one more passing buggy in the night. clip klop kliP KLOP KLIP KLop klip clop clip... Denise Morgan? Setting new female standards of spoken sexual provocation? verrroooOOMMmmmmmm... Peter Belachnik negating abstruse philosophic dictums with his silly lumbering muscular poses? nnnnneeEEEOOOowwwww w... All of this colorful rattling stirred together as a uniform grey. There was no binding element. To lapping lulling ocean sounds of composite blather, absent a single distraction, Macaluso's mind fixed on the emotional brickwork of his compatriot, probing. If telepathy had evenrudimentary existence, Sumner would have deafened to that immaterial plea to come home, to leave darkness - to open to the humanity around this table. But, reality is what it is. Sumner's citadel was impenetrable, fortitude in the grip of grief. Morgan was still blaspheming, Mary Richards espousing God's way, Shannon